Tag Archives: metal music

JEHNNY BETH – Obsession: TRACK OF THE MONTH

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RAW INDUSTRIALS FROM BETH, BLACK METAL FROM EGYPT AND … A VIDEO OF GLOWING SHOELACES

It’s been a big few weeks for big names and big media coverage. Glastonbury dominated the BBC but if you weren’t screen-bound at the time Neil Young actually played, his set remains elusive bar whatever scraps you can sweep up from YouTube (here’s an Old Man clip that’s quietly hypnotic despite – no, because of – being filmed miles away from the stage from by someone who totally gets it… thank you BrainRotRebellion. Great laces).

As if Glastonbury all over wasn’t big enough, Oasis got us giddy for communal anthems less than a week later and then BLACK FCKN SABBATH reunited for a celebratory all-star last-ever show at Villa Park: Back to the Beginning. Massive. Sabbath are dominating the sounds round here but, to balance all that enormity and nostalgia, here are some new tunes – and it’s a noisier bunch this month.

Converge have not put out anything new but Mary Anne Hobbs played the ferocious Dark Horse on her new Sunday evening 6 Music show last month. Why? Seems that Jehnny Beth is a fan – and Hobbs had just given Obsession its first ever radio play.

Unsurprisingly, Beth aces it. Obsession grabs the wracked emotions and desperate aggression of early Nine Inch Nails and makes fresh industrial chaos for 2025 – here’s the video and her new album You Heartbreaker, You is out in August. Obsession bodes very well.

Meanwhile … Manchester for Maruja, anyone?

MARUJA – Look Down On Us

For Maruja first-timers, like what I is, Look Down On Us starts out like punk-noise bass with sax and rage. So far, so grit. But there’s more to it as this is a track (and video) of many parts, moods and movements, where anger slows to calm, calm swells to hope, and hope gets hit with headbanger intensity and a squalling free-form crescendo. Explosive, cathartic and very possibly ascendant, no doubt this is a beast when played live. Video right here.

STRATFORD RISE – Gunshow

Can you call this stuff prog? It’s two and a half minutes short so probably not. But then again, length isn’t everything … is it? In Gunshow, Belfast’s Stratford Rise mangle blackmidi/Geordie Greep quirk into a dense, churning chunk of artsy metallics that doesn’t quite go where you think – and stops before you find out.

WITCHCRAFT – Burning Cross

Very timely, given the music retirement news of the moment – a pure retro crawl from a descendant of a descendant of Black Sabbath. Absolutely nothing about Burning Cross screams ‘2025’. Nothing screams ‘summer heatwave’ either, but this Witchcraft tune is definitely at the quality end of any Sabbath devotion you might stumble on, especially the non-metal (jazzier?) breaks and ever so slightly stank-face wah. Check it here and file away for some appropriate autumn drizzle.

LYCOPOLIS – Mesektet

Feeling the need for raw dirt? An anti slick fix, a hot shot of sonic filth? This’ll do it. Sounding like it was recorded inside a tomb, Mesektet by Egyptian black metallers Lycopolis does to black metal what Entombed did to death metal – gives it swagger, gives it groove, gives it fucking ROLL. Atmos conjured, arrestingly unique.

TAKKAK TAKKAK – Garang

Cultures clash, but which ones? Who knows. Percussion-heavy chants and beats make for an underground cult where the ancient and the modern mix it up while metallic one-chord chugs pin you down. Subterranean club music, without borders, outside of time, impossible to describe. A spirited antidote to barriers and boundaries. Take a hit of Garang from Takkak Takkak and make your own mind up.

BLEETH – Echoes of Doubt

Bass alert: prepare to be steamrollered. Echoes of Doubt employs an absolute wall of it to bulk up its post-desert stoner anthemics so if you’re partial to the late Caleb Scofield’s four-string MO for Zozobra and Cave In, Bleeth are worthy. With thick, catchy riffs, super melodic vocals and a neat little tempo pick up, what more do you need for the summer?

’til next time!

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TAKAAT – Amidinin: TRACK OF THE MONTH

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PIGSx7 LIVE IN MANCHESTER, HEAVY FOLK FROM SHEFFIELD, BLAZING POWER-TRIO ROCK FROM NIGER AND MORE

When you step into Manchester’s New Century Hall for a Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs gig on a Friday night, your first thought is:

Marc Riley must be in here somewhere.

