Corrosion of Conformity Corrosion of Conformity
Candlelight Records
Corrosion of Conformity’s 1985 Animosity line-up of Mike Dean, Woody Weatherman, and Reed Mullin made big news when they reunited in 2010 for a two-song EP, Your Tomorrow (Parts 1 and 2), mainly because Animosity‘s punk/thrash crossover made such a monumental contribution to heavy music and because it brought an end to C.O.C.’s five year hiatus after the release of In the Arms of God in 2005.* Of course, it’s the former point that garnered the most excitement, the belief that with Pepper Keenan still toiling away in Down, C.O.C. would lay aside its Southern metal sound and return to its influential, raucous, politico-skate metal roots. Well, gray hairs and lost years be damned because the new full-length, Corrosion of Conformity, finds the Raleigh, North Carolina trio in a fresh, aggressive, and loud way, chucking around thrashy riffs like empty beer cans. I’m sure it was never the band’s intent to recreate Animosity, which they don’t do by a long shot, but what they do do is spread their innate abrasiveness over several well-executed styles of metal to create a rush of dynamic anarchy. From the traditional blast of “Psychic Vampire,” “River of Stone,” and “Your Tomorrow,” to the motor-punk of “Leeches,” “The Moneychangers,” and “Rat City,” to the sludgy doom of “The Doom” and “Newness,” Corrosion of Conformity is utter mosh pit fodder, and Dean’s vocals are perfectly vile for such destructive enthusiasm. You know, it would have been totally reasonable to expect these bastard pioneers to be a bit out of step, but this is so on point that it’s worth your biggest broken-toothed grin…and a hell of a lot of spins.
*Even though it was the last recorded C.O.C. album, Mullin actually wasn’t part of the In the Arms of God line-up. In fact, that last time this trio appeared on an album together was 2000′s America’s Volume Dealer. However, Mullin and Dean do have another band called Righteous Fool.
Listen to “The Doom” from Corrosion of Conformity!
On their self-titled full-length debut, San Francisco’s Hazzard’s Cure bruise and belch their way through a fungal-covered forest on the backs of corpse boars, spears poised to strike the life from those they pursue. Their rabid, sporadic approach to the hunt is propelled by a steady stream of heavy metal buggery; bastard forms of sludge, hardcore, death, doom, speed, and thrash not only occupy the album as a whole but often appear within the same song, and the songs themselves (which range from three to ten minutes in length) run together like the warm blood of their prey. This kind of unfocused racket is often the battle cry of the drunk and stoned, and there’s no doubt that’s the case here, but while songs like “Meet Me at the Mountain” and “Great Dishonor” were born in the bottom of bongs and bottles, “Psilocybin” and “Wolves’ Banquet” are pure mosh pit fodder. But then there’s “Tossed and Dethroned,” “Clashing of Hordes,” and “Prayer of the Hunted,” all of which sound like Mastodon, Black Breath, and Viking Skull trading riffs inside a burning church, and you decide once and for all that there’s no use trying to figure it out because it’s just plain ol’ fucking metal.
Matterhorn Vol. 1. The World Began Without Man...
Thinker Thought Records
On Vol. 1. The World Began Without Man…, Matterhorn takes the familiar destruction-of-human-civilization post-rock theme, splits it up into five stages/songs, and parlays it into a thick-riffed, heavy metal aural story. However, the Colorado trio (all ex-members of The Great Redneck Hope) forgo the more ambient, spacey, and experimental sound most instrumental post-rock bands employ, choosing instead to cash in on their namesake and deliver our demise through mountainous, fuzzy, sludge-leaning chaos that’s as much Karma to Burn as it is Russian Circles, but both will get you where you want to go when it comes down to it. It all plays out in about thirty minutes and covers mankind’s legitimately scientific impending doom, including volcanic unrest (“Stage One: Long Valley Caldera, 8:32 a.m.”), cyclones/typhoons (“Stage Two: Armada Storm”), whatever “The Currents” is about (“Stage Three: The Currents”), radiation (“Stage Four: The South Atlantic Anomaly”), and asteroids (“Stage Five: 99942 Apophis”), all of it a crushing and (at times) melodic attack no doubt laying the groundwork for whatever Vol. 2 is going to delve into. Probably an apocalyptic afterlife or something, who knows. You gotta get through this hopeless bastard first.
Listen to “Stage One: Long Valley Caldera, 8:32 a.m.” from Vol. 1. The World Began Without Man…!
Corrosion of Conformity
Hazzard’s Cure
Matterhorn