positive punk

8.08.2023

IRON MAIDEN

"senjutsu"

Year: 2021

Country: UK

City: London

Label: Universal

Format: CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 10

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"the bookof souls"

Year: 2015

Label: Universal

Format: 2 x CD, 3 x LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 70 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"the final frontier"

Year: 2010

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 10

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"a matter of life and death"

Year: 2006

Label: Universal

Format: CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 10

Time: 70 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"dance of death"

Year: 2003

Label: Universal

Format: CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 60 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"brave new world"

Year: 2000

Label: Universal

Format: CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 10

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"virtual XI"

Year: 1998

Label: Universal

Format: CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 8

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"the X factor"

Year: 1995

Label: Universal

Format: CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"fear of the dark"

Year: 1992

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 12

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"no prayer for the dying"

Year: 1990

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 10

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"seventh son of seventh"

Year: 1988

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 8

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"somewhere in time"

Year: 1986

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 8

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"powerslave"

Year: 1984

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 8

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"piece of mind"

Year: 1983

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 9

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"the number of the beast"

Year: 1982

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 8

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"killers"

Year: 1981

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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"idem"

Year: 1980

Label: Universal

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 9

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Heavy Metal

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7.29.2023

EXHUMED

"gore metal"

Year: 1998

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 13

Time: 30 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

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"all guts, no glory"

Year: 2011

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 10

Time: 30 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

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"necrocracy"

Year: 2013

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 9

Time: 30 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

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"anatomy is destiny"

Year: 2003

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 30 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

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"slaughtercult"

Year: 2000

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 13

Time: 30 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

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"death revenge"

Year: 2017

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 14

Time: 38 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

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"horror"

Year: 2019

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 15

Time: 29 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

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"to the dead"

Year: 2022

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 10

Time: 30 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

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"beyond the dead"

Year: 2023

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 10

Time: 20 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Death Metal

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7.23.2023

BIRDFLESH

"sickness in the north"

Year: 2023

Country: Sweden

City: Växjö

Label: Everlasting

Format: CD, cassette

Tracks: 23

Time: 29 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Grindcore

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"extreme graveyard tornado"

Year: 2019

Label: Everlasting

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 24

Time: 30 min.

Genre: roock

Style: Grindcore

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"the farmers' wrath"

Year: 2008

Label: Obscene Prod.

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 26

Time: 30 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Grindcore

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"mongo musicale"

Year: 2006

Label: Candlelight

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 25

Time: 34 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Grindcore

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"night of the ultimate mosh"

Year: 2002

Label: Spikerot

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 22

Time: 28 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Grindcore

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7.17.2023

CLOUD RAT

"threshold"

Year: 2022

Country: US

City: Mt Pleasant, MI

Label: Artoffact

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 15

Time: 30 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Grindcore

Grindcore isn’t typically about the journey. There’s rarely enough runway to get off the ground, the most potent albums in grindcore maximizing both efficiency and intensity in increments of 90 seconds or less. That doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t, do more with it, but that baseline of bloodthirsty attack is mandatory for even its most artful savagery. Michigan’s Cloud Rat maintain this balance better than most, their body of work featuring few moments of respite (save for maybe their darkwave record) amid a constant onslaught of instrumental violence. Yet as songwriters, they’re anything but a meat-and-potatoes bunch recklessly bashing away—their razorblade raveups are always stunningly unpredictable, frequently ending up in musical territory that’s a great distance from where they began.

Cloud Rat’s 2019 album Pollinator proved to be a personal best from the group incorporating moments of post-punk melody and soaring climaxes amid their technically precise, virulently potent rippers. Its follow-up, the similarly explosive Threshold, maintains that unrelenting level of speed and aggression while offering a set of songs that never stop moving, both in terms of tempo and how frequently they embrace new musical ideas. Yet there’s a return to a seething rawness here that feels like a slight step back from accessibility into something that feels more ill-tempered and dangerous. Cloud Rat could always do a lot more than kick your ass, but here, the ass-kicking is as brutal as it’s ever been.

Threshold isn’t a back-to-basics album so much as a deeper focus on the more hostile and abrasive elements that comprise Cloud Rat’s sound, the band honing in on riffs that draw blood and rhythms that that fracture bone. The tempo shifts in opening track “Aluminum Branches” alone are a masterclass in proficient brutality, though in its most immediate moments, it’s a corker of a hardcore song as well. They go for the throat with power-chord punch on “Cusp,” breaking momentarily for a brief passage of abstract ambience, embrace a darker, Thou-like sludge-doom majesty on “12-22-09,” fire up the d-beats on “Imaging Order,” and invite some of their gothic influences back in on the majestic “Kaleidoscope.”

Yet even in the most visceral songs there often comes a moment of melodic glory, which occurs halfway through the highlight “Corset,” offering a moment of triumph amid well controlled chaos. It’s in these moments where Cloud Rat offer a contradiction to the idea of grindcore living only in the harrowing moment. These are still the sounds of aural antagonism and catharsis borne of open wounds, but they offer a glimpse beyond the immediate terror and into the pink and purple skies just over the horizon (*Review by Jeff Terich ).

