• SHORT REVIEWS • Our nineteenth-ish (?) edition of Short Reviews for 2024 releases finds me grabbing at the first half of June for weirdos, different stuff that isn’t necessarily “metal” in the canonical sense or sits in either the experimental, progressive rock, or punk-related categories in general. // These are more easygoing and casual than longform reviews, so relax and think for yourself. I’ve done my best to showcase the most interesting works that I come across while still presenting some decent variety here but choices boil down to what sticks, what inspires or what is worth writing about. — If you find something you dig go tell the band on social media and support them with a purchase! If you’d like your music reviewed, read the FAQ and send promos to: grizzlybutts@hotmail.com

---

Cum squirting tentacles and the encroaching dick-nosed clown brigade aside… Maybe it’d been all those years I’d spent tanking damage from bands like Lightning Bolt and The Locust but I could totally hang with the maniac hardcore punk/noisecore stoked and grinding-ass noise rock maze presented by Los Angeles-based duo SQUID PISSER on this second full-length album. ‘Dreams of Puke‘ overloads these ~21 minutes with twelve songs that’re flashing plenty of skin in terms of when those intense pockets of choppy riffs and screaming laser-blasted noise fire off but you only get one orgasmic moment at a time, a quick flurry up to speed and a peaking result per that intensity that typically amounts to a bashed-at groove or hyper-technical rhythmic play. There is a conscious creation of wreckage here, a mayhemic treatment of guitar noise/synth and blaring ugliness which has that meth’d out early 2000’s hyper hardcore twitch to its most outrageous moments (“Splatter the Master”, “Kill All Your Friends”). If you’re into this stuff at all you’re in it for the rush, then the details, then the inevitable migraine in that order but if you’ve built up some keen resistance to this level of ear-stabbing intent I’d say this kinda rules for the sake of how hard it goes.

---

Vienna, Austria-based noise rock troupe DESOLAT reach for blunt weaponry in shaping the opening moments of this second full-length album which is as much a tribute to mid-90’s sludge/noise rock dementia as it is a hardcore punk infused, death-disturbed sort of affair. A big fat bass guitar sound, noxious guitars hailing down, and a general mid-paced stomp applied give us the bones of a certain era of noise rock with the vocalist’s expression dictating where their heavier experiments form and dissolve. As we hit the pensive drive unto a rolling jam of a song like “Time For Darkness” the harsh post-hardcore side of the band, not to mention the malaise they grind into it, is made clear enough. They’ve further extremes to explore throughout this well-set ~forty minute record but nothing so drastic as the previous album, I’d say “Central European Nihilist Arrogance” pushes it to a heaviest “sludge metal” place. That said, I’d felt like they were at their best dirging away at songs like “Pregnant Meth Addict with Cancer” and “This Band Is Your Yoga”, lobbing less of the angular and unexpected stuff in terms of riffs and instead showing some of their hardcore punk/crust edged muscle memory in the guitar work, bopping through it. The flow of this record isn’t perfect but the mood is consistent, oppressive and clearly deranged by its surroundings.

---

Stockholm, Sweden-based hardcore punk quartet ALARM! arrive as the next big deal from three members of Victims after that band’d gone on hiatus in 2022. In this format, a new entity entirely, there are two big changes noted up front with guitarist Jon Lindqvist now giving us a prime and pronounced performance on bass and they’ve brought in his former Outlast bandmate Henrik Lindqvist on vocals. The spirit of their formative years spent in an era of 90’s hardcore punk comes across here naturally as does some of the melodic crust ideas one’d expect but, to start it was the active role of the bass guitar that’d really had me focusing in on this ~20 minute record. “Ancient Cycles” was the piece to get hung up on, a very different groove they build up toward which recalls the curveballs their previous band would often include in their releases. This one was a great surprise as I’d gone in blind expecting something referential of B’last! based on the album art and ended up with something surprisingly nostalgic, a bit different in its exploration of melody, and altogether on point.

---

Pulled from the aether of the subconscious and given an experimental chance and/or improvised attempt to manifest the far side of Romanian black metal duo SICULICIDIUM‘s psyche is readily tapped for this curiously free-ranged second of two 2024 releases in ‘Az elidegenedés melankóliája‘ (re: “The Melancholy of Alienation”.) I don’t want to suggest for a moment that this is “experimental black metal” but rather experimental music from musicians known for their own abstractions of black metal — instead we find minimal spaced-out ambient, sentimental electronica, noisome slow-motion doom-tripping, and dark folk/gothic country inspired pieces all of which tend toward post-industrial tonality. The funk-kicked mantra of “Az első”, the Perfect Dark/Deus Ex-level analog synth intrigue of “Együttérzés és bölcsesség”, and the black sun radiation surging from “Hasadás” feature as standouts for my own taste but any given track hands us som a row beyond the necessary sidling of the gothic country/folk pieces (“Zúg a fenyves” b/w “Székely blues”) and this leaves the listening experience as more of a buffet than a meal, a spattering curated for their own specific tastes and expands the personae of the group to a different plane.

---

Oslo, Norway-based progressive rock band AIRBAG weren’t necessarily on my radar ’til the odd cover art for their previous LP (‘A Day at the Beach‘, 2020) gave me reason enough to try their easygoing, at times jazz fused approach, often labeled as Floydian “neo-progressive rock”. At the very least there was a seedling of familiarity planted that’d made it easy to jump into ‘The Century of the Self‘ head first and soak up the considerable depth available. The gist, the way that I’d received the lyrics of this album, came in waves of dismay at the thought of what we lose (good and bad) when society burns itself down with moralization and quick to condemn tactics. Of course even their heaviest-set moments (such as “Erase”) aren’t necessarily going to budge the brick-walled brains of an extreme metal fan though I would suggest that the slow-wandering musings of “Dysphoria” and the terminally catchy brilliance of “Tyrants and Kings” should make a solid enough impression up front. But it is admittedly front-loaded with the most dialed-in events up front and the rest of the record isn’t all magick, such as the summery dread of “Awakening” and the level checking jam of extended closer “Tear it Down”. At the very least listen to “Tyrants and Kings” and ask ’em for way more of that.

---

Temuco, Chile-based solo black metal artist KERASFÓRA reattunes their approach beyond a popular demo back in 2022 to sound even more ancient and otherworldly within the fixated dramatic climes of this inspired debut LP. Each song here has a music box-like twang (via a guitar synth, I assume) to its central rhythmic fold, a frequently strummed spoke which reads like a demented harp in constant four-fingered arpeggiation. To start this’d felt like a simple melodic gimmick and an at times clashing, fumbled echoic voice but this only adds to the shambling pulse of the album overall, especially within the first three songs. There is a decent argument made here for the use of asymmetrical tones next to classical guitar techniques, and simple yet bold implementation of synth to develop the larger thread explored on this album though it mostly satisfies for the sake of how these things don’t set perfectly next to one another. There is a surreal clash of forms here which I’d particularly liked as the characterizing trait of the full listen to start, but their approach does evolve beyond its initial run for example the piercing sci-fi warped synth of “Of Darkness and Confusion”, a piece which interrupts the plod of the full listen with something louder. Emboldened by the use of repetition rather than absorbed by it there is some admirable sensibility applied here which they could certainly perfect and polish to a pristine standard but I think it’d lose the dark, deep underground feeling that pervades here if the homebrewed dementia of it were lost.

---

---