Musket Hawk - Upside of Sick

Gatling Pigeon

Even after several spins I'm not even entirely sure what this is or why I like it so much.  I feel a bit over my head talking about Revolver Duck considering this lays the sludge influence down super thick and my only real point of reference for that is Melvins since I never really bothered exploring the genre much further than that beyond a few scattered classic tracks here and there.  With that little knowledge of one of the bigger influences on Upside of Sick, I really shouldn't even be talking about something I clearly don't understand, and that's been my philosophy for a long time.

However, my philosophy is also "I know good/bad music when I hear it", and Tommy Goose very confidently falls on the "good" side of that equation.  In fact I'd go so far as to say that they've been one of the few truly excellent bands to pop up in my inbox all year.  The sludge metal here may be a major influence and that puts it pretty firmly outside of my wheelhouse, but the band really let the punk side of the sludge mixture shine, and the occasional blasts of grinding intensity make Upside of Sick something I can comprehend just enough to headbang myself into a coma.

This is a very short release, clocking in at just under 25 minutes, but it crams a whole shitload of riffs and hooks into that short time.  The opener, "Roidhead Swindler", pretty much showcases everything the band has to offer.  It crashes through the gate with some brutally doompaced sludge riffs, absolutely drowning in overwhelming distortion, before giving way to some raucous, filthy Discharge-styled hardcore, and from there in peppers in quasi-random blasts and squealing dissonance, all underneath heavily distorted screams and bellowing growls.  It sounds like I'm describing pretty much any extreme metal band, but trust me when I say that the punk attitude of the whole thing keeps it consistently vicious, regardless of whether they're going for the throat with hyperspeed noise attacks or hurling boulders at you with a more deliberate pace.  There's an inherent danger to Upside of Sick that acts as the intangible that keeps this from falling out of regular rotation while I slog through the other dozen mediocre albums I don't care to write about. 

I can't say too much about this considering it's succinctness, but Gun Bird came with a point to make and they're more than happy to make it and carry on quickly, leaving you a twisted, smouldering crater in their wake.  They're explosive and mean and that's all I really ask for out of a band this stupidly simple.  There aren't any flashy tricks because there doesn't need to be.  They show up, destroy, and leave. 


RATING: 84%

Lord Mantis - Pervertor

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark just got weirder

Taste Swap round 5, bitches!  I'm bringing this fad back, and this time I've dragged the monstrous Thumbman, dystopia4, down with me.  The guy may do almost nothing except lift weights and listen to sludge, but every once and a while he takes a break to write reviews, and when he does he's one of the most consistent out there.  And so with that in mind I asked him to pair up with me for this little game I play, and the album he gave me was, much like the last two I did (Witchcraft and Bodycage), very, very good.  Enter Pervertor, by Chicago's own Lord Mantis.

With my first look at the (gorgeously grotesque) cover art, my mind understandably jumped to Dragged into Sunlight's monumental Hatred for Mankind, and I'm not alone because the two bands seem to be compared to one another.  The difference to me is that while Dragged into Sunlight takes visceral black metal and spreads it liberally over dark, oppressive doom, Lord Mantis takes that same Nordic vitriol and instead uses it to coat a base of filthy sludge.  Now generally, I don't give a fuck about sludge (which is precisely why I do these games, of course), but apparently taking the dank, grungy sounds of Grief and sandblasting it with the screeching hatred of USBM makes for a pretty fucking swell combination, because Pervertor completely rips face.

The first thing that stood out to me were the vocals, which channel Melechesh's Ashmedi in terms of sheer force combined with unrelenting harshness.  It sounds like he's pushing the words out of his body with the force of a volcanic eruption, and it comes off as so god damned gritty and powerful that I can't imagine any other way this band could possibly approach the vocal position.  There's a fifteen second howl at the end of "Ritual Killer" that just sounds like the vocal representation of genocide, and it only took the opening lines of "Pervertor of the Will" to cement this as one of the most vicious performances of 2012.

I mentioned Grief earlier, mainly because they're one of the very few sludge bands I'm familiar with in any capacity, but that's honestly not a great comparison because Lord Mantis seems to approach the style with a much different mindset.  Grief is about misery and despair, while Lord Mantis is about misanthropy and hatred.  As such, the music contained here is much more aggressive, which is largely due to the black metal half of the band's style.  The riffs rarely devolve into cliched tremolo abuse, instead working their way around very twisted patterns and evoking an atmosphere of filth.  The bluesy roots of the style rear their head occasionally (like on "The Whip and the Body"), but it never falls into Sabbath retreads or anything like that.  All it really does is keep the songs varied enough for them all to have their own identity in co-ordinance with the ideal of keeping the album unified and cohesive.  The whole album focuses on seismic heaviness, and that's really all I could ask out of it.

This is another case where there really isn't much fault I can find in an album.  This absolutely knows what it set out to do, and Pervertor certainly accomplished that goal.  It's dirty, raw, bloody, and visceral.  Basically any adjectives you could use to describe a knife fight apply here equally as well.  Since jumping from Candlelight to Profound Lore and adding the omnipresent Ken Sorceron to the fold, the band has found its way into the closest thing to the mainstream that metal really has anymore (that being the XM metal station and being namedropped on MetalSucks and similar publications), so I think it's safe to assume they've gotten slightly more accessible with their later releases.  If so, that's a shame, because the unrelenting vitriol contained on Pervertor is brilliant, and we really legitimately need more bands focusing on mood and songwriting like this.  Lord Mantis has a couple of tricks in their arsenal, and they employ all of them wonderfully here.  Even if you end up hating this, I dare you to tell me the vocals suck.  This sickly malformed and fanatical howling is pretty much the closest thing to objectively great you're going to find in extreme metal.  Definitely worth a listen if you're not a pussy, bro.

Cal used to have his own blog but he hasn't updated it in over a year, but you can find his MA reviews here, and he also reviews for The Metal Observer, so you may know him already, but he's pretty swell so read his stuff dammit


RATING - 90%