Combining elements of shoegaze, dreampop, drone and a touch of post-hardcore noise, Montreal’s No Joy have carved out a career as part of the alternative underground, making music that can be both darkly captivating and brutal, yet retain some kind of mystic beauty within that general dystopia. Previous full length releases have featured a broad range of retro sounds and huge echoes of an alt-rock past. From the 90s throwback loveliness of tracks like ‘Wrack Attack’ and the pure dream pop of ‘Moon In My Mouth’, to the Jesus and Mary Chain ugliness of ‘Still’, there’s very little to link the tracks with being the same band, yet at the same time, their unsettling qualities suggest they’re all the product of No Joy. Each record is home to buried treasure – it can be laborious to find that gold, but rest assured it’s there.
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THE 1957 TAIL-FIN FIASCO – The 3 Song Drive EP
On their first two releases (2011’s ‘Private Jet Flashback‘ and 2013’s ‘Cruise Control EP‘) The 1957 Tail-Fin Fiasco proved themselves to be masters of retro cool. Armed with a quirky sense of humour and an unhealthy obsession with Steely Dan, the two men at the core of the Fiasco made audiences wonder how such authentically American sounding music could ever have been spawned from the UK. Not only that, but from the wilds of Essex, too – hardly a breeding ground for AM radio pop.
EDxKEMPER – Cut Her Head And Love Her
Back in 1986 when the seeds of grindcore were sown, it seemed to take extreme music to a whole new level. Often with a raw sound and fairly low budget, the fusion of extreme thrash metal and blistering punk sounds in the hands of bands like Napalm Death and Extreme Noise Terror created something almost beyond music – a form of short and sharp brutality that was utterly visceral. For something that seemed so niche, grindcore flourished with scenes popping up all over the globe. With bands like NAILS keeping it alive in the twenty first century, almost thirty years on from Napalm Death’s genre-defining ‘Scum’, it couldn’t just be written off as a novelty.
Greek grinders EDxKEMPER are absolutely devastating on their 2016 release ‘Cut Her Head and Love Her’, as they mix the brief bursts of noise from those genre pioneers with more of a crust punk aspect and some extreme metal heaviness for good measure. What’s perhaps most impressive here – without anything resembling actual songs – are the production values. Whereas you might expect something of this nature to hang on to some fairly primitive origins – much in the way an early Crass record could be seen as a snapshot of an afternoon – the production/mix on this disc is stunning.
ALL PEOPLE – Learn Forget Repeat
At the beginning of 2013, All People released their debut EP ‘Communicate‘. The variety within the seven tracks showed the work of a band who didn’t want to be hampered by genre constraints. The mix of reggae, ska, punk and alternative rock proved that the band arisen from the ashes of Fatter Than Albert had a potentially great future.
CONCEIVED BY HATE – Death & Beyond
By the beginning of the 1990s, Sepultura had put Brazil firmly on the metal map. While their audience grew significantly with the release of their third full length album ‘Beneath The Remains’ in 1989, it positively exploded with 1991’s ‘Arise’. That album was not only the very pinnacle of the music the then young band had sought to create, but also one of the best thrash releases of the era. Decades on, Seputura’s influence can be heard running through the hearts of many underground Central and South American metal bands – most notably Harvest. Whereas many have sought to emulate the raw thrash of ‘Beneath The Remains’, El Salvador’s Conceived By Hate look farther back, still. On parts of their second full-length LP they cull a definite influence from the Seps’ ‘Bestial Devastation’ and ‘Morbid Visions’ releases, which mixed with their own ideas, crafts an unholy sound that blends extreme thrash and death metal with superb musical results.