MacDara Conroy surveys the latest season's heavier offerings, and offers up his belated end-of-year favourites from 2013
MacDara Conroy surveys the landscape of heavy, noisy and interesting music over the past 12 months
"Weirdly enough for genre born out of the anarchist movement and thoroughly left-wing politics, crust punk is pretty conservative as extreme music styles go." - MacDara on Nuclear Death Terror's Chaos Reigns.
"...now that their lives no longer depend on the band, they can afford to take more risks with their music" - Macdara gets a taste for Pelican from their new EP Ataraxia/Taraxis.
"Overall, this is pretty much the essence of hardcore right here, and if you don't want to skip back to the start and rock these babies again immediately, I'm not sure you and I can be friends."
'It's a record for the angry' - Niall McGuirk on Sect's second LP, No Cure For Death
"Dopesmoker is the entire history of the metal riff, slowed down, and deconstructed. It is, in fact, the entire history of the planet, of humanity." - Dara Higgins finds enlightenment in the reissue of Sleep's Dopesmoker.
'Sunn O))) is impossible to jog along to' - Niall McGuirk on Sunn O))) & Ulver's recent collaboration,Terrestrials
'They were angry, they felt ignored and they were ready to sing about it' - Niall McGuirk on Southern Lord's recent reissuing of The Offenders' Endless Struggle & We Must Rebel LPs
Relapse Records' Tombs & Southern Lord's The Secret play a four date Irish tour this weekend, visiting Belfast, Dublin, Cork & Galway.