Vespers Descent - Visions in Verse (2005)

 Most bands get better with time and would like to forget all about their earlier albums as soon as the new ones are written.  It is the nature of the creative process, and it is unusual to find a local band who produces a newer album that is lesser than their older material in terms of production and quality.  There are exceptions to that of course, Allegiance and Furor are just two bands who created such a blistering first CD that improving on them turned out to be impossible.  Being as "Visions in Verse" was made two years earlier than their current EP "Reality Disfunction" I had expected that it would be a step down in songwriting and recording quality, and yet to my delight I find that Vespers have suprised me again.

The Alchemont - The Pinnacle of the Mind's Evil EP (2007)

 I must have seen The Alchemont live a half dozen times at least, and always found them hard to get into.  It isn't that they are doing anything wrong, but the sound they had is so busy-sounding that if is imperative that they had a very good mix to allow the ear to make sense of it... and the gigs I saw them at never provided them such.   This is a tale we all know all too well, all of us suffer with mix issues more often than not, but even then, Alchemont seemed to get hammered with some extra lousy mixes.  One wonders if it is always the fault of the venues and the mixers, or if the Alchemont's sound just did not transfer well to the live enviroment.

SFD - Destruction of the Youth DEMO (1993)

We are all a creation of our environment, of our trials.  We become what we know, what we are conditioned to be, the sum of our experiences.  So it is with musicians, and Metal is no exception.  In the early 90's there was no internet within easy grasp and we heard only the Metal that made it to our shores, thus the pool of material to draw inspiration from was infinitely smaller than the vast range available to us in this era of digital wonders.  There were some metal bands that DID manage to get their material here in bulk, and they mopped up BIG time.  That doesn't mean to say that the other bands weren't getting their CDs here, but they were more underground and far less exposed.  Metal was ruled globally by Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, Sepultura, RATM, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Kreator and a few others of note, and their shit was everywhere. 

Plague - Plague (1997)

In the early 80's the new sound from England that was being called "New Wave of British Heavy Metal" started to get some serious attention in the USA.  It was this era that was to become pivotal in the making of all extreme metal today, and from this point on Metal was to explode as a world power. 
Thrash Metal  began to be pioneered by such bands as Slayer, Metallica and Megadeth on the West Coast of the country, and was to spawn countless bands in the future.  But on the East coast metal took a different path.  Metal is a living thing, quick to adapt to new ecosystems and quicker still to mutate to conquer all, and so it did when it came in contact with a different kind of aggressive and popular music called punk. Here was a religion all of its own with its own subculture and distinct sound, and when the two genres hit, a whole new group of subgenres was formed.  The most recognisable would be Hardcore Punk, Thrashcore, Crossover and New York Hardcore.

Strangely enough, one of the "Big four" of the era was Anthrax, which had a definate thrash metal feel and yet has its roots in New York on the East coast.  I digress, but forgive me, I find it all rather fascinating.   
  
When I listen to this album by Plague I hear a range of influences, but none so strong as the New York Hardcore bands of the ealy 90s such as SOD and Agnostic Front, and the newer bands of the genre like Sick of it All.  There is no escaping that genre influence for me, the vocals won't allow me.  They are way high up in the mix, too high by half in my opinion and are that throaty shout without variation throughout the entire album, a style that NYHC bands are known for.  They are so very basic and oldschool at times that they come across as bland and uninspiring, yet in other moments they can give the songs some life by throwing a different rhythm into the mix like in the opening stanzas of "Mass Wastage".

Plague - Higher Moral Ground (2005)

I have trouble hearing this CD and believing that this is the same band who wrote the first Plague CD, the evolution is so extreme that it almost seems to be a completely different band. Out the door goes the ferocious and yet often uninteresting early speedmetal-influenced songs, the competent and yet somewhat pedestrian guitar work, the predictible timing structures, the annoying NYHC sounding vocals and the crossover thrash feel. Roaring into that vacuum comes a dynamic and insane sounding album with all the best elements retained and so much more going on.

Nexus - The Paradise Complex (2009)

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Bands come and go. Few of them reach the decade mark, but those who do manage that venerable milestone have generally passed through the formative years, set a solid lineup and got their sound together. Sadly, large periods of time are often lost in reorganising and replacing members and the loss of the musical chemistry this causes, sometimes years are wasted. Nexus defy that trend, as they defy all other musical convention. Each member of Nexus has been there from the formation of the band, almost ten years of working together without cessation, hiatus or retooling and it has bound them together with a singular direction and vision, and honed their skills and accumulative abilities into a single powerful entity. The four elements of Nexus have crafted together a quite amazing sound, the culmination of which is this CD, the bizarre, unpredictible, experimental and cosmic masterpiece, "The Paradise Complex".

Mind's Eye - Cut Snake Poetry (1999)

I had been putting this one off for a while, and now I have begun I am not sure why really.

