Sixteen years into their career, Curse The Son have unleashed a devastating work in ‘Delirium’. By taking many cues from classic stoner and doom bands and then adding their own brand of extra sludge, this fifth album from the New Haven heavyweights certainly doesn’t sell itself short in terms of riffs. The record’s general heaviness will be enough to win over a huge section of the metal community, but some already intense workouts take on new levels of darkness when the arrangements are peppered with some very bleak lyrical concerns.
Category Archives: Album & EP Reviews
UNEARTH – Bask In The Blood Of Our Demons EP
Unearth’s eighth release ‘The Wretched; The Ruinous’ presented fans with an uncompromising thirty six minutes worth of pure metal. The US metalcore band pulled out all the stops to deliver a truly heavy set which pulled together the strongest elements of their crossover sound. The album’s highlights really showed how broadly the band could apply their heaviness for mixed results: ‘Eradicator’ drew from the groove metal of Pantera’s ‘Far Beyond Driven’; the brilliant ‘Broken Arrow’ slowed down just enough to show off more of a timeless hardcore approach; ‘Dawn of The Militant’ applied angular rhythms against a slow and sludgy groove before dropping into some superb thrash passages, effectively showing off the full range of the band’s talents, and ‘Mother Betrayal’ even found time to drop melodic arpeggios and goth influenced vocal passages into something derived from classic Lamb of God. ‘TW;TR’ was one of 2023’s strongest metal discs – one of those records that offered fans of extreme sounds something great, no matter where they chose to drop in.
THE WOOD – Days
Liverpudlian band The Wood are an interesting prospect. Their music, on the surface, is sophisticated pop-rock, but dig a little deeper, and their debut album ‘Days’ will serve up other interesting styles, all pulled together to create an enthralling listen.
SOFTSUN – Daylight In The Dark
A new name for 2024, SoftSun are a doom-laden shoegaze/desert rock trio featuring a few familiar faces. Guitarist Gary Arce will be known to some as a member of both Yawning Man and Yawning Balch; vocalist Pia Isaksen is a member of Superlynx, and Dan Joeright is the drummer with Earth Moon Earth. Between them, they’ve created something that sounds different enough from their parent acts to make SoftSun an immediately effective side hustle.
THE RATTLEBACKS – Sidewinder
Since forming in 2021, Brighton band The Rattlebacks have worked incredibly hard to mark their place within the rock underground. Their debut EP ‘Kink’ shared a sound that mixed classic hard rock riffs with a pinch of melodic metal and grunginess to create something very broad but appealing. The release gained enthusiastic press from a few independent outlets, but as good as it was, it left the feeling that, in time, the band would unleash something much stronger. Continue reading