Category: thrash punk

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Atomsmasher Shares Breakneck “Cartoon Violence”

Led by siblings Ed Erenberg (vocals, guitar) and Brett Erenberg (keys), Atomsmasher formed in suburban New York and made its mark with their full-length debut, 1998’s Up & Atom, a cult favorite that saw the band mixing power pop hooks with restless experimentation, anchored around densely layered guitars, stacked harmonies and lyrics that balance absurdist humor with piercing observation. 2004’s All Around the World and 2014’s Each Day Is Better Than the Next saw the band expanding upon their reputation for eclectic yet cohesive rock, while weaving diverse influences from Julian Cope to Pixies into something completely their own.

Over the years, their work has received airplay on college radio and spots on television shows, helping the band amass a loyal following with the New York City Metropolitan Area’s live music circuit.

Last year’s Keep This Secret was the first Atmosmasher album in over a decade. The album sees the band crating material that showcased the band’s signature sound: tight arrangements with sly lyrical turns within songs that are forcefully immediate and catchy.

“Cartoon Violence,” the first single since Keep This Secret is a frenetic, breakneck ripper that’s one-part math rock, one-part Queens of the Stone Age-like stoner rock that showcases the band’s unerring knack for hookiness paired with a playful sense of menace.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Live Footage: METZ Reunite to Perform “A Boat to Drown In” on “Everybody’s Live with John Mullaney”

JOVM mainstays METZ reunite to perform “A Boat to Drown In” on “Everybody’s Live With John Mullaney.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: BUÑUEL Shares a Primal and Incisive Ripper

BUÑUEL — OXBOW‘s Eugene S. Robinson, Afterhours and A Short Apnea‘s Xabier Iriondo (guitar), The Framers‘ Andrea Lombardini (bass) and Il Teatro Degli Orrori’s Franz Valente (drums) — is a transatlantic supergroup that specializes in heavy music that’s been described as beautiful, merciless and unforgiving.

Creatively, the band has always been led by instinct and the id-like impulse to expressed completely unfiltered and unvarnished emotion through song. And through their close musical alliance, they’ve displayed a seemingly innate ability to craft material that warps and buckles with complexity, freedom, tenderness and primeval energy — simultaneously.

“BUÑUEL is a name that embodies a certain cultural and literary reference, which evokes an entire world,” the band’s Franz Valente says. “Like his films, our Buñuel is surrealism. We take the listeners into a place that’s suspended between dream and reality.” Eugene S. Robinson adds “What we’re doing with BUÑUEL is to carve out a very specific glimpse… partly into hearts of darkness, but more specifically into the depth of our secrets. Secrets we keep from each other, ourselves and whatever futures we’ve imagined for ourselves. We are ultimately trying to communicate something direct and deadly about the human condition.”

Slated for an October 25, 2024 release through SKiN Graft Records and OVERDRIVE Records, the transatlantic supergroup’s latest album, the Timo Ellis-produced Mansuetude derives its title from an archaic word, which means “meekness’ or “gentleness.” Certainly, for a band known for being punishingly heavy, the title probably seems like an ironic juxtaposition. Firmly anchored in the band’s long-held penchant for surrealism, the album reportedly sees the band taking every opportunity they can to stretch their musical tendrils towards discomfort and the deconstruction of tradition, all while reaching absolute abandon. Sonically, the album’s material encompasses many moods — sometimes simultaneously — while blurring elements of post-hardcore, avant-noise, hard blues, post-industrial, symphonic thrash, metal and free-jazz, played at great cost. The record is, in Robinson’s words “extreme but articulate.”

The album also features guest spots from Converge‘s Jacob Bannon (vocals), The Jesus Lizard‘s Tomahawk‘s and The Denison Kimball Trio‘s Duane Denison (guitar), Andrea Beninati (cello) and David Binney (alto sax, vocals).

“Class” Mansuetude‘s latest single is an urgent, amygdala-driven teeth-bared, id-fueled ripper built around Robinson’s primal shouts and howls, thunderous drumming and scorching riffage. Seemingly featuring elements of heavy metal, No Wave, thrash punk and noise rock, “Class” sonically seems like a forceful synthesis of Boris, Bo Ningen, The Stooges and several others while being deliriously artful. But underpinning it all, the song is rooted in incisive socioeconomic criticism that’s furious yet very funny.

