Grains - Grains (2024)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Electronic/Space Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Apr 2024
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Here's something interesting from down under. Grains, who hail from Wellington, which marks as far south as you can go and remain in a capital city, apparently started out as a duo playing synth ambience but they bulked up 2021 to a five piece band. They're primarily electronic, but they run quite the gamut within that. How? opens up as almost new wave, like Tangerine Dream with some welcome throat singing. I am loving how that's travelling far from Mongolia nowadays. Then Ever adds a beat and starts to explore the potential of what five guys playing these instruments can do.

I like Ever, which is over in fewer than five minutes but still moves from pop music into space rock and on into something more esoteric. Sometimes this feels acutely poppy, especially early in Unco and Flying Saucer, which appears to be an old piece of music condensed a little for this, their debut album. There's disco on Unco and there's new wave on Flying Saucer, but both evolve elsewhere. In the former, electric guitars float around deep underneath the synths and gradually surface as the piece runs on. That's quite a tasty solo building towards the two minute mark and a neatly delicate section just after four.

The latter is one of the two epics the album has to offer, L.O.T.A.F! being the other one. Any track here could easily have been extended far past its actual running time, but Grains only allow some extended exploration on these two. They do think about it on Unco too, which almost reaches the seven minute mark, but they haul it back in well before it can sprawl out of control. Flying Saucer starts out poppier than usual, a very old school lead synth backed by far more modern synths, but it also gets heavier than usual late in its first half and again during its second.

If it wasn't for the overt guitars midway through L.O.T.A.F!, then Flying Saucer would feature the poppiest and heaviest moments of the album, which ought to give a good idea of how far it shifts over its eight and a half minutes. And that's a good thing. Anything that trawls in space rock even as a component really ought to take the listener on a journey and I got that the most here on this one highly versatile track. L.O.T.A.F! took me on a journey too but a much darker one that isn't to out there but to in here, which gets experimental and claustrophobic.

It's the longer pieces that connect with me the most, the two epics but also Unco and, after them, the closer, Succession II, which is pure electronic rock in the seventies tradition but introduced to space rock and with layers of extra electronic chirps. It's like walking into a maximalist spaceship control room with ADHD. This one's only five and a half minutes long, which isn't sprawling for the fourth longest piece on an instrumental electrona album. I say instrumental, by the way, because not one of these pieces involves the delivery of lyrics but there are vocals here, whether they're recorded or sampled, just occasional vocalisations and that throat singing on How?

That's not to say that the shorter pieces don't work, but they're far less ambitious. How? sets the scene and Ever is an introduction to where we might be going. Pans is more than a pleasant interlude, but for half its running time it seems to be exactly that. It does get more interesting in its second half but I don't think it quite figures out what it wants to be. And Succession I is evocative from its very first moments, as if it's dumped us into a rainforest and we have to figure out which one. However, it's easily the shortest piece here and it never answers the questions it asks. Succession II seems a lot more confident about shifting to answers within a couple of seconds.

I like this a lot and it's easy to get completely subsumed by it, but how substantial it really is may depend on many further listens. Grains have been around for a few years now, with their earliest recordings issued in 2019 on a single called ζ, the Greek letter zeta. Back then, they were the duo of Calum Turner and Peregrin Hyde. Nowadays, there are five of them, with additional cello from a couple of guests. However, I'm expecting that Turner and Hyde still provide the bulk of this on a selection of synthesisers and sequencers. The rest flesh out the sound into something more. Lets see where they go from here, because I have a feeling that they're going to keep evolving.

Coridian - Hava (2023)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Progressive Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 10 Mar 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | YouTube

I haven't heard Coridian before, even though this is the last in a set of four themed releases about the elements: two EPs, Oceanic and Caldera, to cover earth and water, then two full length albums, Eldu and Hava, to cover fire and air, specifically wind. However, they've sold me on their sound here even though I wasn't convinced on a first listen. It's very clean and modern and doesn't easily fit in only one bucket. I'm not even sure whether it's rock or metal, because it straddles the boundary so well. I'm calling it prog metal for the sake of a label, but there's more here from alt rock and post-rock than any of the usual suspects from prog metal. Dream Theater this isn't.

