The playlist: metal – Primus, Rings of Saturn, Today Is the Day and more
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Version 0 of 1. Today Is the Day – Masada Over two decades on from the release of their debut album Supernova, Today Is the Day remain a reliably eccentric and viciously nihilistic alternative to just about everything that’s going on in the metal world. New album Animal Mother upholds leader Steve Austin’s furiously distinctive sonic principles, offering a sustained rawness and bug-eyed belligerence that are as unsettling as they are extreme. The first track from the record to be released into the wild, Masada is unremittingly bleak, deeply peculiar and quite unlike anything else that’s happening in heavy music right now. Rings of Saturn – Senseless Massacre Quite possibly the most consistently maligned subgenre in recent metal history, deathcore has thrown up so few bands of any enduring worth that the wickedly inventive eruptions of crazed digi-grind on Rings of Saturn’s new album Lugal Ki En seem genuinely shocking. Never mind that songs like this one sound as if they’re being performed by hyper-dextrous muso robots: the sheer intensity and verve on display simultaneously takes the breath away and elicits startled belly laughs. None more mental. Primus – Pure Imagination Honorary members of the metal fraternity that have more in common with Zappa and the Residents than anything more traditionally heavy, Primus have been revered cult oddballs for so long now that their decision to reinterpret the songs from the classic 1974 kids’ movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory will come as little surprise to most admirers. What could have been a cack-handed disaster has turned out to be one of the most thrillingly deranged albums in their career, with Pure Imagination proving a particularly unhinged highlight. The forthcoming live shows promise to be utterly mind-bending. Orange Goblin – Sabbath Hex Currently enjoying the highest levels of popularity and intensive activity of their two-decade existence, London’s mighty Orange Goblin have done more than enough to be regarded as true British metal greats. In keeping with their tireless enthusiasm for rocking the merry hell out of crowds the world over, new album Back From the Abyss once again crackles with wide-eyed excitement at the very concept of metal itself. The wheel is not being reinvented here, but when it comes to nailing the genre’s basic ethos, no one does it with more thunderous abandon than the Goblin boys. While Heaven Wept – Icarus & I Online discourse may have been a little bit cruel to the word “epic” in recent times, turning it into a meaningless epithet for anything that is better than quite good, but While Heaven Wept understand what the word was originally meant to convey. With elements of traditional heavy metal and grandiose doom colliding amid bewildering showers of twinkling, lysergic magic, the Americans are one of modern metal’s most unique phenomena. New album Suspended at Aphelion is every bit as extraordinary as fans have grown to expect, and Icarus & I is an appropriately grandiloquent and, oh yes, epic entry point. |