1. Crooked Hands
2. Misery King
3. Her Casket Holds No Bones
4. Nausea
5. Matriarch
6. Sea of Teeth/Bleak Eyes
7. Heir of the Dog

I was not prepared for such anger and volume of screaming and passion. You can’t fault the performance in this album, they’re bleeding every drop of sound out of every song and I love and appreciate this more than anything else in a band. The massively downtuned guitars create a dark backdrop to this hardcore rock and they have a neverending cache of effects and ideas to create their original sound: from the ringing minor 3rd in the guitar over most of “Her Casket Holds No Bones”, the polyrhythms of the vocals against the drums in “Nausea” and stop time stabs between the punched out vocals in the breakdown of “Misery King”, Bastions certainly are creative.

If you listen to this, actually, when you listen to this (because you really should) you’ll be sure to be blown away by those vocals, which crack and roar with an anger seldom heard. Unlike many hardcore vocalists who seem happy to scream at the same level through every song, the singer of Bastions manages to exert expression yet never yield in the brutality of the sound.

http://www.myspace.com/bstns

1. Lost the Magic
2. Broken Sound

This is pretty damn loud recording, there’s so much compression it’s untrue! I suppose this is all a symptom of the “loudness wars”. Oddly enough though, everything is still audible and mixed well, just a shame some of the treble got distorted during the mastering. Down to the music though, which is a post-hardcore/alt-rock combo with convulsing, throbbing riffs and vocals that are jabbed into the music like a stanley knife into a shaken-up can of ginger beer, each line fizzing with a bitterness of self belief and energy.

It’s nice to hear this kind of music done without too many over-the-top and pretentious lyrics and song titles. In fact, it’s precisely because Hold Your Horse Is stick to some more standard song structures that makes them quite accessible in that respect. There’s the occasional breakout into a quiet, non-distorted build-up or a dark disco beat (!) that keeps the sound from being stale. If they could possibly give a massive slap to the person who mastered the recording then these guys have a bright future.

http://www.hyhi.co.uk

1. Fuck Your Deja Vu
2. Baby, You Are My Ammunition Dump
3. I Have the Jigsaw Man’s Hands

I sometimes wonder what people think of me when I’m at the gym, on the cross-trainer listening to experimental hardcore on my mp3 player while head-banging in multiple time signatures. It generally makes for a more interesting time than listening to godawful Ladyboy GaGa and Black Eyed Piss they pump over the sound system.

Anyhow, I can see Battle for Paris hitting my workout playlist soon, as they mix that kind of style with something softer and more tuneful. It’s a shame though that the songs seem to be in a painting-by-riffs structure, with a lack of consistency in each one, making it difficult to work out what binds each track together. Perhaps if I had the lyrics in front of me it might make more sense, as the titles are somewhat abstract, although in places the vocals seem something of an afterthought. The more melodic sections are refreshing though, and serve as a comfy distraction between the more complex shouty bits.

Having said that, it’s quite a lot of fun and easy to listen to without going to over the top on the hardcore front, certainly not as much so as Daughters or The Locust. It’s easy to get immersed in the technicality and enjoy the grinding spazzcore rhythms, overlaid with distorted screams and funky single note lines that duet tightly between the guitar and bass.

Now if I could convince my local gym to put this over the sound system…

http://www.myspace.com/battleforparisuk