There's also a very American flavour here, but not so far that it turns me off, probably because it's so good at layering textures and because it's never exclusive. State of Mind, for instance, feels like post-everything. It's American post-grunge but also British post-punk and some post-rock textures fleshing it out. It's built on a System of a Down kind of riff but some commercial era Paradise Lost in breakdowns and with everything smoothed and polished to the exact shade of brushed steel on the cover art. The vocals are in between, full of melodies I'd expect from the Foo Fighters but with a grungier edge and even a drop into softer Coldplay territory at points.

That's an interesting mix and the rest of the album continues to play in that sort of area, but with odd departures here and there. It was initially awkward for me because I have a feeling the major influences are often going to be ones I don't know. Rakshasa adds a screamed backing vocal right out of emo, for a start, and that's not a genre I know, mostly because I'm not a fan of that style of vocals, but it works here because it's just another texture rather than a deliverer of fake emotion.

The contrast between the clean vocals of Dity Maharaj, which remain in front, and that scream by Michael Murphy of Written by Wolves, makes for a neat texture. The same goes in a very different way for the other guest vocal, by Jessie Booth of Ekko Park on Redefine, a tasty duet between two different but compatible vocal tones. I ought to check their bands out too, given that both of them are prominent and successful and I haven't heard anything by them before. It seems notable that Booth isn't the vocalist in Ekko Park though she guests here in that role. She's their guitarist.

I mention fake emotion not as a dig towards emo music, but because there's a further paradox for me here. Everything feels carefully constructed, as tends to be the case with prog, but it's battling hard to feel organic, the way that the best alt rock does. However smooth this felt, there's always a hint of grunge in the sound and I think that's what keeps it music to make us feel something, not just admire. Emo is all about making us feel something and it never works for me, because it feels manipulative. This doesn't. I feel that Coridian feel their own music. It's honest and I can easily see them on stage totally lost in the flow of these songs, even on their hundredth time through them.

The first half is solid, but I like the second half even more. It kicks off with Wicked Game, a song we all know that comes out of the blue. Maharaj's voice gets smoother here and Nick Raven's bass is a lot more obvious. It's not Diana Ankudinova but it's a tasty cover. I adore the opening to Coexist, a hint at Tool, I think, but I also adore the fact that the song proper maintains its high standards to become easily my favourite here. It's one of those songs that would sound great in a tiny club in a rundown corner of Auckland but just as great echoing over sixty thousand people at Eden Park.

I should mention The Unkindness too, because, as an atmospheric instrumental, it isn't the sort of song that I'd expect to mention but it's absolutely worthy of it. It isn't the only such piece here, as Algorithm is a capable intro and Exist is an interlude late on the first side, but this one is the best, because it serves both as a perfect buffer zone serving to help us down from Coexist's grandeur to become ready for the rest of the album and as a a worthy instrumental on its own merits. The last three songs are strong too, including the album's epic closer, Naya Din.

I've been listening to this album for far too long, because I have others to move on to, but it caught my attention. It sounded decent but not my sort of thing. The more I listened to it, the more it got its hooks into me and, after a month of mostly 7/10s, I have to bounce this one up to an 8/10.

Leave the Dead - The Cicada King (2022)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Thrash/Groove Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter

To follow last year's Leprous album, which continues their move far from metal, I threw on a Kiwi thrash album, or least what I thought was a Kiwi thrash album, the debut from Leave the Dead. It actually plays deeper than that because, while the thoroughly reliable backing band feel like they want to play thrash and do, it's at the midpace and slower, Morgz Timu often seems to be singing for a groove metal band. He's usually halfway between shouty groove vocals and more grounded thrash ones, but he moves either way as needed.

Long term readers know that I prefer thrash to groove and I prefer my thrash on the fast side, but I'm not averse to slower thrash or to groove. Leave the Dead are an interesting mixture of styles, but what really sells them to me is their engine room, which seems to me like an ultimate session band. The tone is pristine and they're just always on, whether the song wants them to riff or chug or get bouncy all of a sudden for a groove section or drop away for an interesting solo. The band is always at its best when that engine room is fuelled up and in full motion.