Didn’t see him, but he was there – confirmed it when the band were in session on his 6 Music radio show three days later. Tucked away at the back for ear protection. Nice.

Non-sightings of Mr Riley aside, what can you expect from Pigsx7 live?

Oversized doomy bouncing howling slamming ear-ringing max volume euphorics with pink shorts and a workout vest, that’s what. If you’ve seen them before, you’ll know the score with Matt Baty’s onstage kit – it’s a self deprecating pop at the genre’s aggro-macho hardman vibes, shot through with ritualistic stage moves summoning some sort of communion with the heaviness gods. Launching the set with a shamanically extended The Wyrm (I think) and signing off with shit-kicking tarmac tribute A66, it’s a good-times ruckus start to end.

With short mid-tempo tracks like Detroit and The Glitch getting plenty of exposure ahead of Death Hilarious being released, it’s easy to forget the wrecking-ball breakdowns in Pigs’ music and it’s these slow dooming slams that really leap out live. Caught me off guard a bit – it’s been a while – but in the best way. Other highlights include a non-competitive Headbanger of the Night award, plenty of anti-Download patter (it’s a Venga Boys thing) and the perma-seismic bass of John-Michael Joseph Hedley.

Walking back down Oldham Street around 10.45pm, there were loads of people sitting in a line on the pavement. What in the name of cold arse cheeks is going on?

Queue for Record Store Day 2025. At Piccadilly Records. The night before…

Did you go RSD-ing? Was it worth it? Having moved to a town where there is no record shop, that Piccadilly Records queue was the nearest I got to any RSD action.

Slight fomo at that point. Still haven’t written up last year’s RSD find, which is a shame because it’s fckn ace. Even better, it was a CD. Cop for that, vinyl fetishists.

Just before we hit some killer new sounds, can we once again praise the Melvins and their now pathological consistency? After Tarantula Heart formed a stalwart noise rock trilogy of excellence in 2024 alongside Jesus Lizard and Shellac, they’ve only gone and put another one out already – well, Melvins 1983 have. Done it in the same month, too: April. Having squeezed a couple of listens of Thunderball so far, the first impressions are more than promising – a twisted, heavy Melvins 1983 shorn of the jokes that thinned the quality of Working With God. They play Sheffield in August. Cannot wait.

Right then, off we go with some single track highlights.

JIM GHEDI – Sheaf & Feld

David Eugene Edwards plopped onto the radar recently with a project with Al Cisneros, which is uncanny and timely because there’s a 16 Horsepower air to this dense, metallic, ensemble folk shanty by Sheffield’s Jim Ghedi. With its one-two swing, Sheaf & Feld is built for movement and group action – a communal, earthy hymn to keep spirits high while bodies battle or toil. And it’s a bit like this Archie Bronson Outfit cracker from 2006.

TAKAAT – Amidinin

Immediate Mdou Moctar vibes come flying off this unpolished electrified attack. When you find out that Takaat is in fact everybody in Mdou Moctar’s band who isn’t called Mdou Moctar, it’s so obvious. The energy is up, like Funeral for Justice, the triple-time rat-tat rhythm – check those deft beats by Souleymane Ibrahim – drives hard with no time to catch breath and the guitars are saturated with distortion. Amidinin is very much a live-action jam. Scintillating stuff.

THE OTOLITH – Glimmer

When Myrkur goes full blend between blackened metal and ethereal Scandinavian folk, it’s a killer combination for reasons you can’t always place. It just works. Glimmer by The Otolith gifts us a similar genre-blending deal that feels so organic you wonder why it’s not the norm. With sea-siren vocals and viola symphonics, it’s a seductive, enchanting trip that soon becomes darkened by brief but transformative visitations from Riff Lord and Hell Voice, aka the post-metal deathly sludge bit. Hauntingly beautiful and brutish, Glimmer beguiles and intoxicates.

