Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the more interesting tracks that have landed in our inbox over the past few weeks. This time around, we bring you a couple of superb singer songwriters, an interesting remix, an unmissable slab of alternative metal, a jaunty country number and more besides. As always, we hope you find something new to enjoy.
*
Steak’s ‘Acute Mania’ (released via Ripple Music in 2022) presented a brilliant dose of stoner rock. Just as important as sharing some great riffs, the album boasted the kind of production job that made the London based heavyweights sound even heavier. The guitars adopted a tone somewhere between doomy and fuzzy – often making the band’s Kyuss influenced roots more than obvious – and the drums punched through everything with a genuine intent. In stoner terms, it offered the kind of professional sound you’d expect from a major label band a quarter of a century earlier. In short, ‘Acute Mania’ was a contemporary stoner classic.
Phoenix metallers Incite have been releasing classic sounding thrash/groove based albums for over a decade, but their most recent, ‘Savage New Times’ is one of their best to date. Ploughing through ten heavy workouts in a little over a half-hour, the record is insanely tight. From the speed-oriented opener ‘Lies’ – playing like a cross between Soulfly and the faster elements of Testment – to the groove laden ‘No Mercy, No Forgiveness’, to the heavy, rhythmic title track that showcases a sharper guitar tone for its first half, before tipping the hat very obviously in the direction of Soulfly for a much moodier climax, it’s a record that never lets up.
Back in those dismal days of the 2020 pandemic and everything going into lockdown, the world had no end of great music to provide in-home entertainment. One of that year’s more interesting metal releases came from From Under Concrete Kings (you have to wonder how many different combinations of words were considered to create that acronym), which mixed elements of hardcore and groove metal with the artiness of bands like Between The Buried & Me to share something that not only had a great energy, but was far less predictable than “the norm”.
Welcome back to the Real Gone Singles Bar, the place where we explore some of the more interesting individual tracks that have landed in our inbox over the past couple of weeks. This time out, we bring you a great singer songwriter, some post punk riffs with a gothy twist, a very entertaining piece of retro pop…and more besides. As always, we hope you find something new to enjoy!
*