Check your preconceptions at the door when you’re first crossing The Bridge. There’s nothing on ÆGES’s debut album as metallic as bassist Tony Baumeister’s other band 16 or attitudinal as guitarist Mark Holcomb’s old hardcore band Undertow; the songs on The Bridge are way less conventional than what vocalist/guitarist Kemble Walters plays in The Blank Faces, and the fact that there are proper songs at all separate this stuff from drummer Larry Herweg’s other band Pelican.

All those bands sound completely different, and yet The Bridge doesn’t bear the sonic stamp of any of them, or any combination of any of them. That The Bridge sounds so little like ÆGES’s pedigree, and so much like a breed of tuneful post-hardcore bands that hasn’t been popular for like 15 years (and was never even THAT popular in the mid-90s), suggests that these guys are in it for the love of the game. Add ÆGES to the ranks of Vallenfyre, Bloodbath and Dukes of the Stratosphear: bands whose members turn their back on innovation and focus on the music that moved ‘em when they were kids.

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An asterisk amidst the exclamation points, Git Some play atypical hardcore for like-minded weirdos — which isn’t to say that this self-titled Alternative Tentacles production comes up short in the energy department. Hell, these fuckers own majority shares in the electric company and “Wipe The Brain” threatens to prove just how voltaic they can get. Dissonant and angular, “Accountability Starts With Me” indulges a Touch & Go Records sweet tooth with a treat smeared with Melvins-esque bombast.

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Ageism and rockism are strange and inextricable bedfellows, limbs inconveniently entangled. Conventional wisdom dictates that, more or less, rock n’ roll belongs to the young and furious. Time serves to either tame or shame. Rod Stewart makes blue-eyed soul for the cataract set, while Alice Cooper’s continued desperate insistence on eyeliner and leather appears even more embarrassing than his golf get-ups. With some three decades since their respective debuts, neither Keith Morris nor J. Mascis ought to make credible music for expanding audiences. The former SST labelmates should be coasting on the classics, something Dinosaur Jr. did rather effectively at last year’s Bug anniversary gigs. Yet they persevere, with new projects seemingly ill-suited for men of a certain age.

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I have two qualms with Baroness’ Blue Record: 1) It came so highly rated — a perfect rating from Decibel, 4 1/2 out of 5 horns from our own Axl Q. Rosenberg, and some asshole whose name pokes fun at a tequila entrepreneur named it his number one album of 2009 – that it wasn’t hard to feel a little underwhelmed by it after a while, and 2) It was a little short. Now, the latter isn’t a huge complaint — better to be compact than bloated — but Blue Record‘s brevity holds it back from being the sort of masterpiece some thought it was (like, you know, me). I still think the album is a magnificent piece of work, but it feels like it’s closer to “almost there” than “made it.” Baroness sounded as if they were reaching for something more ambitious, brushing it with their fingers but not yet able to grasp it. If they had a great album in them, it’d most likely be next.

And it is. Yellow & Green, the band’s latest (and yes, the dual colors denote a double album), is bold and sprawling. Whereas Blue falls just short of greatness, this record provides just enough to get there. It’s densely packed and carefully assembled, widening the band’s already-considerable aggregate of influences while still sounding uniform. Baroness never seem out of their comfort zone on Yellow & Green, even if they’re wandering further outside of it than ever before. That’s because the band have finally grown into the shoes everyone’s been insisting they wear and stride in them daringly and confidently. They’re the Stephen Strasburg of sludge/doom: they showed a lot of promise, then one day were called up and performed pretty much exactly as you’d expected them to. This album is their perfect game.

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After almost two decades, vocalist Chris Barnes has put together his ideal line-up for his post Cannibal Corpse blood-and-butter, Six Feet Under. While the band’s latest album, Undead, arrived in my inbox flagged with a red exclamation point for skepticism, it has remained on my playlist. Somehow. My life the last few weeks has been a sitcom where some dude from a ‘94 Cannibal Corpse show smokes out of a skull bong and travels to 2012 and stays on my couch. As it turns out, we have a lot to learn from each other.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom reviews a few albums by bands that play their instruments way better than you do. 