“America is schizophrenic about class and class attributes,” BUÑUEL’s Robinson explains. “On the one hand we claim it doesn’t exist here, on the other hand like Paul Fussell lays out in his book on class it works its way through every aspect of American life and living. The song itself eviscerates the notion by placing it where it most needs to be placed: in the iD fuelled [sic] underworld.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: Frankie and the Witch Fingers Share a Scuzzy Ripper

Since initially forming in Bloomington, IN over a decade ago, the acclaimed Los Angeles-based psych rock outfit and JOVM mainstays Frankie and the Witch Fingers — currently founding duo Dylan Sizemore (vocals, guitar) and Josh Menashe (lead guitar, […]

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstays METZ Share Woozy and Anthemic “Superior Mirage”

Toronto-based JOVM mainstays METZ‘s fifth studio album Up On Gravity Hill is slated for a Friday release on Dine Alone Records in Canada and on Sub Pop for the rest of the world. The album, which is the JOVM mainstays’ first album in four years was engineered by Seth Manchester and features guest appearances from Black Mountain‘s Amber Webber and string arrangements by composer Owen Pallett. 

Long known for blowing out eardrums with explosively loud songs of joyous rage, the Canadian JOVM mainstays — Alex Edkins (vocals, guitar), Chris Slorach (bass) and Hayden Menzies (drums) — have, over the course of their past couple of albums have begun exploring ways of turning abrasiveness into atmospherics. The evolution of their sound is not only a reflection of the band’s maturity as humans and as musicians, but also a changed world that demands much more nuance and compassion to comprehend and survive. Up On Gravity Hill reportedly finds the band continuing to bend the raw power of rock music to its most delicate, intricate ends. The album’s material may arguably be their deepest, detailed and unyieldingly personal batch of songs — and their most beautiful to date. 

In the lead up to the album’s release later this week, I’ve written about three of its singles. The band specifically spotlighted the evolution of their sound and approach through the release of its first two contrasting singles:

“99,” a stomping and noisy motorik chug of a song built around their long-held penchant for shout along worthy, mosh pit friendly hooks choruses that sounds subtly informed by Edkins’ work with Noble Rot. “Entwined (Street Light Buzz),” a woozy and swooning song that sees the trio retaining their penchant for power chord-driven, enormous, shout along friendly hooks and choruses with a gorgeous and meditative shoegazer-like bridge. 

“These two songs couldn’t be more stylistically and thematically dissimilar,” METZ’s Alex Edkins says. “‘Entwined (Street Light Buzz)’ is a song about the deep connection humans can foster with one another and how we carry people with us forever, even after death. ‘99’ is about the scourge of corporate greed and bottom-line thinking that runs rampant in modern society. Anything for a buck is the message being sent to younger generations.”

“Light Your Way Home,” a slow-burning shoegazer-like ballad built around the band’s long-held penchant for feedback-driven power chords, thunderous drums, enormous raise-your-beer-in-the-air-and-shout-along worthy anthemic choruses serving as a dramatic and stormy vehicle for Edkins’ achingly yearning delivery and backing vocals from Black Mountain‘s and Lighting Dust’s Amber Webber. “Light Your Way Home” finds the Toronto-based outfit at their most forcefully earnest with hearts worn proudly on their sleeves, expressing the understandably deep longing for your loved ones — presumably while living the rock n’ roll live on the road. Sonically, the track is a subtle departure from their established sound that sees the band proverbially stretching themselves upward. 

“’Light Your Way Home’ is definitely one of our favorites from Up On Gravity Hill. I was listening to lots of Jesu and Low (as I do most winters) when writing this one,” the band’s Alex Edkins says in press notes. “Lyrically, it’s about missing your loved ones to the point of losing your grip on reality. We distorted and added a mechanical slap back to the drums to create a wild and huge sound. I love how big we got the production on this one. It’s like nothing we’ve ever made before, sonically or lyrically. Amber Webber (Black Mountain, Lightning Dust) was so great to work with, and her voice just takes this song to another stratosphere. I think the video by Colin Medley perfectly captures the vibe and intent of the song.”

Up On Gravity Hill’s fourth and latest single, “Superior Mirage” sees the acclaimed Canadian JOVM mainstays pushing their sound into a bold new direction. Anchored around a propulsive boom bap-like beat, reverb soaked bursts of angular guitar and glistening synth oscillations, “Superior Mirage” is a woozy track that sees the band seamlessly blending post-punk, shoegazer textures with their long-held penchant for enormous, rousingly anthemic hooks and choruses. The result is a song that’s still mosh pit friendly yet but arguably one of the more melodic and dreamier songs of their catalog.

