Sharing a label with Harrow, Darkspace and Krasseville, it was always obvious that Drought’s debut album wouldn’t be an easy listen. Quickly gaining positive notices from cult music blogs situated in the deepest corners of the internet, ‘Rudra Bhakti’ set itself a place among lovers of extreme music, while simultaneously presenting something that barely represents music at all. There’s extreme and there’s extreme, and Drought piledrive noise across twenty four brutal minutes, leaving behind something that borders on the unlistenable, almost to the point of representing some kind of bizarre aural self-harm.
Tag Archives: metal
DEVOLTED – Broken Kings EP
Hailing from Dublin, metal four-piece Devolted originally came together due to a love of old-school heavy metal. A few line-up changes led to a shift in their sound and their 2016 EP ‘Broken Kings’ isn’t so much leather jackets, twin leads and dubious mullets as a really thoughtful blend that takes in bits of classic metal and a huge slab of groove as well as touches of thrash and hardcore. It’s four songs, while not too far removed from lots of stuff you’ll have heard before, shows the work of a band that’s keen to mix up their influences and come up with something that is – at least musically – both entertaining and powerful.
JORN – Heavy Rock Radio
Possessed with one of the biggest voices in rock – possibly the biggest, alongside his regular collaborator Russell Allen – Jorn Lande has carved out a career with some great releases over the years. His place as Dio’s natural successor is very much assured due to a few albums of self-penned material often presenting well-honed performances. He’s also fond of a cover tune or six: his 2010 album ‘Dio’, in particular, did exactly what it said on the tin, with Lande putting his stamp on tunes originally brought into the public eye by the late, great Ronnie James, the results meeting critical acclaim. Some six years on from his Dio-fest, Lande’s eleventh studio album ‘Heavy Rock Radio’ finds the huge voiced Norwegian wheeling out more covers. This time, however, the results are sometimes questionable. So questionable in places, the disc could have perhaps been subtitled “Jesus Christ, How Did This Happen?”. The answer to that should-be-rhetorical question, of course, simply being “because he’s Jorn Lande”. As most people know, with Jorn you only get Jorn, and that means – whatever the material in hand – it’s very much a case of “dials up to eleven and needle in the red” all the way. In this respect, he’s very much made each of the cuts his own, but frankly, his choices don’t always work.
FOR THE IMPERIUM – Hail The Monsters
Finland’s For The Imperium are an intense bunch. ‘Hail The Monsters’, their second full length album, is one of those records that’s really hard to get through in one sitting. It’s frightening. Not just because it’s intense and heavy – this is by no means just noisy alt-rock or metal – but more for the fact that between the obvious grooves, these guys aren’t afraid to experiment.
GOLOHOR – In Saeculis Obscuris EP
From Belarus comes Golohor, a death metal band that’s so underground that at the time of release for their 2016 EP, the only mention of them on the internet comes from the web page of the Russian record label distributing their CD/download. It’s almost as if the band members never previously existed; there’s no bio, no photos, no social media presence. That’s odd; even guys with black and white facepaint and pseudonyms usually have some kind of online presence, but for Golohor, there’s this EP…and that’s it.