Scum Will Rise: Heartless

Heartless - Hell Is Other People
2011, Southern Lord

Their selftitled seven incher from 2010 was my first encounter with Philly ragers Heartless. It was a seething mess of fast and heavy blackened hardcore that promised great things to come. Their music was heavy, uncompromising, furious and sweaty, like some old lost  Slap-A-Ham power violence album. But with better production. A re-released demo and a split with The Blind later (I may have the release chronology completely wrong here, but this is the order in which I heard them) they released Hell Is Other People on Southern Lord last year and, not even a minute into opener Clean Slate, I realise all of my expectations were set way, way too low. I knew the band had potential, but this was ridiculous! Hell Is Other People is possibly one of the top ten full length debuts I have ever heard. Ever. Thirteen songs clocking in around twenty minutes leaves no room whatsoever for any sort of masturbatory Steve Vai-wankery or pointless repetition. All the excess fat has been stripped away here, leaving a cadaverishly lean beast, where no element is kept running any longer than absolutely necessary. This makes Heartless' music ferociously hectic and dynamic and, at a first glance, often chaotic. Almost all of the songs are riddled with sharp turns and neck breaking twists and just as you think you've figured out the structure of any one particular song, it instantly whirls away in another direction.
     This could easily be frustrating to an uninitiated listener, were it not for the bands' excellent song writing skills. Where many groups would leave a muddy, tangled and convoluted impression, Heartless does not. Even in the midst of the confusion and fury there is almost always a hook to which you can latch on, that makes the songs memorable and ... well, almost catchy. Stylistically this is a boiling stew of d-beat crustcore, grind, metal, screamo and old school hardcore, with a side order of dirty-as-fuck sludge and alot of noisy textures and feedback thrown into the mix. I could easily draw comparisons to contemporary bands like Nails, Trap Them and Forfeit, or even Brody's Militia, as well as to long gone legends such as Neanderthal and Infest. I even spot a bit of Melvins or 16 in the four minute epic Cop Out, with its simplistic plodding, doomy, heavy riffage and some truly depressing, life-hating EyeHateGod in closing sludge-apocalypse Hard Feelings.
     Another cool thing about this record, beside the excellent material, is the earlier mentioned short running time: it positively gags for repeated spins. This could, in retrospect, be one of the better releases of last year. Some of the earlier Heartless releses are available free of charge at their bandcamp site, so there's no reason not to check them out.

Serving time in the middle of nowhere

Seven Sisters Of Sleep - ST
2011, A389

Everybody were raving about Seven Sisters Of Sleep when this album came out. People everywhere seemed almost taken aback by it and the reviews were glowing. Me, I just couldn't get into it. For some reason it just didn't do it for me. Maybe it was the longish name, maybe the generally slow plodding pace or the sludgy esthetic of their music in general, or perhaps I'm just retarded sometimes. It isn't that the music of SSoS is in any way difficult or overly challenging, I just didn't, for whatever reason, click with the tunes on the album, they just drifted past me without sinking any hooks in. I recently went back and sat through the album again and all of a sudden I got it. How I couldn't before is beyond me. It's almost impossible to describe SSoS's music without using the words Black and Sabbath so I'm not even gonna try. Suffice it to say, this is some amazingly well-crafted, heavy dirty metal with nods to sludge-masters Eyehategod as well as the previously mentioned precursors of all that is heavy in metal. It's not all slow all the time - in fact there are more than a few moments of ferocious hardcore velocity - but the pervading sense is that of desperation and dread and crumbling landscapes frozen in time. The much needed sense of urgency and release in the faster-paced parts serve as a momentum breaker that infuses a definite sense of dynamic into the album. I keep thinking of Eyehategod, circa Dopesick when I hear this but with a punkier attitude and less suicidally inclined. The vocal style on display here would fit perfectly on any d-beat charged hardcore album and this works really well within the context of these songs. Everything reeks of desperation and rage, from the vocals to the constricting, dense atmosphere of the music itself, and while all the songs are short and never even get the chance to be long-winded, they're also never leave you with a sense of being unfinished. In fact, the best song on the album, Swamp, isn't even two minutes long. The band apparently features members from The Arm And Sword Of A Bastard God (whom I have both heard of and heard - got a tape somewhere) and Tafkata (whom I have never heard of). Grade A stuff.

