Monarch! - Sacrifice Your Parents, Satan Wants You To 7"

France's premiere doom exports Monarch! have been on my radar for a while now, but it wasn't until their appearance at the second edition of Bristol's Temples Festival that I became a convert to their terrifying take on drone doom.

Their incredible set had me slack-jawed in wonderment, and as soon as I got back home I immediately forked over all my leftover merch funds to start catching up on their discography. The latest release they put out is this nifty wee 7", featuring covers of The Runaways and The Misfits. The white ink screened cover illustrations for each side, by super-prolific artist Nagawika, are the perfect balance of gimmkvlt and hilarious.

Monarch!'s version of 'Cherry Bomb' takes the original's driving rhythm and coy rebellion and contorts it into a malevolent sacrificial dirge, all inhuman shrieks and howling feedback. Emilie Bresson's usually abstract vocals are far more direct here, so much so that the classic chorus lines are actually recognisable, albeit terrifyingly delivered.

I haven't been able to get this version of the song out of my head for weeks now. I'm okay with that.

Their take on 'Die Die My Darling' is even more unsettling, as they reduce the original's stabbing rhythm and b-movie organ jabs down to a funereal pace, punctuated by eerie piano and Bresson's breathy whisper. She sounds as if she's serenading her victim, the layers of "Don't cry to me, oh baby" build and build over mournful guitar, her detached delivery far creepier than Danzig's psychotic snarl in the original.

The sort of track you'd put on a mixtape to a lover if you wanted them to flee the country in fear.

As an introduction to the band, this doesn't really convey what Monarch! do best, which is mostly long-form funeral/drone doom, but taken as a fun little curiosity, this is one of the coolest things I've heard this year.

You can pick up this 7" as well as other excellent Monarch! records from France-based label MusicFearSatan.

Monarch! on Facebook | Twitter | Sabbracadaver / Mer Morte / Omens on Bandcamp

Hooded Menace - Labyrinth Of Carrion Breeze 12"

Following their Relapse Records debut in 2012 with the rockin' death-doom masterpiece Effigies Of Evil, 2013 saw the prolific Hooded Menace retreat back into obscurity. However, they weren't merely hanging out watching their 'Tombs Of The Blind Dead' videotape for the hundredth time, as they're back with with yet another monstrous release via Doomentia Records: Labyrinth Of Carrion Breeze.

It's clear from the tone and tempo that 'Chasm Of The Wraith' leans more towards the funereal end of the doom spectrum than their usual fare and when Lasse's chasmic vocals kick in, they'll blow the cobwebs off of your casket, that's for damn sure!

Hooded Menace's strong point has always been in the simultaneous catchiness and heaviness of Lasse's riffs, and this new material is no exception; he packs more interesting riffs into a single song than most bands have in their entire catalogue. Only occasionally descending into histrionics, for the most part this track is all killer, no filler, especially impressive for a 10 minute song!

'The Creeping Flesh' pulls no punches, as that roar emerges from the depths immediately, dragging you down into the darkness. While not quite as varied as the opener, this track does feature some prime ribcage-rattling double-kick work from drummer Pekka Koskelo. For those of you who dig the bands that Hooded Menace take their inspiration from, you'll want to throw on Lost Paradise after hearing this one, trust me.

Hooded Menace are one of the most notable death-doom bands of recent years thanks to a slew of consistently excellent releases, and with the release of Labyrinth Of Carrion Breeze their reputation as one of the best in the genre has only been further cemented. There are still copies of the black vinyl variant going over at Doomentia Records, so snag one while you still can!

You can read my full, unedited review of this record over at Echoes & Dust...

Hooded Menace on Facebook | Bandcamp

Lazarus Blackstar / Black Shape Of Nexus split

I've been a fan of Bradford's bleakest, Lazarus Blackstar, ever since stumbling upon their debut album Revelations many years back. Their maniacal fusion of sludge and noise on that release absolutely sickened me, since at the time I hadn't even heard Eyehategod or Unsane yet, and I guess you could say that Lazarus Blackstar were one of my gateways into the uglier side of heavy music.

It's been with great interest that I've followed them from their earlier material with Paul Catten's demented howl, through to last year's excellent Hymns For The Cursed with new vocalist Mik Hell's fearsome growls.

When they released a split 12" with Glasgow's Headless Kross earlier this year, featuring guest vocals from none other than Alicia Morgan (of NYC legends 13), they really established themselves as one of Britain's foulest exponents of gut-churning doom.

This latest slab of filth, a split 12" with Mannheim's Black Shape Of Nexus via Alerta Antifascista Records, will hopefully turn more people on to both of these excellent bands, and have the current crop of weak UK 'doom' bands cowering behind their Dopesmoker reissues. I'm looking at you, Black Bong Goat Witch Whateverthefuck.

