ANTARCTICA – Beheaded By Voltron
Fusing several extreme and highly versatile genres, Antarctica creates a sound that is both aggressive and playful with the song titles being as peculiar as the sonic style of the band itself. Filled with pop culture references or amusing quotes, the song titles permeate a bunch of songs that can captivate by their unpredictable structure and roots on a mathcore that is easily melded into something entirely different.
Originally released in 2009, Beheaded By Voltron is now being reissued in cassette format. Even though the unpredictability and experimentation, the songs can be quite catchy and feature some interesting sound effects such as in the theme, Tennis Grunts.
Heavy and fast riffing with a profound sense of melody give a new edge to the sonic identify of the songs that with a deep commitment to exploration offer brief and good-humored medleys into blues, for example, the moment may be brief, but it's essential and can be listened in the second track, It’s like tomato city in here.
The album is now available on cassettes and it can be a great experience for those who like extreme but unpredictable music with a good humor vibe.
CROSSED – Barely Buried Love
With a deep-rooted commitment to hardcore punk and a strong punch of screamo, Crossed comes from Spain to shatter any rigid or austere shell that guard us from our most primal emotions. Packing feral emotions that revel in complex and fast riffing that can be reminiscent of Converge’s line of sound, the band also gains in intensity by slowing down the riffing a bit and making it noise-rock heavy like in the track, Ghost.
Salivate is perhaps the most straightforward song that blends beautifully the sincere frontality of hardcore punk with the technical and aggressive flourishes of screamo. The trilogy of songs, No love, Barely Buried Love and Saudade create a somewhat painful but real painting of amorous relationships. The bizarre intermingle between desire and repression, that characterizes phases of a relationship, can be felt in the solo riffing of Barely Buried Love when it feels like the heavily distorted guitar is crying. That trilogy or tryptic culminates with the final brushes of Saudade, that combines melancholy and fierceness resulting in a feeling of longing being accentuated by the screamed vocals and the ensemble of guitars that almost touch the cinematic romantic mood of post-rock.
Barely Buried Love can be appreciated by those that like extreme but moody music that can trigger emotions, be they in full, broken or shattered hearts.
4-Way – LYTIC / CHIVALÀ / AMITIÈ /
PIQUE
This 4-Way record joins bands from Italy and the U.S.A. Starting off with Lytic, a duo from New York that play highly inclined experimental screamo that sometimes blossoms into jazz inspired passages. Then follows, Amitiè’s debut with 3 songs that show their unrelenting and free-spirited emo that relies both on melody as in emotion with a powerful convergence of different styles of vocals. The other half of the 4-Way is divided by Chivalà and Pique. Chivàla’s two songs are a smooth blend of post-hardcore meditative passages and straightforward screamo that consistently pull out your heart strings. Pique from NYC offer the closing 4 songs that can be as calm and introspective as disquieting and aggressive.
A solid 4-Way from bands with different and unique identities that together give rise to sonic emotional coherence.
Text: Cláudia Zafre