The wobbletrem guitar(orizzit keys) bit is fucking rad in such sounds. First, other than the name, that i have heard; In general, they have a cool sound to 'em.

I suspect it's a guitar + pedals? This does have a good bit more keys, and more active keyboarding, than I heard from them last- I'd sorta forgotten about them until they came up in conversation recently, so I went to czech the most recent record. They have a thing for vintage gear and NMV amps, for whatever it's worth- very un-metal stuff, old Fenders and Voxen and whatnot. I appreciate their noise.

So, some knuckleheads covered this entire record with conventionally good production and trimming out a good chunk of the repetition.


It's an interesting experiment. Note for note faithful. The vocalist is pretty much spot on, too.

'S not half-bad, at least three songs in or so. It's plenty heavy and grooving. This probably would have gone over far better than the original.

I hadn't heard anything from him in quite a while. One strange dude.

I want to like this, as this sounds like a lot of things I like. The lo-fi strikes me as a bit of an affectation here though, against the '80s-ness of the rest.

I feel like it starts pretty strong, then makes a couple changes that i am less into. Overall, i actually dig it tho.

Even though, i seem to find myself saying that a bit more lately, about things that kind of sound like older/better music cut up and pasted together in slightly different ways than the original source material.

I don't like the parts that sound like more recent Arcade Fire offerings though. Something about that lazy/tired/ennui singer/talker thing that i seem to be developing an acute distaste for. And i don't know where this is coming from for me; i have always liked the laziest singers in the past.

Drummer from Putridity as expected, delivers twice as much craziness as the average guy.

Riffing is tight fo sho.

Theme of band... probably won't be able to carry much more than an EP.

It's solid though.

St. Anger is a pretty good album when Metallica isn't playing it.

There's that. Though a musician friend of mine whose take on things I respect likes it as a noise rock record. I get that, and I think it starts off strong (I don't get the hate for Frantic. The people bagging on the lyrics have apparently never paid attention to most rock music. Also, it sounds like it's delivered with some conviction, which goes a long way.) but as a whole large chunks of it feel bloated, contrived and worst of all, unfinished.

I suppose there's two directions it could have taken that would have improved the thing significantly: the above-posted glossier re-imagining, or as some other commentor somewhere suggested, make it worse in the conventional sense. Keep the trashcan drums and woofy bass (genuine points here for using bleed in the drum mics in lieu of a bass track in some places) and make the guitar and vocal sounds proper shitty. Shorten the songs by a lot. Eight bar noise guitar solos. (I think this would work really, really well here, and I like Hammett in effect-fuckery mode.) Basically go full on lo-fi punk/hardcore-metal with the thing. That probably would have been something exceptional.

Only vaguely related, but I like the video for this:


The fact that Barney Greenway is just some scruffy, pudgy looking dude who looks nothing like any sort of rockstar makes it work.

I liked this record quite a lot when it was new fifteen years ago. All heavy riffing, no clean singing.

Still my favorite Ballou band.

Shit.



Bunch of dinosaurs from My Dying Bride, Paradise Lost, At the Gates... Kurt Ballou HM-2 and feedback production... etc

Ooh, i like that.

Yes, this is good shit. I'd only heard the first record.