Black Shape Of Nexus begin their side with the monumental 'Honor Found In Delay', a not-so-subtle nod to Neurosis, who are obviously a big influence here. The slow build of the riff is soon joined by vocalist Malte Seidel's hoarse bellow, which coincidentally reminds me in some places of former Blackstar vocalist Paul Catten. Around the halfway point of the track, things switch up to a ominous, bass-heavy rumble, strains of feedback weaving throughout. There's not much in the way of variation, but the sheer propulsive power of the track is perhaps their sole intention. Who needs variety when you've got sheer driving force?

Their second contribution, 'Always And Only', is another sterling example of bass-led riffage, Stefan Kuhn's prowling groove locking the whole thing down. For a band with 6 members, they all sound remarkably focused on creating a solid, unified rhythm, instead of veering off indulging each member's individual whims. Though I've never made it to Mannheim, I have spent a lot of time in industrial Germany, and B•Son really do produce a fitting soundtrack to the endless sprawl of purely practical architecture, miles and miles of red brick and steelworks... their sound is as lean and effective as German engineering itself.

Lazarus Blackstar open with 'Command And Control', the guitars of Lee Baines and Izak Gloom possessing a slightly more mournful edge than usual, and Mik Hell's growl even lower and more demented than ever. This track is probably the most out-and-out 'doom' thing they've recorded so far, it has that perfect degree of despair set to a sound heavier than the weight of 6ft of gravedirt on a casket lid.

Closing out their side with 'Whispering Through Broken Teeth', a track just as nasty and unpleasant as it's title, which doesn't so much have riffs as it has audio maelstroms, sucking you down into the murky depths below. Again they eschew the sludgier, more noise-oriented material of their beginnings, in favour of a tar-black strain of doom, even incorporating the sound of a mellotron, and chanted, semi-clean vocals. If this stylistic shift is more than just idle experimentation, and further material in this vein is handled as excellently as it is here, I'm so goddamn excited to hear more from them in the coming year. Here's to hopelessness.

Black Shape Of Nexus on Facebook | Bandcamp
Lazarus Blackstar on Facebook | Reverbnation

This review originally appeared at The Sleeping Shaman.

Meth Drinker / Moloch split LP

Alongside Denmark's Bottom Feeder, Italy's Grime, Massachusetts' Plague Survivors, the UK's own Moloch and New Zealand's Meth Drinker, the term sludge is being reclaimed by a clutch of young bands to epitomise hateful howls, squalling feedback and corrosive distortion at torturous tempo, as opposed to it being applied to any vaguely slow heavy music, or seemingly automatically applied to any band from Georgia.

This is a development I welcome wholeheartedly, and I'm glad to see two of the finest exponents of The New Wave of Worldwide Sludge Metal sharing a split. I've had the great misfortune to witness both of these bands live shows, and left both sets feeling like I'd been held down and had rusted nails slowly forced into my aural cavities. I should probably mention I regard that as a good thing.

Available through Feast Of Tentacles here:
http://feastoftentacles.bigcartel.com/product/moloch-meth-drinker-split-lp-preorder

Read my full review at The Sleeping Shaman...

Ramesses - Misanthropic Alchemy DLP

When Ramesses announced their split in January this year, I was pretty gutted, but not especially surprised. Guitarist Tim Bagshaw had moved to New York, and was playing in Serpentine Path with the guys from Unearthly Trance (with whom Ramesses released a split in 2009), and there were rumours going around that drummer Mark Greening was back behind the kit with Electric Wizard. The split was inevitable.

Criminally underrated during their decayed decade together, Ramesses were one of my all-time favourite bands, as well as simply one of the best heavy British bands, and it's only fitting that their horrifying legacy be preserved. The label started by the band, Ritual Productions, have reissued the band's debut album Misanthropic Alchemy as a kind of epitaph, and after trying to get hold of a vinyl copy for ages now, I snapped one up as soon as they were available.

I never managed to snag a copy of the original vinyl release so I don't have much basis for comparison, but it can't have been as perfectly packaged as this repress. The intricate print on silver mirror board is glorious, though this being a double LP it struck me as odd they wouldn't go for a gatefold sleeve, but its still a thing of twisted beauty.

'Ramesses Part 1' opens the record at an uncharacteristically fast tempo, the clatter and clang of Mark Greening's poor abused drumkit driving the whole corroded cacophony along at deathly speed. Adam Richardson's serrated rasp of a voice spits only the necromantic call "Arise legions... Destroy Enemy..." before the summoning is complete and the tempo drops you into 'Ramesses Part 3'.

Slowly uncoiling riffs emerge from the suffocating murk, unfurling themselves insidiously from the speakers. Cries of "Holding out to die" are sung in a startlingly clear voice, contrasting with the usual vocal style employed that erupts forth like molten hate. Around two thirds of the way through the track it switches down a gear, taking on an elegiac, sombre tone. The lamenting wails sound like some damned maddening choir. The music burns out and smoulders in warm feedback before the needle scrapes its last. Damn it's great to finally hear this album on vinyl.

