Darkthrone
Circle The Wagons
Peaceville Records
8 March 2010

by Tom Dare

Legendary black metal pioneers Darkthrone began moving away from a conventional black metal style some time ago, and with Circle The Wagons, their fourteenth album, it could be argued they have stylistically abandoned black metal altogether. However, this would be a mistaken impression – because although this record initially sounds very much like a punk record, it still has the consummate feel of traditional Darkthrone.

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Mnemic
Sons of the System
Nuclear Blast
18 January 2010

by Andy Parker

The release of The Audio Injected Soul saw Denmark’s Mnemic receive serious acclaim from the metal world. Released in 2004, for many it was the teat desperately needed since the demise of the industrial nipple that was Fear Factory. Similar characteristics appeared and with single ‘Deathbox’ reaching charts worldwide the band quickly became a hot property.

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On Monday, Bedfordshire punk’n'rollers, The Smoking Hearts, self-released their debut album Pride of Nowhere on their own George Street Records. With 13 songs clocking in at under 30 minutes, it rattles around with the shitkicker spirit of Backyard Babies, if perhaps they hotwired a Mustang, sandblasted the gloss and glam clear off it, and drove it headlong into a demolition derby. It’s The Computers minus the doo-wop, and lasts just long enough that it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

With that in mind, we caught up with Simon Barker, one of the band’s guitarists, to find out amongst other things just why the band are intent on getting one of their song titles, ‘Thrash B4 Gash’, tattoo’d on as many folks as possible…

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Okay, okay – we’re a little late on this one. The Defiled actually released this video to ‘The Resurrectionts’ –  one of the centrepiece tracks from their excellent 1888 EP – last weekend. We just failed to mention it because we’ve either a) been out of the country, b) been moving house, and c) have been battling the technical gremlins all fucking week.

But our troubles really shouldn’t be your concern right now – it should be this video. Because this track is awesome.

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We shouldn’t need to tell you just how frickin’ awesome Dorset sludge-doom titans Ramesses are – after all, we pretty much demanded earlier this year that you go see them play live. And those among you that heeded our advice might’ve spotted that the band’s drummer, Mark Greening – also a former sticksmith for the mighty Electric Wizard, no less - not only has Billy, the puppet from the Saw movies, emblazoned across the front of his bass drum, but also has the marionette’s visage tattoo’d onto his very flesh. Yep, you guessed it – he’s a bit of a fan.

With Saw VI released on DVD and Blu-ray this week, we thought it was high time we sent Marek Steven to catch up with Mark to delve the depths of the drummer’s obsession with what is – believe it or not - the most successful horror movie franchise of all time.

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Ov Hell
The Underworld Regime
Indie Recordings
8 February 2010

By Tom Dare

Can we finally put the soap opera of the Gorgoroth name dispute behind us now? As interesting and legally important as the issue was, it is surely time to get back to the business at hand- making disturbing and evil black metal and generally upsetting people.

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Apologies in advance to any of the Thrash Hits faithful who decline to feast upon the beautifully chargrilled remains of our hopefully four-legged friends but…

We thought we were being mildly celebratory and vaguely humourous when we wished you a Happy Heavy Metal Pancake Day but over in LA, a couple of meat-savvy metalheads have created “LA’s only heavy metal gourmet burger truck” and they’ve called it… GRILL ‘EM ALL. Genius.

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What’s that you say? KISS? Playing to less than 800 people in London? Yep, and there was absolutely no way local longhair, Amit Sharma was going to miss the even that will one day be known as… KISSLINGTON.

When you think of seeing Kiss live, you probably envision four hairy men coated in make-up, singing songs about love and rock ‘n’ roll on a large arena stage. What you don’t expect is an ultra-intimate show at a venue you would normally go to see your mate’s band support some obscure European metallers with an indecipherable logo.

It’s hardly surprising that the 500 tickets available were snapped up within 60 seconds of being on sale and some ended up on eBay for stupid money. Im sure some die-hards out there wouldn’t have thought twice about splashing up to half a grand on seeing such a cult band in this surreal setting. You wouldn’t get this with Feeder now, would you?

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…Gallows, Skunk Anansie, Fightstar, Funeral For A Friend, Madina Lake, Family Force 5 and Apocalyptica. Anyone that’s read Thrash Hits for longer than five minutes will know that while Sonisphere’s announcement of some of those bands will have plastered a great big smile across our faces, there’s no way we can pretend that a couple of those bands are anything more than a big ol’ bag of shite. We’ll let you guess who is which.

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Here There Be Monsters
Inherent EP
Black Match Records
13 February 2010

by Lock Johnson

Genre-pigeonholes are the sad crux of the modern record reviewer. Can’t think of a decent opening gambit for your review of the latest record from Band X? Simple – just throw some half-baked tangent out there about whatever micro-niche you think you can shoehorn the band falls into. Fuck it – make up a new genre. No-one will know any different. They’ll just pretend they’ve already heard of post-swervecore just so they don’t look clueless. And it’ll piss off the shitcunt pedants on Wikipedia, at any rate.

Except that tactic won’t work for a band like Here There Be Monsters.

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