It seems Last Hounds have found their feet with latest record Burden. Having honed and developed their sound over two EPs and two full lengths since 2013, their direction seems stronger and more secure. Skilled songwriting craftmanship comes to the fore with the slick dynamics of tracks such as ‘Slow Burn’ and ‘Extraordinary’ as the album leads the listener on a non-stop journey of uptempo feelgood punk.
There’s a little bit of something for everyone, but fans of classic punk and hardcore will feel most at home and satisfied amongst this collection of fun tracks. The beginning of ‘Handmade’ has a bit of an early Nirvana vibe in the opening verse whereas ‘Running With The Dead’ has BMTH tones during the chorus. Mostly, they’ve been compared to the likes of Comeback Kid, and Gallows during the Frank Carter era which seems a valid comment. It’s high energy hardcore with big choruses. Filling a void in the current scene, Last Hounds tick all the right boxes – songs that go hard but also have soul and earworm potential. The lyrics are clear and understandable, the chorus lines and hooks repeated just enough to get stuck in your head and the melodies easy to sing along to.
Tragic folklore and infamous superstitions penetrate every corner of the globe and have plagued every culture for millennia. Eerie tales of undead scarecrows, scorned witches, Nordic flames, and unquiet graveyards, have outlived their origins, lost to the years they emerged from. London based five-piece Green Lung however, have utilised their farmland and countryside upbringings to spout and retell the hair-raising and spine-chilling legends just in time for Hallow’s Eve with their full-length sophomore album, Black Harvest.
Setting the tone for the next 40 minutes, album opener ‘The Harrowing’ could not have been more aptly titled. The doomed fable begins with whisperings of Black Sabbath’s ‘Black Sabbath’, the panic-stricken song wailing it’s warning. Scott Black’s guitars twist and turn like poison ivy asphyxiating its prey, as Matt Wiseman’s drums and Joseph Ghast’s bass lines kick in for the final hysteria.
With the swing of Wolf Mother and the melodies of Deep Purple, ‘Old Gods’ explores the religions of what came before Christianity, as “We stand on heathen land” conjures images of Nordic runes and ritualistic sacrifice. Guitar riffs and John Wright’s keyboard licks dance together to create an air of ancient prog.
After a three-decade career one might assume the band were slowing down or running out of ideas. But this is not the case for the Suffolk based six-piece. Having cemented a new line-up in 2015, Cradle of Filth found a new lease of a life and mined from a fountain of fresh ideas. Rejuvenated and energised, their last two albums have gone from strength to strength and they continue their onslaught with mesmerising Existence Is Futile.
Nihilistic and brutal, the record was recorded during the lockdown of 2020 at Grindstone Studios in Suffolk with Scott Atkins (Devilment, Benediction, Vader). Atkins has done a wonderful job on production, successfully crafting together the massive sound of a band like Cradle and creating a full, fluid piece which takes the listener on a journey through darkness and chaos. While previous Cradle albums have more often than not gone for a storytelling, fantastical approach, crafting twisted worlds and evocative imagery, Existence Is Futile has a more realistic, closer to home approach. Examining the world around us in an exploration of modern existentialism, the band even branch out into socio-political territory with the likes of ‘Suffer Our Dominion’, a track about humanity destroying the environment.
The once hard-partying, hard-living vocalist has spent much of the last decade obliterating the persona he’d developed over the course of the band’s early career. Around the time of 2014’s savage reinvention From Parts Unknown, Buckley began talking of how unhappy he was with his sardonic public image, and the lyrics of that album talk of spiritual rebirth, of collapsing your sense of self in order to rise from its ashes. This reinvention corresponded with a career-best album that was crisp, confident and punishingly heavy.
However, this resurrection would suffer a setback. The shadow reared its ugly head again around the time of 2018’s Low Teens – a bleaker, stranger but no less brilliant album that featured lyrics inspired by the complications surrounding the birth of Buckley’s child. The often harrowing subject matter found him questioning his hard won rebirth, and wondering whether any of it was worth it, when faced with a world that contains such pain. 2021’s Radical continues this line of profound existential questioning, one complicated by further troubles in Buckley’s personal life and the abject state that our planet now finds itself in.
Homebound like the rest of us over the duration of the pandemic, MacNeil has used the time where he’d usually be out on the road to instead set out on a new musical journey honing in on a sound and subject matter more personal to him than he’s ever put on record before. Simply, this is his most revealing and personally emotive work to date. “This is the most personal music I have ever released… It’s a record about my life falling apart and then trying to pick up the pieces. Dooms Children is about falling out of love, about addiction and lying awake at night wondering if you’ve made all the wrong choices” says MacNeil.
Half of the songs on the album were written during a time in which MacNeil reflects on as being a dark period. The other half were written while in rehab aside from ‘Friend of the Devil’, which is a fresh take on an original song. However the focus here isn’t on sobriety. The duality of the music on the album aims to show MacNeil’s journey from his lowest to his newfound sense of purpose, pushing through a point in his life and emerging at the other side renewed and reinvigorated.
Sonically the album is oozing with fuzzy riffs, groovy bass lines, dream-like psychedelia and infectious rhythm sections. The result is a modern take on psychedelic rock merged with hard rock. MacNeil’s harsh gravelly tone may surprise some long-term fans hearing him in this light. ‘Trip With Me; is an impressive opener whereby MacNeil’s vocals take a back seat weaving in and out of the music to give the listener a flavour of the various influences and aspects they can look forward to with the album. ‘Flower Moon’ flips the previous concept on it’s head taking a more traditional approach with the vocals back front and centre. MacNeils vocal range is given the space to stretch and show off whilst the song’s mid-section features an outrageously long 2 minute guitar solo that builds and builds with the payout being well worth the wait.
As something that can be attested to by anyone who has heard their material thus far, the gloomy yet serene Belgian shoegazers create art that is enveloping and blanketing. At first it’s soothing, even therapeutic, but as time goes on it becomes suffocating and engulfing in a transition that’s so gradual, the tranquillizing properties never lose effect. The group’s widely acclaimed debut LP Aurora showcased this brilliantly, but their forthcoming second body of work Hush only sees the band tightening their squeeze in a way that’s forceful yet wonderfully elegant.
Recorded amidst the literal darkness of winter and proverbial darkness that shadowed the height of the pandemic, Hush is without question the group’s darkest work to date. However, simultaneously, it their most hopeful and optimistic. Slow Crush have always been a band of great contrast and division, with their evocative take on the shoegaze genre being composed of both wistful longing and granulating noise, but this record sees the band swirling the two shades upon their palate. It’s a coalescence of fatalism and romanticism, one that’s delivered with tremendous grace and force.
Opener ‘Drown’, to be put simply, is the musical equivalent of its title. Opening with ethereal tones prior to a quickly silenced shriek of feedback, the track feels akin to entering the cold waters of the ocean beneath the alluring warmth of silent moonlight. It’s a greatly serene ordeal, one without fear and one that’s led by the distant dreamlike vocals of Isa Holliday who tempts one further into the depths. To continue with the drowning metaphor, the proceeding ‘Blue’ is the moment where one realises there’s no return to the surface. It lurches into being with granulating down-tuned fretwork and ironclad dissonance, and in relation, the following push and pull of ‘Swoon’ and the minimalistic despair of ‘Gloom’ is where the pressure of depths begin to take effect. Despite such visceral and hopeless visuals though, such tracks invoke heightened feelings of beauty and allurement.