Side B opens with the dirge-like 'Lords Misrule', a draining, dragging track that picks up pace as it progresses. Ramesses lay bare their mission statement in this track, with a putrid growl of "doomed to death". When this album was released, very few bands were forging together the various metals found in Misanthropic Alchemy. With the recent resurgence in death-doom, and almost every subgenre seeming to merit the prefix 'blackened', maybe people have forgotten just how much Ramesses were digging the graves of Winter and Autopsy at a time when very few were. Of course now both of those bands have been resurrected, but even as recently as 2007, there weren't many ploughing the same corpse-bloated furrow as Ramesses.

I'm getting a little off topic, but I can't state enough just how vital this band were to me personally. They opened whole new (creaking tomb) doors along my musical path.

'Coat Of Arms' has an almost postpunk chiming guitar intro before it erupts into the familiar sludge, the distorted mix courtesy of Billy Anderson is so foul and thick you could almost choke on it.

When the vocals eventually appear halfway through the track, it's another case of contrasting the tortured moans of "souls so lost and old" with a more acidic delivery courtesy of "bludgeoned minds". The last minute of the track is a furious flurry of blackened blasts, a maelstrom of sounds to close out side B.

'Terrordactyl' is the precursor to the musically similar 'Terrasaw' from 2010's Take The Curse, opening with the same ramshackle drum fill, before the beast morphs through various incarnations before settling on an unsettling alternating mix of shuddering, churning horror and a sort of drugged funeral march.

Towards the end there's the perpetual threat that the whole thing will explode into blastbeats, before a demented guitar solo that sounds sped-up or backwards masked, somehow unnatural brings things to a head, and the song ends with the harshness of a slap, heard literally in the final sample.

The cacophonic rattle that opens 'Before The Jackals' introduces a plodding doomed procession, conducted by the wretched death rattle emitted by Adam Richardson's ruined larynx. It circles deeper and deeper until the hypnotic effect becomes overpowering, where thankfully it ends before you lose your mind. The plaintive fingerpicking that comprises 'Earth Must Die', the last track of the original album, seems like an ominous portent of horrors to come... but they never do, the track just endlessly racks up the tension.

As I thought when I first heard it, it's still a really odd way to end an album, it seems like a pointless build up to a release that never comes. It's still a great track, it just suffers from being misplaced within the running order.

The two live tracks that follow the end of the album, recordings of 'Lords Misrule' and 'Ramesses Part 3' remind me of just how alternately bludgeoning and hypnotic the band were in the live setting.

I managed to make it to one of their last ever shows before they ceased touring, supporting Eyehategod no less, and was totally blown away by how well they recreated the malevolence of their recorded work, and that effect is captured perfectly on these recordings.

Misanthropic Alchemy is the sound of Ramesses still hashing out ideas, taking the first steps down a darker path than they ever had in their years in Electric Wizard, a conjuring of sounds more atavistic, more primal; old doom from a dark age. Their development would eventually culminate in the refined blackened doom of Take The Curse a few years later, but these recordings mark the beginning of their descent into the darker recesses of doom.

You can pick up this limited double LP from Ritual Productions here:
http://www.ritualproductions.net/rites/rite014/

Or opt for the CD version which also includes a bonus disc containing the EPs We Will Lead You To Glorious Times and The Tomb:
http://www.ritualproductions.net/rites/rite015/

Ilsa - Intoxicantations LP

It took me forever to get around to finally buying a copy of this record due to my current impoverishment. I had to do awful, awful things to afford this album. It was worth it.

The album cover, drawn the band's drummer Joshy, is a truly fucking creepy collage of scuttling insects, animal bones and substance abuse. The juvenile scrawl on the back cover, depicting vomiting and bleeding witches presiding over a cauldron of narcotics, reminds me of the childish obscenity drawn by Mike Diana that graces the cover of Iron Monkey's Our Problem. This is the sort of design that's worth getting the gatefold sleeve for, so you can pore over every revolting detail in the artwork.

The music is just as depraved as the sleeve, and also should be heard as intended; hissing malevolently out of record player speakers. A harrowing catalogue of drug abuse, screams and feedback provides the intro to 'Foreign Lander', the bands brutish take on the folk song. It crashes along at a relentless pace, the shredded throat of Orion imbuing the words with a venomous vehemence before a twisting, writhing solo closes out the track.

The record's title track drags itself out of the speakers, the decrepit drudge of the rhythm overlaid by a howled Intoxicantation, a repulsive recipe for "unholy hallucinations". The tempo is as interminable as the endless agony of fingernails splintering along your spinal column. Fucking lovely.

