NeophobiA

Sabaton - The Great War (2019) While society is distracted by the current political disarray that’s slowly eroding our personal sense of freedom, it’s easy to forget that a century ago the world had just witnessed one of the bloodiest wars in history that saw millions needlessly sacrificed and dynasties wiped out. The Great War, even now, remains a harrowing record of slaughter, carnage and destruction that would have the most hardened Cannibal Corpse fan reaching for a cup of tea and a sit-down, and it took a band with unrivalled historical knowledge to tell its story beyond the gore. If you don’t know it by now, that band was Sabaton. Depending on where you sit, these Swedish power metallers are either an obsessive novelty band who get dorks dancing to songs about D-Day or the greatest history teacher you never had. Such was the grandiose and erudite quality of their output as we ventured into their ninth album, the question wasn’t whether they could make a credible concept record about one of history’s greatest tales, but if they could give us something new and exciting to latch onto. The answer was yes. The Great War was, as usual, a rip-roaring, riff-addled march towards victory, coaxing influences from folk and power metal that sounded remarkably upbeat for an account of bloodthirsty mass destruction. The Attack Of The Dead Men, for all its grim storytelling, remains the most joyful song you will ever hear about chemical weapons, thanks to Sabaton’s knack for lacing their power metal stride with disco-style grooves, while The Red Baron explored other throwback territories with 70s-inspired hard rock. With The Great War, recorded exactly 100 years after the events it honours, Sabaton once more fortified their status as world-class power metallers, not only pushing their sound to new heights but solidifying their adeptness to tell stories and capture imaginations.

Machine Head - Unto The Locust (2011) Few bands resonate so fully with their audience as Machine Head, and perhaps only Iron Maiden and Slayer can rely upon their fans for such unflinching dedication. The crucial difference is that these Bay Area maestros are of a newer generation who enjoy none of the misty-eyed, sometimes forgiving nostalgia of their predecessors. And considering 2007’s The Blackening was lauded as Metal Hammer’s album of the that decade, the pressure to outdo themselves on album number seven was most assuredly immense. Well, it may not have hit the top spot, but its healthy placing in the top 50 this decade gives all the more reason to applaud Unto The Locust – a breathtaking metal masterwork that screamed their supremacy as songwriters from the rooftops. Kicking off with the three-part thrashing cannon blast of I Am Hell, it was clear that this was an album of light and shade, or as it were – howitzer fire and napalm. Be Still And Know was a breathtaking exhibition of Robb Flynn and Phil Demmel’s towering abilities with a six-string, all supercharged by Flynn’s gravel-throated ferocity. So intense you could almost imagine the glee in the studio when it was being tracked. But it was probably The Darkness Within that saw Machine Head at their most courageous. Beginning with Flynn’s Springsteen-conjuring mid-tempo balladry, it gave dimension to all the fast-riffing bravado before the epic slab of Pearls Before The Swine and the haunting Who We Are wrapped up these scorching proceedings. It was a mindblowing testament to a brand of heavy metal that refused to chase its tail but sprinted boldly into uncharted territory.

Korn - The Nothing (2019) Korn have made a career from exposing the chaos and darkness inside their collective psyche, but, even by their combustible standards, the year leading up to The Nothing had been unbelievably traumatic with the passing of Jonathan Davis’ wife, Deven, the August prior. Although it might sound trite to say it, Davis can be proud of the way he channelled that trauma to create a power-house of an album. From 90-second opener The End Begins, we were left in no doubt that this album would be a traumatic experience, the intro consisting almost exclusively of haunting bagpipes and Jonathan screaming through inconsolable tears. As the next few tracks proved, Davis had hugely developed as a vocalist, with both Cold and You’ll Never Find Me showcasing the brutal, death metal growl he had been perfecting alongside his trademark croon. At the end of the latter track we heard him breaking down in the studio, and the howls of pain felt undeniably real. The Nothing was as powerful as this band had felt in a very long time. ‘For every good thing I do there is a price to pay’ he sang on closer Surrender To Failure, and only those with a heart of stone would have struggled to empathise with him. Korn have been on a run of form over the last decade, but no one could have predicted that they would recapture that unique feeling of genuine darkness. Unfortunately it took something deeply and tragically sad for that to happen, but Davis can take a crumb of solace that his catharsis here will have almost certainly inspired many more people to fight their own demons once again.