This is a strange album, in the modern era we might call it hardcore speedmetal, but that still doesn't quite roll right to me. On "Cut Snake Poetry", Mind's eye is playing a kind of highspeed hybrid of "Reign in Blood" era Slayer and "Schitzophenic" era Sepultura in that they have that vile intensely angry speedmetal feel, but the vocals seem to be much more in the vein of skinhead Oi! music or English punk but with an Aussie flavour and far more aggression. The affect of this is a kind of crossover feel between very aggressive punk and serious metal, but that isn't to say that these guys can't throw down with the extreme metal bands. There is plenty of heavy shit going on here, it is just that I found the mix of styles initially to be a bit jarring, like watching Romper Stomper with the sound turned down and replaced by Slayer's punk covers album "Indisputed Attitude".

This album really has to be listened to loud to appreciate. Really fucking loud.

Insurgent - Cutthroat Tunes EP (2007)

It seems to be a common thing for unsigned bands to produce little EPs, some with as few as 2 songs on them. I understand the logic behind it, who wants to finance their own full-length albums when a record company will do it for you once you get their attention with a couple of tracks first, right? I hate to say it guys, but 90% of albums made are going to get no interest from labels, and 99.9% will get no attention from major labels. So you end up with nothing to show for your years in a band and all that hard work but 3 or 4 songs on a cheap CD, and that is the sum total of your legacy.
It hardly seems worth the effort.

Infected - Crawlspace (1994)

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In their time one of Perth's biggest metal bands, Infected were known for their ferocious live shows and unique interpretation of metal. Although Death Metal at their core, Infected seemed to generate their sound from different influences than the more contempory and better known deathmetal bands of the era. To my ears they sound similar in some ways to Six Feet Under, but only in the slower moments, certainly in other ways they sound miles away from that. Take The Amenta and strip them of the computer-generated soundwall of violent white noise and the distorted vocals, and you are more in the ballpark of the Infected sound on "Crawlspace".
There is a definate Industrial metal flavour here, but they journey far off the well-beaten track that such bands of the genre as NIN, Ministry and Misery Lovesco have found their way down. Maybe the old guard of industrial is closer, I can find similarities between Infected and such bands as Pitchshifter and the true pioneers of Industrial, Killing Joke... but on this CD such influences and the death metal stylings of bands such as Entombed are equidistant. It's a hard one.

With their use of keyboards used in moments but not integrally, the use of samples here and there, the occasional use of clean vocals and the periodic slowdowns, there is only one band I can point at as a having a definately similar style. This band is "Soul of a New Machine" era Fear Factory, and chronologically speaking, this is very likely. The "Soul of a new Machine" parallel leaps forth again as their song "Self-Immolation" is remixed on "Fear is the MindKiller" and I personal think it was better than the original, while "Assililation" by Crawspace is given the same treatment to with an equally imporessive result. And yet again the conjuction between the bands; the opening quote on "Crawlspace" is a line from the Sci-Fi classic "Dune", the same place that Fear Factory found the title of their remix album. There is a pattern here, but despite these obvious connections, there is enough difference between the two bands to ask the question: did Infected follow Fear Factory to the creation of their sound, or did Infected and Fear Factory reach this point in their journey independantly?

Before I go on, let me just say that the lyrics of this album are probably some of the best I have read from a local band, they are neither hackneyed or generic, are emotive and thoughtful and are well crafted to fit the music. They also seem to have been written with the vocal style in mind, because the delivery, timing and diction flow beautifully together. The best part of the album for sure in my opinion.

The guitar sound on "Crawlspace" would suit a modern grind band, and the insane intros and violence of the music helps to create that vibe, but you can forget any hope of the lyrical content helping to perpetuate that image. There are songs where they punch it up ("Predetermined"), songs where they add strange and off-key vocals ("Rageflower"), songs where they have extremely aggressive drummings ("Crawlspace"), songs where they use unusual ambient keyboards ("Once More") and so on and so forth. Infected's "Crawlspace" is experimental metal, and far ahead of its time in Perth. In fact it could be said that Infected were GENERALLY ahead of their times, blazing inroads for other Perth bands to travel in future generations.

Like all experimental and innovative new kinds of metal, there are those who love it and those who do not. It saddens me to say it, but I didn't like this CD at all when I was young, and age may have brought me more understanding of metal and what goes into the crafting of it, but in truth I still don't really like it. I search for the right metaphor here... to me "Crawlspace" is comparable to a painting by Picasso or Dali in that it has incalculable worth to some and to others is a bunch of annoying shapes, and I guess that I am just one of those people who have trouble seeing the beauty of a chick with both her eyes on the same side of her head.
For me the mix on this CD is too abrasive, the clean vocals too disharmonic, the structuring too angular and misshapen, neither comfortable to listen to or quite angry enough to use as material for rage ventilation. I can sense that Infected created their music with an intention to challenge, confound and cause an emotional response in a way few albums can, and in some moments it certainly has that affect. The wailing child on "Predetermined" sent shivers down my spine and made me want to go and check on my children, unnerving to say the least.