Eventually it ends and they launch into 'Deadbeat's Ballad', a tale of a Faustian pact, what the Germans call moritaten, or murder ballad. The track careens along at a neck-abusing tempo until midway through when the band lapse into another funeral march, accompanying the horrifying infanticidal lyrics.

The last act of the story, those tortured cries of guilt set to foulest, catchiest sludge makes this my favourite track on the album.

'Man Made Monsters' sounds to me like being stretched to bonebreaking point on the rack, that sick discordant twist of the guitar and the ratcheting of the double kick drumming.

This track reminds me of something Tim Bagshaw would write, that underlying menace in the guitar tone definitely sounds like Ramesses/Serpentine Path to my ears.

The second side of the record opens with 'Say You Love Satan', a foot-stomping, fist-throwing anthem to antichristianity. Ilsa have this ability to make even this harshest of music seem catchy, they've got hooks that dig in like the cover of Severed Survival. I really hope I get the chance to catch them live sometime, so if they ever make it to the UK, there's a floor and a lot of whiskey waiting for them.

'The Scream' is another exorcise in torturous tempo and the strangling of strings. The everyday horror of the lyrics makes it a more disturbing proposition than all that 'anal goat blasphemy' shit kids on tumblr think is evil. The apathy of modern society is far more terrifying than any fictional demon.

The pounding of skins that opens 'Fluid Bound' drives a vertebrae-flexing rhythm, though this track doesn't really vary enough to hold my attention.

'Martyrs', inspired by the disturbing-as-fuck French movie of the same name, is a breakneck bludgeoning that leaves you reeling just as much as the film it takes it's name from. If this track alone doesn't convince you to pick up this record, you're a fucking lost cause.

The album closes out with 'Skin and Bone', which on first impression reminds me of Cursed when they dropped the tempo, the waves of distortion emanating from the speakers hitting with a heaviness I can feel in my gut. An almost melodic guitar solo signals the start of the slow disintegration of the track, the whole structure decaying and dismantling itself til there's nothing left but the scratch of static noise and the wail of air-raid sirens. I almost expect there to be a bonus cover of 'War Pigs' after that, but the sirens die out, the needle scrapes it's last groove and lifts.

I highly recommend that you pick up a copy of this revolting slab from A389 Records
http://shop.a389records.com/products/ilsa-intoxicantations-12

And someone book this band to tour the EU/UK with Coffinworm or Brainoil or something.

Dopefight / Gurt split

I had the great luck to catch one of Dopefight's last shows on a bill that included EyeHateGod, Ramesses, and Conan. Even among illustrious company like that, Dopefight stood out as playing some of the grooviest, most fuzzed-out stoner rock I've heard. When they decided to call it quits a short time after that show, I was gutted.

When they announced their split, they also had a bit of a fire sale in their merch store, offering everything for ridiculously discounted prices. Since I already had their demo tape and a vinyl copy of the Buds LP, I snagged this split for a pound. Thats £1. No fucking way was I going to pass that up!

Stole this picture from Dopefight's bandcamp.

Enough backstory, here's why you should've supported this band while they were still a going concern.

Their side of this heavy little slab opens with Stonk, all buzzing amps and splashing cymbals before the drums crash in with a properly doomy riff. It's heavier than what I was expecting given their high-energy live show, but thats fine by me, I like my riffs downtuned and downtrodden.

A couple of minutes in however, the doomed stomp gives way to a groove as gargantuan as the grand canyon. The vocals are an indecipherable yell, but that's not what I listen to stoner rock for; the riff is king.

Second track 'Green Solace' starts with some filthy bass before the downright dirty guitar joins the fray. The tempo drops about halfway through, the guitar swaggering and snarling towards the end of the track.

The drums build and build, the vocals roar into... the end of the song. Huh. Kinda thought that was gonna lead to the most baddest-ass riff of all time.

If there's one thing Dopefight did in their all-too-brief tenure, it was leave you wanting more.

Gurt's side of the split is pretty fucking awesome too, 'Soapfeast' alternating between southern swagger with great whiskey-soaked rapsing vocals in the slower passages, and an uptempo blast that reminds me of the late great Raging Speedhorn. Good stuff.

'Dudes With Beards With Cats' might sound like a some hipster's tumblr, but is actually a mean motherfucker of a song that reminds me of Scissorfight at their most belligerent.

Yeah, so I'm making lazy comparisons, but if a band can remind me of two of the bands that were my gateway to the world of low n' slow riffage, that is no bad thing in my book.

If Gurt ever play North of the border, and there's plenty of whisky behind the bar, I'm there!

You can download pretty much Dopefight's entire discography for free here:
http://dopefight666.bandcamp.com/

And get your hands on their tapes, 7"s and CDs here:
http://dopefight.bigcartel.com/

Check Gurt out here:
http://gurt.bandcamp.com/