The Mountain, the new four-song 10″ from C’mon, Canada’s premiere bleary-eyed bastards of fuzz, kicks off with the longest, most ambitious song the band has ever laid down. Until now, the seven-minute track “Fortress of the Night” from 2010′s Beyond the Pale Horse held that distinction, but this here title track, which commands all of side A, clocks in just shy of 12 minutes, and reaches an epic and dangerous precipice the band had only previously admired from afar. C’mon has built an outstanding reputation as a band that can move a mountain by sheer rawk force alone, but this time they do us one better and scale the entire fucking thing in a burnt-out van, blowing dirty exhaust the entire way, planting their tattered flag at the top when they land. What they unleash on the world below is a spacey rumble of arena bravado and prog-crunch, a steady build-up of monolithic metal like a giant analog amp rising up from behind the fires of the sun. Musically, “The Mountain” is more dense and layered than anything C’mon has done in the past* and that kind of studio presence/trickery continues as the band bounds on down the back side in its usual muddy-riffed fashion, turning thrusters on high and heavy with “It’s Alright,” the wonky instrumental “The Grunge,” and a cover of The Osmonds’ “Crazy Horses,” a pretty weird beard song to begin with that is given a special kind of supercharged Blurtonian treatment here. Okay, I know you’re waiting for me to say it, so here it is: C’mon does it again.
*Singer/guitarist Ian Blurton has said in an interview that at one point in the song there are two versions of the band playing against each other, so two drum kits, two basses, and about 25 guitars, which he called a tribute to Voivod’s Piggy and Thin Lizzy’s Gary Moore.
“Now Stronger,” the opening track on Ironweed’s sophomore album, Your World of Tomorrow, is a mega-sized mix of spacey ambition and aggressive thrust, and lays the groundwork for an entire album’s worth of all-encompassing cosmic crunch. It might be said, then, that Your World of Tomorrow is a much more loftier effort than 2008′s Indian Ladder, and why not? With its eye-in-the-sky theme, Your World of Tomorrow finds the Albany band reworking their motorcycle metal into a groovier, albeit more paranoiac, ride. And while it still offers up its fair share of sludge n’ fuzz with songs like “The Lucky Ones,” “Enduring Snakes,” “Messenger,” and “Heavy Crowns,” there’s a noticeable move away from the stoner center thanks to the flashy dynamics on songs like “And the New Slaves,” “Awaken,” and “Red Circles”. Make no mistake, though, Ironweed is still really fucking heavy, it’s just that they’ve found occasion to take what they could from The Quill, Soundgarden, sHEAVY, and Solace and incorporate it into their ten ton sound. Best part is, the album ends as it starts, with closer “A Graceful Death” serving as mean, meteoric punctuation.
Check out the video for “Enduring Snakes” from Your World of Tomorrow!
Here’s what’s different about Trap Them’s latest full-length album, Darker Handcraft: it features new full-time drummer Chris Maggio (ex-Coliseum), it has been released on new label Prosthetic Records (after a few years/releases with Deathwish Inc. and one EP with Southern Lord), and its songs are no longer labeled as numbered days. Now, here’s what’s not different about Darker Handcraft: it has, once again, been manhandled by Converge guitarist and super-producer Kurt Ballou, and it contains, once again, an unbelievably potent and possessive force of extreme metal/(grind-, crust-, hard-)core. Basically, it steals all the prefixes, obliterates ‘em, and scatters the gruesome dust over your pummeled being, a disastrous funeral of sorts with a corpse-raping wake that dissolves into some not-so-silent moments of silence with “Drag the Wounds Eternal” and “Scars Align” (examples of Trap Them releasing, albeit ever-so-slightly, their soul-crunching grip). Ultimately, what’s not different about Darker Handcraft is its 30 plus minutes of distorted brilliance, callous cunning, and barking mad, totalitarian rule. Like Trap Them’s previous efforts, this is just another impressive link in the heavy chain dragging us along the left hand path to where the scum and filth will one day worship these American masters.
C’mon
Ironweed
Trap Them