It's another Monday and I've been listening to some metal. Must be a Metal Monday! Every couple of weeks I take the time to do a few short reviews of some underground metal releases that have been making my life suck a little less. Below are four quick and dirty overviews of albums you might not have realized could improve your life as well. You don't have to thank me. I know I'm doing the dark lord's work. That reward is enough.
Humavoid - Lidless (Nobel Demon)
Lidless is the debut LP from Finnish progressive metal quartet Humanvoid. It's an impressive introduction to the group's sound and style., one that feels about halfway between Meshuggah and Bjork's turns towards aggressive, avant-garde pop. It sometimes feels like you're at a dueling piano night at a classed-up jazz bar, where one of the jazz pianists turns out to be a guitarist... and that guitarist is Christian Andreu of Gojira. That's not quite fair, though. The band definitely has their share of jazz bonified, but these aren't entirely represented in the piano or guitar lines of the album. Most of the ivory work here, as iconic as it is, has a theatrical drama to it that is better suited to Dracula's manner in Castlevania than paired with an ensemble for a recital. Instead, Humanvoid's genuine jazz qualifications come out mostly through the drumming of Heikki Malmberg, who absolutely knows how to hold down a polyrhythm and has a remarkable, studied, sense of pacing that I can only describe as academic, without being sterile. This description might make it sound like Humanvoid can't rock, but they do. This is an incredibly forceful sounding band who manage to etch out some definitive character and personality for themselves amongst all of the auditory violence they inflict.
Merked - Mercked (Goat Power Recreation)
If there is a better name for a power-violence band in 2021 than Merked, then you can shoot me. I will go to my grave with a smirk on my lips because I genuinely think it is hilarious. Does a power-violence band deserve to be on a metal rec list? I will let you answer that yourself when you start your own blog. This debut, self-titled EP from Merked, basically combines the wry, body ravishing energy of Spazz with playful but punishing deathgrind that should be familiar to fans of Prowler in the Yard-era Pig Destroyer. It's mostly fun, shout-along hardcore that makes judicious use of extreme metal conventions to package virulently infectious, double-time grooves. That sharp point you feel between your vertebrae while listening to this EP is, in fact, a knife, held my Merked. Their ultimatum: party or die. They'll bring the tunes; you bring your body for the wall of death. Mayhem will ensue. Who knows? You might even live to tell someone about it.
Get this bad-boy on cassette from Goat Power here.
Sacred Bull - Ragged Mountain (Super Carnival Recordings)
Georgia's Sacred Bull is back with a new LP, titled Ragged Mountain. It's a loose adaptation of the Edger Allan Poe short story titled A Tale of The Ragged Mountain, a slightly whimsical, yet singularly moribund story of a gentleman who shares some strange spiritual nexus with another man who died decades prior in India. Many of the titles of the album tracks are drawn directly from lines in the story, including "Never Before Trodden" and "Galvanic Battery." The story plays with the difficult to define barriers between slumber and wakefulness, between memories and dreams, and the hypnotic pull of the unknown and unverifiable, through weighty, slumber-shrowded repetitions, smeary grooves, and bloodless passages of cold-sweat inducing sound. Like the story that inspired it, Ragged Mountain balances the intrigue of the uncanny with a ponderous personification of dread. What's more, it is an entirely instrumental album and carries its narrative without uttering a single word. Nineteenth-century literature was probably never meant to be this heavy, but the heaviness works for it all the same.
Devilz by Definition - The Bitter Remains of Human Consumption (Self-Released)
Big, dumb, riffs are sometimes just what I need to get through the day. Sometimes I just have to have a fat groove to ride to through some interminable task, and I know I am not alone in this because Five Finger Deathpunch is a thing. Instead, of talking about one of the biggest groove and thrash metal bands in the country though, I'd like to introduce you to a band that fills a very similar nitch but who gets about 1/100th the love. Devilz by Definition is an Ontario band who followed up their 2016 debut LP this year with an EP titled The Bitter Remains of Human Consumption. It lacks some of the flair and flash of its predecessor, but they've honed in on the fundamentals for this release to great effect. The songwriting is sturdy, seeing the band serve up some tart licks, shout in-your-face choruses, and more importantly, some greasy, belly dragging grooves. If you can give me a reason to drop whatever I'm doing and fist pump in my chair, your doing something right. And Devilz by Definition is getting me reason to stop short and shoot some horns in the air at least once a track with this baby. So that's an A for effort and an A+ for execution in my book.
Buy the EP here.
