Oct 052017
 

 

To greater and lesser degrees, every track on the French band Wheelfall’s new album gets your head in a hammer lock and seizes control of your involuntary muscle reflexes. Remaining motionless as you listen is not an option. To greater and lesser degrees, every track is also unerringly bleak and disturbing. It’s the kind of black-hearted music that seems simultaneously to be clawing in a blood frenzy to get at your throat while also clubbing you senseless with a cold, machine-like determination and precision.

In reflecting on the album experience, “violent”, “hallucinatory”, “insane”, and “oppressive” are among the words that spring to mind. “Massively heavy” and “compelling” are other words that seem appropriate. The warmth of human kindness, mercy, forgiveness, and love — all of that has been brutally banished from Wheelfall’s musical realm, but man, what they’re doing here is electrifying. The Atrocity Reports keeps you on the edge of your seat, all nerves firing. Sometimes it feels like the world is coming apart, or at least your own sanity, but the allure is nonetheless (and perhaps perversely) irresistible. Continue reading »

Sep 232017
 

 

I wrestled with myself over how to arrange the songs I’ve chosen for this Saturday round-up, trying to figure out the best flow from one track or video to another. No two of them are in the exact same genre space (although three of them do incorporate elements of industrial metal), and that complicated the endeavor. Eventually I gave up and arranged them in alphabetical order by band name.

This is one of those times when every band whose music is represented here was a new name to me when I checked out the songs. But it’s all good shit.

CALQUES

Our president was in Huntsville, Alabama last night, congratulating himself and riling up a crowd of people who don’t seem to realize he’s done nothing for them, calling black NFL protesters sons of bitches, basking in the glow of “lock her up” chants, continuing to brand Russian election interference a “hoax”, and promising to “handle” the “Little Rocket Man” in North Korea (the master plan apparently consists of name-calling). The crowd ate it up.

The two members of Calques live about three hours away in Montgomery, Alabama, but I’m guessing they didn’t make the drive for that rally. “All you get from Calques,” according to the Sentient Ruin label, “is the misery and oppression, the shortcomings, the failures, the ugliness, and the unappealing blight of the southern reality vomited on you through a swarm of shattered glass, mangled nerves, and razor wire.” Continue reading »