Another couple of UKMU unsigned reviews for your delectation.

The frenetic Tharcia:

The legacy of what once was punk has been blurred by an array of mutations and countless stream of frequently turgid *cores. Punk, as an attitude of DIY, cheap and rough as hell anti-music, has been eclipsed by polished, platinum money spinning behemoths and countless cookie cutter copyists.

This is why it’s refreshing to find a band that (for the most part) is keeping the old punk flame burning – albeit in a modern kinda way. Tharcia’s sound is resolutely rooted in England at the beginning of the 80’s. Shades of Oi! and bands like The Exploited saturate these songs, but more modern influences blend effortlessly with the old school.

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The needing to try harder Numblocq

Just because you record your music, no matter how good the songs may be, that doesn’t mean that it’s ready for general consumption. Your songs are your art – a projection of your soul, and deserve the best start in life possible. Providing you’re reasonably good players and you put on a good show, then playing your songs live is likely to do them some justice (worse case scenario your crowd are wearing their ‘beer headphones’ and think anything you play is good). But recording these beloved songs is an entirely different discipline, that, if you’re a young band, you’re probably not that good at. Your songs deserve more than a swiftly thrown together demo constructed using Cubase in your mate’s bedroom. It’s really worth spending a moderate amount of cash to make the best job of it before unleashing them on the general public.

Numlocq didn’t do this. The sound quality is terrible. Some music lends itself to more lo-fi recording (Black Metal purists swear by this) but not this type of music.

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A 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.

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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?

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I’m going to be writing a bunch of reviews of unsigned bands for metal forum UK Metal Underground. Check the first one out here.

It’s never a good to start a band without knowing how to spell your band’s name. There seems to be 2 ways of spelling ‘Hades’ on the band’s MySpace – 1 ending with an ‘s’ and presumably a reference to the ancient Greek underworld, or ending with a ‘z’, which means nothing at all (not that this is a problem, after all, we live in the 21st century dudez).

Whatever they’re called, they make hard rock music. Hard fuckin’ RAWK! Well most of the time anyway. Their MySpace assortment is a ramshackle affair that loiters around various rawk subgenres without committing itself too much.

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