Posts Tagged ‘southern lord’

Album of the day: Nails – Abandon All Life

Posted on Tuesday, March 19th, 2013

Lovingly pinched from The Sleeping Shaman: Nails. Not often has a band been better named, this full-bore sludgy grindcore three-piece monstrosity is simply HARD AS NAILS.

You may have come across them in 2010 as their Kurt Ballou-produced blunt force trauma of a debut album, Unsilent Death, got some pretty rave reviews, but for the uninitiated, they pretty much sound like Napalm Death, early Entombed and Eyehategod mixed together with some more hardcore punk righteous anger thrown in.

You have original Terror member Todd Jones on vocal and guitar, so you know there is going to be some finger-pointing potential moshpit action here. There’s also an undercurrent of noise rock a la Unsane in the sound, which is even more ‘Kurt Ballou’ than on Unsilent Death, further enhancing the punk / noise as opposed to metal aspects.

His style could be described as ‘integrated’, nothing particularly stands out or gets special treatment, it’s just one mass of sound coming at you. Judging by the amount of people that love Converge, his idiosyncratic way of producing ‘metalcore’ isn’t too esoteric. And it certainly works for Nails, conjuring a sense of the no-doubt full body pulverisation that would be the live experience.

The previous album was around 14 minutes, and this is positively an epic at 17 minutes. It comes blazing out of the blocks with ‘In Exodus’, which is pure coruscating, bile-filled excitement, swiftly running into the incoherent short blasts of fury that are ‘Tyrant’ and ‘Absolute Control’, you know there is some political rage going on, if the lyrics could be deciphered.

Continue reading: The Sleeping Shaman – Nails – Abandon All Life CD/LP

Tags: Abandon All Life, Album of the day, James Parker, Kurt Ballou, Nails, southern lord, The Sleeping Shaman
Posted in 2013, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended | No Comments »

Gravetemple (Stephen O’Malley, Oren Ambarchi & Attila Csihar) Confirmed For Roadburn Festival 2013

Posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2012

Gravetemple will bring their metalic free jazz freakouts wrapped in thick clouds of black buzz to Roadburn Festival 2013 on Thursday, April 18th at the 013 venue in Tilburg, Holland. Gravetemple was formed in 2006 as a side-project of the band Sunn o))) by Oren Ambarchi, Stephen O’Malley and Attila ...read more

Album of the day: The Secret – Agnus Dei

Posted on Monday, September 24th, 2012

Lovingly pinched from ThisIsNotAScene: Southern Lord just keeps rolling. This time they offer the fourth album by The Secret, Agnus Dei. No one can ever accuse Southern Lord of coloring inside the lines, in fact it seems at times they go out of their way to blacken everything outside of ...read more

Album of the day: Xibalba – Hasta La Muerte

Posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

Lovingly pinched from The Sleeping Shaman: The adjective ‘brutal’, like many others (such as ‘monolithic’ and ‘crushing’), has been bandied around far too much for its own good. When a writer uses it to describe the sound of a band we are oft numb to its implications through overexposure. I’m ...read more

Album of the day: Eagle Twin – The Feather Tipped The Serpent’s Scale

Posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2012

Lovingly pinched from Metal Review: Something I find very appealing about Utah’s Eagle Twin is the fact that there’s not another band currently kicking around that sounds quite like them. I’ve seen them lumped alongside a handful of other droning sludgers, which I suppose is fair, but this duo truly ...read more

Album of the day: Sleep – Dopesmoker (Deluxe Reissue)

Posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2012

Lovingly pinched from The Sleeping Shaman: Oh come on. This review really is redundant before it’s even begun isn’t it? I mean, where does one begin when reviewing an album that is the very epitome of a genre of music that the band who created it helped define, an album ...read more

Why Stoner Legends Sleep Stole This Year’s Roadburn Festival; Performance Footage Available

Posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Sleep stole this year’s festival by delivering a set on Roadburn‘s main stage that was equally crushing and utterly hypnotic. Given the festival’s proud history of consistently delivering the riff-filled goods, it says a lot that the 013 venue was on the verge of bursting at the seams that fateful ...read more

The Unexpected Highlights of Roadburn 2012 Pt 5: Black Breath

Posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2012

Several performances rank among the unexpected but true highlights of Roadburn 2012. See for yourself why Black Breath made such an impact by watching the clips below. (Pic: Susanne Maathuis) Black Breath combine infectious rock riffs and  black / death metal in a way that is reminiscent of a high-velocity ...read more

Album of the day: Pelican – Ataraxia/Taraxis

Posted on Saturday, March 31st, 2012

Lovingly pinched from CVLT Nation: Having been off the musical radar since 2009’s What We All Come To Need, Chicago’s Pelican burst back into hearts with the grace filled Ataraxia/Taraxis. This four track EP flits between massively weighty bass-heavy tones and sweet uplifting progressions, the instrumental four-piece delving into empty ...read more

Album of the day: Black Breath – Sentenced To Life

Posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Lovingly pinched from Stereokiller.com: The first few seconds of Black Breath’s Sentenced To Life play in waves of backwards revolution. In 2010, Black Breath released their debut LP, Heavy Breathing, an enthralling combination of early 80s hardcore and vintage thrash metal that found modernized revitalization, the band’s fundamental understanding of ...read more