Horn's microreviews for you, the diligent consumer - Featurng Summon the Crows, King Giant, Trippy Wicked, Dark Angel, and Wormrot,

So here's the plan:

Recently, reading an article on another site we'll call... Grapefruits Impossible to Perceive With Your Eyes, I came to the worrying conclusion, stolen from said site, that perhaps music criticism is nearly unnecessary in the era of the internet. After all, if you want to judge an artist's music, you just find it on a site and listen for yourself-- you don't need a critic to spare you the financial risk of shelling out for a record you could end up hating.

Then it hit me: what you DO need from critics is enough of a nudge to know what to check out in the first place-- because that's the other side of the double-edged sword of the internet: while you can check out whatever you want, there's roughly a billion more things to check out.

You need less of a critic, and more of a Herald-- one who points you in the right direction and THEN lets you do your own judging.

So.

Here, in tiny/ sound byte/ on-the-go form is what boils down to psychedelic ad copy-- for you to quickly decide if even investigating an album will be worth your time.

Here are a series of shamanistic near-haiku: brief, transient as sand, ephemeral as tea leaves in the bottom of a pint. The visions of one specific seer, to guide your purchases and/or illegal downloads.

Who says the incredible, chaotic, undetermined, endless and eternal can't find niches in a consumerist, material-driven, commodity-based, filthy-lucre society?

So here, then, are your "blasts of leaden verse about leaden riffs, the nitroglycerin shrieks of advertising," in concentrated (i.e., psychically mainlinable) form.


Summon the Crows - One More For the Gallows

Very Southern Lord, very Disfear/ Kvertllak/ Nails, but with more snappy songwriting/ usually sounds like a Metallica cassette b-side, i.e., NWOBHM, but without clean singing/ "Trojan Whore" has a great riff at 2:15....

It's a detuned, slightly more modern version of every band Metallica covered on their cassette b-sides, The $5.98 EP: Garage Days Re-Revisited, and Garage, Inc.-- Budgie, Misfits, Diamond Head, Sweet Savage, and most obviously Discharge.

Brief songs, and the whole album's 25 minutes....

"Beasts of the Night" starts so much like "The More I See" you'd almost mistake it for that. But don't mistake the riffs baby. And not "doom" riffs, not Sabbath, but punk/ thrash riffs, downpicked over a groovy 4/4 beat....


King Giant - Southern Darkness and Trippy Wicked and the Cosmic Children of the Knight's - Movin' On:

Southern rockish, Monster Magnet lite; although "TWatCHofK" get some originality credit: I've never actually heard the musical term for song sections said during the song before-- and during "Not What You Know" we get a scream of "Bridge!!" right before, that's right-- the bridge.

King Giant's "Mississippi River" sounds like Tom Waits on sludge and is worth getting in and of itself.


Dark Angel - Darkness Descends:

The live version included here of "Perish in Flames" is awesome-- at around 1:00 a second guitar suddenly enters on the left channel, and whether it was intentional or not, it sounds great, as does the longer version of the song. The whole album reminds you what true speed is-- there's a genuine sense of velocity, one that blast beats can't adequately convey; 27 years later, listening to Dark Angel still makes me think, "Fuck, they are fast." And unlike blastibeaty black metal, the vocals here try to keep up with the velocity of the drums, too fast here to even actually sing, they must just speak rudely.... it slows down temporarily, but only to accentuate the speed when it inevitably returns....



Wormrot - Dirge:

"Puckish," not threatening (unlike say Rotten Sound or Phobia), Wormrot are the most together garage band ever, and they fire at you strangely satisfying grindcore in standard tuning: there's a "clean," live, direct sound, one buzzsaw-like, and it makes Wormrot sound like Agnostic Front on the Joker's Smilex toxin... highlight is "Principle of Puppet Warfare," but if you like one, you'll like all. They're really just movements of a long single song. It's almost (more so than other grindcore) thrash metal (which makes sense, seeing as it came from hardcore/punk) gone completely off the rails, coming apart at the seams, like they've gotten going to fast to slow down and they've lost control. Except they never quite do. And despite the velocity and screaming, they sound like they're having fun.

More to come!

--Horn

Earache Records' new compilation - New Noise Attack

 

Like a list on Cracked's website, I've gone through all 14 songs from Earache Records' new compilation, New Noise Attack, and stripped away the hype and puffery from each track, essentially translating each into fanspeak, or, What You'll Probably Say After Hearing Each Number.

Follow that? Yeah, you did. Nice.

Track 1-- Enforcer's "Midnight Vice": practically straight out of 1985, even production wise (light on the bass, drums doing nothing beyond bumpa-chih, bumpa-chih, bumpa-chih), this literally could've come straight from the last hour of Headbanger's Ball (were it actually around in 1985)-- sounds like Krokus.

Track 2-- White Wizzard, "Shooting Star": heavy Dokken with an Iron Maiden chorus. Will instantly transport you to 1985, unless you have no memory of that, in which case it might sound unique. Utterly derivative, but actually pretty fun.

Track 3-- Cauldron's "All or Nothing": even heavier Dokken, almost Motörhead-ish. Very cool.

Track 4-- Hour of 13, "Naked Star," is Badlands or the Black Crowes (or similar Led Zep/ Stones worshipers) [also] worshiping the devil.

Track 5-- The Soulless, "Earthbound," is similar to The Faceless or Obscura or every other tech-death band. Catchy, but nothing special.

Track 6-- The Browning [is this an Elizabeth Barrett reference or a lessening of Machinehead's "The Blackening?"] and their "Standing on the Edge" is --wait for it-- a mix of deathcore with an electronic section that sounds like Paul Oakenfold. Primary reaction to this will be "Why?"

Track 7-- Woods of Ypres, "I Was Buried in Mount Pleasant Cemetary": somber solo piano opener, like a combination of Chopin and Night Ranger; becomes then a Smiths' number if Morrissey liked Rammstein.

Track 8-- Wormrot's "Erased Existence," is a fun, puckish hyperkinetic grindcore number. Quite diggable. (Also, 0:43 long.)

Track 9-- Oceano, "Weaponized." Everything that is wrong with Deathcore.

Track 10-- Cerebral Bore, "The Bald Cadaver": completely formulaic tech-death, but done so enthusiastically it's fun to hear. Like everyone in the band is too young to have any original ideas, but is so young that they have enough excitement and adrenaline to make you remember how furious death metal can be. Also there are pig squeals.

Track 11-- And Hell Followed With, "This Night is the Coroner's": cool band name and song title, but otherwise Every Technical Death Metal Band You've Ever Heard. It's like Earache, at this point, are shotgunning death metal bands into the public ears, i.e., "Let's hit them will thousands of bands that are exactly the same-- one or two or them are bound to hit home."

Track 12-- Bonded by Blood, "Prototype: Death Machine": we have some points! It's generic too, but it's not death metal! It's thrash! Bay area-style! Slow, groovy introductory number followed by a groovy mid-tempo number with a fast chorus chock-full of gang vocals. Takes you straight back to 1988.

Track 13-- SSS, "Eat me, drink me, burn me," is similarly thrash, but more east coast (think MOD, right down to the Milano-ish vocals, or even Gothic Slam)-- fun, punkish thrash ranting.

Track 14-- Diamond Plate, "Waste of Life," back to the west coast with our now-progressive thrash. Sounds like Forbidden with a less-melodic, more gutteral Russ Anderson. Good, not great. Tasty drummer, though.

So, top tracks, in order: Wormrot, Cauldron, White Wizzard, Cerebral Bore.

It's no thing, really. Horn's Here to Help.

--Horn