I Like to Sleep, Kucoshka, The Guts, Kloct, Heptaedium, Schnellertollermeier, The Strawberry Republic, The Great Discord, and Wares

by Dæv Tremblay

I Like to Sleep – Bedmonster

Norwegian jazz force I Like to Sleep just released the fusionesque Bedmonster, a forty-minute disc of aggressive and sinuous jazz-rock fronted by vibraphonist Amund Storløkken Åse and supported heavily by Nicolas Leirtrø and his heavy baritone guitar riffs. Their soundscape cruelly lacks the presence of a bass guitar, but it’s somewhat attenuated by the low notes of the guitar. The album came out on 6 October, and it’s very good!

Kucoshka – Rad Tantrum
What brought me to this album is the sheer ridicule of their cover art, but what kept me listening … Read more

Hybrid Nightmares – Almagest

by Dæv Tremblay

After their Ages EP tetralogy, Australian progressive black metal band Hybrid Nightmares gaze upwards towards the skies. Almagest is their new conceptual full-length album, and takes you on the journey of the Pilgrim, an unnamed automaton, going to various cosmic spheres in a quest to balance spirituality and reason. Basically, it’s a science-fiction retelling of many classical philosophy concepts. It’s quite rare that black metal bands of that ilk look to the future and out into space, although not unheard of, and Hybrid Nightmares is a strong quintet capable of putting this idea into reality and making it truly enjoyable … Read more

Naeramarth – The Innumerable Stars

by Dæv Tremblay

Naeramarth is a progressive metal band from Salk Lake City, and their debut album, The Innumerable Stars is coming out on 20 October. Stating influences as varied as Ihsahn, Leprous, Enslaved, and Opeth, Naeramarth cover an impressive range of metal genres, from black metal to doom metal, with a lot of straight-up progressive metal and prog death in-between. “Asterisms” is a pretty much perfect example of this, it covers well progressive black metal, with a very Opethian acoustic guitars corridor in the middle. Thanks to its 8:50 runtime, each part has the time to breathe, but its only about half … Read more

Brandon Seabrook – Needle Driver

by Dæv Tremblay

Needle Driver is the latest experiment of Brooklyn musician Brandon Seabrook. The hard-to-describe EP seamlessly bridges contemporary classical music, experimental jazz, and mathcore into a nasty instrumental tapestry. The trio even includes some microtonal intervals, spotted in the song “Venwhorerisin'”. The five compositions are too quickly gone, but they provide an endless amount of entertainment while they last: uncommon time signatures, odd harmonies, complex and exhausting melodies, as well as a knack for deranged structures that somehow hold themselves together. Needle Driver goes left and right, up and down, forwards and backwards, and I’m sure it also goes wild … Read more

Tvivler – Negativ psykologi #3

by Dæv Tremblay

The punkish hardcore-n-roll quartet Tvivler, from Denmark release their third Negativ psykologi seven-inch tomorrow. I covered their first one in 2015, but since then they released #2 last year – of which I had no word –, and #3 just now! In the same line as #1, the two most recent ones range from ten to fifteen minutes and boast some aggressive neck-breaker tracks. One of the most interesting, however, is “Oprydning”, which is almost entirely a drums and vocals duo, that is until the bass hits a few notes near the end as a sort of … Read more