Midnight
Satanic Royalty
Hells Headbangers

After almost ten years of releasing only splits and EPs — and not really wanting to become a real band at all –  Cleveland’s cult metal band Midnight have finally succumbed to a full-length job, and it’s the genuine article, man. Led by Athenar, the same freak responsible for the brew-fueled madness that was Boulder, Midnight don executioner hoods, worship flame and steel, and rip through ten songs (eleven if you have the vinyl) of black metal thrash so absurdly good you’ll be reawakening neck muscles that have been retired since the early 80s. It’s clear that Midnight’s mission is annihilation, which they deliver to you, like a shitty 2 AM pizza, in thirty minutes or less, and despite the fact that Satanic Royalty is dripping with Venom inspired evil violence, its really powered by a degenerate biker rawk Athenar has no doubt borrowed from his Boulder days. Thus, every song, especially “You Can’t Stop Steel,” “Lust, Filth and Sleaze,” and “Shock ’til Blood,” sound like Cronos leading Motörhead on a black-winged ride outta hell and straight up your ass. Anyone who has stuck by Midnight over the years waiting for this day to come can go ahead and raise their gauntlets high. As for the uninitiated, prepare to be outright dominated by pure metal riff-itude.

Listen to “Lust, Filth and Sleaze” from Satanic Royalty!

Helms Alee
Weatherhead
Hydra Head

Bands like Baroness, Harvey Milk, Big Business and Torche (and Floor before them) are probably the ones you immediately think of when someone mentions the term ‘melodic sludge.’ But another band, often found on the same bill in smaller letters, that deserves every bit the attention thanks to their 2008 debut full-length, Night Terror, is Helms Alee. But it’s been three years since we’ve heard from Helms Alee, who’ve kept a much lower profile than their contemporaries, which means it falls on the shoulders of their sophomore release, Weatherhead, to legitimize the band’s sound as a forceful one and further expose the Seattle trio for the capital letter weird metal titans they really are. What Weatherhead does is succeed at extrapolating and exploring territories far beyond the melodic sludge they reveled in on Night Terror, and we hear them drawing dirty, noisy, no wave, late 80s to early 90s influences from the likes of the Melvins and Sonic Youth. Weatherhead, then, is awash in slower, pastoral moments (“Music Box,” “Mad Mouth,” and “Epic Adventure Through the Woods (Sucker Punch)”) and instances of over-the-top scuzzy pop (“8/16,” “Revel!,” and “Born in Fiberglass”), but it’s still held together by the usual torrent of core-shaking heaviness and male/female vocal harmonies in which the band specializes. Night Terror junkies should find familiar friends in “Pretty As Pie” and “Speed Sk8r,” but it’s the wide-reaching, muscle and brains dichotomy that makes this album such a wonderfully strange bedfellow.

Listen to “Pretty As Pie” from Weatherhead!

The House of the Devil (2009) is, as advertised, based on true and unexplainable events, and set in the early 80s, a time when 70% of American adults believed in the existence of abusive Satanic cults. I had high hopes. First of all, not only is it set in the early 80s, but it also looks like it was shot in the early 80s. This movie has an excellent retro feel to it, from the music to the film quality to the kind of suspense building found in such earlier horror classics as Black Christmas, most of which is supplied in the first hour and fifteen minutes of the movie wherein Samantha (Jocelin Donahue) explores and acclimatizes herself to the countryside mansion she’s “babysitting” at for the evening. However, that kind of intense mood can come across as slow, but I didn’t mind the pace too much. What I did mind was the pace at the end of the movie, when the action and blood rolls in, because it came and went in a flash compared to the rest of the movie, and left me scratching my head. But hey, at least there was some blood and action, so let’s get to that now.

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