Posted in Whathaveyou on August 4th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Boston’s Gozu have already had a pretty busy summer, touring around their stopthrough at Rhüne Mountain Festival and taking part in the band-affiliated hometown underground fest Grub, Sweat & Beers last month. This past weekend, though, the four-piece entered Mad Oak Studios to begin recording their sixth album and the follow-up to 2023’s Remedy (review here), which the band have spent much of the last two years supporting live.
If it feels like a quick turnaround, that’s probably because the crater from Remedy is still steaming, but Gozu aren’t ones to let momentum slip or miss a chance to move forward. It’s particularly interesting that they’ve returned to Mad Oak Studios to work with Benny Grotto. Gozu‘s last three full-lengths — Remedy, 2018’s Equilibrium (review here) and 2016’s Revival (review here) — were recorded by Dean Baltulonis at Wild Arctic Studios in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Grotto helmed the two prior, 2013’s The Fury of a Patient Man (review here), 2010’s Locust Season (discussed here; review here). Considering the hard-edged style they’ve taken on over the course of the last decade working with Baltulonis, and the warmth both of Gozu‘s earliest LPs and Mad Oak‘s output more generally, I’ll be looking forward to how this re-pairing between band and producer works out.
The band have been doing updates on the socialwebs. They finished drums on Saturday. I don’t know how long they’ll actually be in or what the timeline is on the release, but the process has started. Here’s what they had to say:
“We are very excited to get in the studio at Mad Oak with Benny Grotto to record 8 songs for Metal Blade / Blacklight Media. Heavy AF and catchy as leprosy—this batch is loaded with riffs that stick and grooves that crush. Let’s get weird.”
– First day conquered. 3 songs down. Tomorrow we ride.
– Drums complete and @sethdeebo absolutely destroyed it!
GOZU is: Marc Gaffney – guitar and vocals Joe Grotto – bass Doug Sherman – lead guitar Seth Botos – drums
Alright, day two. Here we go. I never really know how a given day of the Quarterly Review is going to flow until I get there. The hope is that in slating releases for a given day — which I mostly do randomly over time, though I generally like to lead with something ‘bigger’ — I’ve considered things like not putting too much that sounds the same together, geographic variability, and so on. Sometimes that plan works, and I get a day like yesterday, which was pretty close to ideal. If that was the pattern for this entire QR, I’d be just fine with that, but I know better. One day at a time, as all the inspirational tchotchkes say.
Feeling good though headed into day two, so I’ll take it.
Quarterly Review #11-20:
Blackwater Holylight, If You Only Knew
The narrative around L.A.-by-way-of-Portland’s Blackwater Holylight at this point is one of growth, and well it should be. At seven years’ remove from their self-titled debut (review here), the four-piece offer the four-song If You Only Knew — three originals and a take on Radiohead‘s “All I Need” — as something of a stopgap four years after their third LP, Silence/Motion (review here). And like that 2021 album, “Wandering Lost,” “Torn Reckless” and “Fate is Forward” see the band working to expand their sound. They’re not upstarts anymore, and the marriage of dream-pop and crush on “Wandering Lost” alone is worth the price of admission, never mind the downward swirl of “Torn Reckless” the melodic burst-through and quiet space of “Fate is Forward” or the explosion in the back half of the Radiohead tune. Pro shop, all the way.
There’s a deep current of Melvinsian quirk in Spider Kitten‘s thickly-riffed slog, and it’s in the creeper-into-noiseburst of “Revelation #1” with its later rawest-Alice in Chains harmonies as much as the false start on “Febrile and Taciturn” and a chugblaster like “Wretched Evergreen” which is just one of the six songs in the 14-song tracklisting under two minutes long. Throughout the 37 minutes, shit gets weird. Then it gets weirder. Then they do folk balladeering in “Sueño” for a minimal-Western divergence prefacing the later soundtrackery of “Woe Betide Me.” Then they’re back to bashing away — but at what? Themselves? Their instruments certainly. Maybe a bit of shaking genre convention if not outright, all-the-time defiance. The key blend is ultimately of the crunch in their guitar and bass tones and the melodies that come to top it — not that all the vocals are melodic, mind you — with a kind of creative restlessness that makes each cut find its own way through, some at a decent clip, to leave a dent right in the middle of your forehead.
Montreal three-piece Mooch align with Black Throne Productions for their fourth album release. The band, comprised of guitarist/bassist/vocalist Ben Cornel, guitarist/vocalist/bassist/keyboardist Julian Iac and drummer/vocalist Alex Segreti, have run a thread of quick, purposeful growth through the last several years, with 2024’s Visions (review here) following 2023’s Wherever it Goes following their 2020 debut, Hounds, and other singles and such besides. At their hookiest, in a piece like “Hang Me Out (False Sun),” they remind some of At Devil Dirt‘s heavy-fuzz poppy plays, but one knows better than to expect Mooch to be singleminded on an LP, and Kin plays out with according complexity, finding a particularly satisfying resolution in “Prominence” before hitting successive, different crescendos in “Lightning Rod,” “Gemini” and the eight-minute “Zenith” to end the record. A band who genuinely seem to follow where the material takes them while refusing to get lost on the way.
I’m not a punker. I was never cool enough to listen to punk rock. Generally when I hear something that’s rooted in punk and it lands with me, I assume that means the band are doing punk wrong. If so, I like the way Snakes & Pyramids do punk wrong on Disappearer. The tonal presence, their willingness to make not-everything be exactly on-the-beat, the liberal doses of wah treatment on the lead guitar to give a psychedelic edge, the effects on the vocals helping that as well, plus the flexibility to roll out a heavy riff. There’s not a whole lot to not like as they push genre limits across 38 minutes and eight songs, finding space for post-punk in “Disappearer” or “All the Same” before they really dig in on the near-eight-minute closer “Seven Gods.” For future reference, the band is the doubly-Brian’ed three-piece of Brian Hammond (ex-The Curses), Brian Connor (ex-Motherboar) and Cavan Bligh. Psychedelic punk, even more than punk-metal or any other way you might want to try to blend it, is incredibly difficult to pull off well. That seems much less the case here.
Unbelievable Lake, I Have No Mouth and Yet I Must Scream
There is only one song on I Have No Mouth and Yet I Must Scream, and it’s the title-track. At 41 minutes long, that’s all you need, and Northern Irish psych-drone experimentalists Unbelievable Lake — think Queen Elephantine, but longer-form, more effects on the guitar, and dramatic in the ebbs and flows — the first 10 minutes are a movement unto themselves, with a linear build into a consuming payoff; due comedown provided. Those comparatively still stretches can be some of the most difficult for a band who’ve just blown it out to dwell in, but Unbelievable Lake use negative-space as much as crush to make their way toward the next culmination, which sort of gradually devolves instrumentally but makes its way along the path of residual noise toward one last round of pummel. You bet your ass they make it count. This is a significant accomplishment, and enough on its own wavelength that most ears will glaze over to hear it. But there’s just the right kind of brain out there for it, as well. Maybe that’s you.
Krautfuzz scorch the ground on the 23-minute “Live at the Church A” to such a degree that I’m surprised there was anything left to plug in for when they bring out J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. and Witch to take part in “Live at the Church B,” let alone a full album-unto-itself 39 minutes’ worth of go. Rest assured, there’s plenty of noiseshove in “Live at the Church B” as well, and it arrives quicker than in the preceding slab, guitar running forward and back in loops even before the swirl cuts through the fuller distortion surrounding at about seven minutes in, howls and wails and wormholes and spacetime bend inward, flex outward, breathe like the cosmic microwave background, and the exploration continues after the rumble (mostly) subsides, getting ready to sneak in one more mini-freakout before they’re done. Damn, Krautfuzz. Save some lysergic push for the rest of the class. Or better, don’t. Clearly they were rolling out the ‘red carpet’ for Mr. Mascis. It just happened to be red from all the plasma churning thereupon.
