We’ve been featuring music from the Spanish scene recently that’s hotter and darker than Satan holding a Chorizo in the flames of hell and the next two bands we’re going to introduce you to are no exception. The metal scene in this country is nothing if not diverse as you’ll hear now, so sit back, don’t relax and listen to a couple of groups who really demand your attention in more ways than one.
Lords of Bukkake
It’s been three relatively quiet years for the Barcelona based sludge-doomers the Lords of Bukkake. The interestingly named trio consists of Toni Lopez Querol on bass and vocals, Jaume Pantelon on guitar and Sergio Linares on drums. They’ve actually been together in one way shape or form for a decade and so it only seems right they they’re celebrating that with the release of their latest album, called ‘Desagravio’, which came out on 25th March through TotalRust Records and has been eagerly anticipated by fans of the band waiting for some new material to come (if you’ll, er, pardon the pun).
This is the third track from the album ‘Relente’:
It’s a brutal, unrelenting track and shows why they’re known as one of the premier exponents of this particular brand of psychedelic sludge doom. This is an interesting concept indeed, pairing what is essentially quite a hippy driven idea and melding it to something that is jaw-clenchingly hardcore at times. It is an interesting concept in many ways. What the band like to do is have their outright moments of thrashing, but counter them with some really quite challenging music - indeed, you could say it is almost hallucinogenic induced in it’s psychedelic vibe. The hypnotic melodies are then countered by the harder, comedown passages. It almost mirrors the kind of emotional rollercoaster you’d get from a drug withdrawal, the highs and lows, the feelings of euphoria followed by the moments of pain, though thankfully in this case it is all imagined. That this sort of music can do this to you shows the power that it has and this band are a great example of diversity among the metal genre.
What’s probably quite surprising about it, perhaps compared to other groups of the same genre is the higher pitched vocal, that actually sounds almost, but not quite, alarmingly feminine in places. It actually works really well when paired with the low growl of the guitars and the unrelenting bass thud. In comparison to some of the other bands that are emerging from the Spanish scene at the moment, they are really quite unique – there aren’t many other acts that they are on a par with.
Another preview track from the album is the title track ‘Desagravio’ which you can have a listen to here:
Again, this track highlights their strange, insane, but affecting sound. The vocals are almost the kind of thing you’d expect if Angus Young from AC/DC suddenly released a death metal album and had the horns of Beelzebub poking his behind while he sang. The band’s very own record label describe their sound as a cross between Iron Monkey, the Swans, Godflesh, Esoteric and Eyehategod. Which, to be fair, is some sound to live up to. If it’s sick, twisted, sludgey, high pitched yet growly, frightening spaced out, insane racket you want then it’s highly probable the band you need to listen to are Lords of Bukkake.
TORT
Next on the Spanish Hit List is another outstanding band, also from Barcelona. TORT formed in 2009 and comprise Xavier Guerrero Calduch on Vocals, Laurent Py Cazals on Bass, Jordi Baluda Grau and Sergio Sancha Luna on Guitars and Miguel Angel Serrano Ibarra on Drums. Again, they’re another act signed to the awesome TotalRust Records. It’s taken them three years to put together a track listing and mini-album which they felt they were able to release and last year they took over the Moontower studios to put all their ideas together in one thrashy, bloodcurdling place. The end result was produced and mixed by Javi Felez.
It’s an interesting release, merely for the fact it’s more of an old school metal collaboration, that marries the more ‘traditional’ (if you can use that word here!) styles of thrash and sludge doom, but really successfully melds them with a fairly hypnotic blend of riffs and mesmeric feedback and distortion that carry beautifully and lastingly throughout the whole record. Despite all the various different styles they manage to cram into this forty minute death metal epic, they still manage to create a sound that makes them really stand out from the rest and sound that little bit more distinctive than all the others. You can here the album and get a taste for more TORT here at their Bandcamp page, which is really worth a visit:
No comments:
Post a Comment