Fuck me, there is a LOT of music out in the world.
You ever tape songs off the radio? (Yes, at least two of the words in that sentence are enough to paint me as old and crusty as balls.) Record over one tape long enough and you would find ghosts underneath the song. The first half-second of a jingle. The station’s bumper. Maybe even the same song currently playing, but off by a fraction of a beat.
Can you feel that energy? That’s where Fuck You Friday lives, in the nervous half-twilight of false memory and intrusive capitalism. In the place where sounds are everywhere and you just pick them up before you know what they say. Listen:
“YOU KNOW WHERE YOU ARE? YOU’RE IN THE [FUCK YOU FRIDAY] JUNGLE, BABY. /
YOU’RE GONNA [GET ‘FUCK YOU’ SCREAMED AT YOU BY SOME DUMMY UNTIL YOU] DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE.”
Here are some things we would have taped from the radio. What can you listen for under them?
Fuck you, why not go listen to some of THIS music?
Carnosus – Visions of Infinihility
Feels like saline eyedrops advertisements are getting a little too intense with this cover art, but I have precisely zero marketing degrees, so what do I know? Anyway, Don fuckin’ Draper ought to wander on off to Sweden and try to work his bullshit on Carnosus and then go cry over a case of Schlitz because this shit sells itself.
Visions of Infinihility is an outrageous explosion of energy and technicality. Like, if you pulled the pin on a grenade and chucked it into a pail full of dead sardines but then also used an ultra-high speed camera and it turns out that each pulped li’l fishy flailed and arced out of the pail in a mathematically identical trajectory? That’s kinda what Carnosus is doing.
Fuck you, I’ll measure death metal in fish if I want to. More than anything, though, Carnosus sounds hungry on this album. Their death metal is tight, mean, and feral, but it’s also a whole goddamn lot of fun. They touch on the early technical death metal of Atheist, Death, and Cynic, the ironclad melodeath of Edge of Sanity or Heartwork-era Carcass, as well as more modern incarnations of tech death like Gorod, Anata, or Arsis.
Riffs are snaky, bass is rubbery thick and steps out for melodic leads, drums hammer and tumble with effortless finesse, and the vocalist turns in a massive, charismatic performance that includes black metal snarling, hoarse thrashy barking, and sewer gutturals. This album is so good that if you aren’t listening to it right now I will consider it a personal slight and attack on my honor.
Molten Gold – Futures Past
You know how sideview mirrors are always bossing you around about things being closer than they appear? Like, take a hike, mirror; what if I am just farther away from shit than YOU think I am? Idiot.
Anyway, Molten Gold. I guess the mirror was at least right about this one, inasmuch as when you listen to Molten Gold’s absolutely shit-hot LP Futures Past, the 1970s are closer to you than they appear. Molten Gold plays bracingly vintage hard rock full of organs, synths, and piano, bringing the full-on ‘70s vibe of Uriah Heep, Deep Purple, early Yes, and even a bit of Allman Brothers.
The tones are right. The tunes are righteous. The vocals come courtesy of Magister Templi’s Abraxas d’Ruckus. Did I stutter? If you have heard Magister Templi and you did not just immediately shit out your credit card number in the general direction of Norway to order this album then what the HELL. Abraxas sings the everliving SHIT out of these songs, and the guitars soar and noodle and the bass thwobs and thrumps and the drums shimmy shuffle shwoop and simmer. It’s fucking ALL THERE.
Friends, fuck YOU, I tell you that I was singing along to this album the other day when an airbrushed van drove by and now that van is pregnant. “Silverback” sounds a little like Zeppelin’s “Thank You” if it had grown some goddamned hair on its chest. “Bleeding Over” kicks off with some porny funk guitar and then shifts into a lane with Sweden’s Graveyard. “Moonstone” does exactly the things you want a long-ass closing tune to do. The first two songs have miraculous choruses. I am not sure what you are still doing reading these dumb words.
Do you want to know this album now? Or do you want to wait 20 years until you see a video of a wizened Mikael Åkerfeldt stumbling across the LP in a record shop and praising it as a hidden gem? Quit being a LOSER and get with it NOW.
Electrikeel – Straight Outta Depths
No, I also don’t know if or why the album title references N.W.A., but I’m pretty sure that Spain’s Electrikeel is not just a vessel to allow the reincarnated spirit of Eazy-E to play some wild-eyed thrash metal. (But would I listen to “Fuck tha Pizza Thrash” or “Palm Muting Discretion Iz Advised” or “Gang(vocal)sta Gang(vocal)sta”? B, pleeeeeeeeease.)
Hello! I see you trying to inch away slowly. Pay attention, please, because this is good music and your idiot ass needs good music. Electrikeel. Spain. Thrash. Debut album. Rips like hell. Those are the basics and I resent you for insisting on more.