Even before they get to the six-and-a-half-minute “The Door” or the dreamy midsection of closer “Medusa,” London’s Sleeping Mountain demonstrate patience in their delivery early on with the instrumental-save-for-the-sample leadoff “Humans” and “Walls of Shadows,” which leads with guest vocals before the full tonal crux of the riff is unveiled, and continues in methodical, doom-leaning fashion. That’s a vibe that doesn’t necessarily persist as the later “Akelarre” puts the cymbals out front and pushes a more uptempo finish ahead of the closer “Medusa,” but the dude-twang “Alibi” and the all-in nod of “Tennessee Walking Horse” underscore the message of dynamic, and while this self-titled may be the first album from Sleeping Mountain, it portrays the three-piece as confident in their approach and sure of their direction, even if they’re not 100 percent on where that direction is going. Nor should they be. They should be writing the songs and letting the rest work itself out over time, which is what you get here. They sound like a band I’ll still be writing about in a decade, so I guess we’ll see how it goes.
Behold the awaited first album from Durham, UK, sludge-doom, put-a-pillow-over-your-face-and-it’s-made-of-riffs betrayers Goblinsmoker. Dubbed The King’s Eternal Throne and indeed capping with the three-minute minimalist homage “Toad King (Forest Synth Offering),” the preceding title-track works its way from its more poised opening into an engrossing meganod of hairy-ass distortion, with the later-arriving throatripper screams ready for whatever Dopethrone comparison you want to make, and no less sharp in the biting. Of course, by the time they get to that third-of-four inclusions, this has already been well proven on side A’s “Shamanic Rites” and “Burn Him,” the leadoff holding to a steady and malevolent lumber while the follow-up takes a faster swing to upending witchy convention as the vocals offer the most vicious devourment I’ve heard from an English band since Dopefight roamed the earth. Down with humans. Up with toads. Familiar enough in its sludgy roots, The King’s Eternal Throne makes its own trouble like dog food makes gravy (with added liquid, in other words), and basks in heaps of shenanigans besides. The songs are like slow-motion razor juggling.
The three-song sophomore full-length, Shrine, from Italian heavy progressives Onioroshi is the band’s first outing since 2019’s debut, Beyond These Mountains (review here), and is duly adventurous for that. Set up across “Pyramid” (18:18), “Laborintus” (15:35) and “Egg” (20:31), the album feels cohesive in refusing to be anything other than one it is. Its psychedelia is met with fervent terrestrial groove, and “Laborintus” spends most of its 15 minutes sounding like it’s about to fall apart, but never does. Duh, should I call it expansive? The truth is at 54 minutes, it’s a significant undertaking, but “Laborintus” ends up thrilling for the element of danger, and though raw in the production, “Egg” builds its own world in atmospherics, pushing further in the ebbs and flows of “Pyramid,” which itself takes loud/quiet trades to a less-predictable place. Some of Shrine feels insular, but that seems to be the point. A creative call to worship, and maybe worshiping the creativity itself.
Whoa. First of all, with Tempus Deorum, you’ve got L’Ira del Baccano. The Roman psychedelic explorers follow 2023’s Cosmic Evoked Potentials (review here) with the 19-minute piece “Tempus 25,” an ether-bound reach that hypnotizes well ahead of unveiling its full tonal breadth and even crushes a bit before receding ahead of the next go. With synth cascading through the midsection and a duly expansive build that hits two more climaxes before it’s through, “Tempus 25” sets itself up in contrast to Tilburg, the Netherlands’ Yama, whose 2014 debut, Ananta (review here), is well remembered as they offer three songs “Wish to Go Under,” “The Absolute” and “Naraka,” that feel more solidified in their structure but that offer complement to “Tempus 25” for that. Not short on scope themselves, Yama let the chug patterning and vocal soar of “The Absolute” stand in evidence of their progressivism, and after 11 years, they sound like they have more to say. One only hopes that’s the case all around on this somehow-tidy, 35-minute split LP.
Posted in Reviews on April 14th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Welcome back to the Quarterly Review. Just because it’s a new week, I’ll say again the idea here is to review 10 releases — albums, EPs, the odd single if I feel like there’s enough to say about it — per day across some span of days. In this case, the Quarterly Review goes to 70. Across Monday to Friday last week, 50 new, older and upcoming offerings were written up and today and tomorrow it’s time to wrap it up. I fly out to Roadburn on Wednesday.
Accordingly, you’ll pardon if I spare the “how was your weekend?”-type filler and jump right in instead. Let’s. Go.
Quarterly Review #51-60:
Megaritual, Recursion
Last heard from in 2017, exploratory Australian psychedelic solo outfit Megaritual — most often styled all-lowercase: megaritual — returns with the aptly-titled Recursion, as multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and producer Dale Paul Walker taps expansive kosmiche progressivisim across nine songs and 42 minutes. If you told me these tracks, which feel streamlined compared to the longer-form work Walker was doing circa 2017, had been coming together since that time, the depth of the arrangements and the way each cut comes across as its own microcosm within the greater whole bears that out, be it the winding wisps of “Tres Son Multitud” or the swaying echoey bliss of later highlight “The Jantar Mantar.” I don’t know if that’s the case or it isn’t, but the color in this music alone makes it one of the best records I’ve heard in 2025, and I can’t get away from thinking some of the melody and progressive aspects comes from metal like Opeth, so yeah. Basically, it’s all over the place and wonderful. Thanks for reading.
Slab-heavy riffage from Andalusian three-piece Red Eye‘s III spreads itself across a densely-weighted but not monolithic — or at least not un-dynamic or unipolar — eight songs, as a switch between shouted and more melodic vocals early on between the Ufomammut-esque “Sagittarius A*” (named for the black hole at the Milky Way’s center; it follows the subdued intro “Ad Infinitum”) and the subsequent, doomier in a Pallbearer kind of way “See Yourself” gives listeners an almost-immediate sense of variety around the wall-o’-tone lumbering fuzz that unites those two and so much else throughout as guitarist/vocalist Antonio Campos del Pino, bassist/synthesist Antonio Pérez Muriel and drummer/synthesist/vocalist Pablo Terol Rosado veer between more and less aggressive takes. “No Morning After” renews the bash, “Beyond” makes it a party, “Stardust” uses that momentum to push the tempo faster and “Nebula” makes it swing into the Great Far Out before “The Nine Billion Names of God” builds to a flattening crescendo. Intricate in terms of style and crushingly heavy. Easy win.
Even by the respective standards of the bands involved — and considering the output of Detroit grit-doomers Temple of the Fuzz Witch and Montreal sans-guitar scathemakers Seum to this point, it’s a significant standard — Conjuring is some nasty, nasty shit. Presented through Black Throne Productions with manic hand-drawn cover art that reminds of Midwestern pillsludge circa 2008, the 27-minute split outing brings three songs from each outfit, and maybe it’s the complementary way Seum‘s low-end picks up from the grueling, chugging, and finally rolling fare Temple of the Fuzz Witch provide, but both acts come through as resoundingly, willfully, righteously bleak. You know how at the dentist they let you pick your flavor of toothpaste? This is like that except surprise you just had all your teeth pulled. It only took half-an-hour, but now you need to figure out what to do with your dazed, gummy self. Good luck.
