The Love Below - Reproductive Rights 7" (Review)

The beginning of the first track reminds me of Napalm Death’s „Enslavement“ record, just because every record that starts with a bass drum with lots of reverb does so. Well, not the worst first impression I’d say. The Love Below are quite hard to classify, which isn’t a bad thing, somehow they sound like a tougher version of Left For Dead, which is a stupid thesis anyway because Left For Dead were tough as fuck. Next try. The Love Below combine the heaviness of bands like early Blacklisted and the rawness and riffs of bands like Left For Dead or the more Hardcore-ish songs of The Swarm, with vocals that remind me of spazzy Hardcore outfits like early Some Girls or even Swing Kids. The lyrics are quite personal, quite pissed, and more in the vein of Hardcore ca. 2001, but without all the sadness-thing. On their myspace page they state their influences the following: "godlessness. drug abuse. adult situations". I guess that sums it up pretty well.  The more often I listen to this, the better it gets, this record is definetely a grower. At first I thought something like „well, another Hardcore record, not bad, but not exciting as well“, but after a few more turns this record get’s damn awesome, and proves that you just can’t go wrong with A389 Records. Oh, and on the cover artwork there’s a lot of pink. Hint, hint. 

The Love Below on myspace
A389 Records

Virgin Witch - s/t 7" (Review)

Here we have a cool Hardcore item on a small label I unfortunatly haven’t heard about until now, Free Cake Records. In Virgin Witch, Dom from Pulling Teeth is filling on the bass and guitar duties, so I knew beforehand that this shit’s gonna rule. So what music can you expect from a one sided 7“ with two songs, the flip side of the record with a silk screened pentagramm on it, and a cover artwork that has everything what’s good (boobs, skulls, devil horns)? Let me say it like this, if the number of the Os in the word doom correlates with the slowness of the music, the first track is definetely a dooooooooooooom song. Sludgy, with nice twin guitar harmonies here and there, and realy slow, mean vocals, you know the deal. Nothing to bring you into an happy mood, though, like Grief when they had a really bad day. The second song is faster, not really super fast but a solid midtempo, a good Hardcore song in the vein of Pulling Teeth (sorry for the unoriginal comparison), and the solo is one of the best Dom has done so far. It could very well be on one of the earyl Angel Witch recordings as well. I love Angel Witch’s solos. Virgin Witch is probably only one of Dom’s many side projects, but a very good one and I hope that there will be more tunes of that band sometime soon.

Virgin Witch on myspace

Free Cake Records

Nails - Unsilent Death (Review)

Does anybody remember the movie 28 Days Later? In that film humans get infected by a virus, that is basically like to pure rage and turns its victims into some kind of zombies („some kind of“ because they are able to run and climb, something a normal zombie doesn’t). Why am I mentioning this? The first time I’ve listened to this LP, I thought that this record was pure rage pressed on vinyl. And I still think it is. At first I wanted to make the usual Dropdead-meets-early-Terror-comparison, and it still would describe pretty good what’s going on here, but this morning, on my way to the bus, I suddenly knew of what band Nails, especially the new record, reminds me. I think Nails are like a Hardcore-interpretation of Terrorizer (speaking of Terrorizer I only speak about their masterpiece „World Downfall“ of course, I never even listened to the second record because everybody kept telling me how shitty it was). Nails have the same „all go no slow“ meets unseen brutality attitude, a lot of blastbeats, typical Hardcore-rythm parts, with 20 Boss Heavy Metal pedals between instruments and amps, add the hardest moshparts since Hatebreed's "Satisfaction..." record, there you are. The angriest vocals on earth screaming some of the most pissed off lyrics in Hardcore's short but angry history: "Bow to no man, no pig, no book of myths/tolerate no deception, no ignorance/I'm not your fucking servant" ("No Servant") or "Show your true self/Your loyality runs thin/You want to be liked by everyone/Two-faced faker, fucking traitor/Your feet are firmly planted/On both sides of the drawn line/Coward" (Traitor). A lot of "me against the world"-attitude, which is cool if it's authentic like in Nails' case. Now I probably should write about who’s playing in this band, but I don’t think Nails really need that. This thing was recorded at Kurt Ballou’s Godcity Studios, but don’t expect something rather slick like the Carry On full length (no diss towards Carry On, I love that record), the production is really noisy and dirty, still super heavy and, well, brutal. What more can I say... this is one of THE Hardcore records in 2010, if you’re into bands like [namedropping mode on] early Terror or Hatebreed, Terrorizer, Mind Eraser, Dropdead, Entombed or Napalm Death [namedropping mode off] you’ll be blown away by Nails.

www.sixfeetunderrecords.com