Trap Them
Darker Handcraft
Prosthetic Records

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.

Listen to “Slumcult & Gather” from Darker Handcraft!

Zoroaster
Matador
E1 Music

Like an ancient call from deep within the foggy halls of some floating, forgotten, and fervent cosmic temple of metallurgy, the songs on Zoroaster’s third full-length, Matador, swim between sludge-drenched doom, nerve-rattling drone, and psych-metal mayhem, creating one bastard of a heavy, hypnotic ride. This isn’t just music you hear, buddy, this is music you see. It pulses and surges like a snake swallowing a beehive, it moves in nocturnal, amphibious rhythms, it explodes and flows like an active volcano. On previous efforts, Dog Magic and Voice of Saturn, Zoroaster stayed the low-end course of doom, rarely varying from the path of heaviest resistance, but Matador sees the Atlanta trio free-forming their way through meditative expanses of earth-swallowing sound and noise. Dig the title track, “D.N.R.,” “Odyssey” and “Old World” for the freakiest, Om meets Kyuss examples, while the songs “Ancient Ones,” “Trident,” and “Black Hole” spit out those classic Zoroaster riffs, which sound like High on Fire wallowing in a tub of fuzz. This is a potent, mesmerizing, and audacious heavy metal album, my friends, and tailor-made for anyone with a beard.

Check out the video for “Odyssey” from Matador!