Beard of Wolves
From: Connor’s Quay, North Wales
Lazy equation: Pulled Apart By Horses - guitars x Future of the Left-esque Welsh Weirdness
URL: Facebook // Bandcamp

Thrash Hits verdict: Employing the Death From Above 1979 template of doing away with guitars, North Wales two-piece, Beard of Wolves produce dirty rock ‘n’ roll propelled by pounding drums and fuzzy bass lines. They also share a similar penchant for combining the bizarre with pop sensibilities as fellow Welsh men Future of the Left and McClusky before them.

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Describe your sound in 3 words.
SEX/SMASH/BASH

How did you meet?
Through skating and drinking cider in parks from a young age.

What made you want to start a band?
Both our previous bands had just split up and we are both fans of heavier music, so we just bashed it out and here we are. That and the babes. We love the rock babes. 

Where did the name come from?
It was suggested by a friend as a joke, but we didn’t think it was funny, we thought it was the coolest fucking name ever. And it is.

What are your musical influences?
It varies between us both, but we are influenced by bands like QOTSA, DZ Deathrays, Future of the left, Metronomy, Pulled Apart By Horses and The Bloody Beetroots. Something thats loud and filthy always works well.

Why no guitars?
Because neither of us can play guitar. And guitars are for girls. And sometimes boys. But mainly girls. 

So far, what has been the best thing about being in a band?
We signed a single deal with TOO PURE records in January. That was like a dream come true. And playing along side really cool bands like DZ Deathrays, HorseFight and Baby Godzilla. Those guys work hard and play HARDER.

With which band would your dream tour be?
Hands down Queens of the Stone Age. Coolest fucking band ever. Every god damn day.

What bands do you consider as part of your scene or as your peers?
Some excellent music is being formed in North Wales these days, we are privileged to be apart of such an incredible movement. Notable bands to check out are Doppleganger, Falls, The Bluebottle Veins, Obelisks, Mother Of Six, We Are Animal and Maters in France.

What is the most metal thing you’ve done?
We’re not that crazy really, although I did kick my drum kit off the stage into the crowd at a gig in Liverpool in a thunderous hulk like rage once. It felt good. The crowd looked light frightened rabbits. That also felt good.

Why should everyone listen to Beard of Wolves?
Because your parents won’t like us, which makes us INSTANTLY cool. Plus it’s good music to fuck to. Sexy music for sexy people. 

Tell us a joke.
Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
Because he was dead. 

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Beard Of Wolves released a self-titled EP in March 2013 and have started on their debut album, which is being produced by Tom Bellamy of The Cooper Temple Clause fame. Remember them? Apparently, “Its going to be RAD, totally ghostbusters.” Sure, guys.

There are so many regular features about what sick tattoos bands have got and what awesome trainers they’re wearing, but what about their haircare regime? How do they get their hair looking so cool? HOW? You were thinking it, so we asked it.

What shampoo do you use, Loz Taylor of While She Sleeps?

Loz: “I don’t do anything with it. I wash it with what I’ve got and I let it dry naturally. One day when I might have some money I’ll treat myself to a bit of a shampoo but at the moment I’m chilling with whatever I can find.”

Mat: “We’re not endorsed by any shampoo companies yet. I prefer Aussie personally. I like the smell of that shit.”

Sam Carter from Architects uses that.

Loz: “Sam’s got nice hair, hasn’t he.”

Yes, he does, but so do you, Loz. As long as you keep those split ends under control.

Deafheaven
Sunbather
Deathwish Inc
10 June 2013

by Raziq Rauf

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re being made fun of? That unease where some obnoxious prick knows something that you don’t and you don’t really know what to do because you’re not sure. They’re being too subtle, but you know it’s not quite right – it’s too unfamiliar. You don’t know quite how to fight back because you know that if you say the wrong thing, they’ll just laugh at you.

Those obnoxious pricks are Deafheaven. Their weapon of torment is Sunbather. It’s bloody great.

