Monumental is an album about nostalgia, the fourth album from this Ukrainian four piece runs through "the grandeur and ambition of Cold War space dreams to the melancholy of urban decay" so running though a lived history of their country, writing and recording during one of its most turbulent times.
The fact that's this is IGNEA's second album written during conflict particularly telling and shows considerable strength and commitment to their music on their part, as to conceive an album his difficult enough but to do it under a continuing illegal invasion and constant attacks from Russia during the icy temperatures and power outages in Kyiv is something else entirely.
No wonder then that the band have looked back on the past, vocalist and Helle Bohdanova and keyboardist Yevhenii Zhytniuk, crafting the lyrics and music for this album that is "an ode to the past", deeply entrenched in the retrofuturism of the Soviet era, how many of the new buildings built during that time spoke of progress but ultimately were made left to ruins and how they can adapted in the modern day into something more, if peace was in place.
These themes are driven by the hugely melodic metal tracks, the keyboard and vocals the the two most prominent elements as Yevhenii creates sweeping orchestrations, electronic bounces, industrial stomps and power/melodeath gallops with his keys while Helle switches between soaring cleans and gutteral screams.
It's an album that is blends grandiose artistry with technical brilliance, from the almost dreamlike Darkness, into the pulsing beats of Prefab which features Andy LaPlegua and the pulsating 80's synthwave of What Buildings Dream Of, there's a dynamic fusion to all the elements of this record.
With I Am In Hell a short instrumental that is inspired by commercials we slip into Between No Longer And Not Yet a track that has some Eastern influences and a progressive run time quickly deafened by Harmony Manufactured which is battering melodeath with Britta Görtz of HIRAES bringing harsh growls in conjunction to Helle's dreamlike delivery.
Monumental offers up another slice of the unique sound of IGNEA, they are a modern metal band brimming with electronic augmentations that sees them fit into several genre categories, thrilling, danceable and heavy as lead, the Ukrainian band are still focussed on creating music despite facing unthinkable barriers. 9/10
Beyond Extinction - Three Swords EP (Self Released) [Matt Bladen]
16 minutes of intensity now with Three Swords the new EP from Essex deathcore mob Beyond Extinction.
The band who emerged almost fully formed a few years ago, having maturity in their songwriting, venom in their performance and that right balance of ominous atmospheres, disgusting downtuned grooves and vocals ripped from hell itself.
Their music makes good use of the start, stop style that features so heavily in the deathcore scene, the opening Witchfinder creeping with terrifying intimidation as it seeks it next victim, the first of four tracks here inspired by the horrors and plentiful history of their native county.
With marshland folklore and rituals, witch trials, the dangers of the natural landscape and the black plague all visited on this record, don't come into it expecting an easy ride as Beyond Extinction are here to bring the tales of the blood soaked east.
After Witchfinder starts the day comes the tribal bludgeoning of Skin Of The Beast, then it's the murky The Estuary, caked in mud, mystery and misery while the bludgeoning A Dark Sickness piles "bodies, on bodies, on bodies" with this final beat down.
Another lot of battery from Beyond Extinction, intelligent lyrical content over crushing groove and an undercurrent of ambient wickedness beneath the surface. 8/10
Big Ass Truck I.E. – Found On Road Dead (Nuclear Blast) [Spike]
Every now and then, a band shows up with a moniker so bluntly ridiculous that it demands an immediate double-take. Southern California’s Big Ass Truck I.E. (the initials repping their Inland Empire stomping grounds) aren't here to whisper high-minded philosophical treatises in your ear.
They promised vehicular beatdown hardcore, and across five tracks clocking in at an exact, breathless ten minutes, their Nuclear Blast debut Found On Road Dead delivers precisely that: an unbroken, concrete-flattening collision of beatdown, metallic hardcore, and sheer unadulterated hostility.
The tone is set before the tires even bite the tarmac. The opening title track, Found On Road Dead, kicks off with an ominous line: "Hell is only a word, reality is much worse." From there, the floor drops out from underneath you. The riffs don't just hit; they feel like getting side-swiped on the motorway by an eighteen-wheeler hauling gravel.
