Featured Releases: March 25, 2024

Joro Path: Golden Lines cassette (Total Recall Recordings) Total Recall Recordings, a new label from Athens, Georgia, taps hometown talent for their first pair of releases, including this 4-song weirdo ripper from Joro Path. Like the Death Rites demo I also wrote about this week, Golden Lines is bathed in the aesthetic of 80s Japan. I like that while Joro Path likes the hard stuff—your Mobs, Zouo, Execute, etc.—they also embrace the left-of-center quality many of those groups had, just totally nailing the vibe of “obscure flexi from 1985.” Maybe you need an appreciation of that stuff to understand where Joro Path is coming from, but as someone who has a very healthy appreciation for that sound, I think this totally rules.

Blind Ambition: Demo 2023 cassette (self-released) I don’t know much about Amsterdam’s Blind Ambition, but I’m tempted to draw inferences based on their sound. I see them as part of a long tradition of bands featuring people who were weaned on hardcore, but want to get back to their punk roots. Maybe they want to create a sound with more musical colors rather than something focused single-mindedly on intensity. However, while they embrace melody as composers, they still play like a hardcore band, with lock-step grooves, bruising downstrokes, brisk tempos, and a big, aggressive sound. Blind Ambition makes me think of contemporary bands like Neighborhood Brats and Consensus Madness, and like those bands, they draw a lot from early Southern Californian punk, both the proto-hardcore Dangerhouse bands (the singer sings a lot like Alice Bag) and the beach-y punk bands like the Adolescents, D.I., and especially Legal Weapon (not so much in the vocals, but in the way there’s a touch of Johnny Thunders in the guitarist’s Agnew-isms). Great songs, powerful performance… this ticks all the boxes.

Satanism: In Conspiracy with... cassette (Final Return Records) The label’s description for this New York band’s cassette invokes “the golden era of Evil Metal,” and that hits the nail on the head. They mention Venom and Slayer’s Show No Mercy as influences on Satanism, and I’d add Celtic Frost that list, too. The songs move between modes of sleazy and savage, the band equally comfortable in both. The recording is very vintage too, with copious reverb and an unpolished yet heavy and powerful sound. The lyricist isn’t winning a Pulitzer or anything (one song goes “I hate you / I hate you / I hate you / fuck you”), but the rawness and the confrontational quality suits the music. I like that it’s 7 tracks too, feeling more like a long EP or cassette album than just a demo. This will definitely get some horns in the air.

Somnol: Brain Death cassette (Final Return Records) This debut EP from NYC death metal duo Somnol arrives a full nine years after their 2014 demo tape. Somnol features Evan Radigan from the Rival Mob on drums and vocals and Chris Bowman from Ajax on strings, but other than an appreciation of rawness and brutality, you can’t hear much of the members’ hardcore backgrounds in Somnol. Actually, when the tape started and the intro for “Brain Death” kicked off, I was taken aback by the musicianship. Plenty of punks these days are exploring their interest in underground metal, but the intro for that track is this modal riff that sounds like something that could have appeared on Death’s Human LP. That only last a few seconds, though, before Somnol dives headfirst into straightforward brutality with some gnarly early Morbid Angel-style pummel. While Brain Death remains in that more brutal and straightforward mode for most of its five tracks, the musical ambition and sophisticated sense of composition is apparent throughout, making Somnol sound a lot more interesting than your typical old school death metal throwback. The recording is a big part of that too, with Will Killingsworth’s gritty but powerful recording successfully keeping any kind of polish at bay.

Death Rites: Demo 2024 cassette (self-released) This band describes themselves as “LA METAL PUNK” on the j-card of this, their debut release. While Death Rites’ sound is cloaked in the sensibilities of super raw shit like GISM and Parabellum, it reminds me of very early Metallica (like No Life ’Til Leather and Kill ‘Em All) in that the songs and performances are influenced by the relentless forward drive of UK82 punk. It’s also coming from a similar place as the English Dogs circa Forward into Battle or Sacrilege on Within the Prophecy, i.e. raised on GBH and Discharge, but also acknowledging ‘tallica kicks ass. The riffs are fully metal, but the vocals are punk as fuck. The singer sounds like they’re influenced by 80s Japanese punk and the physical tape recalls an artifact of 80s underground metal tape trading in pretty much every way, right down to its length (three songs in about seven minutes, the perfect amount to fill that awkward space on the C90 you’re sending to your pen pal in Saskatoon or Bremen or whatever). Very cool.

Phosphore: S/T cassette (Fight for Your Mind Records) Eight-track demo tape from this band from the d-beat haven of Bordeaux, France. The scene in that city is so fertile that there’s a full spectrum of d-beat flavors, ranging from the more polished and rock-influenced to the more brutal and guttural. Phosphore is on the latter end of the spectrum, with simple and aggressive riffs grounded in the Swedish Shitlickers / Anti-Cimex school of Discharge-inspired hardcore. I love Phosphore’s mid-paced songs too, which are even more blatantly Discharge-inspired. Phosphore plays with the confidence of veterans, taking relatively simple riffs and selling the fuck out of them, their locked-in playing and clear vision shining through the slightly fuzzy, 80s-sounding recording. It would be easy to scoff at this, saying it’s been done before, but for me this recording feels exciting and alive with timeless hardcore punk energy.