Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category
Iron Thrones – The Wretched Sun Album Review
Generally when magazines or websites have contests designed to choose an unsigned band and provide them with some extra exposure, it’s just an excuse to run subtle advertising for some company, and the band tends to be either thoroughly mediocre at best or downright crappy at worst.
That’s not the case with Iron Thrones, who recently won the Scion No Label Needed Contest that was hosted by MetalInsider.net. Sure, the contest was an attempt to sell more cars from Scion’s perspective, but that’s fine with me because the winner, for once, is actually pretty good.
As the winners of this contest, Iron Thrones not only got their new 6-song EP, The Wretched Sun, recorded in a professional studio with a well-known producer, but they also met the guys in Shadows Fall in order to get career advice, took part in a professional photo shoot and subsequent press campaign, and received a new website redesign among many other things that bands signed to a big label probably take for granted.
OK, so this is kind of a dual post. First and foremost to inform anyone who visits Suds about the awesomely talented Rolo Tomassi, and secondly (more importantly) to review their second album: Cosmology.
Having been active in some way or another for close to 5 years now, these guys have built up a solid fanbase and live reputation in the UK, famous particularly for their jarring, synth-infused rhythms and frontwoman Eva Spence’s ferocious roar. They’ve been tearing up venues up and down the country, including high-profile support slots with The Dillinger Escape Plan and slots at the big summer festivals. A worthy live reputation causes problems for a lot of bands. The main issue being the difficulty of capturing the raw passion of a live performance on record. Rolo Tomassi, however, have no such issues.
Their spazzed-out tech-metal meets dance sound is perfectly captured on Cosmology, which is a real relief considering just how easy it is to lose individual instruments and subtle arrangements amongst such a racket. Effortlessly switching back and forth from pummelling brutality to dreamy soundscapes, Rolo clearly have the musical tightrope walking down. The beauty of title track/closer ‘Cosmology’ sits easily alongside the discomforting lurch of ‘French Motel’, and both are high-points. Lead-off single ‘Party Wounds’ is an absolute killer, displaying the prodigious vocal talents of Eva Spence, who straddles the line between angelic choir soprano and feral beast with a confidence rarely seen in metal music. When you throw in the fact that she’s barely out of her teens, it’s quite a remarkable performance. Throw in brother James’s yelping, and it makes for a fine dual-delivery that gives the album’s heavier moments real variety.
As is the case with some of the more experimental works of art, Cosmology is at times a hit-and-miss affair. ‘French Motel’ is an impressive piece of music, but it manages to display both the strength and weakness of the band’s approach. One section sees the most unusual use of the synth amongst a discordant mess that really doesn’t add to proceedings – an example of how difficult Rolo can be to listen to at times – but that section precedes the brilliant use of the synth to emphasise the heavy riffs with a distorted effect, which absolutely pummels the ears. In fairness, those wrong turns are very few and far between. Rolo have polished their sound, focused their efforts, and produced an album which is a real step-up from mental debut ‘Hysterics’.
If you like your music difficult, dense and experimental, then this group of Sheffield youngsters will be right up your street. If you’re into hooks and melodies, steer clear if you don’t fancy a challenge. I like my music either way, and I enjoyed this album. Recommended.
Matt Garfield is just a man with a keytar and a hankering for metal.
He’s also the one-man wrecking crew behind the band Mose Giganticus – handling all the songwriting, lyrics, vocals, drums, and synthesizers himself with a rotating cast of characters backing him up on guitar and bass both live and in the studio – kind of like Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails.
Gift Horse is the band’s major label debut on Relapse Records. The brand of metal that is put forth on this album is difficult to nail down. It should be no surprise that a keytarist liberally uses synthesizers and vocoder in his music, but Gift Horse isn’t industrial metal in the vein of, say, The Downward Spiral; nor is it anything like the recent bastardizations of synth in metal like The Devil Wears Prada or Attack Attack! (or any other group of kids wearing neon shirts and sporting girls’ haircuts while banging on a keyboard).
This album has been out for a few weeks now, so I apologise for the belated review. It’s just that…well, on the first couple of listens I thought it was pretty crap. Alas, out of a love of this band and based upon the very high quality of their previous output, I was willing to cut them some slack and reserve judgement for later. Boy, am I glad I did!
What struck me at first was how restrained the album sounds. The general vibe of the songs on show here is one of wistful rock melancholy; and the too-clean rhythm guitar goes a long way in assisting that feeling. The fact is, it takes an awful lot of listens to get past that initial lack of production-punch. With ‘The ‘59 Sound’, the band proved that you don’t have to crank the distortion up to 11 to make a record that rocks. At first, it seemed like the band had taken that mantra too far with ‘American Slang’, especially considering frontman Brian Fallon’s promise that they were returning to their punk-rock roots.
With all that negativity out of the way, I’ll get down to the real review: this is an awesome album. On that seventh or eighth listen…the whole thing just seems to click. Admittedly, a good-quality stereo system and having the volume cranked up was required to really feel the flow of the album, but when you can really hear that passion cut through the songs…it truly is something special.
