STONEHENGE

The first ten seconds are a good enough idea of what you're in for with thrashing drums and shrieking to the max! But if you can look past it you can see some good musicianship - the guitar work Big Head around 3 minutes in for example (just before more shrieking). Many tracks follow the mix of interesting technical passages and outright brutal thrashing and pained vocals.

At times the heavy distorted bass gives you that funny feeling... you know the one. I think. Kibbutz is a good example! And there's also some fairly punk rock elements to some of the tracks. For me Fallout is one of the better tracks on the album for this reason.

After 16 minutes of the thrashy tracks, October is a sudden gear change, with a slow and sludgy bassline, almost quite MDK-like. It picks up the pace fairly quickly though, with some excellent drumming, but still a style of vocals reminiscent of Magma. A very good track with a mix of a lot of their styles, but mainly for the drumming, which continues brilliantly on the next track Hexagon as well.

Holebones is also quite a punk style track. It would be drastically overdoing it to call it melodic, but there is something to it that's not just the thrashing of previous tracks!

For Hail, we're back to that incredibly heavy bassline. And on the steamed copy of the album I had access to, also a much clearer sound. Unlike other tracks where the drumming is the highlight, this is all about the bass rhythm. Definitely one to check out. Seems to be a one off though, with the title track and Thebbes then returning to the mix of thrash and sludge.

From here, the final run of tracks also appear on the third Ruins EP which I've previously reviewed, albeit with a different bassist. B.U.G. is a very interesting track in its absolute simplicity for most of it - a single bass note and drum hit and a slightly changing tempo - and some stop-start faster paced elements as well. On Ripples, which was one of my favourites on the EP, we get the addition of a violin, which certainly adds a new dimension to the track and I think makes it one of the best on this album too.

Somewhere around 2.5 stars for me, some good examples of the less accessible side of a genre - but hard to say it would appeal to anyone other than fans!

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