Pink is not a natural colour for a black metal album. It looks like a psychedelic electropop album. It’s not. It’s black metal. It may fit into that sub-genre of transcendental black metal coined by Liturgy’s Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, but it’s black metal alright. Is it satire in its highest form? Are Deafheaven using a slice of their artistic output to mock the trver-than-thou naysayers? Possibly.

The idea that someone that isn’t ostensibly “black metal” – wearing corpse paint and leather cuffs – can’t make a decent black metal album is, of course, ridiculous, but the problem a lot of people had with Liturgy actually stemmed from the fact that Aesthetica just wasn’t that good. It was different, sure. It was made by a bunch of cool kids from Brooklyn, sure. It wasn’t a stunning album though. That’s where Sunbather is different. While it’s possible to read so much into the artwork and subtleties, that can only ever be a superficial secondary to the music, and Deafheaven have created some absolutely stunning music.

Opening track, ‘Dream House’ runs at over nine minutes and as the guitars jangle in, before bursting into a wall of post-rock sound, it begins to wash over you and pull you in. The art of holding the listener’s attention is a difficult one to master, but crushing them with music that is determined to chop, change and channel untold emotion clearly works. The combo aural assault of shrill black metal, furious hardcore and glimmering post-rock is an ordeal, and you come out feeling all the better for it. If relief is what makes Sunbather, bury me in it.

Then there’s the 10-minute title track. After the relative piano-led calm of ‘Irresistible’ allows you to appreciate ‘Dream House’ for a moment, ‘Sunbather’ explodes into a glorious cacophony of swaddling guitars and piercing, dynamic drums, striding confidently through into the next dimension. It’s another excellently constructed song and that isn’t an overuse of hyperbole. There is a structure underpinning this song that means that all the poetry that is screeched out overhead has something to cling on to. Hearing the despair that courses through this song and that it’s being told in a fashion that alternates between the literal and abstract is astonishing. Again. That is no overuse of hyperbole.

Six minutes of noise (‘Please Remember’), a 14-minute journey through the wily fury of ‘Vertigo’ and the pain-stakingly subtle ‘Windows’ leads up to closing track ‘The Pecan Tree’. It’s another outstanding track, but this time – after the initial detonation, the swirling guitars that enter unexpectedly and the drumming that changes its direction on a whim – there’s a feeling of finality in the last couple of minutes. The tempo slows and the cries become even more primal. It fades to dust. Relax.

In a world where everything is now “amazing”, it’s rare to find music that genuinely makes your eyes close and your jaw drop, but Deafheaven’s music is as close as we’re going to get. In amongst the torturous noise that makes up Sunbather, you will find the most beautiful of albums. You don’t need to call it black metal, shoegaze or post-metal. You don’t need to call it anything. Just suffer through it and you’ll be rewarded for a long time after.

6/6

Sounds like: the blackest (metal) heart pouring its deepest emotions over you
Top tracks: Dream House, Sunbather, Vertigo

It’s the 4th annual World Goth Day today, 22 May 2013 (5th in total) and, just as we do every year, we thought we’d celebrate by celebrating goths with a few re-posts and as much new goth stuff as we can think of. This is what it’s all about, if you don’t know…

“World Goth Day is exactly what it says on the wrapper-a day where the goth scene gets to celebrate its own being, and an opportunity to make its presence known to the rest of the world. This day falls on 22nd May of every year. The purpose of this site is to centralise as much as possible everything you would need to make World Goth Day a success, and therefore make the goth scene a success in your part of the world.”

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1) Something that’s happened in the past 12 months is ‘Gangnam Style’. And yes, there has been a goth cover of Psy’s K-dancehall classic. Here it is. If there’s a goth cover of ‘Call Me Maybe’, drop us a line. We’re interested.

2) Much more importantly, earlier in 2013, Greater Manchester Police started recording attacks on members of subcultures (such as goths and emos) as hate crimes. This was a direct result of work done following the fatal attack on Sophie Lancaster in 2007 and is a good thing. Click here to read more on the BBC.

3) Here’s a photo from 2009 of the former Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Zapatero and his goth daughters with President of the USA, Barack Obama. It’s still cool.

