Thing of the Day
Five slices of quality extreme metal
MAY 20th 2011
SPLIT ROAST – Various artists (Condate) - What we have here is an aptly named compilation album offering up about an hour’s worth of extreme music and something like twenty tracks, from five of “the UK’s grimmest bands” – so declares the press release.
Said piece of paper goes on to announce “new tracks from Northern black-meets-death assassins COLONEL BLAST, Leeds based extreme tech metallers DIASCORIUM, grind manksters MAGPYES, also from Leeds, Edinburgh death merchants CANCEROUS WOMB and finally Manchester’s brutal death tech grind warriors DYSCAPHIA”.
A pocket-friendly price of a fiver gets you what the label claims is
“an introduction to some of the finest sounds the underground UK metal
scene has to offer right now”. Split albums like this are no new things
of course, and a damn fine way to get some new bands out there, to get
some healthy cross-pollination going – it goes on like this all the
time in the underground crossover worlds where punk and forward
thinking bullshit-free metal flow (Suzie the Swimmer would more than
approve).
Split Roast serves up about an hour’s worth of blurred lines and various shades of frothing barking thrashing slicing extreme metal. None of the bands have any time to stop for breath, or the notions of light and shade; this is just five bands thrashing and riffing and technical metal grinding away. Most of it pretty obvious, most of it pretty good, no need going to start picking over it all, not going to compare the bands here – they're all good, they’re all well worth checking out. We’ll just tell you that if extreme brutal growling pus-bursting metal violence is your chosen thing then this is a damn good mind-blast of a split roast.
The lines where one band’s tantrums end and the next one’s kick in is pretty blurred; takes a while for the individual musical personalities to shape themselves. But emerge they do: slightly different shades of extreme bloody gore and babbling frothing frenzies of metal violence. It's a wretched conflagration of barking thrashing and pounding and yap yap yap… five rather decent, rather imaginative extreme metal bands.A wall of relentless musical onslaughts and spewtums of vocal vomitation, this is barking riffing guttural pestilence and not a bad track between the five of them.
What this isn’t
is a blind following of the extreme metal rules. Split Roast is not
five tedious bands happy to just churn more of the same out - this is
five bands with a bit of colour and imagination added to their
violently bubbling extreme metal melting pot - excellent stuff,
actually. Five strong bands, a whole set of good attitudes and
some healthy underground coming together is a very positive productive
way. Coming together and positive attitudes aren’t enough if the music
doesn’t cut it of course, attitude is nothing without the imagination -
the music here is more than good enough to carry it all and back the
label’s bold claims. Five rather recommended violently extreme
metal bands and a highly recommend split roast of a compilation album.
The
five bands - COLONEL BLAST, DIASCORIUM, MAGPYES,
CANCEROUS WOMB and DYSCAPHIA are threatening to tour together sometime
soon, you have been warned. More details of the release and any dates
from www.condaterecords.com