...we'll be there ready to thrash

Kill Life W/ Mike IX - D.E.A (Dead End American) 7'' Flexi
2011, A389

Yeah, it's a flexi, which means it's basically made for the vinyl nerds and asshole collectors. A bendy piece of pastic the width of a hair and with a magical ability to disappear for years and years, hidden behind bookshelves and underneath seldom moved rugs. Either way it's a nifty format that imposes the need for brevity and succinctness from whoever is on it. This disc only has one track, titled D.E.A, short for Dead End American, and it's my first aquaintance with the entity that is Kill Life, a band purported to feature members from Magrudergrind, Fucked Up, Crass and Integrity. I'm nowhere near certain who is actually on this record. The info that is available is scarce, vague and, probably, purposefully conflicting, but there seems to be at least a concensus that Dwid Hellion from Integrity is among its members. Here they pair up with Mike from EyeHateGod and Arson Anthem for one three minute track that starts off with a rather horrendous vocal rendition of Amazing Grace that slowly gets drowned in feedback and finally moves into a slow plodding heavy intro of sorts which erupts into full on hardcore about fifty seconds into the song. The song proper is only about a minute long with a definite 80s hardcore feel to it, with fast hooks and a ferocious pace. Think Negative Approach meets DRI with a snarly screaming vocal style, that sort of feels like it could be Mike but I could easily be wrong here. Since it's only one song it is by default very memorable, but it quickly degenerates into that Amazing Grace stuff it started with which kind of ruins the flow of the song. But I guess that was the intention, for some reason. I'm sort of torn here. On one hand the disc is two thirds pointless garbage (humor, I guess?) but the important third is pretty great so...I dunno.


Kill Life/33 - Split 7''
2011, All the way live records

Here Kill Life has paired up with brittish thugs 33 for a cool little split, where 33 kick things off with two short tracks of dirty, energetic slightly metallic hardcore with a really awesome dual vocal attack. There is a definte punk vibe to their style, as well as a bit of a power violence hue, that is only partly due to the riffing; it could be the stripped down recording as well as the way the vocals are sung/screamed. The first track, Dark Light is an awesome bouncy midpaced number with lots of cool hooks and twists and an almost screamo-ish touch at times. Parts of the song remind me of some of the wierder hardcore bands from the Alternative Tentacles roster, like Victims Family for instance. Next up is Coke Party, which is a 30 second rager that sounds like it could have been recorded by any number of the better late 80's crossover/hardcore acts, like DRI or their ilk. It's really cool and memorable but I prefer the style presented on the opener. On the flipside we have three really short tracks by Kill Life that blend into each other. First up is Humanity Jihad where Dwid Hellion barks over blast beats and a repeating riff, that eventually breaks down into a short sludgy chorus of sorts. All of it is over in about thirty seconds. Next up is A Change Is Gonna Come which also is a smoking fast track, but less blastbeat-y, with a great chorus that, unless my ears decieve me and I've deciphered them wrong, would have the Secret Service at your door in a heart beat if you wrote the lyrics out on the interwebs. This song is even shorter than the one before and it and it segues into Chimpanzee Eats Friend which has a 911 call of someone's friend getting attacked by a chimp, playing over a slow plodding jam. All in all a pretty damn awesome display of hardcore chops but I think they could do even better and they should've skipped the last track, cause all it does is ruin the flow of their side of this otherwise really decent split. I do think 33 has the more solid material here though and they don't throw in a lot of surplus bullshit that bogs down the music.

On Earth as it is in Hell

Yeah I know, it's been a while. I won't make excuses, I won't pretend you really give a shit if this blog exists or not and I won't waste anymore of your or my time with this preamble. New shit I've listened to these past few days reviewed below.


