Unsigned: Dysian Maze & Hammersalt
Posted in Reviews, Unsigned, Watchlist on July 27th, 2009 by AlexA cheeky double scoop of unsigned acts on UKMU for you consumption.
The delectable Dycian Maze:
History repeats. This is particularly apparent in popular music. In 25 to 30 year cycles, music styles re-emerge, reboot and evolve. Some returning genres are more welcome than others. The current 80’s synth-pop revival is nauseating for example, but I’m quite looking forward to grunge coming back round again. One welcome reboot was thrash metal. Bands like Municipal Waste and SSS are farming the routes of this revered genre (DRI, Slayer, SOD) to amusing effect. It’s fun and they sing about beer a lot. However, somewhere in that latter half of the 80’s thrash evolved. Albums like Ride the Lightening, Peace Sells…But Who’s Buying, History of a Time to Come, Arise took this mishmash of punk and metal and sculpted into a progressive artform. So thrash re-emerged a couple of years ago, but where’s the progression?
Dycian Maze would seem to represent a reprisal of this transitional phase. They aren’t necessarily pushing boundaries but they do make this vital period sound fresh again. The music they play is not new, but this is no shallow revisionism, the spirit of those masterworks is here in spades.
The humdrum Hammersalt:
I don’t know if any of you are ancient enough to remember Baddiel and Skinner’s sketch show The Mary Whitehouse experience. They had this great skit lampooning The Cure – the implication was that they could make any song sound depressing, so every week they dressed up like the Cure and preformed songs like the Laughing Policeman in depressing goth style.
I have a similar problem with Hammersalt, except (in similarly depressing style) they seem to be able to make any song sound like Load-era Metallica – the singer sounds spookily like James Hetfield from those albums. Given that this band are British, and the singer’s surname is Booyse it seems unlikely that he’s Hetfield’s long lost brother. What’s slightly more confusing is that they cite every corporate heavy rock band from the last 20 years (from Pumpkins to Foos to Shinedown) as an influence on their MySpace except Metallica. Are we to believe that he stumbled on this distinctive vocal style by chance?This makes it hard to divine what they really about – it’s kind of like that trick: say milk milk milk milk milk milk….what do cows drink?