Electrikeel’s thrash is built on a classic chassis with a sturdy modern production and a craving for speed. The amount of killer riffs and licks and sweet leads and solos is all the more impressive coming out of a trio, and for a debut album Straight Outta Depths is not shy about swinging for the fences with its ambitions.
It sometimes feels like it’s chasing after the hunger of such latter-day thrash rebirths as Exodus’s Tempo of the Damned, Kreator’s Enemy of God, or Overkill’s Ironbound, but it also flirts with some of the fire of Exmortus, early Vektor, or even their fellow Spaniards Körgull the Exterminator. This is a wild, diverse thrash album that goes from bouncy, classic thrash rhythms to careening black/thrash spite to punky sass. If tha police try to talk some trash about this thrash, well… you know what to say.
Iliaster – Ritos de Muerte
It is a truth universally acknowledged [take a hike, Jane Austen] that smoking is bad for you. Let us both, you and I, be grateful that Colombia’s Iliaster did not get that message, because Ritos de Muerte fucking smokes. This is the debut EP from this Colombian project, with everything handled by Cortex (also of Colombian rough and raw black/thrashers Schizophrenia), and across these meticulously crafted 17 minutes, the name of the game is inviting, detailed death metal with both blackened and melodic touches.
The real highlight across the three main tracks is Cortex’s fluid guitar playing, which moves between styles from taut death metal riffing to mournful leads to stout, trad metal-leaning riffs to tasteful shredding. There’s a slightly mystical, ritualistic feel to the music, which, when coupled with the melodic guitar (and nicely active bass), might remind you of luminaries like Innsmouth, the Chasm, early Rotting Christ, or Sacriphyx.
One of the coolest bits of the EP is on the closer, “Quintaesencia,” where Cortex weaves melodic licks into the gruff death metal in a way that almost sounds like early Morbid Angel with an Iron Maiden influence, so fuck you, of course I am going to call it “Altars of Can I Play with Madness” and you can’t stop me.
Solemn Imagist – Into the Night that Never Fades
The exact number of islands in the archipelago nation of Indonesia is different depending on which survey or agency you believe. A 2002 survey by Indonesia’s equivalent of NASA gave the figure as 18,307. It can hardly be coincidence, then, that the US government’s federal poverty level in 2022 for a family of two was $18,310. What else is Big Island hiding from us? (No, not that big island.)
Fuck me, this is misleading on a couple counts: most of us are not paid our wages in islands, and Solemn Imagist, despite hailing from Indonesia, is a band-family of one, not two. And yes, I know you came to this website for oceanography and economics, but I am sorry to say that now I will talk a little bit about music.
Solemn Imagist’s debut album is diligently, proudly, and almost joyfully 100% imitative. That is to say, if the evocative cover art didn’t give you a little clue, the music here is a lovingly rendered facsimile of early symphonic black metal. So, if the archipelago in your nether-regions twitches in time with In the Nightside Eclipse, Limbonic Art’s Moon in the Scorpio, Dimmu Borgir’s Stormblåst, or Arcturus’s Aspera Hiems Symfonia, prepare to cradle thyself gently.
So all I’m saying is, next time you ask for a raise and your boss gives you shit, tell them to either start paying you in Indonesian islands or shut up and listen to these glistening hymns to the ravening dark of grim and mystic aeons.
Pest Control – Don’t Test the Pest
It was probably the right call to name the genre “crossover thrash” instead of “turnover thrash,” and as a result we are not here to bury Pastry Control’s Don’t Taste the Pastry but rather to praise Pest Control’s Don’t Test the Pest. Friends, cinnamon roll-mans, countrymen, I guess I can’t really tell you exactly what to do with your ears, but as for your eyes, if you can look at Pest Control’s cover art here, with its lurid, Repka-esque colors, and not immediately want to hit play, might I kindly suggest a “fuck you”?
Just like James Hetfield’s picking arm lobbing a steak and kidney pudding at Maggie Thatcher’s grave, Pest Control are A) thrashy, B) British, and C) excellent. Don’t Test the Pest is brash, snotty, aggressive crossover thrash in the lineage of DRI, Cro-Mags, Crumbsuckers et al, but there’s an even meaner metallic Slayer edge at times (as on the almost “South of Heaven” opening to album closer “The Great Deceiver”), and vocalist Leah’s ferocious performance is indebted to Détente’s Dawn Crosby and Sentinel Beast’s Debbie Gunn.
This debut LP is 21 minutes of uproarious, no-bullshit, fuck-you thrash energy. The title track and “Struck Down” are particularly mighty, but even when Pest Control rolls into rudimentary punkish hollering, the songs are mighty, the production powerful, the performances oozing with sass. I would not recommend trying to use a Kaiser roll to stab a Caesar salad, but if you must, think fondly of Pest Control.