“It’s definitely new territory for us, and I really love the sounds we were able to achieve. We blended a Linn Drum with some homemade samples and made this ad-hoc junkyard drum sound that propels the song along,” METZ’s Alex Edkins says of the new single. “We really tried to make the backbeat the defining trait of the song. The lift on the chorus is pretty huge, too. We wanted the wall of guitars to knock you sideways.”

Directed by John Andrews, the animated video for “Superior Mirage” follows two devils speeding through the desert. After stopping to party, they come across a portal to another dimension, where they encounter the members of METZ ripping hard. Evil hasn’t been this childlike or this fun in a while, y’all!

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video/New Audio: JOVM Mainstays METZ Share Two from Highly-Anticipated New Album

Toronto-based JOVM mainstays METZ‘s fifth studio album Up on Gravity Hill is slated for an April 12, 2024 release on Dine Alone Records in Canada and on Sub Pop for the rest of the world. The album, which is the JOVM mainstays’ first album in four years was engineered by Seth Manchester and features guest appearances from Black Mountain‘s Amber Webber and string arrangements by composer Owen Pallett.

Long known for blowing out eardrums with explosively loud songs of joyous rage, the Canadian JOVM mainstays — Alex Edkins (vocals, guitar), Chris Slorach (bass) and Hayden Menzies (drums) — have, over the course of their past couple of albums have begun exploring ways of turning abrasiveness into atmospherics. The evolution of their sound is not only a reflection of the band’s maturity as humans and as musicians, but also a changed world that demands much more nuance and compassion to comprehend and survive. Up On Gravity Hill reportedly finds the band continuing to bend the raw power of rock music to its most delicate, intricate ends. The album’s material may arguably be their deepest, detailed and unyieldingly personal batch of songs — and their most beautiful to date.

To spotlight this evolution in their sound and approach, the Toronto-based outfit has shared two contrasting singles:

“99,” a stomping and noisy motorik chug of a song built around their long-held penchant for shout along worthy, mosh pit friendly hooks choruses that sounds subtly informed by Edkins’ work with Noble Rot. Directed by John Smith, the accompanying video features the members of the trio performing the song in hazy and scorching VHS fuzz and computer generated 3D renderings. The single and its accompanying video are incisive commentary and criticism on our consumerist hellscape.

“Entwined (Street Light Buzz)” is a woozy and swooning song that sees the trio retaining their penchant for power chord-driven, enormous, shout along friendly hooks and choruses with a gorgeous and meditative shoegazer-like bridge.

“These two songs couldn’t be more stylistically and thematically dissimilar,” METZ’s Alex Edkins says. “‘Entwined (Street Light Buzz)’ is a song about the deep connection humans can foster with one another and how we carry people with us forever, even after death. ‘99’ is about the scourge of corporate greed and bottom-line thinking that runs rampant in modern society. Anything for a buck is the message being sent to younger generations.”

Video by William Ruben Helms

Throwback: Black History Month: Bad Brains/Happy 68th Birthday, H.R.!

JOVM’s William Ruben Helms celebrates Black History Month and celebrates Bad Brains’ H.R.’s 68th birthday.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

New Audio: New Hampshire’s Street Trash Shares a Mosh Pit Friendly Ripper

Street Trash is an an emerging New Hampshire punk outfit, and their latest single “Trailer Parks” is a crusty, power chord-driven, mosh pit friendly ripper that simultaneously reminds me of Coney Island High and The Continental on St. Mark’s Place back in the 90s and the RidingEasy Records roster. Play loud, headbang — and open up that pit!

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstays METZ Team up with IDLES’ Joe Talbot on a Towering Ripper

Toronto-based JOVM mainstays METZ share two stand-alone tracks on all DSPs “Come On Down,” featuring IDLES‘ Joe Talbot and the previously unreleased “Heaven’s Gate,” which only appeared in the Cyberpunk 2077, the video game released back in 2020.

METZ’s Alex Edkins says, “‘Come On Down’ was originally recorded during the Atlas Vending sessions but never fully finished. During the pandemic I really gravitated towards the idea of collaboration as a way to fill the void left by the loss of live music. I reached out to friends from far and wide in order to get that feeling of community that gigs provide. Joe Talbot (IDLES) is a longtime friend who METZ has shared the stage with many, many times, and this song was a very natural and fun way to catch up with him and do something positive with our time off the road.”
 
