Iron Pike – II
Unsigned – 2017
Labels, if you're out there – Iron
Pike is cheap gold. Seriously, sign these men and send them on tour,
it's cold in Sweden. Hardcore/Sludge act straight out of Malmö, Iron
Pike takes influences from both scenes, then paints on a grimey
veneer and puts it in the freezer overnight. Ethereal, hope-filled
chords clash with heavy riffs, the latter taking the best of the
hardcore and sludge worlds, while the drums put you in a ritualistic
trance, not dissimilar to that of nodding opium-den lowlifes.
An opium den would be a good descriptor
for the studio this was recorded in – muffled by the thick gray
smoke, II sounds like what happens when the police finally show up,
and bodies scramble upon bodies to escape, blinded and uncoordinated.
There's something so inevitable
about their riffs, as if they warned of unavoidable pain and death,
and all you could do is watch the events unfold.
While some chords
give breathing space, the basslines under finally breaking from the
root note formula, you quickly fall back into the abyssal rage of
Iron Pike, their singer spilling his guts in some of my favourite raw
sludge vocals of this year. The hardcore influences are most apparent
in the riffs and the singing, with raspy barks and angry screams
aggressively punctuating songs – but only with exclamation marks.
There's something
gritty, nasty and dirty between sludge and hardcore. Heavy but still
angry and aggressive – rabid, actually. If there were ever two
genres which need to be mixed more, it'd be these two.
Giuseppe Fitzsimmons
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