New Band To Burn One To: Pauwels

Every now and again we like to throw you up a bit of a curve ball with the bands we’re introducing you to. While still keeping to our core aesthetic of keeping everything HEAVY, a slight side step away from the stoner/doom/sludge bands can be a needed booster, and today we’re bringing you a beast which in all parts excites, scares, confuses, and dazzles in equal measures, rotating in order part way through most songs. Today’s New Band To Burn One To is Strasbourg’s (France) Noise/Post-Rock troupe Pauwels, bursting your eardrums and snapping your neck.

The French instrumentalists are Jeremy Ledda, Bob K, Sebastien Pablo Hermann, Marlon Saquet, and Jovan Veljkovic, and together they make one hell of a noise, frenetically switching from guitar shredding to blissed out technical elements, through counteracting time signatures, flowing along a sound which never lets you settle nor rest for long on your laurels, before it’s removing your face once more.

The band have just released their second EP, Elina, sounding like Cloudkicker if he was brought up on the Noise bands of Melvins and Helmet, while still holding a desire to stray into post-rock wastelands, bringing the youthful Math-rock attitude along to boot. The important thing that Pauwels achieve is never straying far from the realms of making actual songs, their basic sound is instrumental music with chorus and verse, just perhaps not necessarily in the accepted normality of what is perceived as a “song”; but who the hell wants to be normal anyway?

Pauwels are one of those bands that you just can’t predict, not where their sound will take you, not what will come after the next chord change, or for what label to tag them under. The band are an exciting addition to an often underappreciated genre. Trust us, you will want to keep an eye on Pauwels.

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New Band To Burn One To: Human Nature

Holy shit this is heavy!

Playing a brand of feedback induced doom accompanied with cavalcades of noise rock explosions for good measure, is best presented in its purest and rawest form, scraping the layers off your eardrums with each scorching dragging riff. This is the bit where Human Nature are revealed, a four piece London band that have the potential to seriously fuck up your day.

Through their suffocatingly heavy fuzzed doom riffs to their choke-holding drumming, Human Nature have created a demo which many long-stays in the game wouldn’t find enough passion to nurture. The vocals are sparse throughout the self-titled home recorded EP, echoing in through the metal infused ‘Bound’, sandwiched between the instrumental stoner metal of ‘Interlude’ and the psychedelic tendencies of ‘VOID’, Human Nature are a band with seemingly endless ideas of where to take their music, it’s going to be exciting to hear what noise these guys spew out next. Grab a hold of their demo now as a free download from Bandcamp.

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Sunday Stoner-Sludge: Disastroid - "Missiles"

Soccer games, allergy meds, and ridiculous waves from non-friends tend to characterize my Autumns. One exhausting sneeze follows another as my fucking kids amp the tempo and I stab my fucking eye with a sharp stick. Can't we just head home, make dinner, and watch animated drivel until you lose steam and I can carry you to soft dreams, kid? Ha, whoa... "fuck you, Dad!" Sunday translates to salvation, and today's saviors may be the year's best.

California's Disastroid weave a tight sludge-noise tapestry of frayed nerves on Missiles, eight shifty tip-toed exercises of varying speeds and styles that blur lines between genres and likely inject more scope-stretching sounds than any release featured in the Sunday Sludge of 2014. Not exactly accessible, not exactly unsettling, not exactly less-than-awesome, Disastroid click through thirty-five minutes balancing grind and buzz, never quite abandoning a meter that makes you believe they're smarter than you. And they don't care.

Opening slow on Lost in Space may be the band's greatest ruse, hitting hard with abrupt collapse and snuffing comfort. The whisper-scream dynamic is never as pretentious as you'd expect, the un-hinged approach being less important to the trio than their dinner plans. Through shrill ice and the warp of convention, Disastroid immediately announce their bass-driven leveling of standards. But Bird Watcher is somehow more welcoming with its deceptively clean gait. Repetitive and numbing, the track contains elements of 90's buzz that balance the noisy and the focused, making them (somehow) more unsettling. Jagged, jarring rhythms begin characterizing the sound and wagging tongues.

Haunt and fog are never out of reach, though. Unsound Mind spaces through a bayou and grows more eerie with passing moments. Enver's vocals find their marquee here, establishing a cautious trust by calling out your flaws. Buoyant, heavily-caked rhythms harken Failure's best moments, grinding a bit before mudding and hazing. To bottom-line things, Disastroid won't let your bullshit go unnoticed.