MCLUSKY – People Person

Confession: despite knowing the name, this is the first mclusky music I have ever heard. But if their early noughties heyday was anything like People Person then shame on me for missing it – and thank Ipecac for spreading the word because this simmer-to-boiling-point fist fight is right up the piss-damp alley of anyone with a bent for slab rock physicality, predatory bass and caustic wordage. Ipecac is a good home. Want to see office workers lose their shit and beat each other with keyboards? Watch mclusky’s People Person video.

FUCKED UP – Disabuse

Dropping all notion of melodic hookery or progressive art-punk structures, Disabuse sees Fucked Up channel their name more literally to throw up a cathartic hardcore speed assault. Save it for when you need … a cathartic hardcore speed assault. To bang your head to. Blowtorch rock, check it here.

’til next time!

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The monthly music rewind

PROJECT GEMINI – After the Dawn (Large Plants remix): TRACK OF THE MONTH

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Check this Rewind – no chitchat intro. Not through choice, more of a time pressure thing because life has got in the way AND the ‘unable to save draft’ tech hiccup only made things worse so here we are, rewriting and cutting and hurtling to hit publish just to get it done.

And breathe.

Calm.

Oh …

HIGH ON FIRE – The Beating

Never a truer title, and a deserving one, too – haven’t bothered with High on Fire for a few years. No great reason, just … haven’t. They’ve slipped off into a parallel slipstream but a track like The Beating whips them right back, demolishing all complacency in a two-minute rager that burns like a cosmic fireball and leaves a middle-finger shaped trail in the sky. Yeah. The High on Fire template hasn’t been fiddled with so you know the rough drill but the drums here really, really cook – and it’s new drummer Coady Willis, ex Melvins and trusted Melvins live stand-in, who’s driving the band these days. It’s not a brand new track because the album’s been out nearly a year, but having only recently caught it, The Beating makes it in for sheer good time brutality. No mercy.

WALDO’S GIFT – Malcolm’s Law

Instrumental, hard hitting new/post jazz crossover? Whatever this stuff gets called (if anything), Malcolm’s Law by Bristol-based Waldo’s Gift is it. See Run Logan Run for another.

The great thing about a track like this is you can zone in on any element and make a different listening experience for yourself. Want some jazz fusion with metallic edges? Put your receptors on the guitar, my fiend. Chasing a subsonic shakeout? Drop into that bass, man. Spicy beats? YES. Gilles Peterson played this on the radio earlier in the year and if you check Worldwide FM online, you can hear Waldo’s Gift in session last week. Haven’t heard it myself yet and you never know, Malcolm’s Law might be wholly unrepresentative. Then again, so might these words – after all, they’re just an attempt to capture a first impression. Check the track, then check the session.

JESUS LIZARD – Westside

Rack was a 2024 highlight. Did we expect such a resolutely Jesus Lizard-like outing after such an absence? Hard to say but it was a welcome return. Now we have new tracks and Rack’s high bar means expectations have been set …

Westside offers no real hook and doesn’t so much flow as lurch, stop, start and stumble while never quite losing balance … it staggers on. Prime Jesus Lizard, then, if a touch lighter. We’re lucky to have them. Submit.

[if Record Store Day is your thing, look out for Westside and the other two post-Rack tracks on vinyl next month.]

PROJECT GEMINI – After the Dawn (Large Plants remix)

Some classy psyche rock here – not the free-form brain-fry stuff but a more considered, groove-oriented take. There’s a history to Project Gemini but it’s all new to me, as is the news that Wolf People’s Jack Sharp is in Large Plants – which explains the impeccable prog/psyche devotion throughout. The riffs switch to extra fuzz midway through, floating vocals bring Dead Meadow to mind and there’s a classic lead guitar flourish to finish, all anchored by a tumbling, propulsive funk beat. After the Dawn right here.

VELVETINE – Miss Together

Glorious slab of dank quiet-loud here from London’s Velvetine, twisting a gothic edge – the Killing Joke, other-world edge – into an art-punk frame. It slams hard. Shades of late 80s Sub Pop. Squalling guitar abrasion owns the high ground, noise-rock bass bulldozers the low and Mia Scarlet channels Beth Gibbons to both soar and pull us down into the darker recesses. Meet Miss Together.

‘til next time!

Monthly rewind
The monthly music rewind