Redolent of gas-huffing speedfreaks like Motorhead, Mudhoney, Judas Priest, and early Celtic Frost, Razor to Oblivion is a mess of distorted knife-edge thrash guitar, ridiculously downtuned bass, landmine drumming, and raw-throated vocal threats more suited to black metal. It’s a grand fucking disaster, old thrash riffs get into three-car pileups with desert boogie, dirty-ass punk, and delirious noise. And before you even have time to go, “God I like this, I hope they stay out of prison long enough for a full length,” it’s over.

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Kicking off strong with the still-fiery “Oh Bondage Up Yours,” the band speeds through a greatest-hits set. Twenty songs (!) worth, including such still-topical social critiques as “Warrior in Woolworths,” “Genetic Engineering,” “I Am A Cliche,” “The Day the World Turned Day Glo,” “Identity”… man, this stuff is still inspirational. Yet there are some bum notes herein. Styrene’s voice gets a little strained (which she herself admitted in later interviews) from more lack of use than wear and tear, and the band’s performances tend toward the monochrome at points. And though I get a kick out of seeing Styrene’s two daughters duet with her, c’mon, playing “Oh Bondage Up Yours” twice (once at the beginning and once at the end)?

Read the full review at Ink 19.

I’m not saying it was the “end of music” or anything that foolish, but it did certainly demonstrate that there is an endpoint to extremity. And that’s a shame because Netherlands-based mad scientist Mories is one of the stranger outsider voices in the scene today. Imagine a cross between Coil, Abruptum, Deathspell Omega, Stravinsky’s Rites of Spring, NON, Einsturzende Neubauten, and simultaneous screenings of every Dario Argento movie alongside Bela Lugosi’sDracula. Fell sounds, man. And the music of All the Dread… isn’t just rolling around in glass and pushing all of the volume knobs to 11, this music is carefully and painstakingly constructed, like a particularly disturbing Bosch-influenced collage, all careful near-cinematic cuts and jarring juxtapositions.

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Lemme tell ya, it was like watching those early, holy, tentative clips of The Band performing live — back when they all cohabited at Woodstock — but that was, admittedly, long, long, ago, even before my time. No, here it was on The David Letterman Show a couple weeks back, the same searching, pure vibe, but recast for 2010 in the form of three earnest young beardies, who look in varying degrees like Robbie Robertson and Howard Moon from The Mighty Boosh, and a young lady — each picking up unfamiliar and antiquated musical instruments to create a blissed-out, delicate, Spacemen-3-in-a-log-cabin vibe.

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Harvestman is the alter ego of Neurosis’ Steve Von Till, a busy man these days, crafting his own personal, slightly deranged version of Walden covered in animal skins, bones, and sticky pine pitch. Harvestman is drained of aggression and anger, instead a melancholy idyll, a twisting and turning soundtrack for brooding under a bloated, orange moon. Eschewing all the metallic tools of the trade, In A Dark Tongue’s woodsy raggas are rough-hewn, chipped away from blocks of acoustic guitar, bone drums, and strange organic drones…

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It’s nigh impossible to imagine De Sadean noise neanderthal KK Null stripped of the guitar that he has artfully abused for over one million releases, solo, collaborations, and with his Motorhead id project, Zeni Geva. And yet, here is Oxygen Flash, a new solo record peopled with glitches, bleeps, skips, sine waves, and nary a stringed instrument to be found. I can’t help but imagine a long-haired Null sitting behind a MacBook, calmly and methodically bashing his head against the keyboard. Oxygen Flash is not a patiently constructed electronics record, it is a record of vicious revenge against the pointers-and-clickers and ProToolers of the world…

Read the full review at Ink 19.