Link: MySpace Page

A band name like Loincloth accompanied by an album title such as Iron Balls of Steel, garners medieval images of gristly bearded wild men raping and pillaging to the ire of society. Ironically enough, that may be the inspiration of creation for the band itself. Formerly of Breadwinner (major influence of Lamb of God and others), guitarist Pen Rolling envisioned the band Loincloth with like-minded Southern metal heads who surveyed over their beloved genre and didn’t like what they saw. Growling vocals and extravagant leads were overshadowing the core of their music; The Riff. Loincloth has plenty of those to go around with Iron Balls of Steel.

The energy level is intense on opening track “Underwear Bomb” and never tapers down as the album bulldozes through each track. The production is nearly flawless as each instrument is represented nicely. The mix elaborates the conceptual percussion as the highlight but the treble of guitar and deep bass fuzz illuminates the barren framework. Imagine the sonic complexity of Mastodon and the riff-algebra of Meshuggah, minus vocals of course. Somewhere snuggled between those two pieces of bread, you get the slabs of meat that is Loincloth.

Each track never has a runtime longer than two minutes, as if being self-conscious that each jam would soon become redundant. Nothing differentiates each song from the next, distinction an appropriately placed vocalist and lead guitarist could easily provide. Without watching the tracks switch, you would never know you are listening to “Long Shadows”, “Angel Bait” or even “Stealing Pictures” from anything else. Loincloth are great musicians but reiterate once heralded techniques over and over throughout the sixteen tracks. Eventually and unfortunately, Iron Balls of Steel’s brash dissonance fades into the background.

Instrumentation of metal is a romantic, even if a simply misguided notion of purity for the genre. Never lacking the testicular fortitude its title emphatically boasts, nevertheless Iron Balls of Steel becomes stagnate as the album progresses. I’m all for the daunting instrumental concept of Loincloth but consistent creativity and execution must be paramount to stamp it a successful venture. The desire and passion presented is bold and far from pointless but Loincloth’s Iron Balls of Steel sounds like a promising band cutting their demo. All the while, posting ads on Craigslist and continuing that familiar disappointing search for the complimenting singer.

Link: http://www.reverbnation.com/sargonextrememetal

Desert rock this is not, this Mesa, Arizona, fierce metal group belongs more to the howling edges of Gothenburg, Sweden than any Kyuss or Queens can procure.

In Contempt comes from the trenches of battlefields and war cries singed with the scent of extremism. The first thing that we hear on this album are machine gun fire. It trades off for machine gun-like drum rattles. It’s a proper call to arms for the fierce extreme speed metal that is to follow.

“The Hunger” does the same but in 2-2 time and spins like a whirlwind of wild Norse power like they were consumed by the ghost of At The Gates. Complimenting this is “Drown In Sorrow,” one of the great songs on the album. The brutal Abscess-like screaming breaks the silence and conjures up powerful Iron Maiden style guitar rhythms. It’s raucous. It’s intense and every bit as reveling.

“Attack” brings us back to the darkness of war. Not as fierce as the earlier songs, the metal changes to Crustcore when it comes time for the chorus.

The album continues to play in this randomized pattern with consistent chops and impressive solo precision. This is a band that has complete control and an edge on their recording. Hair and sweat will be flying with fury from beginning to end.



Link: M.O.D. Technologies home page (currently inactive)

When this stuff was new (back in the early 90s, in the middle of the grunge revolution), Praxis was something of a revelation.

Keyboardist Bernie Worrell (Parliament-Funkadelic) was the mainstream anchor to a weird bunch of misfits that included famed producer Bill Laswell (Material), a session drummer who goes by the name “Brain,” and the enigmatic speed guitar virtuoso, Buckethead (who to this day performs wearing a featureless white mask and a bucket on his head). Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis) explored the space where speed metal, hip hop, and free jazz met. It was a skronky, sprawling mess of a record that was nevertheless able to captivate the adventurous listener.

By 2005, thirteen years later, the Praxis project had apparently run its course with the recording of Profanation: Preparation for a Coming Darkness. The core lineup of Lasswell, Worrell, Brain, and Buckethead, was on board. High profile guest vocalists (Iggy Pop, Serj Tankian, Killah Priest, and Mike Patton) were brought in to breathe fire into several of the songs. And then… nothing. It took three years for the record to see any sort of release, and when it did, it was in Japan only. Although by 2009 the record was available digitally in the US, it wasn’t until this year that Laswell himself was able to physically release the record here.

