(In this article Andy Synn reviews three recent EPs from bands based in the UK.)
Huh… seems like a while now since I last did one of these “Best of British” columns (I’m not sure exactly how long, I haven’t checked).
And while it’s not like I’ve been neglecting my “local” scene – I heaped praise upon Thundering Hooves right at the start of the year, for example – it’s probably about time to catch up with what’s going on in our ever more divided kingdom. Continue reading »
I think I made a mistake. Between Friday and Saturday I spent 6+ hours just listening to new music, at least half of which I devoted to individual tracks publicly released from forthcoming albums. That’s a LOT of individual tracks. Along with discarding things that didn’t grab me, I started excitedly assembling ideas for round-up posts organized around varying themes, and of course added to an already long existing list of ideas for the column you’re reading now.
Why was that a mistake? Because now I’m mentally suffering from the knowledge that there’s no way I’ll have the time to follow through on all the writing schemes I imagined, no way to feature everything I’d like to recommend. Even if I could, it would be too much music and too many words for any normal person to consume over the space of a few days, on top of other music you would be exploring from other sources.
Well, as they say, I made my bed and now I have to lie on it. Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, here’s what I chose for today — which is a lot of music, but not nearly enough.
MOTHER AUGUSTA
If you haven’t done whatever you need to do to follow the Chinese label Pest Productions on Bandcamp, you ought to fix that post haste. The releases are stylistically more unpredictable than many labels with a black metal pedigree, and over a lot of years I’ve encountered very few that didn’t do something good for me. A Bandcamp e-mail alert just days ago is how I discovered that Pest had released Fragile, which is the name of the debut album of Mother Augusta. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn prepared this trio of reviews for new releases by bands from the UK.)
For whatever reason, I’ve really struggled to pull together an edition of “The Best of British” so far this year. Despite receiving numerous suggestions and recommendations, only a few have really stood out to me.
Thankfully the three albums featured here, all released over the course of the last month, have proven to be the exception(s) to the rule, and are all well worth checking out if you’re interested in keeping abreast of current developments in the UK scene.
Two of these records represent a pair of highly anticipated, highly promising, debuts from a couple of new-ish names, while the third is a stunningly savage sophomore release from one of the country’s most punishing purveyors of sickeningly heavy Sludge-core.
So, without further ado, allow me to introduce you to Antre, Ithaca, and Mastiff. Continue reading »