If you haven’t listened to Hacksaw to the Throat before, you might expect them to be a down tuned Myspace Deathcore band, who vehemently refer to themselves as Grindcore.  Fortunately, you’d be very far from correct in your assumption.  I feel like the band and their 2007 release, Wastelands, have been overlooked, due partly to their unfitting name, partly to the fact that it wasn’t supported live as much as other albums that came out that year, and partly to the fact that the band seemingly doesn’t have much of …

Mare is one of the most important artistic contributions in the entire collected history of the Human race. Ha! But no, seriously; If Hearwax was around for the release of this five song headstone (2004, Hydrahead), it would deservedly get a score of 9.9. No. Seriously; there is no written music, no possibly conceived music past and present that is as bleak, miserable, shocking , and touching as Mare. What undoubtedly is the most qualitative and compelling album I have selected for Weekly Worship so far is, as stated, important. …

After last week’s Eating Glass worship (okay, that was a bit of a special occasion), and now my re-infatuation with the Vatican Chainsaw Massacre’s Hazy Skies Over Martha’s Vineyard, I feel like I am just starting to rehash the best releases from 2008.  Oh well.
Just a word of warning: I did write a review for this record for Chart last year, so if you think I am plagiarizing someone, that someone is probably me.
Bred in the steel-laden city of Hamilton, the Vatican Chainsaw Massacre are a band that are going …

It feels weird to worship something that came out a year ago.  However, with Eating Glass’s final goodbye occurring recently, it feels right to do a writeup about their crushing 7″ Feed Them to the Vultures.
Eight tracks, eleven minutes.  Numbers don’t really mean anything – especially when it comes to hardcore music…usually the best releases are on the shorter side – but for a band to make their first impact so significant in such a short period of time is remarkable.  Eating Glass do just that.  The album’s first two …

There is something to be said of a band that approaches a record with a strict sense of minimalism in their stylistic approach, eventually to walk away in the end with something that sounds truly monumental.  This album, The White Stripes‘ self-titled record, released in 1999, is rich in aesthetic experience.  Dripping in a D.I.Y quality, soaking in a near forgotten dirty blues spirited grime, and cleverly painting an aggressive dance between lyric and sound, Jack and Meg White painted something truly impressive here.  Unless you care to take into …

One lazy afternoon I found myself in the digital company of one Lille Gruber, drummer of German brutal death metal titans Defeated Sanity, and the topic of discussion was “balls”.  Traditionally, brutal death metal has been the zenith and the bleeding edge of testosterone-soaked music, and with limp releases such as Origin’s newest release stepping into the limelight, the two of us were left to ponder: “what happened to the BALLS in death metal?”  Bands like Necrophagist and Origin strive for inorganic perfection – productions as clean and sterile as …

“Like a friend and a new lover” is shrieked with all the manic energy Justin Hill can muster. Honestly, this mutant must have walked right out of the recording booth for the 1981 production of The Lord Of The Rings and taken another step onto 2006’s Death Of A Dead Day. The quote opening this worship is of course from “Summer Rain”; never has my head been banged so aggressively (voluntarily of course… A few Curl Up And Die shows would attest otherwise) and fascinatingly without the aid of palm …

Matt Fox does not write easy music. His creations are compelling, beautiful even, and yet so inaccessible. I have listened to That Within Blood Ill Tempered back to back over ten times these past years, and it seems only recently that I am getting it. Just load up “Scornful Of The Motives And Virtues Of Others” and understand how profoundly sensitive such a melody is in its opening minute. As a strange beast, Shai Hulud produces a kinetic and shockingly well conceived mix of technical prog and straight- ahead …

Never For Ever was always the most magical, sympathetic, and vivid work of Kate Bush’s immaculate career. Like a reborn Maya Deren for the eighties, she is an artist (yes, artist in the truest sense) of limitless methods of expression. She has never been restrained by intrusive systems of process or the caked-on societal judgments which have fascistically spawned Dancing With The Stars… She vibrantly represents a time when a solo female performer could create relevant progressive music in every respect without pandering to personality marionettes and the paraphilia of …

Portal would feel right at home in early 1920’s Berlin, let alone down under in their hometown of Brisbane. 2003’s Seepia was a sublimely discordant offering, and yet four years later, the jump taken goes so far beyond. Their last album, released in 2007, is named Outré. The French word outré itself is one of those tricky designations that cross the language barrier, strictly because some human beings in another part of the world are able to sum up a theoretical concept that so defies vernacular or articulation; in this …

Noctambulant is the most musically complex metal album ever made. Noctambulant is the most musically complex metal album ever made. Do I need to type that again? Regrettably, a Weekly Worship article does not do the proper service to the potential volumes of analysis that could go into why such a statement is valid, but I will at least attempt. Some preamble; Sweden’s Spawn Of Possession was the brainchild of Jonas Karlsson, Dennis Rondum and Jonas Bryssling. While Bryssling handled a bulk of the structural composition (with Karlsson handling the …

First off, how THE HELL does a band’s sophomore recording, mix, and master sound severely worse than a debut with less means of production? I do not goddamn know, ask Defeated Sanity. 2007’s Psalms Of The Moribund is pretty damn phenomenal, but a healthy (ha really?) appreciation of their first album, Prelude To The Tragedy, highlights (and proves) this band’s ability to write and play rifftacular death metal. Seriously, it is like…gore stuffed hog offal and… gore stuffed hog offal’s antithesis, night and day, ok? That is the dynamic between …

!T.O.O.H! or Total Obliteration Of Humanity…! have been grinding in the Czech Republic for almost 20 years. Their success is similar to that shared by bands such as Orphaned Land and Negura Bunget; taking a malleable metal template and putting a geographical spin on it has proven to be an effective method of producing unique aggressive music. Their final album, (final due to a shoddy little record label known as Earache) ?ád a Trest (Order And Punishment), is the ultimate manifestation of their style, utilizing folk grind (yes, really) and …

In a recent interview, I noticed Daniel Mongraine react slightly when informed “The kids in Quebec, they always say, no one can play like Martyr.” He did not so much pause, but register that fact while squinting; all I could think was, he knows. Martyr are, all around, the most instrumentally proficient band that is active today. All of Martyr’s albums collectively contain the peak of musicianship in all modern metal disciplines. Martyr’s 2000 album Warp Zone is criminally under-discussed in the technical death metal cannon; perhaps in part to …

Weekly Worship is a new weekly column that we are going to run, you guessed it, weekly.  It is going to feature paragraph long reviews of albums that hearwax contributors love and want to share with you.  So here goes #1!
Circle Takes The Square – As The Roots Undo

That unassuming mournful line of notation fades into the audible; with whistling. Yes, and opening the final track is the same iteration, only transferred to lonely guitar, then crashing down in chords like the world around you. As The Roots Undo is …