Maylene and the Sons of Disaster
IV
Ferret Music

I’ve never been able to keep track of Maylene’s line-up from album to album, and, in fact, it looks like there’s a few new beards this time around as well, but what I have been able to keep track of is the Alabama band’s Southern-roasted biker rock, which has always tasted as consistently good as a pig on a spit. The band’s appeal as white trash jug guzzlers has always carried certain weight with me, the inbred rage of album’s I through III irrevocably bad-ass, a lethal mix of metalcore and steel-eyed country power fused by shack burnin’ riffs and shit-drunk hooks. However, it seems as though someone filtered the swamp water Maylene’s been sippin’ for inspiration because with the exception of opening track “In Dead We Dream,” which is as close as the band comes to retaining any ounce of their previous nastiness, IV is — to put it in terms familiar to the band — a disaster. The frothy energy has fizzled out, the dirty heaviness has been cleaned up, and vocalist Dallas Taylor’s maniacal, backwoods barking has been carried away on some cruel prairie wind. In fact, a good deal of IV‘s songs sound like goth-treated modern day Bon Jovi ballads, produced exclusively for radio mediocrity. It ends, as all their albums do, with a back porch sun-downer courtesy of “Drought of ’85″ (that is if you completely disregarding whatever the hell “Off to the Laughing Place” is supposed to be, and I suggest you do), but its predictable reprieve comes much too late. It’s not the biggest disappointment of the year (no one’s going to take that honour away from Black Tide), but instead of tearing my shirt off and wrapping my mouth around an exhaust pipe I’m snacking on an apple and moseying on down the road.

Listen to “In Dead We Dream” from IV!

Blacktusk
Taste the Sin
Relapse

Beastly Georgian trio, Blacktusk, bring hell’s hammers down heavy on their sophomore effort, Taste the Sin, like they’re taking out a whole bushel of rotten peaches in one abominable swing, splattering black juice and insidious worms all over the goddamn place. Baizley wrapped and disastrously brackish, Taste the Sin picks up where ‘08’s debut, Passage Through Purgatory, left off by heaping a whole mess of redneck rage onto the sludge metal artistry of bands like Baroness and Torche. The angry, pounding riffs burn like fire on the surface of an oily swamp and every one of the album’s 11 songs seethe and foam like acid on an open wound. Imagine the Cancer Bats with longer teeth or Zoroaster with shorter songs and you’ve got the Southern stoner death thrash of Blacktusk.

Note: I’ve seen the band’s name written several different ways, including Black Tusk and BlackTusk, but I have opted for Blacktusk. If any of the fellas in the band would like to offer up the official spelling of the band’s name, please drop me a line. Until then, I will stick with the one word, lower case ‘t’ version. For better or worse.

Listen to “Snake Charmer” from Taste the Sin!

Violent Soho
Violent Soho
Ecstatic Peace! Records

Aussie flannel junkies Violent Soho are all the rage right now, a term that’s somewhat appropriate given their penchant for the turbulent teen climate of 90s alternative revelry. They’re being heralded by everyone as grunge rock’s very own Lazarus, rising from the tombs and shaking the dust off of an angst-ridden sound once left for dead, but I’m not falling for the ‘Cobain is back’ propaganda. No, what we’ve got here, if you want to know the truth of it, isn’t a grunge revival, but a whole lotta raw power, a real cock n’ roll record filled with flash and ass, even if it is hidden under all those greasy clothes. While this really isn’t the band’s full-length debut (most of the songs already appeared on their 2008 album We Don’t Belong Here), it is the one with Thurston Moore’s fingerprints all over it, so look for it to be the album that makes ‘em famous with the kids in your town.

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