One of the rules of rock and roll is if a record’s release gets held up for more than a year, there’s a reason for it. And if it’s held up more than five years, that reason will be painfully apparent when you finally get a chance to listen to it.

Profanation is not an exception to that rule. It’s a sprawling mess of ideas and unfocused execution, made listeneable by the sheer talent of the guys in the room. Not surprisingly, the strongest tracks are the cluster featuring the high profile guest artists. “Furies” would fit in nicely on any latter-day Iggy Pop record, as he croons over Buckethead’s aptly crunchy licks. Killah Priest rhymes over a fairly traditional funky/jazzy hip hop track that sounds entirely out of place as an intro to Serj Tankian’s wailing “Sulfur and Cheese” — which itself sounds like nothing more than a System Of A Down studio outtake. And therein lies the main problem with this record: it very much sounds like it was recorded in the mid-aughts, and its datedness is a distraction. A listener’s tolerance for this sort of wankery depends to a great degree on the nostalgia associated with the time and place it was first experienced.

Profanation suggests a seven year gap (even a cognitive one) is a bit too much to overcome.

Links:
Bitter End: http://www.myspace.com/bitterend
Deathwish: http://www.deathwishinc.com/

It’s been way too long since we have had a band who can churn out a great hardcore metal album like this, and where Climate Of Fear was an in-your-face, here-we-are offensive, Guilty As Charged pulls back and concentrates more on the elements that drive this band.

What drives this band is the steam train of guitars and the raucous fury of the rhythm. The Texas heat does not stop Bitter End from being the powerhouse they are, holding a power chord out into infinity (“Means To An End”) or being creative enough with their landscape to pull off the Sepultura-infused tribalistic instrumental of “Suenos Muertos.” It’s like a durango version of “Fade To Black” that transitions into a tsunami of metal fury that will keep your fist in the air as

And so what if the title track rubs off of “Corrupted Souls,” both sounding similar, this metal musique concrete is vicious and you will be wiping off the bruises. Forget that the intro to “Broken” is to “Enter Sandman” as “Ice Ice Baby” is to “Pressure,” their mid-tempo agro-groove and pit-stomping party will set off the National Weather Service.

The power is in the punch and this band has taken great care into crafting the lyrics and the music into a dust storm of realism. Not since the early Victory Records days have I spent time slobbering over myself.

Link: http://www.lairoftheminotaur.com/site/

Almost as good as any At The Gates album, chalk Evil Power up to another superb metal release. With Nate Olp taking over on the bass and guest backing vocals by General Diabolical Slaughter of Usurper, Evil Power has more oomph than the band has pushed in the past.

This album has velocity. “We are violence. We are decay. We are the plague of death. We are the end of days.” When they sing it, you believe a song like “We Are Hades.” Built on an ancient mythological background and presenting the same bringer of fear as any social, religious, or political entity throughout western civilization, Lair of the Minotaur does not just stand in the eye of the hurricane, fueling its power, they are the hurricane and you are its destruction.

You cannot imagine how beefy this band is until you dig in from the beginning. There is no fluffery here, just full on fury and pure muscle. What pushes this band up front is the talent this band has. These musicians have the chops to make Metalica look like little sissies. “Let’s Kill These Motherfuckers” proves that. With a guitar crunch and the pounding drums, it’s a steam train of metal fury. Sure the lyrics are elementary, “We fucked them all. Let’s fuck them all again,” but it’s damn effective.

Evil Power is a metal fan’s metal album.

Origin: Montreal, Quebec
Style: Metal

If you want a perfect example post-millennium Victory Records-style hardcore that is influenced from the classic Victory days (think Warzone), then this album is it. Not only does it shine on the Victory roster, it shines within the bands hierarchy of releases.

A sound that is influenced from south of the border, the band holds tight of that East Coast mentality. However, there is a certain sign that the band, or part of the band was leaning towards another direction, that of the Northwest sludge scene and bands like Clutch and Alice in Chains. But A Perfect Murder does not stray too far and head back into hardcore territory towards the end of the release.

However, before this album, the band was as heavy as steel girders into the metal scene. They ripped and shredded with the best of them. What caused the shift in dynamic is uncertain, but they did create a significant change in their sound just from the previous year.

Soon after this release, the leave of an original guitarist eventually caused a doom and gloom scenario that would ruin the band until 2007 when they tried it one more time and released War of Aggression.

Cross-Reference: Warzone, Sick Of It All, Clutch

Link: http://www.myspace.com/pythiamusic

Listening to Pythia’s “Army Of The Damned” is like playing every PS3 fantasy game, only on warp speed. This symphonic metal epic takes everything The Gathering did and 75 percent of any Century Media band and double-time it.

