Iggy Pop - Every Loser (2023)

Country: USA
Style: Punk/Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 6 Jan 2023
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

Iggy Pop is one of music's great survivors and he's been having a blast lately experimenting with a whole slew of styles, to mixed success. I wasn't particularly fond of his 2019 album Free, because it only contained six songs proper, the rest of a short running time filled with spoken word poetry of little repeat play value. This one's hardly generous at thirty-seven minutes, but nine of the eleven tracks are songs and even where they're built with the spoken word, they're worth repeating. Only the second interlude is inherently skippable.

What's more, it marks a firm return to the punk and rock that Pop is known for, with a set of stellar guest musicians, led by multi-instrumentalists Andrew Watt and Josh Klinghoffer. There are clear comparisons to be made with Ozzy Osbourne's latest album, Patient Number 9, another return to form, because it also benefitted from Watt's production and instrumental talents, along with a string of guests, many of whom are the same musicians, like Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Duff McKagan of Guns n' Roses. Smith played on every track on Ozzy's album and seven of the eleven here, while McKagan played on two and three respectively.

Both of them are on the glorious opener, Frenzy, which is an in your face punk song in the Stooges vein. I remember when he used to do this sort of thing and clearly so does he, because he's having an obvious blast with filters off, middle finger extended and that recognisable sneer in full effect. So much for moving away from the trappings of rock music. Welcome back, Iggy. He doesn't stay in this mode throughout, but he's there for Modern Day Rip Off too and other songs have righteous anger in them too, especially the more downplayed closer, The Regency, and the pop punk blast of Neo-Punk, which offers a great contrast between trendier verses, with Blink-182's Travis Barker on drums, and a more hardcore Bad Brains-esque chorus.

When Pop drops back down into pop mode, he's still interesting, especially on Strung Out Johnny, a far more controlled post-punk song. This is Pop doing pop but keeping it interesting in a way that many wouldn't. All the Way Down is a solid rock song, with some searing solos from Stone Gossard of Pearl Jam, and it feels like an epic at only four and a half minutes. Remember that there are no fewer than eleven tracks taking up only thirty-seven minutes. Some of these are very short. Only The Regency is longer and I found myself disappointed with that one, even with Chris Chaney and Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction on board, along with the late Taylor Hawkins. It feels long rather than epic.

The less interesting material once again is the spoken word pieces, but they are at least far more interesting on this album than the last one. The best of them is probably The News for Andy, which is done and dusted in under a minute, but New Atlantis is good too. Pop always had a strong sense of intonation and that's particularly notable on this one, even if he sounds like Johnny Cash on the chorus. It's there on Modern Day Rip Off too, which benefits massively from textbook rhyming and intonation. Morning Show is a mood piece with his voice deep and rich and it's not hard to wait out on the way to more overt songs.

And so, once again, this is a mixed bag, but it's a much better mixed bag than Free. It's longer and more substantial. It's agreeably varied and rarely loses its power, even when shifting between. It's also outstanding at points, Modern Day Rip Off and Frenzy the standouts with Strung Out Johnny and All the Way Down on their heels. Iggy's at his uncompromising best on these tracks and he's a solid iconic presence through everything, even down to the forgettable My Animus Interlude, only a minute long but still inherently skippable. And he's having fun, right down to his rolling Rs at the end of Modern Day Rip Off and his pixie-like laugh after Neo-Punk. Life is good for Iggy, it seems, and it's good for us too when he's in this sort of mood.

Lawnmower Deth - Blunt Cutters (2022)

Country: UK
Style: Thrash Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 28 Jun 2022
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Wikipedia

There's a strong trend right now of bands re-emerging from the annals of history, having released precisely nothing in close to forever, with a new album as if they'd never been away. I have to admit that I never expected to add Lawnmower Deth to the growing list of such bands, but here they are in 2022 with an decent fourth album no fewer than twenty-eight years after their third in 1994. It's appropriate for me to mention here that they did release a single in 2008 and a collaborative one in 2017 with Kim Wilde, their cover of whose Kids in America was their only single back in the day.

