I hadn't heard of these Germans before seeing this nominated as a monthly feature, so went into it completely blind. A bit of background digging reveals that Slaughterday were formed in 2010 and for most of their career to date they operated as a duo with Jens Finger taking care of the six- and four-strings and Bernd Reiners the drums and vocals with a huge cast of supporting drummers, bassists and guitarists helping them out with their live shows. However, for this their fifth full-length, they have inducted reinforcements into their ranks and have expanded the band into a five-piece with Christian Wiesener taking over bass duties, André Janssen drums and Tobias Koops boosting the six-string attack as second guitarist.

So what do we have here? Well, this is pretty much meat and potatoes old-school death metal with obvious influence from usual suspects such as Autopsy, Bolt Thrower and Vader and I say that with no hint of sniffiness because that is exactly the kind of death metal that floats my particular boat. Sure, the more demanding death metal listener will likely feel unfulfilled by the lack of ambition displayed on "Dread Emperor", but I don't imagine that upsetting the Slaughterday guys that much. The performances are very solid indeed, the band obviously know their way around their instruments and have an excellent grasp of what OSDM is about. After a portentious instrumental intro track the band charge out of the blocks with opener proper, "Obliteration Crusade", and proceed to attempt to rip your face off with sheer riff power. Throughout this and the subsequent eight tracks they deploy a withering arsenal of riffs in order to batter down any resistance to their undemanding, but energetic, old-school blitzkrieg. Reiners' vocals are rough, gruff, roaring bellows and are plenty powerful while the rhythm section drive in the rhythmic piles upon which the individual tracks are built in an unshowy wholly dependable way. There is a significant amount of soloing present on "Dread Emperor" and it is with this that I have reservations. The thing is that the solos are actually quite melodic, even to the point of sounding like Maiden or Priest solos at times and I am not completely convinced that they suit the violence of the riffs and vocals, consequenly making the album as a whole sound a lot less aggressive and menacing than it should. I would have preferred more Kerry King and less KK Downing. I have been a big defender of James Murphy's contribution to Death's "Spiritual Healing" where a similar argument can and does get used, so this may be a bit of a hypocritical stance, but I think Murphy's skill was to enhance the more brutal aspects of "Spiritual Healing", where I find the melodicism of the solos here distracting.

Still, that aside, I love the riffs which still manage to give me that warm, fuzzy, OSDM buzz that I can just never get enough of so, derivative and unambitious it may well be and, in truth, I am unlikely to be running out to score a copy any time soon, but I actually quite enjoyed it and that is good enough for me. That cover is pretty badass too. I have been playing the Elder Scrolls Oblivion remake on PS recently and the creature on the cover is exactly like one of Oblivion's Nether Liches, tough bastards that they are!

I have given this one a couple of spins over the past few weeks and whilst I could not say that it is as a direct result of this release, I did notice how much more accommodating I have become of these metalcore releases nowadays. I think there is something about intelligence in most of the music I enjoy nowadays and this possesses intelligence no small quantity, and given that hardcore punk is often thought of as being such a simple style of music this perhaps seems like an OTT statement to some degree. 7 Angels 7 Plagues go beyond any basic template though. The death metal chug on ‘Someday’ being one such example of this more exploratory attribute that the band can muster without making it sound intrusive, or just a selection of ideas thrown together. At the same time the melodic elements of the album seem to possess an almost Deftones, nu-metal quality to them which only manages to further my enjoyment of the album.

I am on the fence about the vocals if I am honest. They grate, yet at the same time I have to agree that they sort of fit perfectly. As a contrast to some of the post-metal moments or just as a more stark opposing force to the great use of melody in general, it is hard to argue that they are not performed in an interesting way. I am not offended by the inclusion of the interludes, but I could quite easily get through the album without them; they most certainly are the weaker tracks overall from the listing. For a band that seemed to be capable of filling the space around them well enough with sound that was intriguing and thoughtful it does strike me as odd that they have included these “palate-cleansers” at all. When you can write the droning chaos present on tracks like ‘Away with Words’ and accompany them to a backdrop of near cinematic percussion, you don’t need to provide fiddling acoustic numbers to prove anything really.

The mood for this current listen through this album tonight is perfect. After a long day with lots of elements jostling for possession of my time, it is cathartic to listen to an album of a similar pulsing multitude of parts and hear them all so well balanced and clearly given space around each other. Perhaps other than the vocals, there is little in the way of any one element dominating proceedings. Overall it feels more of busy as opposed to a heavy record, and I say that without aiming it as a criticism. It does settle into some weighty rhythms I concede but this is not my overarching takeaway from the listening experience. I have a sense that as I listen to more early metalcore, I may get to understand better the importance of this record in terms of it genre developing credentials but at this early stage of my understanding of these things, I can only rate this record on individual merit.

