It’s halfway through the year, and summer has just begun. For many of us, summertime is prime heavy metal season. There’s something about cranking up the riffs when the sun is shining and meat is sizzlin’ on the grill. It’s quite possible that you already have a stack of records you plan to spin all summer: twenty-year classics like Transylvanian Hunger and Tales From the Thousand Lakes or maybe new thunder from Incantation or Gamma Ray.
But perhaps as we head boldly into the future you might wonder what pleasures from the past you might have missed. Well, have no fear, because here at Last Rites, we’ve put our ears together to find 25 albums that you could easily have missed but are definitely worthy of your attention. We can practically guarantee you* that you’ll find at least something here you haven’t heard yet; maybe even your new favorite summer jam.
The list will be presented over the course of this week, five albums per day. Without further prologue, here’s the first set.
• • • •
HAVE A NICE LIFE – THE UNNATURAL WORLD
I have no idea what Have a Nice Life is doing. From an analytic perspective, I cannot explain what this music is. It has beautiful singing, but it sounds like it’s coming from halfway down a mineshaft that may also be on fire. It has tortured atmospherics and unsettling noise, but it’s an absolute pleasure to listen to, and its hooks are deceptively deep. It has lyrics like “Cut my wrists, slit my throat / Take this body and string it up,” but they resonate like deeply wounded truths rather than melodramatic posturing. In part because it so doggedly resists classification, it is an album that the listener can approach again and again through almost any lens imaginable.
Alongside the new album from Wreck & Reference, Have a Nice Life is evidence of a stupidly great year for its label, The Flenser. The Unnatural World is pop music from a hellish parallel dimension; it’s heavy metal under gaseous sedation in Heaven’s antechamber; it is a grandiose vision of decay and remorse that glorifies the very degradations it so effectively mirrors. It is a beautiful calamity – just like life.
• • • •
BLACK MAGIC – WIZARD’S SPELL
Yessssss. Sniff the cold, ebon horn of thine Master, ye damnable whelps! Norway’s Black Magic has arrived, and they are ready to parrr-tayyy. If your idea of a partying involves crushing empty tallboys on your forehead and getting plastered in a cemetery, that is.
Everything I’ve seen anyone bitch about with regard to this album is actually favorable: crudely drawn Satanic shepherd rising upon yon cover? Check. Hackneyed name? Sorry, Brown Magic doesn’t have the same flare. And yet another dose of blackened shpeed metuhl crudely yanked von ze archives? Gimme gimme gimme, gimme some more.
If you want originality, go build a goddamn burger your way at a ding dong Denny’s. But if your pants tighten at the mere whisper of something that sounds like the rawest collision between Merciful Fate, Di’Anno-era Maiden and Slayer circa 1983, get this pig in your belly.
NOTE: LP includes three tunes from the band’s previous Reap of Evil demo. Still good, but replaces most all the melody with straight-up Helltic Hammerfrost worship.
• • • •
PRONG – RUINING LIVES
Prong was so excited for you all to hear their new album that they made it available for streaming via Spotify and other online services well in advance of its release – yet you ungrateful pricks still couldn’t be bothered to listen.
That’s too bad, really, as Ruining Lives just might be the most purely metal sounding thing Prong has ever done. There is nary a hint of their past industrial influence to be found, and there is less focus on laying down a heavy groove than on just being heavy. There are times when this feels like a straight-up thrash record (“The Barriers,” “Chamber of Thought,” “The Book of Change”) as well as flashes back to the immortal Cleansing era (“Remove, Separate Self,” “Absence of Light”).
It’s funny to look back at the praise I heaped upon Carved Into Stone and even Power of the Damager (to a lesser extent), when I used phrases like “return to form” and “back on track,” because they both pale in comparison to Ruining Lives. There isn’t a bad track in the bunch, and you’ll be hard pressed to pick a favorite because they’re all damn good. It’s fitting that the release coincides with the 20th anniversary of Cleansing, because this might be as close as they ever get to topping it.
• • • •
COMET CONTROL – COMET CONTROL
From the ashes of the late, lamented (by me, at least) Quest For Fire rise Comet Control. On their self-titled Tee Pee debut, this Toronto band takes the heavy, fuzzy, psychedelic garage rock they explored in QFF and both amplifies and hones that sound. Gone are the sometimes sloppy jammy bits, and Comet Control is all the better band for it. The songs are sharper and catchier, yet somehow heavier as well; the distortion comes in thick, reverberating walls that most often parallel the melodies like hedgerows on a road. This isn’t metal, nor is it stoner rock. It’s fuzz worship, and these folks are worthy prophets of what I hope will be a growing congregation.
• • • •
TORCH RUNNER – COMMITTED TO THE GROUND
Hailing from North Carolina, Torch Runner play grind that is so crusty it will ask you for a cigarette at a show that was thirty bucks a ticket. You had money for that five-dollar PBR, but you can’t afford smokes?
I digress… Frills aren’t the name of the game with Committed to the Ground. Twenty minutes of scorching of your ass with nary a filler moment in sight, however- this is where you’ll want to sign up. Torch Runner bring fond memories of Nasum cut with much less fond memories of venues having their plumbing ripped out of the walls during a mosh session gone awry. If you like your bass riding on top of the guitar like a rhino riding another rhino, this is definitely the album to pretend like you picked up the day it came out. If that doesn’t sound like your cup o’ tea, then I guess you didn’t like Jumanji as much as I did.
Part two drops tomorrow.