The disc's back-end triptych may wind up being one of 2014's crowning achievements. Mighty Road sounds like sunny Sunday morning kitchen appliances when you're NOT hungover, punchy and patient until guitar noise grows atop a Helmet-ish stop/start tempo. The track shifts, dodges labels, and the scratchy unfurl is pretty awesome. When the cold-stone ending passage eases into Obeah, we're abruptly faced with the album's slickest smack. Loaded with angst and shaken-head judgments, vocal barbs peel off the wheels a la Whores. and the late Akimbo. The evolution is frightening and enthralling as listeners watch patterns and plans totally fucking dissolve.

And oh, that title track. Subtle entry, escalation, a slight hope for escape... What a cool fucking track, buzzing like your first car and fully-aware of its own strength, this juggernaut is a tense juxtaposition of piqued guitars and cool, steady rhythms. Sprinkling the landscape with hope is a cruel exercise when you consider the long, drawn-out saturation of reality on the horizon. Every element is showcased, and all corners of this band's directives are finally revealed. Maybe we weren't supposed to smile in the first place.

Spacey escalations and grounded assertions are just one of the myriad of Missiles's accomplished marriages. This stoner-sludge effort is so much more than hazy jams or drudging rhythms. Try as they might, Disastroid never let the noise detract from their proficiency. Is your stepdad gonna beat you awake or is he gonna wait for you to figure out things for yourself? It's hard to tell. Disastroid's soundtrack to your bruised walk to school won't boost your ego. It's just gonna take a nuanced approach toward your self-improvement. Self-improvement? Shit... by year's end, you'll be at your scabby best.

For fans of: Melvins, Whores., Failure
Pair with: Rosa Hibiscus Ale, Revolution Brewing

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LP Review - "Let It Come From Whom It May" by Tyranny Is Tyranny

Tyranny Is Tyranny are from Madison WI and describe themselves as a post-noiserock band focusing on dynamics, repetition, and the dismantling of capitalism, featuring former members of The United Sons Of Toil they lay down long-form slabs of bleak dynamics and left-wing outrage. The 7 songs on this album bring angsty yet well considered politicisms ranging from the furious punk rock howls of "Down the K-Hole" to the post-metalist atmospherics of "Apostasy ".

Kicking off with "Manufacturing Truth" the stage is set with a song which is, I think, aimed at the mainstream media's tendency to twist information and even outright lie in favor of any given political agenda but this is not a wild rant but a righteous song that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There is some simple but very highly charged riffage and riotous fist raising noiserock-outs with surly growls that point an accusatory finger at the MSM, and rightly so. "Owned by Thieves" follows in a similar vein but this time in the form of an anguished lament to the state of affairs we now find ourselves in; so tragically fooled by a parasitic few.

"Down the K-Hole" lays on howling and dirty noiserock that is as punk as Tyranny Is Tyranny get on this album with throaty slurs and energetic bashing of instruments that builds the tension with head nodding riffs, pounding bass and frantic drumming bringing the track to its inevitable conclusion.

"The Haze of Childhood" brings a mournful ambient instrumental with soft tones, sweet twangs and sparse percussion that could be mistaken for the intro to a 40 minute post-metal opera but the song lies down softly and drifts away into an introspective drone at 4:46 which leads to "Apostasy." This song builds with soft  notes and thoughtful vocals until the meat of the track heaves in at about the 1 minute mark with a heavy riff  interspersed with feedback screeches. The song then takes off into stirring post-metal, piling on the emotive nature that the song has and creating the image of a man in despair at the realization that he has been fooled by a book.

"The American Dream is a Lie" opens gently until guitar, bass and simple drumming tease with repetitive notes that build towards an unleashing of heavy riffs and a declaration that a whole nation has been lied to. I'm in no position to comment on such a statement as I'm from the UK but we have our own, equally dire situations of establishment corruption, the gradual eroding of our rights and an ocean of lies that stinks to high heaven. I can sympathize with the sentiments of this song which can easily fit into the situation on any westernized country. No, scrap that, any country around the world which has a government.

Finally "Always Stockholm, Never Lima" concludes the album with some catchy experiments in noise rock and a comment on a political situation that I am afraid I know next to nothing about but as a song, it is a great way to end this great first album from Tyranny Is Tyranny.

Highly recommended to fans of Cult of Luna, Isis, Fall of Efrafa and Light Bearer and equally recommended to those of you who like politically charged music, Tyranny Is Tyranny's "Let It Come From Whom It May" is due for a vinyl release in October but can be streamed in its entirety at their Bandcamp now.

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