Destroyer Destroyer - Littered with Arrows
Often hard to call death metal albums on a first listen, assuming you like it in the first place. The new Destroyer Destroyer hangs on the same sort of musical fringes as groups like Car Bomb, Gaza, Glass Casket et al, taking the brutality, complexity and dissonant melodic content of the genre and moving it away from little red horned men and upside down crosses into a more modern and forward looking direction. Here you’ll find the same sort of battering energy that fuels the genre but occasionally the music is deconstructed into sections without rhythms, guitar tones are bent and distorted into new sounds, and vocals shriek well beyond the point of sanity. It’s all intense and impressive although I’ll need more time to get to know its dark corridors.
Barry Miles - Scatbird
Utterly killer Mainstream jazz verging on fusion release by a guy whose piano prowess is something seemingly forgotten in time. In fact there’s so much piano playing here that you feel a certain restraint in terms of the music actually moving onto fusion per se, despite the fact the drums push this hard in that direction, riffing and barrelling like about everyone familiar with Billy Cobham at the time. While the album opens with Miles scatting on the title track and a little more across the album, which gets old in a hurry, when Miles and co get past this into the active tracks, the music takes off into almost McCoy Tyneresque regions. Songs like the long “Skeleton Dance” defy anyone to take their attention off the album as Miles plays like a virtuoso throughout. By the end of this song I was practically having a religious experience and it put all the quasi-funk scatting in a better, more positive perspective. It just boggles the mind how much great jazz is out there to be dug up still.
See You Next Tuesday - Parasite
EP length serving of grind/death assault, this will be among the most heaviest 18 minutes or so you’ve ever spent. Every punch, grind and drum battery feels like it’s going to take down your stereo, the entire band channeling every bit of energy and anger into it you can possibly imagine. It’s as if they took a microscopic look at the palm-muted metal guitar sound and altered it until it was as damaging as it could possibly be. Amazingly, they managed to balance some of this sheer grimness by the great song titles, such as “Good Christians Don’t Get Jiggy With It Till After Marriage,” “Before I Die, I’m Going to F*&k me a Fish,” and “Just Out of Curiosity, Are Your Parents Siblings?”, all of which make you wonder where the creavity in this department has disappeared to for most artists. Anyway the time duration seemed about right, I was black and blue when this one was done and, somehow, cleansed.