I should also mention that an added bonus here was discovering that they'd brought Wilde out on stage for a few songs, including that one, at the Download Festival in 2016, and she returned that favour a year later at the Wilde Wild Xmas show. This stuff is all on YouTube and it's priceless. She may have been an eighties pop act but she clearly has a wilde sense of humour so all power to her for that. I never thought I'd ever watch Kim Wilde duet on stage with Qualcast Mutilator on Watch Out Granma, Here Comes a Lawnmower, let alone Egg Sandwich, but there it is. Christmas arrived early, folks.

But back to the present. This is precisely what you might expect from Lawnmower Deth, if you're a fan or even someone who's heard them at some point, so knows I'm not inventing the band out of whole cloth for a fake review. I wasn't sure if they were a joke when I ordered the Mowdeer demo in 1988—I still have the cassette and probably the cover letter too—and I saw them live that year too, opening up an indoor festival in Bradford while some random dude ate his sandwiches on the stage. They were followed by Metal Duck. I'd bought their demo too and the two bands ended up doing a split album. It was a strange time.

There are eighteen songs on offer, but the album only runs thirty-four minutes, so you know there are some really short tracks here, especially given that things wrap up with a real epic, Agency of C.O.B. running over an oddly serious four and a half minutes. There's nothing You Suffer short, but Good Morning, Phil, Space Herpes and Good Night, Bob all last under sixty seconds; Christ Options and the solid advertising genius of Swarfega run under thirty. It's Swarfega that works best here, because, like much of the best underground punk, it is precisely what it is and nothing else. Good Night, Bob is solid too, because it's blisteringly fast and then inexplicably becomes soothing ocean waves. Did Bob do a Reggie Perrin?

Longer songs for Lawnmower Deth tend to last two minutes and change, so this one's another epic at almost four minutes. The longer their songs get, the closer they get to pure thrash, with plenty of strong chugging, stronger riffs and sustained energy. On the flipside, the shorter they get, the more they shift into punk, so reminding more of DOA than Acid Reign, frantic riffs and woah woah backing vocals ruling the day. Those two minute songs mix the styles to create a more identifiable Lawnmower Deth sound, especially with the infusion of their very recognisable surreal humour. It is never more obvious than when it vanishes for Agency of C.O.B.

And, as much as I can't help but adore blink and you'll miss 'em ditties like Swarfega and I can lose myself in the guitarwork in extended ones like Raise Your Snails, the best material here is the mid-length stuff. Nothing But Noise particularly blisters, Mr. Mutilator exhibiting his best rasp and the mighty bass of Mightymow Destructimow getting quite the turn in the spotlight. I like the opener, Into the Pit too, which speaks to me, because I love the pit but, in my second half century, I'm more likely to dislocate my hip, as the lyrics suggest. I settle for keeping people safe nowadays.

If you haven't heard Lawnmower Deth before, now's a great time to dip into their world. In ours, it can seem overwhelming, because of everything that's going on right now. In times of pandemic or war or polarised chaos, Lawnmower Deth can always raise a grin and our spirits. And, apparently, snails. There's even a video for Raise Your Snails, with an overt nod to Metal Duck. Nice. Don't get me wrong. Most of this is stupid. But it's fun. And sometimes that's exactly what we need.

Impaled Nazarene - Eight Headed Serpent (2021)

Country: Finland
Style: Black Metal,Hardcore Punk
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 28 May 2021
Sites: Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

This ought to be a lucky thirteenth album for Finland's black metal maestros, Impaled Nazarene, and I can't complain about how old school this sounds, but I find myself struggling a little with it. Usually, I'd be totally into something as retro as this, which takes us back to the proto-extreme metal of Bathory and Venom, but with Discharge as a third influence rather than the usual Celtic Frost (though there's an obvious Tom G. Warrior death grunt in Debauchery and Decay), and I won't say that I didn't enjoy this, because I did, but I enjoyed it more as an overall effect than as a set of songs. I kept turning the album up louder and louder and letting its relentless onslaught clean me out.