Karkajou – Let There Be Blight (self-released)

The members of Michigan three-piece Karkajou wear tie-dye t-shirts in their fun-loving promo shots. It makes them look more like The Monkees than the progressive death metal merchants that they are. But once you read through the cheeky liner notes of Let There Be Blight, and notice how Karkajou’s songs veer between environmental policy critique and predicting the creation of a new form of pornography with the power to destroy the universe, you get the sense that this is a band that takes its lack of seriousness seriously.

It’s easy to swallow the sophomoric humor on Let There Be Blight when it’s accompanied by such oddball groove-metal tunes like “Embryonic Lethality” or “From Hive to Grinder.” Even if the Karkajou’s music isn’t as distinctive as that of Deadsea’s or Dysrhythmia’s or Stinking Lizaveta’s, the band’s still one of the most balanced power trios I’ve ever heard in metal – nobody solos, nobody dominates, and yet everyone shreds. It’s a true rarity to hear musicians use their chops to serve the composition rather than the ego. That by itself makes Karkajou worth listening to.

LASTLY: Two members of Karkajou wrote me on the same day to tell me that the band’s new album was available. One of them told me that the band had recently broken up. I hope the other one knows, otherwise there’s a bassist somewhere in Ann Arbor wondering why his bandmates haven’t shown up to practice for six months.

(3 1/2 out of 5 horns up)

Download Let There Be Blight for free here.

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These vernal months have played host to a number of mildly to moderately exciting rock releases, so here’s a quick little rundown for you. Gauge your interest accordingly!

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Bubble-sludge? Superpower-pop? Stoner-slop? Beast-rock? Torche just begs to have some dumb genre named after them. As one of the heaviest, and certainly the catchiest, vocal bands in the domain of what might be called “metal,” that’s their burden to bear, and everyone’s pleasure to listen to. On Harmonicraft, their third LP since 2004, they strap on the jetpack propelled by pos-vibes and bongwater-fusion, and tear through a megalithic landscape of chest hairy riffage, and epic drooling vistas. It’s thirteen tracks of the most awesome beer commercial in history. And who doesn’t like beer?

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Length of time can be an odd thing. For instance, I recently watched M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender (because… I honestly don’t know why. I was feeling too good about my life? Eating a bowl of refried beans, hot sauce, and a potent laxative would have been too inconvenient?), and despite it being around ninety-three minutes long, I was shocked to look up and see it was 9:30 and not well past midnight when it was over. With horrid acting, a thoroughly punchable little kid as the lead, and some of the most convoluted and choppy plotting this side of Dune (without the aid of early Virginia Madsen, probably one of the greatest things mankind has ever done), I found myself trapped in a void of timelessness, an endless middle section of Zack Snyder’s trademark fast-slooooow-fast sequences (which Airbender rips off pretty shamelessly toward the end).

In contrast, I was in the same realm during Phobia’s Remnants of Filth, except it wasn’t a thrill ride on par with listening to a tax attorney talk about his or her day, but a proper album’s worth of songs that run just under twenty minutes. Good grind does this well, which is why Phobia have been around in some form as long as they have. Remnants of Filth is dense but never a slog, a fully-realized collection of ideas rattled off at a rapid clip.

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UPDATE, 3:30 pm: The PRP has alerted us to the fact that you can now stream these two tracks — check ‘em out below. Original review follows after the jump.

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Children of America: never let your dad think he’s too cool. Let him practice in the garage, but don’t start a band with him. To do so would break the natural order of things. I don’t know if Brendon Small has children, or if he thinks about jamming with them, but regardless, his first non-Dethklok album, under the “Galaktikon” banner, is effectively some stoked Dad’s oblivious, dorky, garage masterpiece. Assuming, that is, this dad was trained at Berklee and spent years as a guitar tech. Galaktikon is cool dad unleashed.

