Mike Vest and Mike Vest fans definitely have a mutually beneficial addiction thing going on: there’s no way to stop him firing up his hotrod space-shred rig and dealing out new sounds (just look at the sheer volume of it all), and whatever product hits the streets gets lapped up fast. This latest one on Riot Season cassette imprint Swap Meat is another prime example of the versatility within his signature style – wah blizzards and psychedelic, doomed riffing – here found stalking around the superb hypnotic drumming of Matteo Dainese II Cane. Mean, muscly fuzz riffs groove hard under the flightpath of the nonstop blazing solos, so unrelenting they blur in to a mesmerising texture, like the doppelgänger antithesis to mopey shoegaze. All six tracks clock in around the relatively concise five minute mark, and the sudden shuddering to a halt comes as a surprise if you haven’t shaken the longform swells of Blown Out and Bong from your preconceptions. Maybe in years to come Vest will be thought of as the UK’s answer to Wino, a lead guitarist with a wicked one-off style, and if so, this Dodge Meteor tape will rank as one of many discography highlights.
RECENT, DECENT: a spree of where it’s at tunes from the abundance of excellent new things that keep cropping up.
Doe drop two videos in two weeks from their new record Some Things Last Longer Than You. They’ve got doubts about sincerity, but their punk-pop is bullshit-free and doesn’t patronise you at all – it’s adult and feelgood and catchy, especially ‘Last Ditch‘. It’s another lesson in understated drumming excellence by Jake (of The Exhausts, City Dweller, Tremors, and er TAT), and Nicola’s vocals have got some of the best vowel inflections ever.
Blown Out have served up a sliver of their new record, New Cruiser, which you can listen to here:
Last June they released easily the best psychedelic release of 2015, the Jet Black Hallucinations LP, listening to which was like inhaling space vacuum for kicks, and you can only hope the new one out on Riot Season next month proves to be as thrilling and fatal. Similarly lengthy, boggling and from Newcastle is Khünnt‘s new LP/song, the 38 minute long Failures, which you can attempt to digest at Echoes and Dust. It sounds like a demon sentenced to drown inside a giant church bell at the bottom of the ocean, being knocked about by evil whales.
Both sides of the split below have surfaced now, which won’t take long at all to listen to:
Leicester’s Nothing Clean are improving on their infuriatingly slippy and complex powerviolence with every release, Ona Snop on the other hand are a bit mincier and yesss come on, and the fact that they can use Broken Teeth as a cheap gag is great – still, horror grinders Chestburster make them both look like pensioners in the fast lane holding up the guy behind in the Ferrari. The Troma E.Pis a visionary mini-epic that combines sound collage, studio-refined grind and horror movie aesthetics, with truly remarkable results.
Betrayer released the Demonstrating Aggression demo last month, promising thrash and duly delivering, but in a way which will definitely appeal more to fans of Unearth and other beefy metalcore groups from the early 2000s than old school purists – although Dan of Renounced absolutely masters the sneering villain vocals. Northern wolfpack crew Control are playing the exact type of bright, melodic hardcore that people like to champion, but only if it’s from the US… Something of a shame, seeing as they’ve patiently reared and evolved a youth crew sound over the past few years to the point where their own tracks come across stronger and more full of conviction than the Turning Point cover.
Manchester’s Big Machine are two ex Hammers members, and pretty much the only aspect they’ve kept moving forward from those heady crust days is their total refusal to do things in a straightforward manner. On the new demo Bigger Machine, Nick and Sacha break out contortionist punk that can’t decide if it’s seething or pleasant, with intricate folding riffs and perplexing direction changes around every corner. Only three tracks, but totally fascinating.
Last of all, if the JK Flesh and Sun Kil Moon collaboration at the beginning of the year rubbed you the wrong way, then Broadrick’s latest distort-techno LP Rise Above restores a sense of vitality to his work, as his dystopian, disorientating electronic flows and reveals at its own pace rather than serving as a diminished backing track. ‘Defector’ gives a good estimation of what the motorways of 2116 will sound like, while tracks like ‘Cast’ and’Conquered’ are like trudging through a marsh of slimy, burping bass.
Routine Stomps 