The Hu - The Gereg (2019) At the very end of Shireg Shireg, the lilting, rather lovely song that closed the debut album by Mongolian sensations The HU, the music gently faded to expose a rhythm that backboned almost the entire album: the sound of trotting hooves. It was like being shown how a great piece of magic works, with the big reveal enhancing the cleverness of the trick rather than spoiling it. For The Gereg was a remarkably clever album. It had been attempted before, this kind of thing, combining the throat singing and folk melodies of Central Asia with Western rock music, but never so subtly, nor as smartly. Unlike the great Tuvan rock band Yat Kha, or – more recently – Tengger Cavalry, The HU resisted the temptation to ramp up the volume in the pursuit of global appeal, instead finding an audience through a series of spectacular videos that amplified the band’s visual appeal rather than aligned their sound with any number of take-yer-pick stadium fillers. Without shifting the sonics too far from their roots, The HU created an album that felt epochal. From the viral smashes – Yuve Yuve Yu, Wolf Totem and The Great Chinggis Khan – through the epic sweep of The Song Of Women and the foreboding chug of The Same, it was music of intense drama and widescreen beauty. It was music that somehow painted a vivid portrait of the land from which it had sprung. And for music that didn’t shy away from covering subjects unusual in heavy metal – The Legend Of Mother Swan reflected on the power of a mother’s love for her offspring – it was music that somehow felt both familiar and comforting. It was as if we’d all grown up throat singing, with the jaw harp and the horse head violin and the three-stringed lute. Such was its power.

Baroness - Purple (2015) There’s enough trauma in the world right now that even the tiniest crack of light is something to cling to. For Baroness, that crack of light came in the shape of their fourth album, Purple. In August 2012, a horrific bus crash almost wiped the US band out, leaving singer/guitarist John Baizley hospitalised and in danger of losing his arm. Purple was the product of both personal trauma and Baizley’s long and painful physical rehabilitation. Purple simultaneously built on what Baroness's previous albums had achieved and reined in their sometimes overwhelming sprawl. Shock Me came clad in heavy metal drag – fuzzy guitar, tumbling drums – but its deceptively simple yet electrifyingly huge chorus indicated keener minds at work. Lyrically, Purple erred on the side of the battered. ‘She cuts through my ribcage and pushes the pills deep into my eyes,’ sang Baizley on the undulating, spiritually dislocated seven-minute centrepiece Chlorine And Wine. His arid holler possessed the same limited effectiveness as that of Jaz Coleman. It wouldn't have won him the 2015 series of The Voice, but it carried all the urgency and desperation you’d expect from a man who once woke up with a 20-ton bus on top of him. You don’t have to be a shrink to work out that Purple was a work of pure catharsis, and a sometimes tortured one at that. But whether they meant to or not, Baroness had made an album that brimmed with hope. That was one a hell of an achievement.

Which one Tech.?. Jinjer or Mariana.?. I'm a huge fan of Jinjer, Mariana Semkina I've only recently discovered...

Jinjer - King Of Everything (2016) After uploading their video for rabid single Sit Stay Roll Over, one week and 100,000 YouTube views later, Jinjer were snapped up by Napalm Records. Everything was heading in the right direction for this Ukrainian metalcore crew, and rightly so. Their third album was an accomplished collection of brutality, intelligence and technical proficiency, splicing ferocious Lamb Of God-style grooves with math-metal and djent twists. At the heart of it all were vocalist Tatiana Shmailyuk and guitarist Roman Ibramkhalilov, whose vocal and riff gymnastics were embroiled in a violent game of cat and mouse. Tatiana is a ridiculously talented vocalist and her bludgeoning growls were as equally impressive as her rich clean vocals that carried the urgent choruses of Words Of Wisdom and Just Another towards strapping apexes. The centrepiece of the album, though, was the vast expanse of I Speak Astronomy, which was akin to traversing an inhospitable and polyrhythmic universe of gritty, vivid worlds. King Of Everything was an unrelenting album that kept you guessing. Oh, and it rocked pretty hard, too.

Black Sabbath - 13 (2013) Okay, let's get it out of the way first: no, 13 isn’t as good as Black Sabbath's first six albums – what is? – but it’s a million times better than most of what followed, and way more than you could ever expect from a three men of pensionable age who proved all they had to prove 40 years ago. Sabbath's 19th studio album started as it should: with an almighty riff. End Of The Beginning was Black Sabbath redux: an eight-minute wallop to the gut that ladled foreboding atmospherics onto tectonic grind, before stepping up its pace around a third of the way through. ‘Reanimation of the sequence rewinds the future to the past,’ howled Ozzy, and while the sentiment may have been pure Doctor Who-circa-1976 hokum, the delivery was gloriously clear-headed: the dead-eyed zombie who multi-tracked his way through his last few solo albums was nowhere to be heard. They played it cunningly. Amid all the blind idolatry that has grown around the band, it’s easy to forget that every album recorded by the original quartet had its own personality: Black Sabbath was wide-eyed and bluesy; Paranoid swung from pole to emotional pole; Master Of Reality was a rush of blood to the head and Vol. 4 was the dense, druggy comedown; Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was wired and experimental; Sabotage was just mental. Even Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die were different. Not good. Just different. Here’s the thing: 13 didn't sound like any one of those albums. It sounded, at various points during its 70-minute length, like all of them: a riff here, a melody line there, the odd ‘Alright now!’ thrown in for good measure. And boy, did it work. Gripes? Well, this wasn’t wholly Black Sabbath, as Ozzy himself admitted. Bill Ward was the Banquo at the 13 feast, a shadowy spectre lurking in the background as a partial reminder of the business concerns that clouded Sabbath's latter days days. Did the album miss him? Definitely. It lacked the wild edge he brought to matters, the sense that it could all fly off the rails at any point. But what’s done is done. As time has told, 13 will remain Sabbath's final album. And it was the perfect way to close the circle.

