American Heritage / Foe / Art of Burning Water
The Combined Stupidity of Spiteful Men [Split CD]
House of Stairs
Who says heavy metal is irrelevant in today’s post cold war age? Certainly not these three bands, all influenced by Killing Joke and the cult of the metal power chord. With a synchronized thrash guitar sound, angry, inaudible lyrics and a time signature best represented by a fractal expansion, all three bands sound close enough to one another to pass as a single entity. The sound is loud and obnoxious, with the emphasis on pissing off your folks and showing solidarity with the other high school outcasts. That’s not a bad thing, mind you, but you do have to fit into a certain demographic to get the full effect of these bands. I won’t say white, hormonally engulfed and alienated, but I’m leaning toward typing those exact words.
Will feedback ever achieve the same heights it did when Hendrix set fire to his guitar with a small can of lighter fluid and a pack of paper matches? If so, that soaring excellence would have to come from this school of hard rocks. It’s a non-danceable, non-hummable wall of noise that will sound best at 90 mph in your bitchin’ Camaro after a few cheep beers, just before the cops pull you over and hassle you and your buddies. Will you come to revile stupid hateful men from this disc? Perhaps no, not if you haven’t reviled them already. Will you bang your head? Hell, yes, that’s what we have here – highly developed pounding of the skull, and 3 bands that sound so similar, they might as well be one.
House of Stairs: http://www.houseofstairs.co.uk/