4) The Goth Cruise is still goling. The next one sails from Florida in September. See GothicCruise.com for more info.

5) Here’s an episode of Wife Swap USA that features an entire goth family. It’s a feisty one.

6) We wrote an A-to-Z of Goth in 2010. It still holds up today.

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Go visit World Goth Day at Facebook and at Twitter.

In case you haven’t noticed, WE RELAUNCHED THRASH HITS. This week on the podcast, Raz and Hugh talk through the fancy new changes that we’ve made to the site (we’re pretty proud of it FYI), as well as giving the lowdown on our team-up with Songkick Detour (help us bring American Nightmare, SikTh, and a load of other awesome bands to London!), as well as talking about the only news story that’s mattered over the last week – Tim Lambesis of As I Lay Dying being arrested and charged with attempting to hire a hitman to murder his estranged wife.

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Click here to subscribe to the Thrash Hits podcast via iTunes

So yeah, give us your feedback – either via email, by posting a comment down below, or by dropping a comment at us over Facebook or Twitter. And if you were interested by the discussion in this week’s episode, go and subscribe to our podcast over on iTunes.

Svalbard
From: Bristol, UK
Lazy equation: (Rinoa + Modern Life Is War) x the inevitability of environmental collapse.
URLs: Facebook // Twitter // Soundcloud // Bandcamp

Thrash Hits verdict: We love a bit of progressive UK hardcore, so the thoughtful but forceful racket knocked up by Bristol’s Svalbard was just the ticket for our Future Hits column. Lead guitarist/vocalist Serena Cherry answered most of our questions, but left it to guitarist/vocalist Liam Phelan to add the cheesy jokes at the end.

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Describe your sound in 3 words.
Reverb, Delay, Distortion.

What made you want to start a band?
Dissatisfaction and disillusion with previous bands! We all played in previous bands that had crossed paths on the local gigging circuit and shared the same eclectic love of music and the same obsessively passionate mentality towards making it. We all wanted to make this type of music; but also to create it with people who are genuinely enthusiastic, consistently reliable, open minded, and just nice to hang out with.

Where did the name come from?
Svalbard is an archipelago off of Norway which is locked in a constant state of change – it is either freezing over in winter, or melting in summer. It never stays the same for long; I feel this is symbolic of the ways in which all art is never “in the moment” but in a state of either becoming, or reflecting upon, what it is going to be next.

The land of Svalbard is also receding away due to climate change, making it a visible consequence of globalisation. This again adheres to the notion of inevitable change, but in a more finite sense – the accompanying feelings of helplessness over this situation also inspired the title of our 10″ Gone Tomorrow.

Where did you grow up? How do you think it’s affected your music?
Three of us grew up in Bristol, one of us grew up in Surrey. I don’t think place particularly affected our music, as a city is just another city; and our music isn’t really about localising our pasts.

However, I would say that the diversity and sheer activity of the Bristol music scene affects our music nowadays; in the sense that there is always something interesting going on, whether it’s hardcore, jazz, underground metal, noise, dance. The variety of gigs in Bristol helps to broaden your tastes and in turn keep you open to all kinds of inspiration.

What are your non-musical influences?
The brilliant work of Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman – particularly his concept of ‘liquid modernity’- has influenced a lot of our lyrics. Visually, the art of Theodore Kettelson has been a source of inspiration as he conjures dark and mysterious atmospheres amidst beautiful yet stark Scandinavian backdrops. We try to bring a similar atmosphere into the artwork for Svalbard- which tends to be drawings of bears – purely in admiration for their strikingly powerful and solitary nature.

What bands do you consider as part of your scene or as your peers?
Locally, Bristol has a great hardcore scene because no two bands sound the same. We have bands such as True Valiance who mix hardcore with thrash, Honour Your Pain who are all about the “sweet mosh”, Failure To Follow who play slightly more melodic, modern hardcore; I Don’t Want To Know Why The Caged Bird Sings who make amazing emotive screamo.