While songs like the title track take them a lot further into groove metal, the default is thrash at the mid-tempo with slower sections that are heavy metal pure and simple. In slower sections, like the end of the that title track, the band that leapt to mind for comparison is Toranaga. They were always on too and they shifted from riff to riff to riff so seamlessly that I'd get lost in them and, if Mark Duffy hadn't been such an emphatic frontman, I'd have forgotten he was there. I kind of did that with Morgz Timu here, because these chugging riffs own the album. The other name that I'd throw out is Death Angel, especially in faster sections, again because of the reliable way in which those riffs flow thick and fast. Leave the Dead have definitely heard The Ultra-Violence.

All that kicks in with the opener, Everyone is Dead, and just never quits. It works whatever they're doing, whether it's something as overtly simple as AOW or as inventive as Thorns. AOW has such a simple riff, that gets even simpler as it goes, that I surely must have heard it before, and there's nothing fancy to be found in the song at all, but that chug is just as engaging as on anything else here. The delightful riff on Thorns is far from complex either, but it's magnetic and solid as a rock. The faster drums from Colin Rennie underline it really well too.

And I really should call out these musicians for special mention, especially given that this is a first album and, at least according to Metal Archives, none of them have recorded for anyone else. I'm thinking we should start at the back with Rennie, who's as reliable a drummer as I've heard in the past few years and one who does a surprising amount of not just keeping the beat here. I may not be a huge fan of Morgz Timu's groove-infused vocals, but I love his basswork. He's right there with the drums throughout and he gets a few moments of his own on songs like Destroyed by the Sun.

That leaves two guitarists, Rob Black and James Miles, who are perfectly fine whenever they play a solo or step up to take a lead role, but they both just own rhythm. Arrival begins with a riff duel between the two, each speaker taking its side, and it underlines how much I'd happily sit back and just listen to them doing that, for extended periods of time. Imagine a Metallica that never hired Kirk Hammett away from Exodus but cloned James Hetfield to replace Dave Mustaine instead. I'd think, with groove vocals and more reliable drumming, they might sound like this. OK, they'd be a bit faster, but that's a preference thing.

And yeah, I'd like to hear Leave the Dead play faster, but I'm not going to complain about how well they play at the speed they do. They do this insanely well and I became a confirmed fan after only a few songs. A few more times through the album and I'm totally on board with whatever style the gods deem theirs. I'm just thinking of a song like Diamond Head's cover of No Remorse. It was at the mid-tempo for much of the song and it sounded great, riff moving into riff just like every song on this album. I adore that cover and, vocals aside, it's a solid comparison to what Leave the Dead do, except for one thing. The one missing tool in their toolbox is what happens in the final ninety seconds. And, if they add that into their sound, even only occasionally, they'll become unstoppable.

Ulcerate - Stare into Death and Be Still (2020)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Technical Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 24 Apr 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Official Website | Wikipedia

Most of my recommendations come from bands themselves, or their labels, as a part of their promotional push. Here's one from a reader, so thanks, Jo from Castelldefels, which suddenly makes me miss all the glorious food I devoured while in Barcelona way too long ago now. This is a fantastic album from down under, the first Kiwi death metal I've reviewed since Fall of Them just over a year ago. Jo calls it his album of the year and I do expect it to show up

It's a highly immersive album that's impossible to ignore. Listening is like being dragged into the underground by some eldritch creature that's allergic to light so that it can force its art upon us for an hour before letting us go, slithering away into the darkness while we wonder what just happened but remain somehow nostalgic for the surreal experience and hope for the rest of our lives that it'll happen again.

Amazingly, Ulcerate are only a trio because they generate quite a versatile soundscape with so few instruments. Paul Kelland is the man on double duty, his bass a dangerous texture lurking under whatever else is going on and his vocal arguably the lead instrument.

