Thing of the Day
Authorization, The Robot Heart, Not Above Evil, Cult of Erinyes
MAY 7th 2011
Four slices today, just because… Four albums worth a little of your time today, Washington D.C duo Authorization with retrospective album available for free, Brighton choral popists The Robot Heart with their layers of melody, extreme metal from Manchester’s Not Above Evil, and a relentless black hellwind from Belgium’s Cult of Erinyes… We do like a touch of variety around these parts…
AUTHORIZATION – Version 1 (self
release) – Seems this U.S band Authorization, a rather intriguing
instrumental duo featuring Jeff Barsky
(Plums,
Insect Factory) and Dan
Caldas (Black Eyes,
Horses) split last year.
However, before the duo split they recorded one album, an interesting
album that they’ve just made available as a free
download. Version 1 consists of eight variations
around what
appears to be the same musical theme, that theme being rather edgy,
rather clean cut, rather rewarding post-punk experimental
instrumental sharpness. Pin-point tunes, smart angles, pumping in a
minimal less-is-more-way, a post-punk new-wave bass-groove augmenting
the high-end rhythm box beat and the positively evolving repetition.
A touch of Wire, a hint of a Krautrock undertone in those synths,
and actually a rather uniquely different sound
Download the album for free, with the blessing (and indeed authorization) of the band, and find out for yourself, via authorization.bandcamp.com/
THE ROBOT HEART – The Robot Heart
(Bleeding Heart) - Pleasantly nice, mellow
relaxed band from Brighton,
I guess if we were being helpfully lazy and throwing up vague
signposts we’d start talking about the notions of gentle
choral-indie. Beautifully soft, sunny, easy, flowing unobtrusive
layers of quiet voices, harmonies, gentle electronica, glockenspiel,
melodica, delicate waves - boy girl vocal waves, sweet
sunny songs, harmless inoffensive delicate sunny breezy beauty should
you be in the mood, maybe just a tad twee and polite if you’re not…
Clever songs, simple, uncluttered, well constructed, delightfully
refreshing… Here come the link for you to explore should you feel
the need to be curious..
www.myspace.com/therobotheart
www.bleedingheartrecordings.com
NOT ABOVE EVIL – Deification
(self
release) – Ten track album from a relatively new Manchester-based
extreme metal band. Formed in late 2009, the three piece “melodic
death metal band” (their description), take a classic Iron Maiden
style metal approach to their guitar stylings, then pile on the
thrashing drums and the growling shouty throat-ripping vocals and come
out with rather a good blend actually. A
touch of Lamb of God... Not Above Evil are brutally melodic, they're
right about that -
melodic in a pounding charging extreme metal way, and they have got
their sound (and everything else) rather impressively together (self
release does not mean low budget of cheap sounding production in this
case).
Now we can’t say Not Above Evil are doing anything
radically
different, in reality they’re just another very slight variation on
the millions of other extreme metal bands out there, -
nothing punky,
nothing grinding, no deviation towards any kind of whatevercore, no
notions of progressiveness or anything like that. Just well played
extreme yet brutally melodic no messing intensely good, same as a lot
of things you already heard, heavy metal. Without really doing
anything new Not Above Evil have managed to hit somewhere near the
spot that most modern metal bands (especially English ones) manage to
miss by miles these days. Rather decent debut: if melodic extreme
metal is your thing, then Deification
is well worth checking out…
Deification came out this April – www.myspace.com/notaboveevil
CULT OF ERINYES – A Place To Call My
Unknown (Ladlo) - A relentless black hellwind
of almost never ending
white noise and a whole load of blustery high-speed extreme deathly
wind-tunnel black metal (from Belgium). It all comes with the usual
almost unintelligible frothing growling guttural low-end screams of
man-in-need-of-throat-lozenge, same old extreme death metal vocal
delivery, might have been radical once back in the day, all a little
tediously predictable now though. Start of the sixth song sounds like
someone just took a jackhammer to singerman’s big toe, he’s
yelping like a demon-pig. Cult of Erinyes are kind of like that Hate
Forest vibe without the dark subtle atmospheres that Hate Forest lace
their sound with – they sound like the faster, less thought about,
primitive, speed-metal meets a bit of moody atmosphere, a far less
subtle take on Hate Forest and about a million other relentless
hellwind-blasting atmospheric ritualistic extreme black metal bands
who throw in a bit of dark mood candlelight and roar like demon-pigs
about it all All pretty much the same - same sound, same look, same
feel, same, and yet I do kind of like it, in a mindless ball of
extreme white noise hell wind of primitive black metal kind of way….
“furious rythmics and ambient digressions are only a few weapons
which will make of Cult of Erinyes a band to be reckoned with” so
they say, well not quite a band to be really reckoned with yet, do
rather like their furious hellwinds though…