Outside of Bristol, there are bands we have toured/played gigs with who we absolutely love – Notebooks, Direwolves, Pariso, Hammers, Culver, Arboricidio, Chapters, Stallone; to name a few.

What marks you out as different to other bands around at the moment?
I don’t think we can speak for other bands, as you never really know how a band works from within. It’s easy to make snap judgements from the outside about the attitudes/abilities/productivity of other bands without really knowing what their aims are. We probably do own more delay pedals than your average hardcore band, though!

What’s the funniest show you’ve played?
We played on Halloween at “Treehouse of Horror Fest” in Bristol, dressed up as Simpsons characters. Our drummer and bassist unknowingly both turned up as Otto! We were all sweating yellow face paint and none of our costumes survived the entire set…

What have you got planned for the future?
We will be releasing a 5” vinyl with two new tracks on it, entitled Flightless Birds. We will be touring again in September, and playing lots of other odd gigs and weekenders around the UK in the next couple of months.

What other band should everyone find out about?
Direwolves.

Tell us a joke.
Where do horses go when they are sick?

The Horsepital.

Where do people with sore throats go?

The Hoarsepital.

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Svalbard’s Gone Tomorrow EP is available to buy right damn now. As they mentioned above, their new Flightless Birds EP will be out later this year, along with some dates in the Autumn in support. We can’t wait.

My Dying Bride
The Manuscript
Peaceville Records
13 May 2013

by Daniel Cairns

Whilst peers like Paradise Lost and Anathema have gone through a litany of musical changes, experimenting with Depeche Mode style electronics and glorious anthemic rock songs, My Dying Bride have mercifully continued to wallow in their Keats-meets-Castlevania misery, writing melodic dirges for those moments at four in the morning when you’re not miserable enough for Khanate, but still feel a bit naff anyway.

It’s not like My Dying Bride were ever incapable of doing anything different. Their one attempt at branching out a bit, the severely underrated 34.788% was met with the kind of fan backlash which makes you wish metal fans would just bugger off down a well forever. So for the past 15 years they’ve stuck steadfastly to the melodramatic, lyrical doom that’s served them so well. They’ve managed to maintain a pretty high quality too, as their last EP The Barghest O’ Whitby and this one, The Manuscript proves.

It’s business as usual really. They’ll make no new fans off The Manuscript, but they won’t lose any either. Aaron Stainthorpe creaks away over melodic, mournful symphonies like he’s laconically, miserably slouched himself on a leather couch in a dimly lit room in a gothic mansion, with only candle-light, the dying embers of a once raging, warm fire, and glints of moonlight dancing languidly on the surface of the half-finished merlot he’s been nursing, providing any semblance of illumination while reading a book. For shits and giggles let’s imagine the book is the Players Guide to Banjo Kazooie.

There’s nothing wrong with it really. Nothing mould breaking either, and My Dying Bride will never suddenly find themselves inspiring a Harlem Shake style craze (although I would give absolutely everything to see them start the “Yorkshire sulk”) but sod it. In a shitty unpredictable world, it’s nice to have something reliable like My Dying Bride to remind you that everything is truly utterly meaningless, any and all struggle is futile and we are all but slaves to the whims of a cruel, unpredictable mistress called mortality who could cruelly yank away the choke chain of existence clasped around our necks at any moment.

Banjo Kazooie was the best game; the bird pooped out eggs.

5/6

Sounds like: A long, lyrical and very smartly dressed sigh
Standout tracks: Vår Gud över Er, Only Tears to Replace Her With

What? You really had to ask? One Of Us Is The Killer by The Dillinger Escape Plan came out last week. Later this week we’re going to explain in great detail why it’s one of the best records you will hear all year.

GO AND BUY IT. GO AND BUY IT NOW.

In case you missed the news earlier this week, we’re teaming up with Songkick Detour to try to bring some of the best bands in the world to London. Some of them have split up (but occasionally threaten to get back together), some of them have reformed but just not made the trip over to the UK yet, and some of them have never been to these shores. This week’s Sunday Spotify Slaylist will hopefully remind you why you need to pledge to see these bands.

