Album Review: The Sword - Gods Of The Earth

Beneath towering mountains a battle rages on as a mighty barbarian army trade blows with the Roman legions for ultimate supremacy of the land. In the midst of the fighting stand one band, The Sword, bashing merry hell out of their instruments. That’s the image I have whilst listening to ’Gods Of The Earth’. Perhaps I should lay off the sauce.

Stoner grooves and menacing doom metal chords drive this album as they did on their superb debut effort. Yet the echoing slightly-detached vocal of J.D. Cronise sounds cleaner, intense and more vital. In fact the same can be said of the guitars which aren’t quite as muddy as before. This is instantly noticeable from the opening salvo, ‘The Sundering’, which sets the scene with gentle plucking ballooning out into cantering hooves of guitar riff and steady pounding snare. This pushes through to ‘How Heavy This Axe’ with its epically mystic mutterings and pistoning riffs that grab you firmly by the balls and won‘t let go.

Then there’s a moment at the beginning of the bizarrely titled ‘Fire Lances The Ancient Hyperzephyrians’ where there’s a four-bar of filthy dirty, chugged guitar riff, which in the next four-bars wipes it’s feet and comes back cleaner. That’s when you really notice the extra ping in the strings. From here on the album rocks like a bastard. From somewhere the groove finds a more settled pattern and it starts sounding like an amalgam of High On Fire and Saviours - a band who they just happen to be touring the UK with over the next couple of months. ‘Mother, Maiden & Crone’ is glorious steel on steel, fist-in-face rock music at its best. I defy you to remain motionless through it. I see your head nodding there, indie-kid. We end on ‘White Sea’, an instrumental gem, with cannoning beefed-up guitars over exacting cymbal and snare combos. It’s a fine way to finish. In my reverie I see the last body fall and the valley battlefield become silent once more. Awesome.

Album Review: Graveyard - Graveyard

Graveyard, the perfect Father’s Day gift!

With an insane pattern of dragons and horned beasts within a kind-of drugged-out comic version of Da Vinci‘s ‘The Last Supper’ it’s difficult to know what to expect from just the cover art. Upon playing what’s within though it’s immediately apparent that Graveyard have spent way too long immersed in the psychedelic rock of the Seventies. The blues-folk sensibilities of Cream do battle with the harder edge of Black Sabbath whilst a Gong injection of space rock are the source for all on offer here.

Lead singer Joakim Nilsson’s vocals take surprising shifts with an awesomely impressive range. They sashay from Chris Cornell’s yelped cries on ‘Lost In Confusion’ to Eric Clapton’s lazy vocal on ‘Blue Soul’. With lashings of hushed bass and warbling, bluesy guitars and rhythmic drums Graveyard plant us firmly back in time. Memories of my childhood burst into view; of my father’s record collection and his particular affection for that era. If you took Cream’s ‘Strange Brew’ and placed it in the middle of this album you simply would not notice.

Hell, how do you criticise something that’s been done so well but is so lacking in imagination? Tell you what, if you’re my Dad and you’re longing for another album to add to your collection, then go out and buy this. You’ll love it for many, many years until the next time all this comes around again.

Album Review: Hamfatter - What Part Of Hamfatter Do You Not Understand?

“As Seen On TV” shouts the graphic on the front of Hamfatter’s debut album - and indeed, the ex-Cambridge University music graduates are fresh from extracting £75,000 from one of the moneybags on Dragon’s Den. The initial furore over the event appears to have died down but Hamfatter are keen to wring all the extra exposure they can out of it… and why the Hell not?

‘The Girl I Love’, the lead single from their new album ‘What Part Of Hamfatter Do You Not Understand?”, serves as a gentle introduction to their reflective indie pop. Eoin O’Mahony softly sings of resisting sexual temptation to a backdrop of chugging guitars and digitised backing harmonies. It offers very little in the way of effective hooks or variety, seemingly happy to simmer along without ever threatening to boil over.

‘Karma’, by contrast, is a multi-faceted rock out with it’s unaccompanied half-sang, half-spoken introduction leading into fizzing guitars and hammered piano. O’Mahony’s vocal explores a range that flits from simple two-note sneering to glorious lilting highs. With a mighty mid-song dropout, a catchy repeated riff and funky, pummelled bass all contained within the complex song structure there is an endless backdrop of intertwining threads to fascinate.

There is certainly an element of frustration at their inability to lock-down a style that they are both comfortable with and which isn’t formulaic. There’s ’21st Century Sex’ sounding, as it does, like Badly Drawn Boy covering one of Divine Comedy’s scattier songs - the problem here is O’Mahony’s vocal just doesn’t stand up to such comparisons. Then there‘s ‘How Sweet It Is’, seemingly a play on the Marvin Gaye classic. It’s replete with strings and piano (nicely arranged as it happens) but with the vocal disintegrating into a Morrissey-styled whine the whole thing becomes too much and begins to parody itself.

