Metal fans are so particular that Toxic Holocaust’s seemingly innocuous change in logo and cover art (opting for black and white this time around instead of the usual radioactive neon of covers past) nearly started a rash of hangings by bullet belt across the whole of the thrash world, an overreaction not experienced since Metallica took a trip to the barber shop (although something has to explain the music that followed, I suppose). Add to that the fact that Mr. Toxic Holocaust himself, Joel Grind, brought a full band into the studio to help pull off what he usually does alone, and you can pretty much taste the vile panic. But one spin ’round the ol’ graveyard gravel pit and it’s abundantly clear that Toxic Holocaust are as evil and furious as ever before, so I’d urge anyone with any doubts as to Conjure and Command‘s integrity and legitimacy to take their skullets out of the noose, crush a million fucking beer, and mosh their neurotic aggression into oblivion. Every one of the 10 songs here drip with toxicity and disease, a battery of riffs as sharp as wolves’ teeth, and will send you straight into Hell, all clenched fists and burning eyes, on a mission to desecrate the underworld. And don’t worry if you’ve got an old logo patch on your denim jacket when you do, that will just earn you extra desecration cred with the souls of the damned .
Motörhead The Wörld is Yours
Future PLC/Motörhead Music
If you’re an avid reader of Classic Rock magazine, you might consider Motörhead’s twentieth studio album, The Wörld is Yours, a December 2010 release, but for anyone waiting on the standard CD, it’s a January 2011 release, which really just means that no matter how you shake it, the transition from last year to this one was book-ended by a couple of nic-stained, heavy-ringed fists striking you hard and purposeful on either side of your mouth. A review at this stage of the game is ultimately pointless because, well, it’s Motörhead, which means it’s reliably metal and enviably Lemmy, through and through. But if you must know, it ceremoniously boasts predictable words in its song titles, like die, devils, rock n’ roll, snake, outlaw, and bitch, and rocks like a formulaic motherfucker. That’s what you get because that’s what you need. It’s as simple as that. I mean, you could not bother with it because you’ve heard it all before, but that would probably be pretty stupid because Motörhead is, as Lemmy says of rock n’ roll music (in the song of the same name), a true religion and will never let you down.
Check out the video for “Get Back in Line” from The Wörld is Yours!
Even though they hail from the City of Angels, Night Horse carry themselves with that Americana swagger befitting East Coast brawlers, chucking big, dopey, boogie-fried riffs at you like ham-sized fists that leave deep, lasting bruises. Picking up where their 2008 debut, The Dark Won’t Hide You, left off, Perdition Hymns lays the Southern stoner rock on nice n’ thick, incorporating plenty of organ, slide, and 70s-infused boxcar blues to send you on a weed-eating nostalgia trip to Altamont and back. Sure, it’s got all the dusty charm of Skynyrd or the Allmans, and sounds like a nasty mix of Cracktorch and the ‘Crowes, but ultimately (and maybe it’s because of the way singer Sam James Velde howls at the blood red moon) the songs on Perdition Hymns come off as bastard inventions from an alternate universe where Danzig grows up a wayward cowboy and not Lucifer’s brawny spawn.
Toxic Holocaust
Motörhead
Night Horse