We’ve already had enough pledges for American Nightmare to get the ball rolling insofar that a promoter has already been found for the show – but the more pledges our picks receive, the better the chances we’ll be able to get these bands over. Want details of how to get involved? We’ve written this handy blog post for you. Our picks are the aforementioned American Nightmare, SikTh, Botch, Old Man Gloom, Blood Brothers, Muck, Primitive Weapons, Super Snake, All Pigs Must Die and I Am Heresy. Want to get pledging ASAFP? Get thee to the Thrash Hits Songkick Detour page then!

Spotify is available to most of Europe, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, and a load of other countries for free – though obviously you’re better off shelling out either £5 or £10 a month for one of Spotify’s premium packages, as then you can listen to our Slaylists without having them interrupted by adverts. For our readers in countries not currently serviced by Spotify….go put on a Slayer album and listen to that instead. Don’t even try to tell us you don’t own at least one Slayer album. Don’t be that guy.

Watch the video to ‘Island’ by Muck, as they’re not on Spotify:

If there is one shared passion of the collected Thrash Hits writers (other than smugly mouthing-off about bands on the internet), then it’s football. So when the London leg of Title Fight’s UK tour clashed with the Europa League Final this week, we were worried we wouldn’t be able to find anyone able to review it…so we guess it’s a good job that Alex Andrews is a Spurs man…

6 things we learned watching Title Fight in London…

1)  2005 was probably the last time I’ve had to queue to get into a show. That’s not some snobbish industry-wanker/guestlist-dickhead observation – despite arriving a good 30 minutes after doors, the combination of Kings College’s dawdling door staff and an eager crowd means the line snakes down Surrey Street and almost around the corner while Whirr get things started. The thuggishly-heavy Dead End Path continue the night’s theme of eclectic support  acts, but the prospect of drinking pints of Doom Bar while watching the Europa League final downstairs triumphs as the better option.

Watch a live bootleg of Dead End Path playing in London last year:

2)  Title Fight take to the stage earlier than billed and just in time to save us from the farce that follows Chelsea’s inevitable last-minute winner. They open brightly with a tight trio of songs that includes ‘Secret Society,’ before announcing themselves to the welcoming audience.

3) The set’s heavy on songs from last year’s Floral Green, which found the band in a mellower and more introspective mood. The slow and almost psychedelic ‘Head In The Ceiling Fan, fills the room with a warm, sonic glow towards the end of the night, but too many others sound weak – something which isn’t helped by the venue – and only serve to dismantle the conveyor belt of stage dives in operation for the band’s older – and faster – songs.

4) Speaking of stage dives, what’s the deal with jumping feet first? At risk of sound patronising, the crowd is an alarmingly young one, and many (barring the snapback crew out in full force for the mosh part at the end of ‘Youreyeah’) look bewildered to find themselves on stage before propelling themselves into a crowd that quickly parts at the sight of another incoming pair of Vans.

Watch the video to ‘Shed’ by Title Fight:

5) Although gracious guests, the band’s stage patter leaves much to be desired. Two years ago at Hevy, the lack of tedious pleasantries was something which made the band’s set so remarkable. The whirlwind of songs hit everyone packed into the tent like a freight train. This time, the impact’s not the same. There’s no ‘Memorial Fields,’ no ‘Evander’ and the newer material lacks the intensity of old.

6) In a rare interval, singer/bassist Ned Russin takes a moment to dedicate the next song to the now defunct Basement, whose ex-members scatter the stage. The holler which greets Russin’s earnest dedication makes it hard to believe they’ve already been buried for more than half-a-year. Andrew Fisher, who fronted the band, makes a brief cameo for ‘Shed’, before somersaulting off the stage, and as Title Fight close with a visceral rendition of ‘27,’ the thought which lingers the longest (besides whether Chelsea fans will now sing their infuriating ‘Champions of Europe’ chant for another year), is how long we’ll have to wait before Basement get coaxed out of retirement

3.5/6