Uncle Woe offer two eight-minutes-each tracks on the new EP, Folded in Smoke, Soaked and Bound, as project founder/spearhead Rain Fice (in Canada) and collaborator Marc Whitworth (in Australia) bring atmosphere and grace to underlying plod. It’s something of a surprise when “One is Obliged” relatively-speaking solidifies at about five minutes in around vocal soar, which is an effective, emotional moment in a song that seems to be mourning even as it grows broader moving toward the finish. “Of Symptoms and Waves” impresses vocally as well, deep in the mix as the vocals are, but feels more about the darker prog metal-type stretch that unfolds from about the halfway point on. But what’s important to note is these plays on genre are filtered through Uncle Woe‘s own aesthetic vision, and so this short outing becomes both lush and raw for the obvious attention to its sonic details and the overarching melancholy that belongs so much to the band. A well-appreciated check-in.
I would not attempt to nor belittle the band’s accomplishments by trying to summarize 35 years of Negative Reaction in this space, but as the West-Virginia-by-way-of-Long-Island unit led by its inimitable principal/guitarist/vocalist Ken-E Bones mark this significant occasion, the collection Salvaged From the Kuiper Belt provides 16 decades-spanning tracks covering sundry eras of the band. I haven’t seen a liner, so I don’t even know the number of players involved here, but Bones has been through several incarnations of Negative Reaction at this point, so when “NOD” steamrollers and later pieces like “Mercy Killing” and the four-second highlight “Stick o’ Gum” are more barebones in their punksludge, it makes sense in context. Punk, psych, sludge, raw vocals — these have always been key ingredients to Negative Reaction‘s often-harsh take, and it’s a blend that’s let them endure beyond trend, reason, or human kindness. Congrats to Bones, whom I consider a friend of long-standing, and many more.
Given how many different looks Fomies present on Liminality, and how movement-based so much of it is between the uptempo proto-punk, krauty shuffle and general sense of push — not out of line with the psych of the modern age, but too weird not to be its own spin — it feels like mellower opener “The Onion Man” is its own thing at the front of the album; a mellower lead-in to put the listener in a more preferred mindset (on the band’s part) to enjoy what follows. This is artfully done, as is the aforementioned “what follows,” as the band thoughtfully boogie through the three-part “Colossus,” find a moment for frenetic fuzz via Gary Numan in “Neon Gloom,” make even the two-and-a-half-minute “Happiness Relay” a show of chemistry, finish in a like-minded tonal fullness with “Upheaval,” and engage with decades of motorik worship without losing themselves more than they want to in the going. At 51 minutes, Liminality is somewhat heady, but that’s inherent to the style as well, and the band’s penchant for adventure comes through smoothly alongside all that super-dug-in vibing.
Classic Boston DGAF heavy riff rock, and if you hear a good dose of hardcore in amid the swing and shove, The Long Wait‘s self-titled debut comes by it honestly. The five-piece of vocalist Glen Dudley (Wrecking Crew), guitarist Darryl Shepard (Kind, Milligram, Slapshot, etc.) and Steven Risteen (Slapshot), bassist Jaime Sciarappa (SSD, Slapshot) and drummer Mark McKay (Slapshot) plunder through nine cuts. Certainly elbows are out, but considering where they’re coming from, it’s not an overly aggressive sound. Hardcore dudes have been veering into heavier riffing à la “Uncharted Greed” or “FWM” for the last 35 years, so The Long Wait feels well in line with a tradition that some of these guys helped set in the first place as it revisits songs from 2023’s demo and expands outward from there, searching for and beginning to find its own interpretation of what “bullshit-free” means in terms of the band’s craft.
Since 2020, Miskolc, Hungary-based solo-band Babona have released three EPs, a couple singles and now two full-lengths, with Az Utolsó Választás Kora (‘the age of the last choice’) as the second album from multi-instrumentalist and producer Tamás Rózsa. Those with an appreciation for the particular kind of crunch Eastern Europe brings to heavy rock will find the eight-tracker a delight in the start-stops of “2/3” and the vocals-are-sampled-crying-and-laughing “A Rendszer Rothadása,” which digs into its central riff with suitable verve. The later “Kormányalakítás” hints at psych — something Rózsa has fostered going back to 2020 with Ottlakán, from whom Babona seems to have sprung — and the album isn’t without humor as a crowing rooster snaps the listener out of that song’s trance in the transition to the ambient post-rocker “Frakció,” but when it’s time to get to business, Rózsa caps with “Pártatlan” as a grim, sludgy lumber that holds its foreboding mood even into its own comedown. That’s not the first time Az Utolsó Választás Kora proves deceptively immersive.
Sit tight, because it’s about to get pretty genre-nerdy. Sutras, the Washington D.C.-based two-piece of Tristan Welch (vocals/guitar) and Frederick Ashworth (drums/bass) play music that is psychedelic and heavy, but with a strong foundation specifically in post-hardcore. Their term for it is ‘Dharma punk,’ which is enough to make me wonder if there’s a krishna-core root here, but either way, The Crisis of Existence feels both emotive and ethereal as the duo bring together airy guitar and rhythmic urgency, raw, sometimes gang-shouted vocals, and arrangements that feel fluid whether it’s the rushing post-punk (yeah, I know: so much ‘post-‘; I told you to sit tight) of “Racing Sundown” or the denser push of “Bloom Watch” or the swing brought to that march in “Working Class Devotion.” They cap the 19-minute EP with posi-vibes in “Being Nobody, Going Nowhere,” which provides one last chance for their head-scratching-on-paper sound to absolutely, totally work, as it does. The real triumph here, fists in the air and all that, is that it sounds organic.
The story of Sleeping in Samsara‘s self-titled two-songer as per Christian Peters (formerly Samsara Blues Experiment, currently Fuzz Sagrado, etc.) is that in 2023, My Sleeping Karma drummer Steffen Weigand reached out with an interest in collaborating as part of a solo-project Weigand was developing. Weigandpassed away in June 2023, and “Twilight Again” and “Downtime,” with underlying basic tracks from Weigand in drums, keys/synth, and rhythm guitar, and Peters adding lead guitar, vocals, bass in the latter, the songs are unsurprising in their cohesion only when one considers the fluidity wrought by both parties in their respective outfits, and though the loss of Weigand of course lends a bittersweet cast, that this material has seen the light of day at all feels like a tribute to his life and cretive drive.
Posted in Reviews on April 10th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
A lot going on today, not the least of which is the Spring 2025 Quarterly Review passing the halfway mark. Normally this would’ve happened yesterday, but half of 70 records is 35 and unless I’ve got the math wrong that’s where we’re at here. It’s a decent time to check and see if there’s anything you’ve missed over the last couple days. You never know how something will hit you the next time.
The adventure continues…
Quarterly Review #31-40:
Messa, The Spin
Now signed to Metal Blade — which is about as weighty as endorsements get for anything heavy these days — Italy’s Messa emerge from the pack as cross-genre songwriters working at a level of mastery across their fourth album, The Spin, elevating riff-led songs with vocal melodicism and aesthetic flexibility. “Fire on the Roof” is a hook ready to tattoo itself to your brain, while “The Dress” dwells in its ambience before getting intense and deceptively technical — just because a band dooms out doesn’t mean they can’t play — ahead of the Iommi-circa-’80 solo’s payoff. It’s all very grand, very sweeping, very encompassing, very talented and expensive-sounding. “At Races” and “Reveal” postulate a single ‘Messa sound’ that someone more important than me will come up with a clever name for, and the band’s ascent of the last nine years will continue unabated as they’re heralded among the foremost stylistic innovators of their generation. You won’t be able to say they didn’t earn it.