The tone is set before the tires even bite the tarmac. The opening title track, Found On Road Dead, kicks off with an ominous line: "Hell is only a word, reality is much worse." From there, the floor drops out from underneath you. The riffs don't just hit; they feel like getting side-swiped on the motorway by an eighteen-wheeler hauling gravel.
It spills immediately into lead single Dragging Meat, which, at just over three minutes, is practically the progressive centrepiece of an EP built entirely for violent room-clearing. The accompanying groove has that disgusting, low-tuned crunch that bridges 90s nu-metal bounce with ignorant, knuckle-dragging hardcore efficiency.
What makes this bite-sized release so deeply satisfying is the total lack of fat. When they tap the brakes on Big Ass Gun, it isn’t to let you catch your breath; it’s so they can downshift into an agonizingly heavy, half-time crawl that rattles right through your fillings. Drummer Andres Torres lays into his kit with terrifying malice, making every snare crack and bass-drum kick feel like a personal vendetta against human bone density.
By the time Forced Through Sludge grinds through its filthy low-end muck and the 54-second blast of 1 Trillion Pounds arrives to obliterate whatever structural integrity was left standing, you feel like you've been run over, reversed over, and left in the gutter.
There’s a refreshing, unpretentious honesty to bands who understand exactly what their sound is built to do and refuse to dress it up in polite airs. Found On Road Dead brings that feral, fun-as-hell aggression back to the forefront of modern hardcore without losing an ounce of genuine technical punch.
What makes this bite-sized release so deeply satisfying is the total lack of fat. When they tap the brakes on Big Ass Gun, it isn’t to let you catch your breath; it’s so they can downshift into an agonizingly heavy, half-time crawl that rattles right through your fillings. Drummer Andres Torres lays into his kit with terrifying malice, making every snare crack and bass-drum kick feel like a personal vendetta against human bone density.
By the time Forced Through Sludge grinds through its filthy low-end muck and the 54-second blast of 1 Trillion Pounds arrives to obliterate whatever structural integrity was left standing, you feel like you've been run over, reversed over, and left in the gutter.
There’s a refreshing, unpretentious honesty to bands who understand exactly what their sound is built to do and refuse to dress it up in polite airs. Found On Road Dead brings that feral, fun-as-hell aggression back to the forefront of modern hardcore without losing an ounce of genuine technical punch.
With UK tour dates slated for 2027, you can bet I'll be keeping an eagle eye on the gig listings as experiencing this kind of vehicular violence in a packed venue is going to be an absolute bloodbath. A cracking debut. 9/10
Swervedriver – Raise Demos (Outer Battery Records) [Spike]
There is a massive difference between a lazy, barrel-scraping archival dump and a genuine time capsule that lets you watch history being forged in real time.
Swervedriver – Raise Demos (Outer Battery Records) [Spike]
There is a massive difference between a lazy, barrel-scraping archival dump and a genuine time capsule that lets you watch history being forged in real time.
Having just picked up the 35th anniversary edition of Raise which is an absolute belter of an album that sounds as vital, petrol-fuelled, and massive today as it did three and a half decades ago, sitting down with Raise Demos hits on an entirely different emotional frequency.
It is the audio equivalent of watching the artist actually painting the canvas stroke by stroke in a freezing, paint-spattered workshop, rather than simply standing in polite reverence in front of the finished masterpiece hung up in a gallery. You get to witness the raw, unpolished spark of creation that most bands keep locked away behind closed studio doors.
The backstory alone reads like pure, unadulterated rock folklore. Transport yourself back to the autumn and winter of 1990/91: London in the affordable years. Huddled inside Playground Studios, a former car repair garage tucked away behind the imposing, Clockwork Orange-esque concrete monolith of Camden’s Maiden Lane estate, Swervedriver set up camp in a tiny converted storeroom.
