Antimatter Halo

[antimatterhalo]

X's For Eyes

Facebook officially crossed my line in the sand for sketchy right wing content today, gonna just write here while I get an official dot-com set up for my webzine.

It'll probably take about two weeks to get that up and running. I'll make some kind of announcement when it goes live.

I'm also doing away with numbering these posts from here on in, 'cos fuck it. We're informal around here.

Anyway here's the review:

Absolutely wicked industrial-tinged grind from down under... Reminds me of 90's era spazz units like The Locust/ Asterisk/ Jenny Piccolo welded to the whacked out angularity of Kobong/ Sam0/ Antigama/ Nyia and the skull-caving bass tone of Napalm Death's "Joi De Ne Pas Vivre."

Whole thing rules, but my favorite track of the bunch might be "Unholy" 'cos jesus christ what an opening riff that is... Shit is like getting beat about the head and face with a concrete parking block.

Highly Recommended.

[antimatterhalo]

029 - Black Snake Moan

Imagine listening to The Gun Club, Bauhaus, and Wovenhand at the same time while tripping balls on LSD and that’s pretty much what this tune sounds like. Not super familiar with this guy’s other stuff but I really, really, dig this track.

Dusty, twangy, doomsday-cult psych-out drug-music.

[antimatterhalo]

028 - Failure

"I'll show you a trick with ants when The sun's high in the sky we can Burn them up to crispy black shells See them crunched by old, slow, slick snails

Light the fuse inside the dead bird Feather flurries rain on our heads Empty nest with three small brown eggs We'll think of something before the night falls

Don't hurt a fly they all sang Don't rape a girl in bright may Don't kill anyone ever Lay still and stand this fever

The sun's just A big glass We're all ants I love you"

[antimatterhalo]

027 - Lightning Round aka: Shit I've listened to today but don't feel like writing much more than a sentence about.

I dunno, today was one of those rare days where I woke up with a headache and I just wasn't in the mood to listen to metal at all. This is what's been on the stereo while I work.

I expected to hate this but it's honestly pretty cool. Sounds like if the Velvet Underground recorded a noise rock album around a bunch of weirdly distorted hip-hop beats.

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Xiu Xiu are a generally a band I like, but I don't always love every album they put out. I dig this newest one though.

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These guys are a recent favorite. Heavy and weird.

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I want someone to give me a bunch of money to direct a movie that starts out like it's gonna be a reimagining of Fear City then goes off the rails into some kind of gory monster flick where the killer is loosely based on the SPAWN violator character and the hero is an off the rails psycho cop who comes back from the dead to stop him. This would be the theme song because something about it always pokes weirdly at my anxiety.

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It's not always the mood I'm in but jazz is a thing I like sometimes. This album reminds me of hanging out with my grandpa back in the day. He was a jazz drummer (He wasn't famous, but he was a great player and gigged around with a couple of his buddies occasionally) but I didn't appreciate his taste in music at the time... Wish he was still around to talk about it now.

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Holy fuck this kid is a hell of songwriter.

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Shimmering ambient dronework over top of an endlessly spiraling tribal drum loop. My favorite Troum release.

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Sexy breathy female vox over grinding shoegazy guitar chords. How long til she collabs with The Body you think?

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More sexy chick vocal stuff. This song is often stuck in my head.

[antimatterhalo]

026 - Brainbombs

"You can't be with people/ You can't be alone."

[antimatterhalo]

024 - Darkspace

I've seen a lot of hemming and hawing on various metal blogs about the new Darkspace being a massive disappointment, but to me it sounds a lot like their second album which is the one I always liked best.

YMMV, but if I was gonna describe this I'd probably say something like: "Doomed out space metal that sounds like a series of disembodied Godflesh riffs completely drowned in intergalactic dark ambience ala Lustmord.

Might not be your thing but it's definitely my thing. This rules

[antimatterhalo]

023 - Morguewalker

Quick EP of nasty death-tinged black metal from South Carolina… If you dig stuff like Desolate, Profanatica, or Demoncy, you'll probably find a lot to like here 'cos this is basically that same style of monstrously primitive blackdeath laced with the foaming-at-the-mouth sludge-grind insanity of the first couple Burmese albums.

Really dig this stuff, hope these guys manage a full-length.

[antimatterhalo]

022 - Cadaver in Drag

Cadaver in Drag can be kinda hit or miss for me... Love most of their "band" stuff, but a couple of their more noise oriented releases didn't really grab me (which is weird cos I really like Josh Lay's solo stuff).

That said: This album, and this song in particular, absolutely fucking rule...