Kansas-based heavy djent instrumentalists After Nations offer their fifth full-length, Surface | Essence, with a similar format to 2023’s The Endless Mountain (review here), and, fortunately, a similarly crushing ethic. Where the prior album explored Buddhist concepts, the band seem to have traded that for Hinduist themes, but the core approach remains in a mix of sounds churning and progressive. Meshuggah are a defining influence in the heavier material, but each ‘regular’ song (about four minutes) is offset by a shorter (about a minute) ambient piece of one sort or another, and so while Surface | Essence gives a familiar core impression, what the band add to that — including in short, Between the Buried and Me-ish quiet breaks like in “Yāti” and “Vīrya” — is their own. Not to harp on it, but the last record played out the same way and it worked there too. Eventually, one assumes, the two sides will bleed together and they’ll lay waste with that all their mathy interconnected atmospheric assault. As-is, the gigantism of their heaviest parts serves them well.
Taking its chiaroscuro thematic to a meta level, The Complicate Path to the Multiverse breaks its eight-song procession in half, with four heavy rockers up front followed by four acoustic-based cuts thereafter. It’s not a hard and fast rule — there’s still some funky wah in the penultimate “When it’s All Over,” for example — but it lets the Roman troupe give a sense of build as they make their way to “Cradle of Madness” in drawing the two sides of light and dark together. The lyrics do much of the heavier lifting in terms of the theme — that is, the heavier material isn’t overwhelmingly grim despite being the ‘darker’ side — but they let tonal crunch have its say in that regard as well, and side A brings to mind heavy rockers with a sense of progressivism like Astrosoniq while side B pays that off with a creative turn. If you don’t know what you’re getting going into it, the songwriting carries the day anyhow, and as laid back as the groove gets, there’s an urgency of expression underlying the delivery.
Likely no coincidence that London instrumentalist guitar/drum duo Bident — get it, bi-dent? two teeth? there are two of them in the band? ah forget it — launch their debut album, Blink, with “Psychological Raking.” That opener lives up to its billing in its movement between parts and sets up the overarching quirk and delight-in-throwing-a-twist that the subsequent eight tracks provide, shenanigans abound in “Calorina Leaper,” “Thhinking With a Moshcap On” and “Blink,” which renews the drum gallop at the end. With a noteworthy character of fuzz, Blink can accommodate the push of “Two-Note Pony” — which sure sounds like there’s bass on it — the nod in “Bovine Joni” and the sprint that takes hold in the second half of “That Sad,” and their use of the negative space where other instruments or vocals might be is likewise purposeful, but they don’t sound like they’re lacking in terms of arrangements thanks to the malleability of tone and tempo throughout. They operate in a familiar sphere, but there’s persona here that will come to fruition as they proceed.
Death-sludge and post-metallic lumber ooze forth from the five songs of Harvest of Ash‘s second full-length, Castaway, which keeps its atmospheric impulses in check through grounded riffing and basslines as the whole band takes straightforward nod and extreme metal methodologies and smashes them together in a grueling course like that of “Embracing.” Remember in like 1996 when a band like Skinlab or Pissing Razors could just make you feel like you needed to take a shower? There’s a bit of that happening on Castaway as well in the opening title-track or the nine-minute “Constellation” later on, what with its second-half murk and strident riff, but a turn to quieter contemplations or a flash of brighter tone, whatever it is that offsets the churn in a given song, gives breadth to all that misanthropic plodding and throaty gurgle. Accordingly, Harvest of Ash end up both aggressive and hypnotic. I’m not sure it is, at least entirely, but Castaway positions itself as post-metal, and if it is, it is its own interpretation of the style’s tropes.
Berlin’s Vlimmer — the solo-project of multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, label head and producer Alexander Leonard Donat — return on a not-surprising quick turnaround from late-’24’s full-length, Bodenhex (review here) with six new tracks that include a Super Furry Animals cover of “It’s Not the End of the World?” and quickly establish a goth-meets-new-wave electro dance melancholy in “Firmament” that gives over to the German-language “Ungleichgewicht,” residing stylistically somewhere between The Cure and krautrock experimentalism. Guitar comes forward in “Friedhofen,” but Donat keeps the mood consistent on Diskomfort where the album ranged more freely, and even as the title-track moves into its finishing wash, the bumout remains. And I don’t know if that’s an actual harpsichord on “Nachleben,” but it’s a reminder that the open arrangements are part of what keeps me coming back to Vlimmer, along with the fact that they don’t sound like anything else out there that I’ve heard, the music is unpredictable, and they take risks in craft.
When Duskhead posted “Two Heads” in December from their The Messenger four-songer EP, it was the first new music from the Netherlands-based rockers in a decade. Fair enough to call it a return, then, as the band — which features members culled from Tank86 and The Grand Astoria — unfurl a somewhat humble in everything but the music 15 minutes of new material. “My Guitar Will Save the Day” answers the Elder-ish vocal melody with a fervent Brant Bjork-style roll, while “Kill the Messenger” cuts the tempo for a more declarative feel and “Searchlights” takes that stomp and makes it swing to round out, some layering at the end feeling like it’s dropping hints of things to come, though one hesitates to predict momentum for a band who just got back after 11 years of silence. Still, if they’re going for it, there’s life in this material and ground to be explored from here. Concept proven. Back to work.
Plenty to hear in The Watcher‘s Cruz Del Sur-issued late-2024 debut Out of the Dark as the Boston unit — not to be confused with San Fran rockers The Watchers — unfurl the Trouble-and-Pentagram-informed take on traditionalist metal. The title-track opens and makes an energetic push while calling to mind ’80s metal in the hook, where “Strike Back” and the lead-heavy “Burning World” emphasize the metal running alongside the doom in their sound. Time for a big slowdown? You guessed it. They fall off the edge the world with “Exiled,” but rather than delve into epic Sabbathianism right then, they break into to the thrashier “The Revelator,” which only gets grittier as it goes. “Kill or Be Killed” and “The Final Hour” build on this vitality before the capper “Thy Blade, Thy Blood” saves its charge for the expected but still satisfying crescendo. Fans of Crypt Sermon and Early Moods will want to take particular note.
Each of the six inclusions on Weed Demon‘s cleverly-titled third long-player, The Doom Scroll, adds something to the mix, so while one might look at the front cover, the Columbus, Ohio, band’s moniker and general presentation and think they’re only basking in weed-worshipping dirt-riffed sludge, that’s not actually the case. Instead, “Acid Dungeon” starts off with dungeon synth foreboding before the instrumental “Tower of Smoke” lulls you into sludgenosis before “Coma Dose” brings deathlier vibes and, somewhere, a guest appearance from Shy Kennedy (ex-Horehound), “Roasting the Sacred Bones” strips back to Midwestern pummel circa 2002 in its stoned Rustbelt disaffection, “Dead Planet Blues” diverges for acoustics and the vinyl-only secret track “Willy the Pimp,” a Frank Zappa cover, closes. By the end of the record, Weed Demon are revealed as decidedly more complex than they seem to want to let on, but I suppose if you’re numbed out on whichever chemical derivative of THC it is that actually does anything, it’s all riffs one way or the other. You want THC-P, by the way. THC-A, the ‘a’ stands for “ain’t about shit.” I’m gonna guess Weed Demon know the difference.