As it stands, Hamfatter appear to need one hefty dose of Ritalin. The unsettled nature of this album improves with repeated plays with a few of the songs sticking out above the rest (’Karma’, ’I Want To Be You’ and, to some extent, ‘Down Tonight‘) but there is far too much that merely mimics for their instant hit of fame to allow them to reap the full benefits. A hamfatter is, apparently, a third-rate minstrel - enough said.

www.myspace.com/hamfatter

Also online @ Music-Zine = http://www.music-zine.com/reviews/?id=544

Album Review: Suicide Silence - The Cleansing

Now this is scary shit. Even the album artwork gives me the heebie-jeebies. But then it would, it being the work of the legendary Dave McKean, best-known for his graphic novels and Neil Gaiman collaborations. The band lurking menacingly within are Suicide Silence, a pummeling mixture of death metal, grindcore, hardcore and doom. Upon spinning the opening tracks of ‘The Cleansing’ I can’t help but notice the surgically precise, distorting time signatures and destructive breakdowns that drill slowly, persistently into your brain. The vocals are a mixture of tearing screech fighting for dominance over the heavy spadework of bass-grunting. It’s mindless, nigh-on incomprehensible and meltdown-inducing.

The promo blurb with the CD announces that on its release in the U.S. ‘The Cleansing’ made the Billboard Top 200 entering at 94. Vocalist Mitch Lucker reportedly responded with “It felt fucking amazing to have the Billboard news broken to us. It also felt great knowing that all of the non-stop touring and going fucking nuts every night on stage had such a positive effect on our first week sales”. That’s an impressive breakthrough for such a brutal band and bodes well for the band’s future.

As I write, I’m about half-way through the album now and each track has been indistinguishable from any other. But, wait. ‘No Pity For A Coward’ has a nicely balanced double-kick, guitar whine and bullet-bass concoction. Combined with the rhythmic vocal changes, a spot of arpeggio guitar lead and you actually come out the other side without feeling completely nauseated. Well, that’s a result. The screamo parts are starting to grind but I’m persevering.

The band have clearly set out to cherry-pick the most bruising, deafening sounds they can find from a variety of genres and the result is a cacophony of vitriol from beginning to end. Without doubt its one for the more discerning death metal fan to find fault with – I’m flailing, nay, suffocating here. It’s track eight - appropriately titled ’Bludgeoned To Death’ as it happens - and I’ve made my peace with the deep guttural growl and plan to team up with him and take out his insane, caterwauling friend who seems hell-bent on obliterating my ears. I decide I might use my desk-phone to beat him to death with. No, hold that thought, I’ll ram this portable heater down his throat instead.

The last track approaches and it’s ‘Green Monster’. Frenetic double-kicks slip in and out of the breakdowns and move on into some feisty spots of snare-bashing. The guitars feedback, then pistol into a grinding mash of bass and lead. All the while the vocals wallow before there’s a reverberating, watery thread of city sounds, garbled phone conversations and high-pitched guitar whine over bowed strings. The fade-out leaves me at peace. No! There’s a hidden track!

The lack of track variety leaves me with no choice, and this won’t be popular with their rapidly increasing fanbase, but to advise you to steer well clear of this one. There is the odd glimmer of respite as, at times, promising snippets of dark and thickly melodic guitar shine out above the misery. The band proudly shuns their genre’s predictable conventions but for me they would be better served incorporating a few of them into any future efforts, if only to break free from the remorseless attack of repetition that they seem to have found themselves wedged in.

Also online @ Subba-Cultcha = http://www.subba-cultcha.com/album-reviews/article.php?contentID=5363

Album Review: Ill Nino - Enigma

Cristian Machado’s spitting vocals echo Robb Flynn’s monstrous roar and threaten to overwhelm but they quickly flatten out into a wash of harmonised choruses that fit snugly over rattling, crunched guitars. The real delight here though is the brilliantly conceptual intros, bustling into clever drum syncopation which reverberates throughout. The band’s Latin roots anchor the album with these percussive rhythms and some tracks are sung wholly in Spanish. Their groove is undeniable and irresistible, rumbling slowly forward.

‘Compulsion of Virus And Fever’ scorches a great scar of bellowing whilst the guitar sections bully their way to the forefront over dancing drums. There is a tendency for the weaker, more formulaic tracks like ‘Formal Obsession’ or ‘Guerilla Carnival’ to get lost alongside ones that simply fizz and bristle with emotion and cunning. Still, by keeping close to their roots and inflecting their own unique touches they have produced a constantly surprising album worthy of a place in anyone’s collection.

Also online @ Subba-Cultcha =  http://www.subba-cultcha.com/album-reviews/article.php?contentID=5396