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Sludge, maybe more than any other genre in metal, benefits from aging. But not like a fine wine (partially because that’s a huge fucking cliché) and more like a bottle-conditioned beer. Sure, it’s pretty decent a little while after it’s bottled, but given enough time, it’ll bloom into something else altogether that leaves the original brew in the dust. Though there’s plenty of reason to be angry in your early 20s, there’s something to having a few decades under your belt, having seen some shit with sleeves of faded tattoos and a perpetually sad and lost-looking leathery face that just fits sludge’s MO just fine (by this line of thinking, the next eyehategod record will be the best thing they’ve ever done). And it’s why 16’s Deep Cuts From Dark Clouds works so well: it’s grown-up anger bowling over a generation of New Jacks. With all the charm and poise of indigestion, the band present a concise and effective slab of sludge metal. No frills, no surprises, and no bullshit.

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The members of trans-Atlantic punk foursome Split Cranium must have had Cheshire Cat grins on their faces as they bashed the shit out of their instruments and larynxes recording this, their eponymous debut. It’s easily the most straightforward, least introverted record that vocalist Aaron Turner has recorded since Isis disbanded, if not ever. Guitarist Jussi Lehtisalo, who’s also the “ring” leader of the mercurial Finnish rock outfit Circle, its offshoot Pharaoh Overlord and about three gajillion other mind-bending projects, is more often heard playing 15-minute free improv jams than the two-minute punk ditties here. And while bassist Samae Koskinen and drummer Jukka Kröger don’t exactly revel in abstractions with their other band Steel Mammoth, that band’s music is leagues more complex than these unrepentant blasts of d-beatery.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom recognises the calibre of several bands from the United Kingdom with the honour of a review, free of pretence.

Black Sabbath. Iron Maiden. Venom. Napalm Death. Carcass. Cathedral. Name a heavy metal sub-genre, and chances are there’s a British band that pioneered it. So how do the heavy Englishmen of today shape up? Do let’s see, shall we then!

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Admittedly fatigued of writing long-form album reviews for close to 15 years, I created the Bleeders’ Digest feature here at MetalSucks with the idea of giving a small number of records a thoughtful capsule review, leaving it open to all contributors. (Corey Mitchell has dutifully refined it for his purposes, resulting in what I consider one of the site’s best recurring features.) As my scope intentionally narrowed to hardcore, I came to accept that the bulk of the artists I sought to cover were largely releasing music in non-LP formats, which led to the creation of my Inch Scraper column, of which I hope you have enjoyed the (almost) weekly installments.

Still, I haven’t felt comfortable essentially shunning the albums coming out of the vibrant hardcore scene. And so, I’ve decided that the sensible thing to do would be to regularly select a healthy handful of LPs suited for pithy and potent assessment. With the first quarter of 2012 behind us, I’m pleased to present a roundup of the hardcore albums that have hit my mailbox these past three months. Make sense? Good. On with it then…

The finest Southern Lord style band not signed to Southern Lord, Rise And Fall return in fine ferocious form with Faith (Deathwish). Face-ripping pit beasts like “Deceiver” and “Hidden Hands” abound, and the breakdown on “Dead Weight” is especially crushing. As with 2009′s Our Circle Is Vicious, the Belgians remain unashamed of their sonic diversity. “Things Are Different Now” veers into nihilistic noise rock terrain well trod by Today Is The Day or Unsane, while the hulking post-metal of “Faith / Fate” bulldozes the record to a triumphant close.

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What’s wrong with being nineteen forever? If Municipal Waste’s new album The Fatal Feast answered that question, it would probably screech, “Not a god damn thing!”, give you the finger, run into a glass screen door, break its nose, stagger up from the floor, and point with a bloody finger to the liquor cabinet and ask for a shot of your stepdad’s gin. Depending on who you are, this is good clean fun or the worst night ever.

Maybe the most recognizable face of neo-thrash, Richmond’s second or third  finest is back with little deviation from their template, delivering another sesh of furiously galloping thrashterpieces, thrashulated direct from the thrashle of Count Thrashula. Also, this album thrashes.