3Teeth - Metawar (2019) 3Teeth emerged in 2013 from metal’s underbelly, leaving behind a streak of glinting mimetic alloy and a whiff of leather. Since then they’ve morphed, like a PVC-clad T-1000, into high-concept cyber warriors with a flair for hyper-sexualised drama. In 2014, their self-titled debut grabbed the attention of Tool guitarist Adam Jones, who invited the band to open for the alt-rock pioneers on their 2016 US tour. Then their follow-up, <shutdown.exe>, put them in front of equally huge crowds, this time supporting Rammstein. On third album Metawar, it seemed that 3Teeth had picked up a trick or two from Lindemann and co, delivering a record that upped the ante on their previous material with a bigger, sleazier and darker sound. Enigmatic frontman Alexis Mincolla had always instilled deeper meaning to the band’s mechanical thunder and described Metawar as “a sonic attack on the wide scale perception management systems that currently grip our worlds.” Accordingly, opener Hyperstition noted ‘As the cost of living continues to go up, the value of life goes down’ and there was discontent abounds in the buzzsaw synths of Affluenza and reptilian swagger of Sell Your Face 2.0, which took swipes at corruption and greed. To help them turn up the power and darkness of their corrosive sound, the band enlisted the services of producer Sean Beavan, a man who knows exactly how to exploit the symbiotic relationship between man and machine having worked on some of industrial’s most treasured albums by Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. At times the throbbing influence of Ministry, and especially Manson, loomed large over the filthy pulse of President X and in Mincolla’s sneering vocals, but Metawar produced several standout tracks, particularly Exxxit and American Landfill – two corroded, molten anthems that lunged and snapped like a steel-jawed velociraptor. With Metawar, 3Teeth continued their razor-straight upward trajectory.

Brian Fallon - You Have Stolen My Heart One with which to chill/peace out/find your mellow happy place now. You can check out more from the Gaslight Anthem man on 2020 album Local Honey (and on tour in the US and UK/EU March-May), but for now we'll whet your appetite with this oh-so-pretty acoustically led number.

Ocean Alley - Tombstone These Aussie freakniks’ music has been described as “cruisey psych, rock and reggae fusion”. You can hear elements of all that in this trippy, more-ish number. In some ways it echoes the oddball pop stylings of their West Coast compatriots (Tame Impala, Pond…), but with a more organic sense of 70s/80s warmth.

Saltlake - Bitter Pill A meaty new tune from Sussex trio Saltlake, which soars as well as crunches. If Muse and Bullet For My Valentine went to an alt.rock night and had a baby, it might have turned out something like this. Vocalist/guitarist Henry Gottelier says: "Bitter Pill is a metaphor for the struggles of everyday life-being lost in a society that you just don't seem to fit into, and the anxiety that comes with that-being the person that someone relies on, but never having it returned."

Mariana Semkina - Everything Burns The Kate Bush-nodding singer with Russian chamber-prog act Iamthemorning releases her solo debut in the new year, from which this beautifully haunting single is taken. Mariana says of the song: “Everything Burns focuses on the demons that you take with you no matter how far you try to go; the fact is you just can't run away from them. No matter how hard you try to change everything around you, they will stay with you unless you realise that the most important change, the one that is by far the hardest to achieve - the one that happens inside of you.”

Donnie Vie - Beautiful Things The former Enuff Z’Nuff singer/songwriter’s latest solo tune is a blissed-out blast of pretty harmonies, Cheap Trick-esque emotion and lead guitar lines that’ll pull your heart right out of your chest - figuratively speaking, we think...

KOYO - Ostracised The great new track from progressive Leeds types KOYO flits effortlessly between gnarly Tool-esque weight and the sort of hazy dream pop you’d associate with Tame Impala. It’s a sharp, smart step forward from their initial burst of promise – bringing a new spirit of cerebral adventure, without sacrificing on melody or hookiness.

Those Damn Crows - Set In Stone The Welsh hard rockers have upped their game on new album Point Of No Return (set for release in February 2020), as this oomphy, galloping single confirms. Music to pump your fist, break speed-limits and tear the doors off buildings to – with your bare hands...

The Lutras - Fight Night There’s a time and place for gently easing into a song, but this isn’t one of them. Scottish foursome The Lutras don’t leave you waiting, or wanting, for a second in this three-minute monster – boasting one of those simple, likeably cocky riffs that'll add some swagger to your step, or make you air-guitar at your desk... (Sorry no Video for this one...)

Naked Six - Song of The City

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G'day Mate and welcome...

G'day Mate and welcome... \m/_(0.~)_..|..

G'day Mate and welcome...

G'day Mate and welcome...

G'day Mate and welcome...