Reviews: While She Sleeps, Body Void, Crown, Bongzilla (Reviews By Liam True, Paul Scoble, Matt Bladen & Paul Hutchings]

While She Sleeps – Sleeps Society (Sleeps Brothers/Search & Destroy/Spinefarm/UNFD/Universal Music) [Liam True]

UK album chart is weighted heavily in favour of musicians whose fans actually buy their albums – rightly so, you could argue, given how hard it is for artists to make money these days. One sale of an LP, CD or download is equivalent to 1,000 streams, meaning that if an artist gets their ducks in a row – pre-order campaign, enticing vinyl editions, merchandise bundles – they can gatecrash the Top 5 off the back of fan purchases, as the cult likes of Dry Cleaning, Thunder and RJ Thompson have found in recent weeks.

On the strength of this stupendous a fifth album, and the formidable passion of their fanbase, Sheffield pop-metal band While She Sleeps could probably have secured a No 1 spot – they sold out Brixton Academy on their last tour. Instead they used a local distribution company for their pre-orders that isn’t recognised by the Official Charts Company, reducing their chart position but giving something back to their area and scene.

This is just the latest way the quintet have turned their backs on the music industry’s markers of success and methods of business. In 2016, they walked away from Sony to release their third album independently, its title You Are We laying out their vision of communality. Sarcastic posters promoted their fourth album So What? with the words “no one buys music anymore, but it’s OK, we only need 4m streams to pay for these posters and our rent this month”. They have since deepened their direct-to-fan connection with a monthly subscription model: for between £5 and £60 a month you get extras like soundcheck access, instrument tutorials and mental-health advice. As mass culture continues to atomise into individual “content creators”, While She Sleeps are consolidating an intense connection with a smaller number of people. On the opening track of Sleeps Society, Enlightenment(?), they declare in their trademark massed vocals that “there’s no me without us”. Later, they fold recordings of 200 singing fans into Call Of The Void.

Where While She Sleeps’ previous album So What? was overly ambitious – each song full of exciting moments but poorly finessed – those structural problems have been tightened here, and the band finally realise their pop potential in cheesy but magnificent songs (particularly You Are All You Need and Nervous). Vocalist-guitarist Mat Welsh sings yearning boyband hooks, before frontman Lawrence Taylor responds with stark realisations: “We are so blind!” It makes for a reliably exhilarating pattern of tension and release, with Sean Long’s clean and peeling lead guitar tone evoking Eddie Van Halen in virtuosic solos.

In the past, the band’s lyrical focus has occasionally blurred into lazy homogeneity “Sick of division in colour, religion, when we’re all the same” ran a misguided lyric on So What?) but their humanism is often invigorating. Just as fellow British metalcore stars Bring Me the Horizon imagined the apocalypse on Post Human: Survival Horror, and Architects confronted the climate crisis on For Those That Wish To Exist – both excellent albums in their own right, While She Sleeps aim to vent the pressures of 21st-century common life. Their shared sound is essentially an intense update of the nu-metal plied by Linkin Park a generation ago, but with the world having demonstrably worsened since then, personal angst is transplanted into a wider civic context.

Architects sounded like a jaded bishop on their album, with a clever, sardonic irony to their use of sermonising language about the end of days; While She Sleeps are more plainspoken, and reject religion’s salve in a much more straightforward way “There’s no hope in a rosary”. Written down, While She Sleeps’ lyrics like can read like the ramblings of a redpilled Redditor down a conspiracy rabbit hole: “How many more times are we going to be tricked, by society and more importantly our own minds?” runs a spoken intro. But nuance was always likely to be drowned out by music this loud, and in the eye of a storm of drums and thrashing guitars, their bullhorn slogans prove gripping.

After all, it can be difficult to pinpoint where anxiety stems from in a loose fog of different forces. Blunt lines such as “if the worst is yet to come then I don’t think we’ll make it out” could map on to pretty much any crisis, be it personal, environmental or political. There are rallying cries for protest but to no specific end. This isn’t so much a cop-out as music for a world where so many things are badly wrong it’s difficult to focus on a single one. The pleasure of a band like this isn’t in poetry or perspective, but in a howl of shared fear, and a fraternal paw on your shoulder to let you know, as they say, “it’s OK to not be OK”.

The fact the WSS are heading on a massive UK headliner later this year and are headlining small venues shows their respect to the grassroots shows they’ve had behind them. The fact they haven’t even headlined an arena yet is criminal. Not everyone like the band of course. But tickets to even one arena show should sell out fast than Metallica after a 10 year hiatus. Sleeps Society is their best album. Period. 10/10

Body Void - Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth (Prosthetic Records) [Paul Scoble]

San Francisco based duo Body Void have been making decidedly nasty music since 2016. In that time Eddy Holgerson (Drums) and Will Ryan (Guitar and Vocals) have released 2 albums; 2016’s Ruins and 2018’s I Live Inside A Burning House, and an EP in 2019’s You Will Know The Fear You Forced On Us. The band have a reputation for high quality, deeply unpleasant music, have they continued their trend with Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth? Body Voids style can best be described as a mix of Blackened Doom/Sludge and Blackened Hardcore. The album is formed of four long tracks, which in many ways feel like one huge fifty two minute long song.