“METZ have been a band we’ve looked up to since they came into our lives and made things better,” IDLES’ Joe Talbot adds. “I will never forget the first time I saw them or any of the other times. Allowing me to sing with them is a gift and I hope you like it. I love it and I love them. Long live METZ.”

“Come On Down” is a classic METZ ripper: Towering fuzz and distorted-fueled power chords, thunderous drumming, mosh pit friendly hooks and choruses. Prominently featuring Talbot’s snarling delivery and Edkins’ shouting, “Come On Down” has a gritty and crusty-old school punk quality while retaining the Toronto-based outfit’s enormous sound.

Directed and edited by Arturo Baston, the accompanying, animated video for “Come On Down” features a series of different birds — a hawk, geese, ducks, an ostrich and the like — flying and walking through flames.

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: JOVM Mainstays Otoboke Beaver Shares a Dizzying and Breakneck Ripper

 Kyoto, Japan-based garage punk act Otoboke Beaver(おとぼけビ～バ～ in Japanese) — Accorinrin (vocals, guitar), Yoyoyoshie (guitar, vocals), Hirochan (bass, vocals) and Kahokiss (drums, vocals) — can trace their origins back to when the band member while being in Kyoto University‘s music club. 

The Kyoto-based punk outfit quickly built a profile locally and nationally for pairing incredibly dexterous musicianship with Accorinrin’s confrontational stage presence. But when Damnably Records released the Okoshiyasu!! Otoboke Beaver compilation, Otoboke Beaver began to amass international airplay from BBC Radio 6′s Gideon Coe and Tom Ravenscroft, XFM’s John Kennedy, as well as praise from the likes of Pitchfork, NPR, i-D and The Fader.

Building upon a rapidly growing profile, the band made critically applauded, attention-grabbing appearances across the international festival circuit with stops at SXSW and FujiRock Festival. Their extensive global touring included a sold-out show at London‘s 100 Club. 2018 included an extensive UK tour and a stop at that year’s Coachella Festival.

2019 saw the release of ITEKOMA HITS, an effort that featured “Anata Watashi Daita Ato Yome No Meshi” and “Don’t light my fire,” two feral rippers that possessed elements of noise punk, no wave, prog rock and riot grrl punk, as well as the straightforward yet breakneck “I’m tired of your repeating story.” 

At the beginning of 2020, the members of Otoboke Beaver quit their office days jobs in order to embark on a world tour. They completed a two week European tour and were about to embark on their first Stateside tour when the COVID-19 pandemic forced global quarantines and lockdowns. With touring out of the question, the band worked on new material, which they recorded between lockdowns at Osaka-based LM Studio. 

The acclaimed, Japanese punk outfit’s newest album Super Champon is slated for a May 6, 2022 release through their longtime label home Damnably. The album’s title is derived from champon, a Japanese word that means a mixture or jumble of things of different types. “It’s a mixture of songs from love to food, life and JASRAC (Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers),” the band explains. “Our music is genre-less and has various elements. We hope that it will be our masterpiece of chaos music. It also sounds like champion.” 

Earlier this month, I wrote about “I am not maternal,” a defiantly feminist, breakneck, mosh pit friendly ripper meant to be played as loudly as humanly possible. The album’s latest single “PARDON?” is a feral, tempo-shifting thrash punk ripper, full of furious riffage and howled lyrical refrains in English and Japanese. The song is a playful retelling of situation the band often finds themselves in: unrelenting miscommunication of unsolicited and fervent points of views.

The accompanying lyric video is full of rapid-fire cuts and edits, which help emphasize the song’s glitchy stop-start nature while capturing the band’s infectious, raucous and playful energy.

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Formed a little over two years ago, the rising New Orleans-based metal outfit Total Hell features an All-Star cast of the city’s metal and punk scenes: Sick Thoughts‘ and Trampoline Team‘s DD Deth, a.k.a. Drew Owen (drums, vocals); Static Static and Heavy Lids‘ John Henry, a.k.a Henry Hell; Persauders‘ and Tirefire’s Jason “Panzer” Craft (guitar); and Trampoline Team’s Micheal He-man, a.k.a Michael Maniac (guitar).

