The debut album from Dutch rockers Hvalross introduced listeners to a band with a very distinctive sound. Released in 2020, ‘Cold Dark Rain’ wasn’t afraid to mix styles. Tunes like ‘Finally Repent’ and ‘I Shot My Best Friend’ blended old style melodic rock with light alternative rock tones and semi-bluesy sounds, and the band’s huge approach to backing vocals occasionally hinted at a love of ‘Dog Eat Dog’ era Warrant. ‘As I Am’ leant further towards a prog metal-post grunge hybrid with its contrasting muted riffs and huge blankets of sound, and ‘Death From Above’ showed how Hvalross could weave stoner-ish tones within their riffs and still convey a huge hard rock melody. They didn’t always get it right; the huge, wailing vocal cutting through the middle of ‘The Owl’ proved to be a massive distraction from some potentially enjoyable music, but few records are perfect.
Author Archives: Real Gone
VOLT RITUAL – Return To Jupiter EP
Volt Ritual’s self titled album was released in the summer of 2022. Being a wholly DIY release, it didn’t get the full bells and whistles in terms of promotion, but for those who stumbled across it on Bandcamp, it was a record that struck a chord almost immediately. Its seven songs drew heavily from the past, with huge musical debts owed to Black Sabbath, Fu Manchu and Kyuss, but Volt Ritual clearly understood the value in “recycling with love”, and against a lot of competition – let’s face it, the stream of new stoner and doom albums is never ending – it became one of the scene’s best records.
Watch: KMFDM share new video for ‘Airhead’ ahead of new album
On the heels of previous single ‘Let Go’, KMFDM ramp up the promotion for their forthcoming album with another new track, ‘Airhead’.
WASP MOTHER – Digital Pollution EP
On this follow up to their ferocious ‘Self-Loathing’ EP of 2022, Massachusetts brutalists Wasp Mother challenge the idea of disposable media on their 2024 release ‘Digital Pollution’. In the band’s own words, “artists [have become] content creators with each successive work being left behind as new content fills the void of malaise.” They mourn the fact that “our appetites and attention span for media has become insatiable in a way where the meaning of the art we’re viewing is being lost in a sea of likes, comments, the all-knowing algorithm.” In short, there’s no longer time to stop and digest the wonders we’ve been given. We watch the YouTube clips; we then seek out new quick thrills. More importantly, we listen to an album; we then move on to another at the push of a button. We’ve somehow lost the ability to lose ourselves in a new set of songs, play them on a loop for weeks and actually feel the value of that art.
EXIT EDEN – Femmes Fatales
In 2017, Phantom Elite’s Marina La Torraca, League of Distortion’s Anna Brunner, Trillium’s Amanda Somerville and Clémentine Delauney pooled their collective vocal talents to create Exit Eden, a symphonic metal supergroup which aimed to bring a very theatrical slant to several rock and pop classics. Their ‘Rhapsodies In Black’ album – released that same year – showed how brilliantly 80s tunes like Visage’s ‘Fade To Grey’ and ‘Heaven’ by Bryan Adams would work when reworked in a Nightwish-esque mould. The project’s real magic came through, however, when the performers and their assembled session band put a heavier slant on (then) more contemporary pop material like Katy Perry’s brilliant ‘Firework’ and Lady Gaga’s ‘Paparazzi’.