Listen to this and once the initial laughter of awesomeness wears off and the TNT references end, you get a “Lord Of The Rings” head-bashing of a good time. The song ends with the poem “Suicide In The Trenches,” recited by British actor Brian Blessed, that sounds like Patrick Stewart reciting Vilvaldi’s The Seasons.

The kicker (at least for me anyway) is that the song abruptly ends and if you have a song immediately following on your iTunes (for me it was Dick Dale’s “Ooh-Wee Marie”), you may be in for a surprise depending on how stark the transition is.

Joking aside, Pythia can conjure up a thundering fistful of metal that almost makes you forget that humans are actually making this music.

Links:
Kerretta: http://www.myspace.com/kerretta
Midium Records: http://www.midiumrecords.com/
Carrot Top: http://www.carrottoprecords.com/

Sometimes you just need to shut up and jam. Kerretta’s collection of instrumentals does just that, even when they are going at a slow pace.

Vilayer may be wordless but the album is chock full of enough guitar jams to keep your mind occupied. Hell make up some words yourself, it does not matter what.

Whether it is power groove of “The Square Inside” or the consistency of “Maven Fade,” either one gives you every reason to put your skinny wrists to the sky. And no I am not talking about the realms of metal in the progressive sense here. And I am not going near jam band territory. What Kerretta does is exploratory.

Often times each member drifts off into their own microcosm, but then gets pulled back into the group as the band knows just exactly when to become unified and rock.

These instrumentals have the fat trimmed off of them. The members are very well touted to keep a disciplinary time structure, and they work so well together, something that’s necessary when you rely on your instruments to carry you forward.

Beauty and brawn, that’s what you will find within Vilayer’s seven songs.

Link: http://www.aurora-b.com/band_pages/ABX038.php

Climb up in the attic and dig around for a while. I’m sure there is that VHS player stashed somewhere in the back. Got it? Good. Now go get you a dirty copy of Faces Of Death and make sure the slow motion option is on when you watch it.

That is what it feels like when listening to The Hunt. At first you get this cinematic ambient brooding going on. But when you least expect it, a death metal onslaught clocks you upside the head and doesn’t stop beating you in the face for what feels like hours. It’s sheer horror to bear, but let’s attribute that horror more towards the car accident syndrome when driving by, you just cannot seem to look away.

The Hunt is this combination of death doom and gloom covered by spurts of ambient electronic soundscapes that sometimes prowl around your eardrums while other times taunting you to see how long it will take for you to crack.

It’s like Type O Negative covered Burzum but would much rather listen to something like Labradford. Quite confusing, but that’s the essential reason that makes you want to listen to Fauna. After a few listens, I still don’t know what lurks around the corner.

Open the door that leads into the dark depths of the unknown and expect some strobe lights to beat you down along the way. They didn’t say it was easy, but nor did bands like Whitehouse or Zoviet France.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Desert_Sessions

Remember that part in the movie Vanishing Point where Kowalski (Barry Newman) is in the desert, and he stumbles upon a hippy commune with desert hippies playing music and religiously performing some crazy free-form dance? It felt like an existential mirage generated from the heat of the desert.

If you substitute ‘60s psychedelia with a roving dust storm of gypsy revivalism, then you get the gist of the first song “Don’t Drink Poison” from Desert Sessions.

I always thought that scene in Vanishing Point was a weakness of the movie, as is Volumes 7 and 8 of this collective.

Despite the first number, a watered down original version of “Hanging Tree” that later was re-recorded for Queens Of The Stone Age’s Songs For The Deaf, and “Poly Wants A Crack Rock” — being the finest examples in the stoner rock style — this compilation keeps a low profile that doesn’t really do its part to push the envelope like it should.

The Desert Sessions collective has always included the best in alternative performers and these two volumes are no different. Mark Lanegan, Alain Johannes, Joshua Homme and others make up Volumes 7 (Gypsy Marches) and 8 (Can You See Under My Thumb? There You Are).

Trailing towards the end of the collection (the final imprint on this collective was Volumes 9 and 10), and serving as an historical document for Queens of the Stone Age,   unless you are a deep fan of Screaming Trees or a Queens junkie looking for earlier versions of a few songs that make the lifeblood of the band, then you are not going to really want to bother with the rest. Sure Johannes’ Eleven imprint is embedded in here somewhere, but you will have this picked over if you keep that philosophy.