about a hard rock/metal band's debut (with a decent music video)

This band sounds like it will steal your tools

The band photo shows three guys wearing ugly masks, studded arm bracers, and chain mail as they pose, let's say, in the side yard of someone’s wood-shingled duplex in Nassau County, New York. With those costumes, you’d be forgiven for lowering your expectations. But Rotgut’s debut, “24 oz Cantrip,” features five songs of excellent, heavy rock n’ roll amped up with death metal, black metal, and thrash influences.

Opening song “Bonemelter” is fine—thick guitars with hot leads, bass and drums tight as hell, and good momentum.

But I took interest in the EP when I heard “The Hunger.” Rollicking from the first, the song’s fast thrash riffs burn amphetamine energy. This sounds like driving with your eyes closed, racing down the freeway shoulder, sending cars spinning in all directions.

“24 oz Cantrip” isn’t beer-bash partier thrash. Rotgut trends darker. The single, posted below, is “Return of the Dead Without Eyes.” Just get passed the group-shout chorus and focus instead on the splashy cymbals after 1:25 and thereafter as the song revels in black-metal-influenced passages. It wraps with beautiful patience at about 3:20 with an inspired payoff led by the vocals, “Blood of the maiden, blood of the priest, blood of the mason, blood of the thief / A beggar to Caesar, a flame to the cloth, sixes in triplicate, salt to the north / A clarion call to the dead without eyes to lead us to darkness and swallow the skies!”

I love the agile bass on this album. It's always on the offensive. It looms and lifts the whole composition.

The album goes by fast. The songs, each 3 or 4 minutes long, make for a loud and enjoyably intense listen. The music sounds a little like The Crown, Midnight, and, at a vast distance, Converge. The Seattle-based band self-released “24 oz Cantrip” on streaming platforms June 20th, 2025.

Those costumes are a fun, cheap way to get your attention. But this band’s sound deserves to hold it.

 

 

about Linkin v Dillinger

In my freshman year, I went to a guy's dorm to play guitars. I was pretty good. I played Slayer and Ozzy. A few years later he asked if I wanted to start a band. He wanted to sound like Linkin Park, but I was into The Dillinger Escape Plan by then.

He had never heard Dillinger, so I played "Calculating Infinity" on my car stereo for him. He didn't like it: "Who wants to listen to this?"

I asked the same question about Linkin Park: trend-chasing commercial music for idiots, I thought.

Since then, I shed some snobbery and learned to see his side of it. It's fine if you care whether people like your music. Like, when I listen to music, I usually decide within two minutes minutes, asking, "Where is the bite? What's in this for me?"

But on the merits of sounding like Linkin Park versus The Dillinger Escape Plan: Dillinger was an admirable success for over 15 years. Its audience was loyal, and the band's influence continues. Linkin Park changed nothing and shed fans rapidly after a few years. The lead singer killed himself in 2017.

Note:
- Success in the music industry is the Holy Grail, anyway.
- Funny, all the little details of these two moments.

a draft of my all-time favorite albums list—a list that constantly changes but includes constants

Top-Tier All-Time Favorite 10 Albums"

"The Wall" by Pink Floyd

"The Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink Floyd

"Reign in Blood" by Slayer

"Aja" by Steely Dan
"For Emma, Forever Ago" by Bon Iver
"Jane Doe" by Converge

"Calculating Infinity" by The Dillinger Escape Plan
"Metamodern Sounds in Country Music" by Sturgill Simpson
"Pet Sounds" by The Beach Boys
"Badmotorfinger" by Soundgarden

Second-Tier All-Time Favorite 10 Albums
"Sadness Will Prevail" by Today is the Day
"A Sailor's Guide to Earth" by Sturgill Simpson
"Appetite for Destruction" by Guns n’ Roses
"Grip It! On That Other Level" by Geto Boys
"Picture This" by Do or Die
"Blizzard of Ozz" by Ozzy Osbourne
"Malady" by Malady
"Seasons in the Abyss" by Slayer
"The Satellite Years" by Hopesfall

"The City of Caterpillar" by The City of Caterpillar

Honorable Mention
"Roots" by Sepultura
"Weezer" by Weezer
"Dirt" by Alice In Chains
"Above" by Mad Season
"The Bends" by Radiohead

 

 

Note: With endless caveats and prefaces about how I appreciate and care about the important bands, like the Beatles and Black Sabbath.