That bass sets a tone that I'd call dank if that hadn't been appropriated by stoners and rendered into meaningless cool. I think of it as a texture that engages multiple senses, like slime dripping off the walls of an underground cavern. It makes this feel dangerous. The vocals are deep and emotional, as if Kelland is that ageless creature railing against its confinement. He's a musical equivalent to Swamp Thing, looming and lost but ever magnetic.

Surprisingly, Kelland isn't the founder of Ulcerate. In fact, he's the new fish, having taken over from Phil Kusabs on bass in 2005 and Ben Read at the mike in 2008. Both his bandmates were there in the beginning in 2002, when a band of theirs called Bloodwreath renamed and set a new era into motion.

The guitarist is Michael Hoggard and he's wildly unusual. This isn't music built from riffs, let alone hooks. There are points where he crunches along in a complex riff but mostly he flits around above the music like a will o' the wisp, hurling out notes and melodic line almost with a hope that they'll have an effect, which of course they do. We might not recognise what he has in mind but he knows exactly what he's doing and that effect is massive.

And that leaves Jamie Saint Merat on drums, who must be a demon octopus. His contribution is just as unusual because he refuses to just keep the beat; he plays the drums like a lead instrument much of the time, generating melodies out of his fills and runs. I can't reconcile how accessible this seems given that it's so complex that we struggle to realise any semblance of structure. However many times I listen to this, I'm always stuck in the moment while it all washes over me.

I certainly couldn't pull out a favourite track. This album plays to me like a single hour long slab of art, an experience as much as a recording. Sure, its core is in death metal but it's often much slower than I expected it to be, not merely flirting with sludge and doom because atmosphere is king here and both those words are applicable as words as well as genres. It speeds up too, creating a wall of sound remiscent of black metal, even if the drums do not comply with that genre's standards. It's that dense.

Just in case it felt the need to elicit more praise, it's a generous slab of virtual vinyl. There are eight boulders of music here, the shortest of which is almost six minutes and the longest three over eight. It can't be easy to play live, given how long these pieces are, how untraditionally they are in structure and how complex every component part of the music is. However, the studio recording captures it all magnificently. It's raw emotion in extreme metal form. What an experience!

3000AD - The Void (2020)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Mar 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | YouTube

With a population of only 5 million, New Zealand punches above its weight on a lot of fronts, but I see fewer Kiwi metal bands than I might expect, both in quantity and importance. The most notable outfit I can name may be Shihad and the most fun lately has been Alien Weaponry. Perhaps not coincidentally, both of those bands play (or least used to play) thrash metal and so do this band, 3000AD, who hail from Christchurch though their Bandcamp page suggests that they may be based in Berlin nowadays.

Interestingly, they call what they do progressive thrash, and I won't argue with that too much because there are certainly prog elements here, but they also play close to the looser punk side of thrash. They're a power trio, for a start, with drummer Hellmore Bones singing lead and the other two members singing plenty of backup. If the backing features prog stylings, the vocals are all crossover attitude.

One aspect that both the instrumentation and the vocals share is the way in which they interact as a matter of course. Just check out the intro to Who's Watching?, which we would usually expect to be a solo guitar but here is a duet between Sam Pryor's guitar and Scott Austin's bass. The reason that the band sound like they have more than three members is because that bass has a surprisingly high tone so that we often mistake it for a second guitar.

They have a clean sound that ought to fit pretty well when they perform with other German thrash bands. It's those punky vocals, which are as reminiscent of, say, the first Suicidal Tendencies album as someone like Kreator, and a futuristic lyrical bent that sets them aside. And the world's doing its best to catch up with them, as if the band were really 2020AD not 3000AD.

For instance, a song like Cells, which I presume was not written last month, seems eerily contemporary, set as it is against the wildly unlikely theme of a global pandemic. "Those walls have become a tomb, enclose around you like a concrete womb" sounds like it was written in response to social isolation. Its "microscopic annihilation" comes from "germs bred for war" so I hope we don't discover next week that COVID-19 was a CIA weapons test. It's not like the US hasn't done secret medical experiments in foreign countries before. Hey, Guatemala!