Lots of black metal bands like to kickstart their albums with some slow build up. And then you have Cabinet, who's like, "Nope. I'ma shove a dump truck full of dirt on top of your head. Here's music that sounds like a corpse is digging back to the surface and growling while the earth keeps getting stuck in its mouth. Then halfway through the first track, we get guitars that sound like the music that plays when flies are buzzing around you in the cartoons, expect the flies are gonna kill you. But because of the heavier focus on the noise factor, there's less melody and more chugging than usual, at least there is when the war metal takes the stage. When you have the doomy stuff with the creppy chanting in "Precipitating Pneumonoconiosis In The Cremation Cellar," (I totally copy/pasted that) there's more "songwriting" involved. And out guy's going a little crazier with the sound effects this time. He ends one track with the bubbling sounds of having your head forced underwater, one track ends with collecting wheezings and coughs, and there is one disturbing narration that I won't ruin for you. But overall, this album may be more of the same at its core, but its war metal is dirtier and its clearer edges are smoother. Definitely has a lot of replay value.

90

An artist that I have somehow missed (or perhaps subconsciously avoided) up until now, Devildriver stomped late into my weekly listening after many years of total neglect. The initial four songs on Strike and Kill do indeed land with a deadly accuracy, their thrashing grooves leaving little room for breath in fact. ‘Dead in the Water’ marginally steals the run on the title track as being the standout of the opening salvo of tracks. The track has a ferocious nature to it that is just so infectious, that it becomes near impossible to ignore after one listen. Groove metal rarely moves me, but I would put Strike and Kill on a par with the last Exhorder album in terms of unexpected entertainment levels.

Unlike Exhorder however, Devildriver have always had a penchant for dipping into the wider metal genre pool and just as I start to get all carried away with myself, elements of melodic metalcore/melodic death metal start to appear from ‘In the Moonlight’ onwards. These moments do go a long way to breaking up some of the repetition of the album, since even within the more positively received opening track listing it does suffer from Machine Head like predictability creeping into the edges. Whilst it is hard to call them disruptive, these moments do blunt the attack somewhat in what is clearly aligned to be an “in your face” type of record. Lyrically things are a bit hit and miss also at times but the guitar playing is a clear cut above everything else (yuck, clicky drums).

Whilst I almost expected a decline in quality over the second half of the album, there is an argument to say that fear is never fully realised. If anything, the albums lull is in the middle section over tracks seven through ten, with there being a marked recovery to get us to the end of the record. The superb blast of fury that is ‘Oath of Iron’ is completely unexpected and that track alone manages to fully steer the album back into my repeat plays list for the future. I am not going to pretend that this is album of the year material by any means, which is fine because I don’t get the impression that this is why Jez and co released the record in the first place. However, I can’t get away from the fact that this is an infectious affair, full of riffs and tantalising melodies on the leads that I have just lapped up for the last forty-eight-hours.

Melbourne's Axatak are often referred to as a key player in the early Australian metal scene that was still just in its development stage during the early-to-mid 1980's. Their four-piece lineup got together some time between 1981 & 1983 before quickly becoming a mainstay of the local live scene. During their time together, Axatak produced one demo, one full-length album (i.e. 1984's "Shock Rock") & this five-song E.P. which I actually never explored until earlier this decade. Axatak wouldn't be around for too long though, disbanding in 1988 off the back of frontman Andy Zouman having become a born-again Christian & subsequently producing a film about the influence of Satan on rock music. 

Axatak are widely known for being heavily influenced by KISS. In fact, they started as a KISS cover band so it's no real surprise that their image involved makeup & theatricality. They could no doubt play a bit though, as can be seen from the performances on this E.P. which certainly has its moments. Guitarist's Pete Denero & John McCulloch know a thing or two about shreddy 1980's guitar solos & drummer Don Hailes keeps a tight rhythm throughout. The production job offers plenty of clarity but does tend to feel a little too separated with the high-end being a touch too prominent. It's the inconsistency of the song-writing that's the real issue here though as this is somewhat of a roller coaster ride in that regard. I quite like hard-rocking opener "Shock Rock" (which was also the title track of the band's debut album) & the more metallic "Let the Beast Run Wild" (my personal favourite) but the remaining three songs all fail to hit the mark, particularly the God-awful power ballad "You" which reeks of Motley Crue at their worst. Zouman's vocals are patchy at times & the weakest points of the release generally match up with his biggest failures.

Axatak's sound sits somewhere between the US glam metal that was booming at the time & the classic heavy metal that most of us know & love. You need to be a little patient if you go in searching for the metal side of that equation though as the first couple of tracks don't really present much in that respect with all of the genuine metal appearing during the middle & end of the release where you can expect to hear some aggressive bottom-string palm-muting & even a bit of tremolo-picking, reminding one of WASP more so than the band's idols KISS. I have to warn you that gang vocals are drawn upon quite regularly during the choruses which can be a deterrent for those with a weak stomach for the glammier side of Axatak's delivery, me included.

While this is certainly a better record than Kings Cross' dodgy "Gimme" E.P. from the previous year which traverses similar creative ground, I still wouldn't recommend "Axatak" as an early Australian metal release worth pursuing. It sounds more like a demo than it does a proper release as the songs deserve a glossier coat of paint, one which they likely would have received had the band resided in Los Angeles. I can easily understand how Axatak would have gone down really well in the Melbourne live scene of the time though as their sound & image would have translated very well to the stage. I'm just not terribly surprised that they didn't break out of the local live scene for wider success.

For fans of Bengal Tigers, Boss & WASP.