Galway’s finest of raging crust, Bacchus will launch their debut LP this weekend with a show in Dublin’s Fibber Magees with a pretty killer line-up to boot. Also on the bill are Drainland, This Tongue Is Poison, Rats Blood and The Blind. It’s only €8 too so you would be just a tool to turn it down. Check the facebook event page HERE and in the meantime listen to one of the new tracks below. Abbadon Incarnate are playing on Friday too, but that blabbered was about HERE.
The album marks the new line-up of the band, but of course still headed up by the manic noise master himself, Steve Austin. Judging by this track, Today is the Day hasn’t lost a step, as well as their rather splendid show in Whelan’s back in April, which more than edified that too.
Pain Is A Warning is released on August 16th through Black Market Activities. Check out the artwork below too.
Galway’s Rites have been whittling away at this EP for some time, and finally their sludging assault has been committed to a 12” vinyl, encased in this imposing artwork, a fragment of Santiago Caruso’s Sandman. The sleeve in your hands creates a vibe straight away for the record, but visual aesthetics are one thing. So it’s particularly pleasing to find that the music held within is more than meeting of expectations. The multi-faceted but somewhat downcast doom/sludge is remarkable in its guttural punishment. There are riffs that move at a glacier’s pace, slowly marching along in a crushing and mauling manner. But then the clamour can give way to a volatile offensive of riffs. The whole sound and vibe of the record is an exhilarating one, set from opening barrage of the intro track before the sizzling into, particular highlight, ‘Vessel’. Then, ‘Plastic Lung’ spends its seven and a half minutes slowly pummelling, until the bile soaked vocals enter.
The vocals of the EP are scant throughout. This is an effort very much focussed on the riff, but when those biting, ripping vocals do pervade the din, they add a new texture to the cacophony that’s wholly embellishing, adding new dimensions each time. The thick, dense bass also adds more and more layers to the sound.
Production wise, the record has a slick feel to a degree but none of the grit has been lost and or any jagged edges filed down. Thankfully. Then again, the band did record with James Eager at The Hive Studios, who hasn’t really been putting a foot wrong at all lately.
‘Forging’ heaves with plate shifting heaviness and more of those sickly vocals, meanwhile, ‘Iron Shrimp’ appropriately winds down the record, first commencing with a vast, striking riff before trekking through more ominous passages. This whole effort is simply doom laden, sludgy brilliance but with an affinity for hardcore and crust that’s hard to avoid. All this is flung into this one 27 minute long melting pot of dirty noise, and it’s beautiful altogether.
8/10
Leicester’s Diet Pills, who recently released their LP (reviewed HERE by the way), posted earlier tonight that they will be releasing a split 7” with German hardcore band Grinding Halt.
It should be a dirty as fuck record, given the sickliness of Diet Pills’ LP. Also, Grinding Halt released a great split 10” with Drainland last year, their side being very much on the visceral, speedier end of things.
Now, flipping things completely in another direction. A tweet from Scale The Summit’s Chris Letchford revealed that he is in the process of writing a jazz record, stating, “Played guitar until 530am last night. Got some good stuff written for my jazz record! Excited!”
Some following tweets to fans’ questions included: “It’s more a "contemporary clean" guitar album, than a traditional jazz record... but I know it will be classified [as] jazz”. Also, some loose notions of a timeframe for its release in “I don't have as much time to work on it as i would like due to all the touring. Before the end of the year is the plan!”
Scale The Summit released their third album in March, The Collective, which was a stunning piece of work and more than suitable follow-up to 2009’s Carving Desert Canyons, a record that garnered a lot of attention for the band. Have a listen to ‘Black Hills’ below:
[R]evolution of a Sun are something of an anomaly in Irish music, having been threatening to drop this album for some time now, and after several EP/Demo efforts that only added fuel to the fire.
‘Evolution’ opens with a gloomy intro, which slowly creates a bleak atmosphere. Eventually building and building, the din erupts into a barrage of grating vocals and frenzied riffs, all alluding to gripping things for Hell. The album is available through Underground Movement and Into The Void Records.