I wonder what else the prophets in 3000AD have in store for us. Well, hey, I see environmental disaster, internet addictions, the surveillance state, the world catching fire... all eerily topical. Only Journeys really sounds like a future state, involving interstellar travel as we attempt to locate a new planet to terraform. Maybe Elon Musk is already working on that.

I liked this but not as much as I thought I would. Even at its fastest, it's slower than I tend to like my thrash and it spends a lot of time mid-pace. I would see 3000AD as the sort of band who come on a few bands into a festival and energise the crowd. They're tighter and more sophisticated than the warm up bands but they're not iconic enough yet to be the names at the top of the bill. Then again, this is their debut. I like the riffs, the sound and even the punky vocals. I'd like to see where they go from here.

It's worth mentioning that the album wraps with Born Under a Black Sun, so that's what we have in our heads as we leave The Void. Along with Journeys, it's the joint longest song on the album and it's the only instrumental. It easily counts as the most consistent prog thrash across the eight tracks and it's delightful. I like the punky vocals but I love 3000AD all the more when the musicians concentrate on their instruments.

Fall of Them - Deeds of Dying Faith (2019)

Country: New Zealand
Style: Melodic Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Apr 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

Ever since the Phoenix Film Festival wrapped and I can get back to everything I do on a daily basis, not least sleep, I've had this melodic death metal EP from New Zealand stuck on repeat and it's burrowed into my brain because it's not what it's supposed to be.

I'm not finding a genre listed in the band's web presence beyond just "metal" and that's probably appropriate. Metal Archives calls them melodic death metal but they're often achingly slow for melodeath. I'd call them doom/death but that's not where their influences come from. Their Facebook lists bands as varied as Amon Amarth, Black Dahlia Murder and Killswitch Engage, but they don't sound like any of them.

Whatever they play, they sound good to me and much of that comes from a tone I find surprisingly warm and comfortable for what is inherently harsh music.

It rumbles out of the gate, literally, as the opening track is called The Gate and we hear what sounds like a regular conversation against a backdrop of an approaching Mongol horde. Eventually, it fades so that we can hear some sort of religious pronouncement and the guitars kick in with a slow riff, to be joined by the thunderous drums of Morgan Olliver, which do up the pace but in a rather odd fashion. They're tribal and raw and they make this instrumental not just really heavy but rather exploratory too, like their drummer isn't Olliver at all but rather some giant insect tap dancer.

When The Gate gives way to three linked tracks with vocals, we find that the band is all about texture because each of the four instruments provides its own and they combine into a fifth. The commonality is a very heavy approach, the bass of Jesse Heney deep in the mix but defining it, that is never quite doom. The vocals of Chris Hunt are harsh but warm and they're enhanced by the periodic backing vocals of other members of the band.

These three songs have similar primary names but their own secondary names. I presume there's some sort of progression from Deeds of Dying Faith through Deeds of Dying Flesh to Deeds of Dead Fortified, but it's the secondary titles that suggest the progression more, from Cast Out the Heretic through Supreme is the Caliphate to Stone Mountains Run Red. This is clearly about religious conflict, presumably with an Islamic focus, but I didn't catch enough of the lyrics to figure out what.

I may be deluding myself but it feels like each of these three tracks grows in length but slows down as it does so. That's an odd direction but it's one that works for me. I won't say that Deeds of Dying Faith: Cast Out the Heretic is a fast song, but it's faster than Deeds of Dead Fortified: Stone Mountains Run Red and it's not much over a third of its length. This also means that the EP ends slow and that shapes our thinking of it.

It's this latter track that resonates with me most, a seven and a half minute piece that has echoing notes float in beauty before it dives into a doom/death crescendo and rumbles along at an achingly slow but heavy pace. Its refrain of "Burn sacred texts" is sinister and evocative, and there are gothic moments in this one too, with the backing vocals moving up to duet status for a while.

I liked this a lot but it's pretty much all we have for Fall of Them, just one single, Ankana, prior in 2018. I'd love to hear what this band will do at full length.