Skip to main content

Iron Pike – II

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
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sulphurous - Dolorous Death Knell

Sulphurous – Dolorous Death Knell December 2018 – Dark Descent Records 90s revival and cavernous death metal started gaining popularity about two years ago, with bands such as Phrenelith and Pissgrave being propelled into quasi-mainstream success thanks to a couple of public figures introducing their audiences to an otherwise relatively underground facet of death metal. Dark Descent Records have certainly capitalized on said revival, signing giants of the genre like Blood Incantation, Spectral Voice, and previously Chthe’ilist (and Mitochondrion to a certain degree). As with any other cavernous death metal record, the production is the first thing you’ll notice – it’s all suffocated, as if the amps were draped in thick curtains. Few effects and no triggers are applied to the drums, giving the whole package a very live/practice room aspect. Despite the apparent muddiness of Dolorous Death Knell, everything’s quite audible – even the lower registers somehow retain
Post a Comment
Read more

Kataplexia – The Rise of the Unknown

Kataplexia – The Rise of the Unknown January 2019 – Rotten Music Kataplexia is Finland's best Indonesian brutal death metal band. You read that right, Indonesian is now a valid qualifier for brutal death metal. For those unaware, I explored and wrote about the Southeast Asian brutal death metal scene two years ago, discovering a gigantic scene with an uncharacteristic public acceptance. One of the members of Jasad began a side-project, Kaluman, which is the definition of high-quality Southeast Asian brutal death metal. A couple seconds into Kataplexia's latest, I expected to see Rottervore or Extreme Souls as their label, as every element pointed towards Indonesian origins – the tone, production, vocals, riffs and even album art all felt like Ferli Suferli (Jasad, Kaluman) was behind the project, yet Helsinki is listed as their base of operations. Admittedly, there's only so much one can actually say about the music without endless comparisons. A modern
Post a Comment
Read more

Uboa, the interview

UG You’ve gone over the “Jouissance” title in the past. Would you mind going over Coma Wall? It’s got quite grave and final undertones. First, Coma Wall has no totalised meaning for me, but death of the author could suggest otherwise. But there are themes. The Coma Wall, also known as the CfA2 Great Wall, is a galactic filament - thread-like structures composed millions of galaxies - of and one of the largest structures in the observable universe. It’s 750 million ly high x 200 million ly in width x 16 million ly in thickness. There are few structures bigger than it before you get to the “End of Greatness”, where the universe no longer is seen in discernible structures (filaments and voids, which combined look awfully organic, almost like clusters of interconnected neurones) and you get undifferentiated noise, like static on a TV or white noise. Basically, in cosmology, there seems to be an upper limit to how big things get before the universe seems to become pure undifferentia
Post a Comment
Read more