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"pollinator"

Year: 2019

Label: Artoffact

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 14

Time: 18 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Grindcore

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"qliphoth"

Year: 2015

Label: Halo of Flies

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 17

Time: 40 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Grindcore

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"moksha"

Year: 2013

Label: Halo Of Flies

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 13

Time: 29 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Grindcore

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"idem"

Year: 2010

Label: Artoffact

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 12

Time: 18 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Grindcore

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7.14.2023

ILL NIÑO

"Revolution Revolución"

Year: 2001

Country: US

City: New Jersey

Label: Warner

Format: CD

Tracks: 13

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Nu Metal

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"confession"

Year: 2003

Label: Universal

Format: CD

Tracks: 14

Time: 50 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Nu Metal

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"one nation underground"

Year: 2005

Label: Warner

Format: CD

Tracks: 13

Time: 45 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Nu Metal

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7.11.2023

MASTODON

"remission"

Year: 2002

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 60 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Sludge Metal

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"leviathan"

Year: 2004

Label: Relapse

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 10

Time: 46 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Sludge Metal

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"blood mountain"

Year: 2006

Label: Reprise

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 12

Time: 60 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Sludge Metal

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"crack the skye"

Year: 2009

Label: Reprise

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 7

Time: 60 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Sludge Metal

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"once more 'round the sun"

Year: 2014

Label: Reprise

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 60 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Sludge Metal

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"emperor of sand"

Year: 2017

Label: Reprise

Format: CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 60 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Sludge Metal

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"hushed and grim"

Year: 2021

Label: Reprise

Format: CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 15

Time: 60 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Sludge Metal

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7.08.2023

HAWKWIND

"idem"

Year: 1970

Label: Liberty

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 7

Time: 40 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Space Rock

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"warrior on theedge of time"

Year: 1975

Country: UK

City: London

Label: United Artists

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 11

Time: 60 min.

Genrre: rock

Style: Space Rock

Formed in 1969, Hawkwind are a prolific and pioneering space-rock group from the UK. Within weeks of their formation, the band had made a name for themselves on the free festival circuit and would perform live without fee wherever they were able. By the time of their 1971 album 'X In Search Of Space', Hawkwind were infamous for their science fiction themed music and theatrical concerts, the latter renowned as exhibitions of pulsing electronics, dazzling light shows, LSD consumption and (from 1971-75) a nude dancer in the form of Stacia Blake .

Despite a near-constant revolving door of members, Founder member Dave Brock has been the sole mainstay and the core of the band since its inception and has steered the band from its psychedelic rock roots into flirtations with heavy metal, new wave, ambient and techno. Notable contributors have included "accidental" bassist Lemmy (who would go on to greater fame with Motörhead), Cream (2)'s Ginger Baker and science fiction writer Michael Moorcock.

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"X in search of space"

Year: 1971

Label: United Artists

Format: CD, LP

Tracks: 6

Time: 50 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Space Rock

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"space ritual"

Year: 1973

Label: United Artists

Format: 2 x CD, 2 x LP

Tracks: 16

Time: 87 min.

Genre: rock

Style: Space Rock

Crucial reissue from a band whose disorienting electronic drones and motorik rhythms were akin to their Krautrock contemporaries, but who also could make a racket as unrelentingly punchy and violent as anything from the Stooges' Fun House.

It's been said that the span between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars was science fiction's downer period, with the grim silliness of TV shows like Space: 1999 and dystopian unhappy-ending movies like Soylent Green and The Omega Man dampening the optimism of NASA's space exploration with constant warnings of a gloomy future and post-apocalyptic isolation. But it was a golden age for sci-fi in pop music: Between the unbridled creativity of Sun Ra's Philadelphia years, the development of Parliament's intergalactic mythos, and David Bowie being David Bowie, there were plenty of artists who saw something promising outside the bounds of Earth.

And aside from Sun Ra, few artists captured that sense of mind-warping, my-God-it's-full-of-stars astronomical mysticism in their music like Hawkwind. With their tendency towards extended jams full of disorienting electronic drones and drummer Simon King's motorik rhythms, they had a certain creative kinship with their Krautrock contemporaries. But their racket could also be as unrelentingly punchy and violent as anything from the Stooges' Fun House, especially considering guitarist Dave Brock's Ron Asheton-esque affinity for blistering, wah-wah-drenched riffs and Nik Turner's freeform sax outbursts, which were more Steve MacKay than John Gilmore. It was all put to good use by their lyrics and their philosophy, much of which was inspired by the writing of sci-fi author and sometime collaborator Michael Moorcock, and typically themed around interstellar travel, metaphysics and Pythagoras' theory of celestial-mathematical "music of the spheres."

If this all seems a bit dense and weird and impenetrable, rest assured that Hawkwind's arcanum isn't too difficult to get caught up in, especially via their circa-1972 lineup-- which delivered plenty of straightforward rock riffage amidst all the special effects and featured, amongst the aforementioned personnel, a former rhythm guitarist turned bassist named Lemmy Kilmister. Space Ritual, recorded over two separate concert dates in London and Liverpool in December 1972, is a solid effort at capturing what made Hawkwind a cult favorite, and the Collector's Edition pads it out just enough to keep things from being too overwhelming. The set has been expanded from its original "88 minutes of brain damage" (as a 1973 print ad hilariously put it) to just over two hours, with most of the added material devoted to a few alternate takes and the restoration of a few minutes here and there that had to be cut for the original United Artists double LP. (A bonus DVD includes the whole shebang in Dolby, and despite it being in PAL format, North American viewers should be able to hear it on their PCs or DVD players.) The flow of the concert typically alternates between spoken-word passages about time, space and the future, delivered with ominous camp by resident poet Robert Calvert, and extended, high-velocity performances of material from their '72 album Doremi Fasol Latido, with a handful of non-album tracks thrown in for good measure. Everything you need to glean from this album can be heard in the first 20 minutes: The Electric Ladyland-esque hue and cry of the distortion-heavy opening cut "Earth Calling", the 10-minute "T.V. Eye"-gone-starfighting assault of "Born to Go", the rumbling vortex of bass in "Down Through the Night" and the Calvert space-voyage poem "The Awakening" ("Landing itself was nothing/We touched upon a shelf of rock/selected by the automind/And left a galaxy of dreams behind...") ...continue to read this review by Nate Patrin .

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