The New Orleans-based metal outfit’s self-titled debut EP is slated for a November 19, 2021 release through Goner Records. The tracks on the EP reportedly sees the band crafting melodic rippers with a floor-to-ceiling hugeness but while doing so in an economical manner. “Recorded on a Tascam 8-track cassette live at home (aka “The Parkway”) by Michael He-Man and the process was a nightmare,” Total Hell’s DD Deth explains. “Original tape crapped out on us back in early 2020 so we had to redo the whole thing.” 

The EP’s first single “Clones from Hell” begins with a hellish sounding countdown before roaring out of the gate as a Motörhead-like ripper, centered around scorching, felt-melting riffage, thunderous drumming and howled vocals. Lyrically, the song is perfect for the season: clones from hell have run amok! But seriously though, play this one loud and imagine yourself in a sweaty mosh pit.

Video by William Ruben Helms

Live Footage: METZ Performs “Pulse” Live at Toronto’s Opera House

Throughout the course of this site’s 11 year history, I’ve spilled copious amount of virtual ink covering Toronto-based punk trio and JOVM mainstays METZ. The JOVM mainstays’ fourth album, last year’s Atlas Vending found the band setting a goal for themselves and for the album before they set to work on it: they wanted to make a much more patient and honest album, an album that invited repeated listens rather than a few exhilarating mosh-pit friendly bludgeonings. Co-produced by Uniform’s Ben Greenberg and mastered by Seth Manchester at Pawtucket’s Machines with Magnets, the album sees the band attempting to intentionally craft music for the long haul, with the hopes that their work could serve as a constant as they — and their fans — navigated through life’s trials, tribulations and victories.

Sonically, Atlas Vending sees the band retaining the massive sound that has won them attention and fans across the world — but while arguably being their most articulate, earnest and dynamic of their growing catalog. Thematically, the album touches upon disparate yet very adult themes: paternity, crushing social anxiety, addiction, isolation, media-inducing paranoia and the restless urge to stop everything and just say “Fuck this!” and leave it all behind. Much like its immediate predecessor, Altas Vending offers a snapshot of the the modern condition as they see it. However, what makes Atlas Vending different is that each of its ten songs were written to form musical and narrative whole with the album’s songs following a cradle-to-grave trajectory.

As a result, the album’s material emotionally runs through a gamut of emotions — from the most rudimentary and simple of adulthood to the increasingly nuanced and turbulent peaks and valleys of adulthood. So in some way, the album finds the band tackling what’s inevitable for all of us: getting older, especially in an industry suspended in perpetual youth. “Change is inevitable if you’re lucky,” METZ’s Alex Eadkins says of the band’s fourth album Atlas Vending. “Our goal is to remain in flux, to grow in a natural and gradual way. We’ve always been wary to not overthink or intellectualize the music we love but also not satisfied until we’ve accomplished something that pushes us forward.”

METZ have developed and furthered a reputation as purveyors of abrasive melodicism and one of the planet’s most bombastic, contemporary live acts through relentless touring across the globe throughout both this site’s history and their history. Determined to connect with their fans and to find a way within the confines of the pandemic to create a live experience as dynamic as Atlas Vending, the members of the Canadian JOVM mainstays took the stage at Toronto’s Opera House in October 2020 to livestream their latest album in its entirety. Today, the band announced the official release of the live show, Live at the Opera House recorded by longtime collaborator Graham Walsh and mixed by Seth Manchester through all the digital service providers with bundles at Bandcamp and Sub Pop’s Mega Mart that include the full concert film, directed by the band’s longtime video collaborator Scott Cudmore.

There’s also a pre-order for a limited 1,000 piece vinyl pressing on tricolor (Black/White/Oxblood), which also includes a download of the full concert film. The LP can be ordered through megamart.subpop.com, METZ’s merch store, and Bandcamp, and will be available November 5th in select independent retailers in North America.

Now, as may remember I wrote about Live at the Opera House single “A Boat to Drown In,” which was also coincidentally, Atlas Vending’s first official single. While continuing the band’s long-held reputation for crafting enormous, aural assaults centered around layers of distortion pedaled power chords, thunderous drumming mosh pit friendly hooks and chorus, and Eadkins’ howled vocals, “A Boat to Drown In” also finds the trio subtly moving away from their grunge influences with the song possessing an oceanic heft.

“Pulse” is a seething and furious roar, full of the anxious and uncertain dread and that has become a part of our daily lives since the Trump Administration — and has continued through a deadly pandemic that has put most of our lives in disarray. The live footage finds the band delivering a blistering and forceful performance that’s shot with an intimate yet cinematic aplomb.