The album kicks off with the title track and lead-off single – a highlight that managed to make an impression even on that unsure first listen. From there, it’s sweet, good old-fashioned Americana heaven. ‘Stay Lucky’ is up next, and is probably the best track here. It rattles along with an effortless grace, whilst still managing to maintain the momentum of the opener. Fallon delivers one of the strongest vocal performances of his career on ‘Bring it On’, an absolute stormer that’s all pounding drums and classic rock leads. The soulful chants of “The Diamond Church Street Choir” mix things up a little, reminding the listener that these guys have some startling tricks up their collective sleeve.
‘American Slang’ continues in a similar vein. ‘Boxer’ and ‘Old Haunts’ mix their trademark wistful lyrics with soaring melodies and toe-tapping choruses. I would recommend hunting down iTunes exclusive track “She Loves You”, as it seems to round off the album better than standard closer “We Did it When We Were Young”. God Knows why it wasn’t included in the standard track-listing, as it’s a real winner and by far one of The Gaslight Anthem’s most mature and affecting songs – all choirs and regrets etc.
The instrumentation proves to be the biggest step-up for the band (even if Fallon’s vocal delivery occasionally sounds a little forced). They sound tighter and more passionate than ever. Benny Horowitz’s drumming is innovative without being intrusive, but the real star here is Alex Rosamilia. This, my friends, is a vintage lead-guitarist performance. He’s not one of those guys who noodles away at his fretboard endlessly like countless other (let’s face it) show-offs. His leads sound organic and always prove to be the strong point of each track. Considering the personal troubles Rosamilia went through leading up to the writing/recording of the album, it’s astonishing to hear just how much raw emotion he wrings from each note. This release is worth purchasing for his performance alone.
Buy ‘American Slang’. Give it your time. Give it your love. It will repay you tenfold.
Zoroaster is one of a seeming endless number of young bands to be coming out of the South’s heavy metal scene. And while they can safely be grouped in with such regional peers as Mastodon, Kylesa, and Black Tusk, these Atlanta, GA-based metallers bring their own specific flavor to the established sludge/stoner formula.
Specifically, they specialize in the psychedelic and drone doom genres of metal.
Matador is the band’s fourth release, and by far it represents their best, most complete effort to date.
You expect confrontation when it comes to M.I.A.
She’s blazed paths on the strength of wildly fresh sounds and uncomfortable politics – inciting just as many death threats as dance parties.
But trailblazing as a career is tough to pull off.
And this is especially so for an artist like M.I.A., who is so heavily dependent on her producers to make top-notch beats. Without them, she’s basically dead in the water. And as /\/\ /\ Y /\ (henceforth called Maya) displays, even with a solid beat in tow, her provocateur personality sometimes comes across as blissful ignorance.
How many times can a band “go back to its original sound” before the whole thing becomes a desperate sham?
That’s the question that has loomed large over Korn ever since they declared that their newest album, Korn III: Remember Who You Are, would be a return to the group’s early aural stylings after enduring several years and several albums worth of misguided experimentations and lousy music.
The first time Korn pulled this trick was with Take a Look in the Mirror. That album was a reaction to what the band perceived as slow sales of Untouchables, and they wanted to bring back their hyper-aggressive sound. But it wasn’t seen as a ploy because the finished product was actually pretty good.
The same cannot be said for Korn III.
Back in April, when I reviewed Sevendust’s new album Cold Day Memory, I said that after eight albums, the band’s sound was noticeably stagnating. This happens a lot with bands that lock onto a sound and just choose to make minor tweaks over the years rather than wholesale changes or flirtations with experimentation.
And so while Sevendust’s self-titled debut album is not a huge sonic departure from the tunes they are cranking out today, it does represent the template for everything that has followed in a prolific career that began in the mid-Nineties.
And as they say, you only get one first impression so make it count.
Sevendust definitely did that with their debut, and as a testament to its lasting impact, the album has received the deluxe reissue treatment complete with new remasterings of the songs and some extra rare and live tracks added on.
When it was originally announced that Mastodon would be writing music to serve as the score to the film Jonah Hex, I was pretty psyched. I had never heard of Jonah Hex before and for the most part I think film adaptations of comic books and graphic novels are always a letdown (The Dark Knight notwithstanding), but none of that mattered because we are talking about Masto-fucking-don, the best metal band out there in my ever so humble opinion (but I’m right).
But then as the supposed release date got closer and closer, word started to spread of how disjointed and troubled the film’s production had become. This movie was going through reshoots almost right up to its final release it seemed. Composer John Powell was originally tasked with working with the band to incorporate the music into the film, but as the reshoots delayed things, Powell had to abandon the project to begin work on other films he had committed to. So the producers basically scrapped everything Mastodon had written thus far and brought in a new composer, Marco Beltrami, at the last minute and expected him to get all new music for all the new scenes that were being thrown together at the last minute.
Yeah, sounds promising.
If you’ve never watched the TV show Scrubs (first of all, what is wrong with you?), then you wouldn’t be familiar with lowly lawyer Theodore Buckland, aka Ted, and his unassuming band of barbershop quartet a cappella buddies. In the show they are known either as The Worthless Peons or simply Ted’s Band. In real life, the four guys (Sam Lloyd, Philip McNiven, George Miserlis, and Paul Perry) actually are in an a cappella group together called The Blanks.
I’m a huge fan of Scrubs (minus the unnecessary and derivative ninth and final season) so it was with much delight when I was walking around Annapolis, MD that I saw a poster on the window of a restaurant/small concert venue announcing that The Blanks would be playing a Sunday matinee show this weekend! Count me in.