If I ignore the final track for now, there are a dozen songs here that strut rudely onto stage, do their thing with an obvious middle finger and then stalk back into the wings, in only twenty-seven minutes. Only two of them make it past three minutes and then only just. Human Cesspool wraps up in under a minute and four others fail to reach two. They're all very consistent in approach, enough that the first three take a few listens to distinguish themselves, other than the odd intro to Goat of Mendes, which I assume has to be a sample from a Nollywood religious horror movie.

The Nonconformists only changes things up in the sense that it underlines the punk influences, power chords taking over from fast riffing, as otherwise it has much the same effect. How much you'll enjoy this album may well come down to what you feel about variety, because there really isn't any here to be found and I don't know whether you, yes you, care about that or not. If you're into the punky proto-black metal sound that Impaled Nazarene have moved into, then you'll love this. I can only imagine it live, because the pit ought to be utterly alive. The band don't slow down to let us take a breath. They just kick in at high speed and stay there until we're either exhausted or revitalised.

In this, Eight Headed Serpent reminds me of the latest Cannibal Corpse album. I gave that a 7/10, as it did exactly what the band do best in a way that their fans would love. However, I couldn't avoid saying that it did absolutely nothing else. Every song was fast and technical and kicked our asses. The end. If I recall correctly, I listened to that album three or four times and still couldn't tell any of its songs from any of its other songs. This plays in a different extreme style and I could tell these songs apart, but the overall result isn't that different.

Now, I dig this style a bit more than I do that of Cannibal Corpse, so I'm far more likely to come back to this album than Violence Unimagined, but I'd have trouble picking out one song to, say, program into a radio show playlist. Maybe The Noncomformists is a little looser. Maybe Debauchery and Decay is a bit more over the top. Maybe Unholy Necromancy is both the most repetitive and the song with the most interesting range of vocals, from guttural grindcore to demon chorus. But I'd do just as well throwing a dart at the back cover and checking which song it skewered.

And, with the first dozen songs covered, then there's Foucault Pendulum to wrap up the album with a completely different approach. This one's five minutes long, so a true epic for Eight Headed Serpent, over double the length of two thirds of the other songs. It's also as slow as the rest are fast, taking an unlikely sidestep into doom metal, albeit without changing the vocal style at all. It comes utterly out of nowhere and I rather like it, with its cavernous power chords and playful bass fills, but it seems like it crept in from a different album during a strange studio mix-up.

It has to be a deliberate attempt at contrast, like Nick Cave writing nine songs about murder and then adding a cover of Bob Dylan's Death is Not the End to wrap them up. I can't see a reason for it, but it's a clear demonstration that a band that does almost exactly the same thing over and over for a dozen songs can do something different. Maybe that's all it is, an artistic statement to say, yeah, everything here is almost indistinguishable but that's only because we want it to be. And here's the exception to prove the rule.

Eyehategod - A History of Nomadic Behavior (2021)

Country: USA
Style: Punk/Sludge Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 12 Mar 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I knew Eyehategod had been around a while, but I was surprised to find that they were founded all the way back in 1988. They've also had a pretty stable line-up, with two of the four members in place since their demo days; I'm sure drummer Joey LaCaze would still be there too had he not passed in 2014. It's only their release schedule that's fighting them. For a band formed the same year as Cannibal Corpse, Paradise Lost and Nine Inch Nails, it's surprising to realise that this is only their sixth studio album, given the healthy double digit output of those other examples.

I'm not sure I've ever heard Eyehategod before and I certainly can't say that this is my favourite style of all time, but they do what they do very well. Generally, they're regarded as sludge metal and there are certainly some huge riffs here, but there are few songs that really live or die on those. They have a confrontational style that's epitomised in the hardcore punk vocals of Mike Williams that sound very sarcastic indeed. He's not just singing with his audience, he's arguing with them and he has the mike.

That's only one reason why they sound very punk to me. There's a stop/start mindset to the music that makes their often already short songs feel even shorter. The Outer Banks, for example, with a creeping riff, only runs two and a half minutes but a big pause and tempo shift halfway makes it sound like two songs of a minute plus rather than one at double that. They often made me think of the Accüsed but with a serious pace drop. Even in the faster second half of that song, Eyehategod sound like an Accüsed EP played at 33rpm instead of 45rpm.