The one-man solo-project of Jon Weisnewski (also of Sandrider, formerly of Akimbo), Nuclear Dudes released the rampaging full-length Boss Blades (review here) in 2023, glorious in both its extremity-fueled catharsis and its anti-genre fuckery. Weisnewski described the seven-song EP Compression Crimes 1 as “a synthwave album, probably,” and he might be right about that, but it’s definitely not just that. “Death at Burning Man” brings unruly techno until it lands in Mindless Self Indulgence pulsations, where “Tomb Crawler” surges near its end with metallic lashing. “Skyship” is so good at being electro-prog it’s almost obnoxious, and that too feels like the point as Weisnewski sees through creative impulses that are so much his own. Sleeper outfit, maybe. Never gonna be huge. But if you can find someone else making this kind of noise, you’re better at the internet than I am.
Just Gozu on fire, you know how it goes. I was fortunate enough to catch the Boston throttlers last Fall at Desertfest New York (review here), and golly, that was a pleasure. That performance was part of a Fall tour that itself was only a fragment of one of the busiest years Gozu have had as a band. Setting out to support their 2023 album, Remedy (review here), the four-piece hit the road about 13 months ago with The Obsessed and Howling Giant, and it’s from that Spring tour that this footage comes.
There’s more than just this, as I understand it, and watching “Tom Cruise Control,” I can’t help but feel like Gozu are readier to put out a live record than they’ve ever been. Guitarist Doug Sherman has backed guitarist/singer Marc Gaffney on vocals all along, but as “Tom Cruise Control” makes clear, the band are all the more able to bring the layering and character of their studio work to life with Seth Botos on drums. Botos, who resides in the rhythm section alongside the charming groove factory that is Joe Grotto, joined Gozu in 2021, and the hook of “Tom Cruise Control” tells the story. Gaff goes up for the falsetto, and Botos slides in to cover the lower vocal part, and all of a sudden, Gozu are more able to bring the studio version of that song to life. Sherman can focus on shred as his apparent preference would dictate — certainly if he had any real interest in singing more, some chances would’ve come up in the 18-or-so years of the band — and the dynamic gets stronger for their having the additional flexibility. In this way, an already awesome band is made better. Watching the video is cool, and I’m not telling you not to do that, but if you focus on listening, I think you’ll agree: a live record sooner rather than later would be the way to go.
Until I can start the billboard campaign along I-95 between here and Beantown, please feel welcome to check out “Tom Cruise Control” below, as recorded in Vermont a year ago. And heads up, if I see more of these coming out I’ll probably post them too. Gozu are ‘any excuse is enough to write about’ in my mind.
Dig:
Gozu, “Tom Cruise Control” live
GOZU UNLEASHES LIVE VIDEO FROM STONE CHURCH, VT FROM THE OBSESSED / HOWLING GIANT TOUR
Boston riff-masters GOZU have released a searing live video from their performance at The Stone Church in Brattleboro, VT, recorded during their run on The Obsessed / Howling Giant Tour. The video captures the band at full power, delivering their signature mix of bone-crushing grooves, soaring melodies, and psychedelic swagger.
Credits Stone Church VT Videography: Garth Dunkel & Ryan Campbell Edit: Garth Dunkel mixed: Ben Grotto
GOZU has also officially begun writing their next album, set for release through Blacklight Media/Metal Blade Records.
GOZU is: Marc Gaffney – guitar and vocals Joe Grotto – bass Doug Sherman – lead guitar Seth Botos – drums
Posted in Reviews on February 24th, 2025 by JJ Koczan
Before Show
The ride up here was a breeze. It’s been a while since last I set foot in the Bay State, but the route I took — rt. 287 to 95 to 91 to 84 to the Masspike — is one I’ve been driving since my wife was undergrad at Brandeis in Waltham. So not without some element of nostalgia for times I drove north in high school and college to see her, in snow, the middle of the night, whatever other stupid situation.
But driving four-plus hours to see three bands isn’t so crazy in this day and age, right? I don’t know. If it is gonna take me two hours each way to see a show in New York, is two more hours up the coast for Worshipper’s 10th anniversary really that wild? They’ve got Roadsaw and Summoner on the bill, I have a place to crash (thank you to John and Kerry Pegoraro for the hospitality), and I’m able to drive. Seems like kind of a no-brainer to make it happen if you can get up the gumption, which I’ll note that I haven’t been able to do in the six years since we moved from Massachusetts back to New Jersey. Obviously that’s on me.
Worshipper released their first single, Black Corridor/High Above the Clouds (review here), early in 2015. I don’t know the exact date, but when they announced a 10-year show, I realized it’d been too long anyway since I saw them, and with the company they’re keeping it was an easy choice.
Like a lot of breweries, Widowmaker’s setup can by design easily accommodate a rock and roll show, and for sure it got one. Plus it’s in Braintree (which I’ll forever here in the guy’s voice announcing the T stop). If brewery shows are how heavy rock happens in the suburbs, I’ll take it.
Here’s notes on the night:
Summoner
The last Summoner album, Beyond the Realm of Light (review here), came out in 2017. Why lead with that factoid, I don’t know, but I’m trying to give myself some sense of scale for time. They were an easy band to like at the time, and before that as well — it was their third album — and they were an easy band to like going on eight years after the fact. Funny to feel nostalgic as they hit into “Phoenix” at the start of the set, but there it is. I don’t know how much they’re up to, but they were always super-tight and a ton of fun besides. Whatever else the intervening years have wrought, their time on stage was enough to have me wondering what a circa-2025 album might sound like from these guys. Full-blown prog metal? Maybe, but they always had that underlying impulse to ride a riff when it worked, so I’m not sure I’d want to predict. I wouldn’t mind finding out, of course, but there was no mention of working on anything new or anything like that from the stage. I’m not holding my breath, but still, never say never, and as packed as the room was, clearly I wasn’t the only one who’d be up for such a thing. Good band. It would be cool to see them get credit for being as ahead is the heavyprog curve as they were.
Roadsaw
I think maybe it’s been 11 years since the last time I saw Roadsaw, which seems impossible, but the links don’t lie. Their 2019 album, Tinnitus the Night (review here), was kinda-maybe-sorta their swansong — or at very least I’m not expecting a follow-up anytime soon — retained their signature charm and songwriting, throwing somehow-friendly elbows, and so on. But that wasn’t the focus here. With Darryl Shepard on guitar alongside a largely mustacheless Tim Catz, Craig Riggs and Mike LeFevre their drummer whose name I don’t know, the set was centered around their earlier work. First three albums. They had CDs of Nationwide for sale and I bet they sold a few, since I own the record and was thinking of picking up a copy just on moral grounds because they were so much fun to watch. Darryl, of Kind. Milligram, Hackman, Blackwolfgoat, indeed Roadsaw, and I honestly don’t know how many others, is always a thrill to watch on stage, and Tim Catz remains a punker with classic heavy tone. His and Riggs’ energy, chemistry, was a familiar (if long ago) dynamic, and Riggs teased the prospect of doing more from the stage, so I’ll just for the announcement to come through that they’ve been added to Ripplefest Texas or some such. I wasn’t the only one feeling nostalgic — the older material made sure of that — but after 11 long years, to get to see them again was humbling. Let this be signs of life.