 

a review of a decent hardcore band that has some screamo and post-rock stripes

Demersal tries to capture the sound of everything happening to us

Demersal’s charged brush casts multicolor strokes of hardcore, post-rock, and screamo in all directions. Abrasiveness and harmony occupy background and foreground on the band’s new self-titled sophomore album.

It captures the turbulence of a world steeped in crisis and inequality, a world needing relief. With ideals and aggression, the band rebukes dominant ideologies—and with cloudy eyes, signals empathy for the disheartened. The band says, “It serves as a counterpoint to modern capitalist ideals of self-sufficiency—the notion that one should be a strong individual who’s able to stand up for oneself and one's own values alone—and it encourages to share one’s vulnerability with caring people and to reach out when the world feels the most incomprehensible.”

"Demersal" opens with vulnerability—the song “Flakkende Som Tusind Lys” approaches quietly, adding piano notes and synthy atmospherics to an anxious guitar and vocal.

But most of what follows is metal ricocheting around avalanches of sound—scream-singing, layered guitars, and fueled drums and bass. It’s dynamic and vivid.

Arpeggios open album single “Lys I Natten” and chime into a tight cadence. The song gets mathy, then melodic, with layers of low- and high-end guitar. From moment to moment, this band soars or menaces.

 

“Something” is a journey. A tension-shaping bass follows a subdued opening, then the volume swells into a hardcore onslaught succeeded by a shoulder-bruising breakdown at 1:40. Next, everything hushes and rebuilds with modest orchestration that pushes and draws air shapes.

I also like screamo song “Vakuum” and its fevered drumming and dream-captured bass guitar. Demersal comes up with some fantastic guitar arrangements, but those would be greatly diminished without the strong bass and drum performances.

Demersal, from Denmark, released its debut EP, “To Mend a Yellow Wound,” in 2017 and its first full-length album, “Less,” in 2020. The band’s new release, "Demersal," was released just May 10, 2024.

 

a poem about making music

Mid-40s, playing guitar

 

Dissonance and distortion hid subtlety
And, subtly, dissonance and distortion hid
I got old, and I believed I would
But did not feel it until it happened
Music roams

  home roams never to mine
Now I have no sound other than
  what the sound is
    of passing time

 

about a loud band that sounds good

Hazing Over sounds fantastic on "Tunnel Vision," the band’s new EP. Hardcore, mathcore, grindcore, metalcore—all those cores fly like musical shrapnel.

“Gushing Wound” intends next-level wreckage beginning at the 30-second mark with the vocal “Corrosive connection, it wore me down.” Then a writhing riff at 1:30 folds melting beams into a mechanized monster—one of the most devastating sequences to hit ears in a while.

“Disavowed” razes in melody. The track with its clean vocals is an outlier in the young band’s small catalog. I hope the band tries more of it. The melodic turn starts 45 seconds in with the lyric, “Gutted prey swallow rain in neglect," the vocal melody summoned somehow from a gory parade of inspired hardcore. At 1:25, the song transitions into some weight-throwing chords and the lyrics, "Strangers in motion see through on their own the changes that no one seems to undergo / Disavowed, they wait it out / It weighs us down!" What a song.

"Tunnel Vision" was released July 7, 2023, via 1126 Records. All six songs run under 3 minutes. “Pestilence,” the first EP from the Pittsburgh-based five-piece, was released in early 2021.

 

Note: I started writing music reviews in June 2006. The first site I wrote for was taken down by the owner after years and years.

about a type of metal band

The style suggests that repetition is rehashing, that sustainment begets staleness, and redundancy is unwanted. The sound is bait—it strings you along and promises the next moment will pay off. It could, just by percentages, but almost all of it will be lost and forgotten without any attachments or lasting connections having been made, leaving you wondering what you have been doing all this time.