The other punk angle is that this is a deliberately rough around the edges recording, as if it's not the actual album but we've been made privy to an early rehearsal tape that would normally be polished in many ways before release. Nobody in this band cares about tidying up loose endings, presumably of a shared mindset that feedback is a crucial part of their sound. It works to my mind in Three Black Eyes, which is one of the most agreeably loose songs here, but not on Current Situation, which may actually feature more feedback than notes. Some of these three minute recordings are two minutes of song and another of plugging in instruments and checking that the guy in the booth is awake.

But, like I said, they do this well. I actually don't mind Mike Williams's vocals, because they really fit this sound. Jimmy Bower's riffs are as crushing as anything this loose can be and I liked the prowling bass of Garry Mader a lot. He's always plugging away as a reliable backdrop even when the rest of the band gives up on songs like Current Situation and The Day Felt Wrong to experiment with feedback. Sure, there's Discharge and Black Flag here, but there's some Swans too.

The last time I was this unenthused by an album that I actually reviewed (holy crap, there are plenty I don't review because there's way too much good stuff out there for me to haul the hatchet man critic persona out) was the Hum album from 2020 that did so well in the end of year lists. The big difference between the two is that, while this isn't my thing, I can easily get why it might be yours. I couldn't get why anyone would listen to, let alone like, that Hum album, but this is clearly good stuff and many of my punk friends would dig it.

Eyehategod are heavy and angry, but they're playful and inventive too. Even I got into songs like The Day Felt Wrong—"Who do you trust? Who do you trust?"—or Smoker's Piece, with its sleazy vibe and even sleazier bass, and this isn't my scene. If it's yours, then I recommend this even if I'm not likely to ever haul it out again. Well, you never know.

Boris - NO (2020)

Country: Japan
Style: Stoner Metal/Punk
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 3 Jul 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives | Official Website | Tumblr | Twitter | Wikipedia

Boris have been around for a long while and they've released a lot of music across a much wider set of genres than most bands even listen to, but this one garnered more praise in 2020 than anything they have released since Pink in 2005. While much of their work is experimental, including collaborations with Merzbow and Sunn O))), this is much more accessible, though still notably varied. The final track feels like it's on a completely different album to everything else but this is a band who veer between dream pop and drone metal, via pretty much everything in between.

My favourite track may be the first one, Genesis, which is a slow and heavy sludge metal instrumental, as controlled as most of the rest of the album isn't. It could easily have been intensely boring but it's full of feedback that's ridden like a bucking bronco and refuses to let my attention wander. Anti-Gone starts out that way but soon ramps up into a punk onslaught and is over in three minutes. I've seen a lot of descriptions of this album as hardcore and I'm not seeing it, because the vocals aren't shouts. A punk sound doesn't have to mean hardcore.

In fact, with all three members of the band now contributing their voices as well as their instruments, the vocals encompass a number of styles, as is very obvious on Non Blood Lore. Mostly the vocals are clean on this one with a neat echo that I presume is a second simultaneous voice, but there are angry vocals too and some wilder stuff during a slower but impatient section. I like this one too, because of how the guitars threaten to be wall of sound but the bass can still almost solo over them. Everything here works, from the energy to the tone, via the solos.

So far, so good but I don't like everything here. My least favourite song is Zerkalo, which slows down a vast amount from the Misfits-esque blitzkrieg of Temple of Hatred to find sludge metal territory with the drums stubbornly slow and the vocals as raw as anything else here. I'm not very fond of HxCxHxC Parforation Line, which eventually feels like the band are performing on a runway as a convoy of jets land behind them.

It really is an odd combination of songs, but then this is a Boris album and we shouldn't expect them to care about consistency, especially on an album written relatively quickly and recorded in isolation during lockdown for COVID-19. One minute there's a frantic cover of nineties Japanese band Gudon's Fundamental Error, which is a blast, especially when it drops into punk pop melodies but without any pandering to commerciality at all. The next there's Interlude, a strange title for the final song on any album but appropriate here given that it's a shoegazy post-rock song with clean and whispery female vocals.