Thinking back a few years, this was one of the things I was listening to a lot back when we decided to start Rot Coven... Pretty much this, "Lonesome Drifter" by Mammal, SWANS, HALO, White Mice, Burmese, Air Conditioning, and a bunch of Cold Meat Industry/ Slaughter Productions type stuff. Then all the Goth and Psychedelic stuff DD brings to the table. That's pretty much our musical DNA.

[antimatterhalo]

021 - Diabolos Rising

Intensely weird mid 90's black metal/ industrial/ digigrind from this mega-obscure side project of Necromantia/ Impaled Nazarene. Was recently reminded of this album after not thinking of them in probably 27 years.

This shit is probably gonna be way too whacked out for all but the most die-hard of musical mutants, but at the same time there was something about this album that kept making me think "Skinny Puppy's VIVISect VI reimagined as a Hellenic Black Metal album with eruptions of completely unhinged Agoraphobic Nosebleed/ Dataclast/ Wadge style digiblast " and I dunno... That worked pretty well with the mood I was in this morning.

[antimatterhalo]

020 - Pando

Heady blend of Americana twang, home recorded black metal/ doom abrasion, and lengthy detours into ambient/ music concrete/ noise territory... Might be too "out there" for those looking for a more traditional black metal approach but I could totally see it appealing to those who dig the twangy Earth stuff, Cryostasium, Light, Horseback, Popul Vuh, and just generally spacing out on a winter afternoon.

[antimatterhalo]

019 - Violenta Domestica

Ok, this is EBM or whatever so a bunch of you are gonna hate it on principle, but there's something about Violenta Domestica's simple pounding synth "riffs", sampled porno dialog, and misogynistic/ antisocial murder-screed vokills that kept making me think "80's Skinny Puppy plays Brainbombs" and I really really dug that.

Other points of reference might be stuff like GGFH, Nasenbluten, STCLVR, Mentallo and the Fixer, etc.

Like it definitely goes "untz untz" but it still sounds like it wants to slam your head into a wall and choke you unconscious, does that make sense?

Recommended.

[antimatterhalo]

018 - Voz De Nenhum

Really cool experimental black metal that reminds me of my favorite Mayhem Stuff (Ordo Ad Chao, Grand Declaration of War) with an added twist of "Blood Libels" Anteus/ "Salvation" Funeral Mist/ "Rom 5:12: Marduk and a slithery undercurrent of dark ambient/ noise.

I can't believe I'd never heard of this shit before 'cos it goes every bit as hard as a lot of the 00's Norma Evangelium Diaboli stuff I was OBSESSED with back in the day.

[antimatterhalo]

017 - Savage Cross

Ultra lo-fi black metal/ doom/ noise from Maryland. First 20 minutes hits the eardrums like a cross between Sutekh Hexen, Gnaw Their Tongues, Burmese, and Rectal Hygenics. Last 40 is a low-freq static ritual/ HNW wipeout that sounds like a 9.5 magnitude earthquake recorded directly to wax cylinder.

I remember really liking this CD-r when it came out, but I honestly hadn't listened to it in almost a decade before I noticed it in one of my storage boxes while I was digging around looking for something else earlier today.

[antimatterhalo]

016 - Netherlands

Spazzed out electro noise rock from NYC. Destructive synth/ bass/ guitar tone, IN-FUCKING-SANE drumming, and strangely melodic falsetto vocals that reminded me of the dude from the Deftones crossed with the dude from The Mars Volta (which seemed totally out of place with the rest of the music at first but after a couple songs... I dunno, they work well enough). If you like Petbrick, Deafkids, or that Jaaw album I posted the other day this will probably also scratch an itch.

[antimatterhalo]

015 - Nightstick

Ever wondered what Siege would sound like if every song was Grim Reaper? Or what Flipper might have sounded like if they got way into Sabbath/ Cathedral? Well then, this is definitely the album you've been looking for.

Never seeing Nightstick live despite growing up two towns over from Weymouth MA is one of my life's biggest regrets.

[antimatterhalo]

014 - Infant Island

Screechy chaotic hardcore (I'm way too old to call it "screamo") that reminds me of Pg.99, Orchid, Forcefedglass, and "Explosions in Ward 6" era Pig Destroyer... Ran across this stuff down the same rabbit-hole that led me to that Respire album I wrote about the other day and wound up liking it enough that I'm probably gonna pick up the CD and a shirt.

[antimatterhalo]

013 - Sinister

I was really into Sinister back when I was a teenager, but I honestly hadn't thought of them in kind of a while before this album popped up on the front page of Youtube this morning... Sturdy early 90's DM that still goes hard as fuck, especially the track "Magnified Wrath".