Worshipper
Happy 10th anniversary to Worshipper. This was my first time seeing the band as a three-piece, as they bid farewell to lead guitarist Alejandro Necochea right around the release of their third album, One Way Trip (review here), which to put it bluntly took some of the wind out of the sails of the band’s best work to-date. Worshipper were actually the band I’ve seen most recently in this show, and it’s been since 2019. I was glad to have come north before they were done playing songs from 2016’s Shadow Hymns (review here), their first LP and thus the beginning of their chronologically-arranged set. Widowmaker was packed out, and I can’t speak to the experience, but if I was in a band for a decade and we pulled like 200 on a Saturday night in our hometown, I feel like that would be pretty satisfying, and indeed, guitarist/vocalist John Brookhouse (who handled the solos), bassist Bob Maloney and drummer Dave Jarvis looked pretty stoked on how it all turned out. Me too. They didn’t make it easy on themselves in setting up the night to follow Roadsaw, but there was no doubt whose party is was when they got going and they held it down until the venue had to cut them off for time, losing out on some of the material from One Way Trip in the chronological running, but throwing in their take on Uriah Heep’s “Easy Livin'” as appeared on their 2018 Mirage Daze EP (review here) to finish with a blowout, and to be sure that worked just fine.
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Thank you to The Patient Mrs. for making this quick trip north possible. Thank you to John Pegoraro and Kerry Pegoraro for letting me crash at their house and do a little writing on their couch. And thanks to John Brookhouse for making sure I was okay bringing my camera through the door. I saw some old friends at this one, and that made the night even more special. More pics are after the jump, as usual.
Posted in Reviews on December 11th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Wow. This is a pretty good day. I mean, I knew that coming into it — I’m the one slating the reviews — but looking up there at the names in the header, that’s a pretty killer assemblage. Maybe I’m making it easy for myself and loading up the QR with stuff I like and want to write about. Fine. Sometimes I need to remind myself that’s the point of this project in the first place.
Hope you’re having an awesome week. I am.
Quarterly Review #21-30
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Thou, Umbilical
Even knowing that the creation of a sense of overwhelm is on purpose and is part of the artistry of what Thou do, Thou are overwhelming. The stated purpose behind Umbilical is an embrace of their collective inner hardcore kid. Fine. Slow down hardcore and you pretty much get sludge metal one way or the other and Thou‘s take on it is undeniably vicious and has a character that is its own. Songs like “I Feel Nothing When You Cry” and “The Promise” envision dark futures from a bleak present, and the poetry from which the lyrics get their shape is as despondent and cynical as one could ever ask, waiting to be dug into and interpreted by the listener. Let’s be honest. I have always had a hard time buying into the hype on Thou. I’ve seen them live and enjoyed it and you can’t hear them on record and say they aren’t good at what they do, but their kind of extremity isn’t what I’m reaching for most days when I’m trying to not be in the exact hopeless mindset the band are aiming for. Umbilical isn’t the record to change my mind and it doesn’t need to be. It’s precisely what it’s going for. Caustic.
The fourth full-length from Boston’s Cortez sets a tone with opener “Gimme Danger (On My Stereo)” (premiered here) for straight-ahead, tightly-composed, uptempo heavy rock, and sure enough that would put Thieves and Charlatans — recorded by Benny Grotto at Mad Oak Studios — in line with Cortez‘s work to-date. What unfolds from the seven-minute “Leaders of Nobody” onward is a statement of expanded boundaries in what Cortez‘s sound can encompass. The organ-laced jamitude of “Levels” or the doom rock largesse of “Liminal Spaces” that doesn’t clash with the prior swing of “Stove Up” mostly because the band know how to write songs; across eight songs and 51 minutes, the five-piece of vocalist Matt Harrington, guitarists Scott O’Dowd and Alasdair Swan, bassist Jay Furlo and sitting-in drummer Alexei Rodriguez (plus a couple other guests from Boston’s heavy underground) reaffirm their level of craft, unite disparate material through performance and present a more varied and progressive take than they’ve ever had. They’re past 25 years at this point and still growing in sound. They may be underrated forever, but that’s a special band.
Writing a catchy song is not easy. Writing a song so catchy it’s still catchy even though you don’t speak the language is the provenance of the likes of Uffe Lorenzen. The founding frontman of in-the-ether-for-now Copenhagen heavy/garage psych pioneers Baby Woodrose digs into more straightforward fare on the second full-length from his new trio Lydsyn, putting a long-established Stooges influence to good use in “Hejremanden” after establishing at the outset that “Musik Er Nummer 1” (‘music is number one’) and before the subsequent slowdown into harmony blues with “UFO.” “Nørrebro” has what would seem to be intentional cool-neighborhood strut, and those seeking more of a garage-type energy might find it in “Du Vil Have Mere” or “Opråb” earlier on, and closer “Den Døde By” has a scorch that feels loyal to Baby Woodrose‘s style of psych, but whatever ties there are to Lorenzen‘s contributions over the last 20-plus years, Lydsyn stand out for the resultant quality of songwriting and for having their own dynamic building on Lorenzen‘s solo work and post-Baby Woodrose arc.
The popular wisdom has had it for a few years now that retroism is out. Hearing Baltimorean power trio Magick Potion vibe their way into swaying ’70s-style heavy blues on “Empress,” smoothly avoiding the trap of sounding like Graveyard and spacing out more over the dramatic first two minutes of “Wizard” and the proto-doomly rhythmic jabs that follow. Guitarist/vocalist/organist Dresden Boulden, bassist/vocalist Triston Grove and drummer Jason Geezus Kendall capture a sound that’s as fresh as it is familiar, and while there’s no question that the aesthetic behind the big-swing “Never Change” and the drawling, sunshine-stoned “Pagan” is rooted in the ’68-’74 “comedown era” — as their label, RidingEasy Records has put it in the past — classic heavy rock has become a genre unto itself over the last 25-plus years, and Magick Potion present a strong, next-generation take on the style that’s brash without being willfully ridiculous and that has the chops to back up its sonic callouts. The potential for growth is significant, as it would be with any band starting out with as much chemistry as they have, but don’t take that as a backhanded way of saying the self-titled is somehow lacking. To be sure, they nail it.
Oase is the second full-length from Berlin’s Weite behind 2023’s Assemblage (review here), also on Stickman, and it’s their first with keyboardist Fabien deMenou in the lineup with bassist Ingwer Boysen (Delving), guitarists Michael Risberg (Delving, Elder) and Ben Lubin (Lawns), and drummer Nick DiSalvo (Delving, Elder), and it unfurls across as pointedly atmospheric 53 minutes, honed from classic progressive rock but by the time they get to “(einschlafphase)” expanded into a cosmic, almost new age drone. Longer pieces like “Roter Traum” (10:55), “Eigengrau” (12:41) or even the opening “Versteinert” (9:36) offer impact as well as mood, maybe even a little boogie, “Woodbury Hollow” is more pastoral but no less affecting. The same goes for “Time Will Paint Another Picture,” which seems to emphasize modernity in the clarity of its production even amid vintage influences. Capping with the journey-to-freakout “The Slow Wave,” Oase pushes the scope of Weite‘s sound farther out while hitting harder than their first record, adding to the arrangements, and embracing new ideas. Unless you have a moral aversion to prog for some reason, there’s no angle from which this one doesn’t make itself a must-hear.