It may feel like I am sinking the boots into a band that deserves more, but I mean no disrespect. I hold Infected in high esteme for their pioneering spirit and willingness to break the shackles of conformity and convention, and for the crafting of what is considered by many to be a underrated and breakthrough album. I really hope that the rest of you are able to grasp what it is that they are trying to do here, because love it or hate it, Infected's "Crawlspace" is an important part of the history of Metal in this city and should be in every Perth metal collection.

Review by Jez.

Hated By Humanity - No Need for Crying (2003)

HBH's "No Need for Crying" is a horrible album.

The music is horrible.
It's kind of punky speedmetal with a grindcore flavour, like a blend of Dead Kennedys and extreme metal. It is rough, unrefined, ugly and scabby sounding, and there are some reasonable riffs here and there - where they can be heard - but they are hard to get a good grip on, as...

The vocals are horrible.
I have seldom - and maybe never - heard vocals as fucked up, irrational, off-kilter, uncomfortable and generally awful sounding as the vocals on this CD. They are ghastly enough that they just about warp the space/time continuum, to find a worst moment on this album might be possible, but only if I could get through the CD a second time, which I don't think I could. That said, "Human Meat" was a particularly horrific number for me, the vocals have to be heard to be believed. This is HBH in their purest form, deliberately making the ugly into the deformed, the deformed into the dreadful and the dreadful into abominations. They push this agenda in every possible way, because even...

The playing itself is horrible.
Even with some good drumming holding it together, there are moments where HBH sound sloppy as fuck and quite obviously intend to be, they are notorious as the band who used to play completely shitfaced. I mean wow, the songs don't even seem to have an obvious end at times, they just sort of stumble to a stop like a wino finally passing out and falling on his face. Despite some clever moments like the loopy guitars in "I was a Teenage Smartbomb", they sound like four dudes who got pissed together and said "fuck it, let's write the worst and ugliest shit we can think of, rehearse it once and hit the studio with a $12.07 budget". This seems likely, as...

The recording quality is horrible.
Noisy and ugly, pretty much without a real mix at all from what I can tell, this sounds like the recording was treated with the same level of serious contemplation as the writing process. There is so little definition in the mix I have trouble at times hearing anything but the drums and white noise. This is obviously not something just left to chance, the mix is all part of the horror of the entire product, enhanced - or further corrupted - by some bizarre samples. That said...

The samples are horrible.
Oh fuck, but they really are horrible. In fact deplorable. Some of them sound like snippets from C-grade movies, some even sound like bits from snuff films. Whatever they are, they caused the hair to rise on the back of my neck and I actually felt a true sense of dread creep over me during one particular moment of morbidity. They have the affect of making the whole CD so much more twisted, as if it needed any more help...

The song names are horrible.
With such thought-provoking and sacarine-sweet song titles on this CD as "Rape is my Best Friend", "My Knife is a phallus", "Christfisting Satan Metal" and "Cannibles are Cumming (And you're gonna die)", there is little need to actually read the words, you know that they are gonna be fetid, dastardly, rotten and hienous in equal doses. Even scarier are the song titles like "Frosty the Snowman" and "Good looking Girl on the Bus", what sinister things are being done to these seemingly wholesome concepts? All this maladjusted nightmarish material is enough, right? Not a chance, because...

The artwork is horrible.
Crudely put together in the extreme, the CD slick has all the charm of the rest of the album. Black and white and appearing photocopied, it goes one step beyond forgiveness with what is probably THE most politically incorrect cover in the history of the universe. The famous pic of Kim Phuc at about age nine howling in horrible pain and running naked up a vietnam road after being severely burned on her back by a napalm attack has been doctored to instead have a child suffering from downs syndrome running in her place and with a big dopey grin. The Album name "No Need for Crying" is beneath it, a quite amazing concept in its raw twistedness. The first moment I saw this I laughed out loud, and yet the true nature of the awfulness of this design dawned on me within seconds, and now I swing between being mortified by the image and stunned by the brilliance of a design so lowdown and despicable that it can inspire such emotional turmoil in me.

Everything about this album is horrible. It is completely incorrect on every level, completely devoid of anything uplifting or comforting. It could have been steered into a sense of black comedy ala Cuntscrape, but any humour here is so black to be stigian, and other than the moment of weakness looking at the cover, I have detected nothing I am amused by, it has been sterilized of comic relief and it truely horrifies me. In a world of dark terrors and horrors untold, this album was able to make me feel dirty just by listening to it. I never want to hear it again and I really wish I hadn't had a cone before I listened to it.

Thus, it is GENIUS. FUCKING GENIUS! Hated by Humanity set out to create just such a masterpiece of sickness, and have succeeded spectacularly. SPECTACULARLY. Blase' and watered down emotionless shit bores me, and although I experienced no pleasure from listening to "No Need for Crying", I found it to be absorbing to a degree that was astonishing. I hate this album, and I want to tell you all to avoid this CD like testicular cancer, but I can't... I need you all to own a copy just so that we can be sure that there are no loose copies that might find their way into the hands of any paranoid schitzophenics.

I am blown away by this album, totally stunned by it. God help me.

Review by Jez.