Sulaco - Build and Burn
2011, Handshake Inc

Sulaco has been around since 2003 and even though I've seen the name around and heard of them I'd never made an effort to actually track anything of theirs down. It turns out I'm a bit of a fuckhead. Because I should've. Sulaco oozes energy from every available pore and orifice. There is a Converge-meets-Trap-Them sense of unstoppable urgency going on here that's impossible to not get hooked on. There are semi-mathy prog parts, lots of insane almost b-horror movie like melodies and a huge dose of Brutal Truth grindness/weirdness, both rythm-wise and in the riffing. The more I listen to this album the more I get an almost caleidoscopic feeling off of Build and Burn. I mean, shit there's a huge death metal presence here, loads of dirty punk as well as an almost, well, dare I say it...emo-esque sense of melody. There are heavy as fuck sludgy, almost doomy, parts and there are pure blast beat sections that weave in and out of it all, often driven by those mathy odd horror movie melodies. I am so incredibly pleased to have finally gotten my shit togehther to listen to Sulaco because it's most definately worth it.


Young Hunter - Children of a Hungry World
2011,

Young Hunter, hailing from Tucson, Arizona, sounds like they just stepped out of a time warp straight from the late sixties and they spin huge, epic doom yarns mixed with drugged out psychedelic rock and stoner elements in a way that completely blew me away. There are even black metal-ish segments thrown in for good measure, with blast beats and all! Amazing. This is living-in-a-van-smoking-dope-kinda-music, it's I-wanna-move-to-the-desert-and-do-peyote-music, this is Charlie-Manson-is-a-friend-of-mine-and-he's-groovy-kinda-music. With a modern twist that somehow eludes my attempts to pin down. Imagine mixing Jefferson Airplane, Black Sabbath and Kyuss and letting it all pass through the digestive system of both Boyd Rice and Hunter S. Thompson. That's what Young Hunter sounds like. Kinda. Their stuff is available through bandcamp. Go there and listen for yourself.


UFO Gestapo - Grandemmisair
2011, Streaks Records

Grandemissair is the latest offering from vaguely proggy, heavy doom dealers UFO Gestapo. There's a huge Sabbath presence in these songs but there's also a dirty, ADD-kind of punk vibe going on that's a bit Black Flagg-y if you get my drift. This isn't only all-out sludge in the EyeHateGod sense of the word, but there are lots of loose structures here, lots of weird, noisy parts and lots of spaced out jams. But there are also brief, wicked, blasts of unrestrained hardcore fury, that break up the plodding monotony that's inevitable in this kind of music. There is a strong sense of 80's hardcore to some of these songs, reminding me at times of bands like Flipper and early The Melvins. I know next to nothing about the band except that they're apparently from France and that this is their second full length release so far. Really good stuff.

Serving Time In The Middle Of Nowhere

Meth Drinker - Meth Drinker
2011, Always Never Fun Records

On their self titled debut New Zealanders Meth Drinker set the bar for what's to come right at the onset. Opener Deprivation is a plodding, ragged, nasty piece of downtuned punkfuelled hatesludge. There is no beauty or light to be found here. There isn't anything even remotely positive that you can draw from this album. Only a damp sense of failure and angst, of drug induced psychosis, misdirected rage and self-destruction. This is the soundtrack to a decaying life of rotting teeth and substance abuse and a slowly deteriorating surrounding world that doesn't care if you live or die. This is pitch black, devastatingly depressive shit. But it's also very, very good. There are obvious shades of EyeHateGod clearly present but that in no way detracts from the force of these rumbling, feedback-laden dirges of death, failure and spite. None of the nine tracks are overly long or in any way boring or droney, which is too often the case with this style of music. This is doom/sludge with a huge side-order of Flipper/Black Flag snottiness and chaos attached to it, as well as some obligatory Black Sabbath riffing. Meth Drinker in no way re-write the book or anything. They just do what they do really, really well. Even if I do feel like I need a long, hot shower after listening to it.