It's almost a love letter to American punk, ripping its way through the various genres, some extreme but others conventional. For every Temple of Hatred, easily the loosest song here and one that wraps a while before its two minutes are up, there's a Kiki no Ue, a fascinating piece that starts drum heavy but eventually lets the bass take over and define it. I like a lot of this, but I don't like all of it and, as energetic and fun as it gets, it just feels like a good and varied album, and one that's more accessible than the double album they released with Merzbow in December.

However, it doesn't feel like best of year list material, even though it made five of those I'm tracking thus far, including two top tens and a top five, which was a third place in Treble Zine's list right after the Oranssi Pazuzu album that blew me away. I'd just call it a generally enjoyable release that's more appropriate as an entry point to Boris's discography than pretty much anything they've released in a decade and a half. If you want to find out what all the fuss is about, this is as good a choice as any.

Agnostic Front - Get Loud! (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Hardcore Punk
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 8 Nov 2019
Sites: Facebook | Twitter | Wikipedia

I learned long ago just how differently punk was seen in the US to the UK, a difference that's only got more obvious with the rise of hardcore in the US and its influence on what became nu metal and metalcore. The American punk I like isn't Green Day or the Offspring, but older bands like the MC5 and the Stooges, running through to the New York Dolls and the Ramones. The hardcore punk I like revolves around the bands who created crossover, such as the Cro-Mags, D.R.I. and the Crumbsuckers. After that era, I found grindcore and the slow stuff just didn't cut it any more.

That's why I'm happy to finally break my hardcore punk review cherry here at Apocalypse Later with Agnostic Front. I remember buying their second album, Cause for Alarm, back in 1987 or so, as a young thrash fan eager to explore the genre's roots. The songs were co-written with people like Pete Steele, who I knew then from the thrash band Carnivore rather than Type O Negative. In turn, members of Agnostic Front guested on thrash band Whiplash's debut album, Power and Pain, which is still a favourite of mine.

Get Loud!, which I believe is the band's twelfth studio album, isn't a mile away from what I remember from back then. It's short at just a whisper over half an hour but there are no less than fourteen songs. The half dozen under two minutes tend to be speed metal blitzkriegs. The, erm, longer songs, only one of which makes it past the three minute mark, are slower and moshier and are driven by punk bounce. It has to be said that the first mosh pits were at hardcore punk gigs, even if many of us gloss over that.

Unsurprisingly, I prefer the faster crossover material, but I'm digging the punkier songs too. While I attended a lot less hardcore gigs way back in the day, I felt some of the nostalgia in the lyrics of I Remember. It really was a brotherhood, even in England, where I was a metal interloper for a while. As long as I had a Motörhead logo visible somewhere on my person, it was OK because it meant acceptance. The pits back then were alive and we dived like crazy people.

Even while I enjoyed faster songs like Anti-Social (no, not the Trust track that Anthrax covered), mosh songs like the instrumental AF Stomp and up beat punk songs like the title track, I wondered at how Roger Miret's voice would appear to modern audiences. It's close to what I remember from back then and it works fine for me, but it's nowhere near the style that people tend to be used to nowadays, where hardcore vocals are vicious shouting assaults. Miret is somewhere between clean punk and hardcore shouts, with a little accent I don't remember, but he's easily nearer the former than the latter.

But hey, I've reviewed a lot of albums this year that are throwbacks to the eighties. Why should that just be a trend for heavy metal bands? Why should the punks opt out of that nostalgia, especially if they happen to be a band like Agnostic Front who helped create a surprising amount of what we might take for granted today? Without the New York punk scene, Anthrax would sound very different indeed.

The downside here isn't that its old school, it's that it's happy to be safe and relatively generic. Every one of the fourteen song titles sounds like it must be on a dozen different hardcore albums, from Isolated to Attention to Pull the Trigger. The music's good and the lyrics are good too but it's 2019 and there's so much obvious opportunity for Agnostic Front to, as they say, rage against the machine. They just don't seem to want to. I wonder why.