The backstory alone reads like pure, unadulterated rock folklore. Transport yourself back to the autumn and winter of 1990/91: London in the affordable years. Huddled inside Playground Studios, a former car repair garage tucked away behind the imposing, Clockwork Orange-esque concrete monolith of Camden’s Maiden Lane estate, Swervedriver set up camp in a tiny converted storeroom.
Surrounded by tangled cables, battered Converse High Tops, dimming fluorescent tubes, and roaring Marshall stacks, with the looming spectre of Gulf War One flickering on an office black-and-white portable TV, Adam Franklin, Jimmy Hartridge, and company plugged straight into a cassette-based Tascam Portastudio with the needles slammed firmly into the red.
That specific rehearsal-room geography bleeds through every single second of these ten tracks. From the opening squall of Sandblasted, the sheer immediacy grabs you by the throat. It isn't high-gloss studio perfection; you can hear the physical buzz of FX pedals, the warm hiss of overloaded magnetic tape, and the dry room ambience of four musicians sweating out ideas in real time.
That specific rehearsal-room geography bleeds through every single second of these ten tracks. From the opening squall of Sandblasted, the sheer immediacy grabs you by the throat. It isn't high-gloss studio perfection; you can hear the physical buzz of FX pedals, the warm hiss of overloaded magnetic tape, and the dry room ambience of four musicians sweating out ideas in real time.
Yet, far from diminishing the songs, that primitive grit highlights just how formidable Swervedriver's songwriting chops were right out of the traps. Sandblasted and Sunset arrived in the world practically fully formed, already packing that ferocious blend of Detroit proto-punk muscle (the Stooges and MC5) and swirling British shoegaze texturing that always set the Oxford crew miles apart from their more passive, gaze-at-their-shoes peers.
What makes this collection so endlessly fascinating is tracing the architecture taking shape. On Flawed, Hands, and Pile Up, the riffs hit like tectonic plates shifting across concrete floorboards. When Melody Maker reviewed their Camden Underworld warm-up show around this time, they famously noted that the band "hew their melodies from the hills themselves," and that elemental power is on full display here. These aren't fragile, polite indie-rock sketches; they are great, roaring slabs of fuzz, volume, and momentum.
The second half of the recording offers pure gold for the dedicated heads. Lead Me Where You Dare and Sci Flyer showcase that effortless, swaggering sense of groove, while Feel So Real captures that breathless moment when a late-breaking composition suddenly locks into focus just weeks before official studio tracking begins.
What makes this collection so endlessly fascinating is tracing the architecture taking shape. On Flawed, Hands, and Pile Up, the riffs hit like tectonic plates shifting across concrete floorboards. When Melody Maker reviewed their Camden Underworld warm-up show around this time, they famously noted that the band "hew their melodies from the hills themselves," and that elemental power is on full display here. These aren't fragile, polite indie-rock sketches; they are great, roaring slabs of fuzz, volume, and momentum.
The second half of the recording offers pure gold for the dedicated heads. Lead Me Where You Dare and Sci Flyer showcase that effortless, swaggering sense of groove, while Feel So Real captures that breathless moment when a late-breaking composition suddenly locks into focus just weeks before official studio tracking begins.
And while Rave Down bypassed the demo stage entirely, closing out with the alternate Raise-era take of Mustang IV (a sibling to the classic Son Of Mustang Ford) gives the release a poignant, reflective full stop, capped by an alternate, cleaner finish that fans have never heard before.
Raise Demos doesn't pretend to be an audiophile showpiece, nor should it be. It is a loud, dirty, and utterly authentic glimpse into the engine room of a classic debut album being brought to life through cold weather, cheap beer and boundless creative fire.
Raise Demos doesn't pretend to be an audiophile showpiece, nor should it be. It is a loud, dirty, and utterly authentic glimpse into the engine room of a classic debut album being brought to life through cold weather, cheap beer and boundless creative fire.
If you already love Raise, hearing these building blocks is nothing short of a revelation. A brilliant, essential piece of rock history. 9/10
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.