a generous note about a Swedish hardcore punk band's EP

If you can’t win by reason

With an earth auger of a sound, “Mental Taxation” kicks off the new galloping seven-minute streak of an EP by Industrial Puke. The opening song’s thick, compressed production and deft chord changes represent the band’s best and only method.

Industrial Puke at times tries a regulated rhythm but cannot long resist the siren of speed. The one break from the forcible run comes at about a minute and a half into “Constant Pressure” with a slamming progression of chords—each chord stands out once from the blur. Then guitars harmonize and the song resumes its inevitable flameout.

The music bullies you, goes straight-ahead with insolent consistency—Industrial Puke happily suffers the hobgoblin of little minds. The band comes from where volume is power, volume overcomes weakness. Sound waves knock through the ear canal and shoulder into the tympanic membrane, like it or not.

The Swedish hardcore punk band started about 5 years ago. Time settling on a lineup and writing songs led us here, to Where Life Crisis Starts. The band put out its debut single and video, “Mental Taxation,” in June 2022, is partnering with Suicide Records to release this EP on September 16th, and plans to issue the full album Born into the Twisting Rope in spring of 2023.

(posts) Meshuggah drummer Tomas Haake's playthrough for "Clockworks"

Note: The song is from the Swedish metal band's 2016 album, The Violent Sleep of Reason.
 

something about Yngwie Malmsteen's "Relentless: The Memoir"

Yngwie Malmsteen rips up the fretboard, exacting from his guitars a patented metallic neo-classical dazzle. And he is versatile, being more than capable of playing blues, composing classical scores, writing lyrics, arrangements, anything. But shredding classical-style is his bread and butter.

The guy's seemingly limitless ability is matched only by his unlimited ego. And in Relentless, Malmsteen plays us briskly through his life's song, tooting his own horn all along way.

Malmsteen starts with his childhood in Sweden, where at a young age he zeroed-in on guitar and practiced and played his way into the local music scene. After entering his recordings in a guitar magazine contest, he was recruited to play in an American band. Not one to stand stageside, Malmsteen quickly established himself as a musical entity unto himself. His is not a fascinating history, really, but he is a unique-enough guy to make it worthwhile to listen to his version of it. That is, it is worthwhile if you like rock autobiographies and are not bothered by the company of an elitist prick.


Note:

• While Malmsteen's playing is universally acknowledged for its technical brilliance, the sound is often dismissed as "souless."
• He spends a good chunk of time late in the book admiring his custom equipment. He shamelessly endorses anything and everything with his name on it.

 

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