Fear Factory – Soul Hacker
Despite their current status as resurgent underdogs, Fear Factory are one of the most important and influential metal bands of all time. Their pioneering hybrid of extreme metal, electronics and dark sci-fi has been plundered repeatedly over the last 25 years, but no one has ever come close to matching the robotic precision of Dino Cazares’s riffing or Burton C Bell’s seminal melding of growls and crooning. The band’s new album Genexus – their ninth – more than makes up for the slight disappointment of 2012’s The Industrialist, not least because it boasts countless refined examples of the soaring but insistent vocal refrains and powerhouse, staccato ensemble assaults that typified Fear Factory’s most revered album, Demanufacture (which celebrates its 20th birthday this year). Soul Hacker is the simplest, most direct and, perhaps, least interesting track on Genexus, but it still makes most other supposedly modern metal bands sound anaemic and bland by comparison.
Meta-Stasis – Disintegrate
Wild hybrids in metal rarely work particularly well, but Meta-Stasis have nailed it, with spectacular results, on their new album The Paradox of Metanoia. Two parts groove-driven death metal to one part bowel-shredding breakcore, with a slight hint of Killing Joke in some of frontman Solomon J Lucifer Christ’s vocal melodies, the Londoners’ sound dares to be different and wickedly extreme while somehow tapping into the same rich vein of enigmatic chaos that helped to turn Slipknot into one of the biggest bands on the planet. Whether the metal mainstream is quite ready for a band as self-evidently unhinged as Meta-Stasis is another matter entirely, but rarely has an underground British metal band seemed so deserving of greater attention.
Baby in Vain – Muscles
There is a fine line between the artful end of grunge (think Melvins) and the myopic thump of proudly Sabbathian doom, and it’s one that teenage trio Baby in Vain are unlikely to be even vaguely aware of. Audibly untutored but already writing songs that thrum with fearlessness and great confidence, this Danish all-girl outfit could easily bring the joys of proper riffs and authentic heaviness into the mainstream realm, but there is something so wonderfully gnarly and uncontrived about their sound that should preclude them from being a flash in the underground pan. A sneak preview from the band’s forthcoming debut album, Muscles is a bracing splurge of warped riffing and wonky lyrical flurries that sounds quite unlike anything else out there at the moment.
Locrian – An Index Of Air
The problem with post-metal is that so few of the bands that involuntarily operate under its auspices are anywhere near as good as Neurosis, the band that inadvertently spawned the entire scene. Help is at hand from Chicago’s Locrian, however, and their mind-blowing new album, Infinite Dissolution. While still firmly rooted in the hypnotic, low-slung grind of their post-metal forebears, this band have somehow devised a perverse and unnervingly fresh approach that exploits both jarring, jackhammer blastbeats and waves of synapse-tickling ambient interference. The album is best experienced in its disorientating entirety, presumably while supremely bollocksed on hallucinogens of unknown origin, but An Index of Air works as a shimmering and quietly nasty entry point.
Sterbhaus – Crossed & Pissed & Devoured
The notion that metal can only truly move forward via acts of flagrant cross-pollination with other genres certainly contains a grain of truth, but real progress in the genre tends to emerge from a more subtle tweaking of a well-worn formula. Sterbhaus hail from Stockholm, a city with an impeccable death metal heritage, but theirs is a far from traditional take on high-velocity brutality. Cleverly blending death, black, thrash and traditional metal into a streamlined, startlingly precise whole and, more importantly, remembering to write great songs with hooks galore, the Swedes come a lot closer to reinventing the steel wheel than any amount of pop-embracing chancers.