The doomy side of their sound is the part that dominates, this is mainly slow and heavy with the occasional blast of Blackened Hardcore. When I say slow and heavy, this isn’t stoner Doom with a nice groove to it; this is slower than continental drift and heavier than continents. In some of the sections of Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth there are two or three seconds between drum beats, all the tracks have sections of these ultra slow riffs, but the opening of final track Pale Man is the most extreme example of this. A lot of the Blackened aspects of this album come in the production and guitar and drum sound. The guitar is always on the verge of feeding back, and most of the transitions between riffs or distinct sections of the songs are signalled by a blast of feedback; the album itself ends with a blast of feedback.

Forest Fire uses a lot of feedback and nasty dissonant noises to great effect, this helps to increase the intensity of the song, which is one of this album’s features; huge intensity. That intense feel is helped by Will Ryans vocals which are savage, nasty and massively impassioned. They drive the album along, and add to the feeling that, despite the slowness, the album could spiral out of control at any moment, Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth feels like a pressure cooker on the point of exploding. One of the ways the album does this is to occasionally explode into savage Hardcore. The hardcore is fairly loose in style, but with a huge amount of viciousness and spite, The track Fawn has a section that despite this loose feel, is a potent as Grindcore.

The last song on the album brings another nasty aspect to the table; Noise. Pale Man has some elements of Harsh Noise, with some horrible electronic filth adding to the filthiness of the album. Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth is a fantastic piece of Doomy, Sludgy nastiness. A lot of people will be put off by how hostile, ugly and filthy this album is. However, if you enjoy this kind of extreme vileness, you won’t find it done much better than this. If this album was palatable to everybody then it couldn’t have been this successful at pushing the boundaries of what extreme music can be. Not for everybody, but those that can handle it will find a huge amount to love about this album. Beautifully nasty. 9/10

Crown - The End Of All Things (Pelagic Records) [Matt Bladen]

I'll admit, I nearly overlooked this one. However when it's sent to you by a very trustworthy source of excellent music (For The Lost PR) and the band themselves are featuring on the Roadburn Redux stream (which took place this past weekend), you really have no choice but to give it a spin. Crown are a French based industrial/doom/sludge metal band consisting of musician/producer/engineer David Husser and vocalist/engineer Stéphane Azam, their initial set up was to be two men and a drum machine relying very heavily on the influence of bands such as Ministry, Killing Joke and also band such as Depeche Mode, NIN and Alcest all artists/members David and Stéphane have played/engineered for. Now with the first listen, I'm glad I decided to play this record, on second listen I was angry with myself for even thinking about not playing it. The End Of All Things is probably the most accomplished Crown album so far, for this French duo. 

The End Of All Things sees them take a slightly different approach than previously heard. Their past two albums have been built on industrial beeps and sweeps with crushing sludge riffs and screaming vocals marrying with the numerous vocal guests. Here nearly all the vocals come for Stéphane, who relies on his low, emotive croon rather than harsh aggression, though Shades calls back to the previous albums as does the ragged Firebearer. It's a revelation that brings a sound of Dave Gahan or Jonas Renkse, to the introspective lyricism, the guitar driven electronic thrust washes over you with waves of melancholy. Illumination really taking you deep into that esoteric Depeche Mode electronic haze There is one guest on the record however; Årabrot's Karin Park lending her resonant tones to the final track Utopia a tender, almost stripped down number that is in opposition to the throbbing opener Violence, which, along with the pulsating Neverland are key in establishing the album's dark overtones, and allowing you to settle in to the clean vocals as if they have always been there. The twisted Flevue fades into the raging Firebearer giving a neat duality. The End Of All Things is a near perfect representation of how to create a industrial music. 9/10   

Bongzilla – Weedsconsin (Heavy Psych Sound Records) [Paul Hutchings]

Having returned from hiatus in 2015, the past few years have been somewhat of a roller coaster for Wisconsin’s weed appreciating Bongzilla. The band who took the decision to put things on hold in 2009 are now making their debut for Italian label Heavy Psych Sounds with album number 5, Weedsconsin. 

It won’t surprise those not acquainted with the band that their primary source of inspiration for their material is related to marijuana and its legalisation. Tracks such as Free the Weed, the sprawling ten-minute Space Rock, and the tumbling 15-minute meander of Earth Bong, Smoked, Mags Bags aren’t subtle but the overall downtuned riff fest of this 40+ minutes is a delight to those who worship at the altar of the riff. 

It’s a pummelling, piledriving rampaging beast that punishes those who dare to involvement. Snarling vocals that aren’t often associated with stoner also work brilliantly. Formed in 1995, it was sad to read that original member Cooter Brown had to step down in March 2020 due to ill health and family reasons. Undaunted the band have continued onward, with Weedsconsin one of several releases that the band are involved in including several split EPs with bands on their own Gungeon label. Weedsconsin was written by Muleboy (bass, vocals), Spanky (guitar), and Magma (drums) and recorded and engineered by the late John Hopkins at Future Apple Tree Studios in Rock Island, IL in October 2020. Whilst the rest of the world has been locked down, it’s clear that Bongzilla have put in some gargantuan work to push themselves right back to the top of the pile. 8/10