Spammerheads
The Mire Chronicles
self-released
The Mire Chronicles is an accounting of Spanish EBM act Spammerhead’s experiences with the massive flooding that laid waste to the city of Valencia. As you might imagine they address the despair brought on by the destruction of their home (and their studio), while also speaking to the efforts of their community to support one another and rebuild. “Aftermath” and “Quicksand” are well in the former camp, with neo-old school body music styled sounds and gravelly vocals, recounting the chaos of evacuation and the uncertainty of what to do. “Shocking Days” turns up the stridency, putting the vocals further forward in the mix and tossing in some sharp lead and syncopated rhythm programming against the bass and drums, the sound of despondency turned to resolve. The remainder of the record is very much in that vein of defiance and solidarity, with the former embodied by the screed against apathy “Amazing Disgrace” through to the concluding song “Soultrigger”, an accounting of the cost of complacency in the face of tragedy. The music and sound design is kept lean and rough, but full-bodied, a match for the raw emotional tone of the proceedings, and the populist spirit it addresses. Spammerheads speak to perseverance, and the work it takes to push through adversity.
Sophrosyne
Skullduggery
self-released
Screwball UK industrial metal act Sophrosyne is back with their third release (and second one this year alone), reaffirming our suspicions that the project was engineered in a lab with the specific intent of pissing off metal and industrial purists alike. To a degree the project’s power rests in reminding us just how safe so many bands who fancy themselves industrial metal play it; in six minutes “A Death Worse Than Fate” does what would take most bands four albums: jamming together drippy dungeon synth, witch house, coldwave, and groove metal. There’s perhaps a wider range of metal sub genres and eras referenced on Skullduggery than on previous efforts, from the melodic death breakdowns of the opening track to the blackened thrash of “Live Fast…Die Faster!”, not to mention the digital hardcore throwback of closer “The Harrowing Of Hell”. But even those different niches are all gathered under the difficult to pigeonhole, but immediately recognizable aesthetic Sophrosyne has developed. It’s an exercise in one extremity after another, but rather than pursuing extreme heaviness, offense, or obscurity in the way Sophrosyne’s metallic influences did in generations past, Skullduggery zeroes in on the extremities of the digital, of the memification of kvlt, of Eno’s limit of the medium, and frankly of taste; if you fancy yourself a connoisseur of raw sound design you owe it to yourself to experience the digital thunderfart of the bass which slaps along though “Eaten (From The Inside)”.