Big on tone and melody in a way that feels inspired by the modern sphere of heavy — thinking that Hum record, Elephant Tree, Magnetic Eye-type stuff — Florida’s Orbiter set forth across vast reaches in Distorted Folklore, a song like “Lightning Miles” growing more expansive even as it follows a stoner-bouncing drum pattern. Layering is a big factor, but it doesn’t feel like trickery or the band trying to sound like anything or anyone in particular so much as they’re trying to serve their songs — Jonathan Nunez (ex-Torche, etc.) produced; plenty of room in the mix for however big Orbiter want to get — as they shift from the rush that typified stretches of their 2019 debut, Southern Failures, to a generally more lumbering approach. The slowdown suits them here, though fast or slow, the procession of their work is as much about breadth as impact. Whatever direction they take as they move into their second decade, that foundation is crucial.
As regards genre: “dark arts?” Taking into account the 44 minutes of Vlimmer‘s fourth LP, which is post-industrial as much as it’s post-punk, with plenty of goth, some metal, some doom, some dance music, and so on factored in, there’s not a lot else that might encompass the divergent intentions of “Endpuzzle” or “Überrennen” as the Berlin solo-project of Alexander Donat harnesses ethereal urbanity in the brooding-till-it-bursts “Sinkopf” or the manic pulses under the vocal longing of closer “Fadenverlust.” To Donat‘s credit, from the depth of the setup given by longest/opening track (immediate points) “2025” to the goth-coated keyboard throb in “Mondläufer,” Bodenhex never goes anywhere it isn’t meant to go, and unto the finest details of its mix and arrangements, Vlimmer‘s work exudes expressive purpose. It is a record that has been hammered out over a period of time to be what it is, and that has lost none of the immediacy that likely birthed it in that process.
Indianapolis four-piece Moon Goons cut an immediately individual impression on their third album, Lady of Many Faces. The album, which often presents itself as a chaotic mash of ideas, is in fact not that thing. The band is well in control, just able and/or wanting to do more with their sound than most. They are also mindfully, pointedly weird. If you ever believed space rock could have been invented in an alternate reality 1990s and run through filters of lysergism and Devin Townsend-style progressive metal, you might take the time now to book the tattoo of the cover of Lady of Many Faces you’re about to want. Shenanigans abound in the eight songs, if I haven’t made that clear, and even the nod of “Doom Tomb Giant” feels like a freakout given the treatment put on by Moon Goons, but the thing about the album is that as frenetic as the four-piece of lead vocalist/guitarist Corey Standifer, keyboardist/vocalist Brooke Rice, bassist Devin Kearns and drummer Jacob Kozlowski get on their way to the doped epic finisher title-track, the danger of it coming apart is a well constructed, skillfully executed illusion. And what a show it is.
Although it opens up with some element of foreboding by transposing the progression of AC/DC‘s “Hells Bells” onto its own purposes in heavy Canadiana rock, and it gets a bit shouty/sludgy in the lyrical crescendo of “What a Dummy,” which seems to be about getting pulled over on a DUI, or the later “The Castle of White Lake,” much of Familiars‘ Easy Does It lives up to its name. Far from inactive, the band are never in any particular rush, and while a piece like “Golden Season,” with its singer-songwriter vocal, acoustic guitar and backing string sounds, carries a sense of melancholy — certainly more than the mellow groover swing and highlight bass lumber of “Gustin Grove,” say — the band never lay it on so thick as to disrupt their own momentum more than they want to. Working as a five-piece with pedal steel, piano and other keys alongside the core guitar, bass and drums, Easy Does It finds a balance of accessibility and deeper-engaging fare combined with twists of the unexpected.
Progressive stoner psych rockers The Fërtility Cült unveil their fifth album, A Song of Anger, awash in otherworldly soul music vibes, sax and fuzz and roll in conjunction with carefully arranged harmonies and melodic and rhythmic turns. There’s a lot of heavy prog around — I don’t even know how many times I’ve used the word today and frankly I’m scared to check — and admittedly part of that is how open that designation can feel, but The Fërtility Cült seem to take an especially fervent delight in their slow, molten, flowing chicanery on “The Duel” and elsewhere, and the abiding sense is that part of it is a joke, but part of everything is a joke and also the universe is out there and we should go are you ready? A Song of Anger is billed as a prequel, and perhaps “The Curse of the Atreides” gives some thematic hint as well, but whether you’ve been with them all along or this is the first you’ve heard, the 12-minute closing title-track is its own world. If you think you’re ready — and good on you for that — the dive is waiting for your immersion.
Posted in Reviews on October 21st, 2024 by JJ Koczan
This is the last day of the Fall 2024 Quarterly Review. Day 11 of 10, as it were. Bonus-extra, as we say at home. 10 more releases of various kinds to underscore the point of the infinite creative sphere. Before we dive in, I want to make a note about the header above. It’s the same one I used a couple times during the pandemic, with the four horseman of the apocalypse riding, and I put it in place of the AI art I’d been using because that seems to be a trigger for so many people.
In my head, I did that to avoid the conversation, to avoid dealing with someone who might be like, “Ugh, AI art” and then a conversation that deteriorates in the way of people talking at each other on the internet. This saves me the trouble. I’ll note the irony that swiping an old etching out of the public domain and slapping an Obelisk logo on it is arguably less creative than feeding a prompt into a generative whathaveyou, but at least this way I don’t have to hear the underground’s moral panic that AI is coming for stoner rock.
Quarterly Review #101-110:
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Chat Pile, Cool World
Chat Pile are two-for-two on living up to the hype in my mind as Cool World follows the band’s 2022 debut, God’s Country (review here), with a darker, more metal take on that record’s trauma-poetic and nihilistic noise rock. Some of the bassy jabs in songs like “Camcorder” and “Frownland” remind of Korn circa their self-titled, but I’m not sure Chat Pile were born when that record came out, and that harder, fuller-sounding impact comes in a context with “Tape” following “Camcorder” in bringing together Meshuggah and post-punk, so take it as you will. Based in Oklahoma City, Chat Pile are officially A Big Deal With Dudes™, but in a style that’s not exactly known for reinvention — i.e. noise rock — they are legitimately a breath of air that would be ‘fresh’ if it weren’t so desolate and remains innovative regardless. There’s gonna be a lot of mediocre riffs and shitty poetry written in an attempt to capture a fraction of what this record does.
I guess the anonymous project Neon Nightamre — who sound and aesthetic-wise are straight-up October Rust-and-later Type O Negative; the reason the album caught my eye was the framing of the letters around the corners — have gotten some harsh response to their debut, Faded Dream. Critic-type dudes pearl-clutching a band’s open unoriginality. Because to be sure, beyond dedicating the album to Peter Steele — and maybe they did, I haven’t seen the full artwork — Neon Nightmare could hardly do more in naked homage to the semi-goth Brooklyn legends and their distinctive Beatles/Sabbath worship. But I mean, that’s the point. It’s not like this band is saying they’re the first ones doing any of this, and in a world where AI could scrape every Type O record and pump out some half-assed interpretation in five minutes, isn’t something that attempts to demonstrate actual human love for the source material as it builds on it worth at least acknowledging as creative? I like Type O Negative a lot. The existence of Neon Nightmare doesn’t lessen that at all, and there are individual flashes of style in “Lost Silver” — the keyboard line feels like an easter egg from “Anesthesia”; I wondered if the title was in honor of Josh Silver — and the guitar work of “She’s Drowning” that make me even more curious to see where this goes.