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High on Fire’s last album, 2010’s Snakes for the Divine, was like a long night drinking cheap beer: starts out strong, has a lot of cool moments here and there, but after a while, it feels bloated and sluggish, and despite a strong finish, doesn’t have enough transcendent moments in between to justify the massive abdominal pain, dry mouth, and heightened photosensitivity at work the next morning. And while Snakes may not have literally given me stomach discomfort, the filler-to-killer ratio was tipped a little to far toward the former to live up to the mighty standard the band have set for themselves. Fortunately, a couple of years and a Sleep reunion later, they’ve rebounded in epic fashion with De Vermis Mysteriis, an embarrassment of Lovecraftian riches simultaneously dark, pummeling, and catchy. It’s an album of sludge-punk peaks and smoky psychedelic valleys. Even for a band as esteemed as High on Fire, it’s a career high point.

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I’m just going to come right out and say it: EMMURE have lost me as a fan :( Before you write me off as just another butthurt hater, hear me out. Trust me, I really WANTED to like this album! I spent the last two weeks mashing F5 on all my favorite deathcore download blogs, waiting with baited breath for the leak I knew would eventually get posted to some Russian 9th grader’s Blogspot with a lulzy name like DA SICKNEST DEATH AND CORES. I was prepared to wade through the broken English and links to dodgy spyware-laden filesharing sites, because I was a man on a mission: I had to have SLAVE 2 THA GAEM on day one!!

I watched this trailer like 10 times in a row and I was like ‘fuck my asshole that bounce riff goes so hard and it even starts with a BLEH! This album is going 2 be so fucking sick!!!!’

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Sorry for the delay. SXSW. Does it every year. A week-and-a-half of horror films, parties, BBQ, interviews, and heavy metal concerts kicks my ass every time. I need another week just to get my bearings straight afterwards. Hell, I even moderated a panel with Clown from Slipknot and Mike IX from Eyehategod where we showed pictures of decapitated naked men and dead deer. And we went on AFTER Bruce Springsteen!

As a result, I have just now caught up on my February metal listening and, man, all I can say is what a perfectly shitty month. Don’t get me wrong, the Bleeders I’ve chosen are all solid efforts. It’s just the rest of them, and there were a fuck-ton of ‘em (maybe 160 releases???), were astoundingly crappy. More Blowers than ever.

As usual, there will be bands on my Meh’ers and Blowers lists that you guys may like. I could care less if you think I’m an idiot for not liking them. I’d rather hear why you think those bands deserved to be ranked higher. Be an advocate, not an asshole.

I’m grateful that March is already looking way better with excellent releases from Meshuggah, Primitive Weapons, Every Time I Die, Ministry, Black Sheep Wall, and more.

Here are the February 2012 releases that got under my skin, burrowed their way into my brain, made my ears bleed, or simply tickled my unmentionables:

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I’ve been on a vegetarian kick for the past few weeks, eschewing cheeseburgers in favor of greens and healthier proteins. I don’t know whether or not I’m more irritable as a result, but I can relate more to vegan straight-edge act Noose. Following on last year’s demo, The War Of All Against All (React!) drops dogma like a cluster bomb. The lyrics to cuts like “Lex Talionis” depict a misanthropic worldview in which veganism is the only solution. I miss cheeseburgers.

People I trust tell me I’m supposed to give a shit about Dallas’ Power Trip. After checking out this self-titled 7″ (Lockin’ Out), I’m starting to catch on. Unafraid to hitch their wagon to the outdated crossover label, the band bring some wicked thrash back to the core. Far from the didactic leanings of purist re-thrashers, “Divine Apprehension” and the taut “Suffer No Fool” feel vital and liberated. The addition of “Brainwaves,” a Prong cover, reveals a crucial influence without strictly mimicking it.

“I’m having fingernails for breakfast.” With that, German unintentional comedy troupe Bitterness Exhumed stumble hard and hilariously out the gate on their eponymous debut (Wooaaargh). Sure, it’s easy to poke fun at lyrics not written in one’s native tongue, but the thesaurus-dependent word jumble of “Thoughts Of Denial” is as egregious as it is hackneyed. Musically, the quintet fare slightly better, with serviceable deathcore for those few who haven’t moved on yet.

-GS