Oh, what an impressive beast this LAVOTCHKIN is! Or ‘was’, I should rather write… After seven years, diverse releases and extensive touring, the boys from Northern England have decided to put the band to rest. Fueled with the energy of CONVERGE, the chaos of BOTCH and the dirge of CURSED, these guys definitely have been one of the better European hardcore bands of recent times. Thanks to an impressive presence on stage and relentless touring they had earned a reputation as a must-see live act, due to their dedication and heartiness they stood out in a scene swamped by pretenders and fashionists. Awesome band. Will be missed.

You can stream, download and buy all LAVOTCHKIN releases on lavotchkin.bandcamp.com. Footage from their final appearance at Northumberland Arms, Newcastle on April 1st, 2012 can be viewed here: READ MORE…

With dissemination of anxiety, confusion, humiliation, darkness, conflict, cruelty, nihilism, inferno and all kinds of other evil, Lautréamonts fictional character Maldoror attempts to demonstrate the hated mankind its own badness. With the second album of their experimental project NERNES/SKAGEN, Kjetil Nernes and Stian Skagen, both members of the noise/math/chaos formation ÅRABROT, want to tell the story of a contemporary Maldoror.

However, the Norwegian duo aims not to set the literary text to music, but to generate appropriate moods. Instead of coarse words, as with Lautréamont, “Confession” is told with massive guitar drones and abstract electronic noise. The inhospitable and distant sounds create a quite dark atmosphere. In the vein of EARTH and KHANATE, NERNES/SKAGEN create narrative soundscapes that are tentatively searching through an eerily desolate dark. Challenging and exciting!

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It’s brilliant to see how far the CVLT Nation has come, since its emergence one year ago and I am more than pleased to be a tiny part of all this! But instead of holding overblown speeches, I want to share an inspiring piece of art with you guys: the powerful and meaningful “Punk Rock In The Wrong Hands” by PG.99. This particular song and this band in general to me is the essence of what all this means to me, as well as the motivation to keep on doing it. A more than appropriate obeisance to celebrate an anniversary, if you ask me.

“Being in a punk rock band, being into punk rock, being into hardcore [...] doesn’t mean one fucking thing. You have to use your involvement to shock people! You have to get other people who don’t know anything about punk rock.”

“Places to Hide” is the second album of JACK AND THE BEARDED FISHERMEN. The formation from French city Besançon plays a heavy, bulky and modern heavy rock, that owns distinctive hardcore/punk roots. The sound is dense and heavy, but always remains flexible and transparent. The ten pieces convince with their convoluted, but never erratic or chaotic song structures. Very well thought out and pretty mature – and deliberately placed outside usual (sub)genre limitations. J&TBF skillfully combine the muddy stoner rock of QOTSA, the noisy riff-rock of AKIMBO and the raspy post-hardcore of DRIVE LIKE JEHU. Highly Recommended!

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‘The Tunnels’ is the untamed, noisy, gloomy and depressed first work of this radical and vanguard noise band TERRA TENEBROSA from Stockholm, Sweden. The overall sound of the trio – a direct descendant of the widely appreciated BREACH, by the way – is based on the repetitive, monotonously clanking percussion, which makes for a aseptic industrial feel. Above that reside these weird, distorted vocal contributions, flanked by diverse down tuned stringed instruments, which grub in dissonant anti-harmonies, as well as harsh synths, that cut through the thicket of sound like bright rays of hope. All these sonic aspects merge in and with each other to form a threatening blackened mist, leaving the listener behind in a mixture of inconvenience, alienation and derangement. The metal and hardcore roots of the ensemble can only be detected as rudimentary basis elements, buried under nightmarish noise textures and wrapped in a pitch-black coat. Reminiscent in sound and aesthetics of the early work of NEUROSIS. An astounding album!

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Darkness, despair, brutality – these are the coordinates between which the Italian formation LENTO, with the help of down tuned guitars, versatile riffing, intricate rhythms and exhausting slowness, builds a massive wall of sound. Brutally sludgy and monotonic parts, with their savvy, endlessly repeated rhythms, convey the impression that one is caught in a time warp. Playful noise offshoots, as well as ambient-like passages that repeatedly appear seamlessly between all the brutality, serve as moments of arousing from this sonorous hypnosis. The meandering between different moods and sound structures is what makes ‘Icon’ pleasantly varied and diverse. This is progressive sludge metal, reminiscent of the early creative stages of ISIS and CULT OF LUNA, without being a mere imitation of those classic bands. With interesting ideas, delicate details and exhilarant variety LENTO have managed to develop a quite distinct tone of their own.

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