Brooklyn-based instrumentalist five-piece Astrometer present their full-length debut after releasing their first demo, Incubation (review here), in 2022. The double-guitar pairing of Carmine Laietta V and Drew Mack and the drumming of Jeff Stieber at times will put you in mind of their collective past playing together in Hull, but the keys of Jon Ehlers (Bangladeafy) and the basswork of Sam Brodsky (Meek is Murder) assure that the newer collective have a persona and direction of their own, so that while the soaring solo in “Power Vulture” or the crashes of “Blood Wedding” might ring familiar, the context has shifted, so that those crashes come accompanied by sax and there’s room for a song like “Conglobulations” with its quirk, rush and crunching bounce to feel cosmic with the keyboard, and that blend of crush and reach extends into the march of closer “Do I Know How to Party…” which feels like a preface for things to come in its progressive punch.
An annual check-in from universe-and-chill molten and mellow heavy psych explorers Acid Rooster. It’s only been a year since the band unfurled Flowers and Dead Souls, but Hall of Mirrors offers another chance to be hypnotized by the band’s consuming fluidity, the 39-minute four-songer coming across as focused on listener immersion in no small part as a result of Acid Rooster‘s own. That is, it’s not like you’re swimming around the bassline and residual synth and guitar effects noise in the middle of the 14-minute “Chandelier Arp” and the band are standing calm and dry back on the beach. No way. They’re right in it. I don’t know if they were closed-eyes entranced while the recording was taking place, but if you want a definition of ‘dug in,’ Hall of Mirrors has four, and Acid Rooster‘s capacity for conveying purpose as they plunge into a jam-born piece like “Confidence of Ignorance” sets them apart from much of Europe’s psychedelic underground in establishing a meditative atmosphere. They are unafraid of the serene, and not boring. This is an achievement.
Giants Dawrfs and Black Holes, Echo on Death of Narcissus
Five years on from their start, Germany’s Giants Dwarfs and Black Holes present Echo on Death of Narcissus as their third full-length and the follow-up to 2023’s In a Sandbox Full of Suns (review here) as the four-piece bring in new guitarist Caio Puttini Chaves alongside vocalist Christiane Thomaßen, guitarist Tomasz Riedel (also bass and keys) and drummer Carsten Freckmann for a five-track collection that has another album’s worth of knows-what-it’s-about behind it. Opener “Again,” long enough at eight minutes to be a bookend with the finale “Take Me Down” (13:23) but not so long as to undercut that expanse, leads into three competent showings of classic progressive/psychedelic rock, casual in the flow between “Soul Trip” and the foreboding strums of centerpiece “Flowers of Evil” ahead of the also-languid “December Bloom.” And when they get there, “Take Me Down” has a jammy breadth all its own that shimmers in the back half soloing, which kind of devolves at the end, but resounds all the more as organic for that.
Oryx‘s Primordial Sky threads a stylistic needle across its four songs. Delivered through Translation Loss, the 41-minute follow-up to the Denver trio’s 2021 offering, Lamenting a Dead World (discussed here), is no less extreme than one would expect, but to listen to 13-minute opener/longest track (immediate points), 13-minute capper “Look Upon the Earth,” or either of the seven-minute cuts between, it’s plain to both hear and see that there’s more to Oryx atmospherically than onslaught, however low guitarist Thomas Davis (also synth) pushes his growls amid the lurching grooves of bassist Joshua Kauffman and drummer Abigail Davis. This is something that five records and more than a decade on from their start their listeners know well, but as they refine their processes, even the outright sharp-toothed consumption of “Ephemeral” has some element of outreach.
Heads up on this record for those who dig the mellower end of heavy psych, plus intricacy of arrangement, which is a number in which I very much count myself. By that I mean don’t be surprised when Sunface‘s Cloud Castles shows up on my year-end list. It’s less outwardly traditionalist than some of the heavy rock coming out of Norway at this point in history, but showcasing a richer underground only makes Cloud Castles more vital in my mind, and as even a shorter song like “Thunder Era” includes an open-enough sensibility to let a shoegazier sway enter the proceedings in “Violet Ponds” without seeming incongruous for the post-All Them Witches bluesy sway that underlies it. Innovative for the percussion in “Tall Trees” alone, Sunface are weighted in tone but able to move in a way that feels like their own, and to convey that movement without upsetting the full-album flow across the 10 songs and 44 minutes with radical changes in meter, while at the same time not dwelling too long in any single stretch or atmosphere.
While consistent with their two prior LPs in the general modus of unmitigated aural heft and oppressive, extreme sludge, Fórn declare themselves on broader aesthetic ground in incorporating electronic elements courtesy of guitarist Joey Gonzalez and Andrew Nault, as well as newcomer synthesist Lane Shi Otayonii, whose clean vocals also provide a sense of space to 11-minute post-intro plunge “Soul Shadow.” If it’s the difference between all-crush and mostly-crush, that’s not nothing, and “Anamnesis” can be that much noisier for the band’s exploring a more encompassing sound. Live drums are handled in a guest capacity by Ilsa‘s Josh Brettell, and that band’s Orion Peter also sits in alongside Fórn‘s Chris Pinto and Otayonii, and with Danny Boyd on guitar and Brian Barbaruolo on bass, the sound is duly massive, tectonic and three-dimensional; the work of a band following a linear progression toward new ideas and balancing that against the devastation laid forth in their songs. Repercussions of the Self does not want for challenge directed toward the listener, but the crux is catharsis more than navelgazing, and the intensity here is no less crucial to Fórn‘s post-metallic scene-setting than it has been to this point in their tenure. Good band actively making themselves better.
Big-riffed heavy fuzz rock from Northern Ireland as the Belfast-based self-releasing-for-now four-piece of vocalist/synthesist Fionnuala McGlinchy, guitarist Tom Finney, bassist Michael McFarlane and drummer Ciaran O’Kane touch on vibes reminiscent of some of Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard‘s synth-fused sci-fi doom roil while keeping the material more earthbound in terms of tone and structure, so that the seven-minute “The Abstract” isn’t quite all-in on living up to the title, plenty liquefied, but still aware of itself and where it’s going. This mitigated terrestrialism — think Middle of Nowhere-era Acid King — is the source of a balance to which Negative Space, the band’s second album, is able to reshape as required by a given song — “Burning Gaze” has its far-out elements, they’re there for a reason — and thereby portray a range of moods rather than dwelling in the same emotional or atmospheric space for the duration. Bookending intro “As Above” and the closer “So Below” further the impression of the album as a single work/journey to undertake, and indeed that seems to be how the character of “The Forest,” “Delirium” and the rest of the material flourishes.
Romanian instrumentalist heavy psych purveyors Methadone Skies sent word of the follow-up to 2021’s Retrofuture Caveman (review here) last month and said that the six-songer Spectres at Dawn was the heaviest work they’d done in their now-six-album tenure. Well they’re right. Taking cues from Russian Circles and various others in the post-heavy sphere, guitarists Alexandru Wehry and Casian Stanciu, bassist Mihai Guta and drummer Flavius Retea (also keyboards, of increasing prominence in the sound), are still able to dive into a passage and carry across a feeling of openness and expanse, but on “Mano Cornetto” here that becomes just part of a surprisingly stately rush of space metal, and 10-minute closer “Use the Excessive Force” seems to be laying out its intention right there in the title. Whether the ensuing blastbeats are, in fact, excessive, will be up to the individual listener, but either way, Methadone Skies have done their diligence in letting listeners know where they’re headed, and Spectres at Dawn embodies that forwardness of ethic on multiple levels.
