Relapse Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Over three decades into their well storied career, Japanese post/noise-rock auteurs, Boris, return with the latest addition to their 'Heavy Rocks' saga. Running the spectrum of dynamic ground the band have covered throughout their tenure, this latest project explores both the most ferocious and serene material the stoner-doomers have ever tempered with. From the bombastic, fuzzed out opener, 'She Is Burning', to more industrial tinged fair, such as the unsettling, 'Ghostly Imagination', these ten pieces coagulate to paint a sonic tapestry of one of the most innovate, stone cold heavy rock acts to ever grace our speakers. When you need expansive, multi-faceted noise-rock to keep you endlessly guessing, send no substitutes for Boris.

Review: The debut full-length (not counting the Beyond Hypothermia compilation that came beforehand) from seminal Massachusetts metalcore/emo/post-rock/alternative giants Cave In, still stands as a monumental work that has maintained its position within the Venn Diagram intersection of a myriad of altering sonics two decades on. Tragically losing bassist/vocalist Caleb Scofield in a car accident in 2018, the band made a much-supported return with last year's phenomenal Heavy Pendulum while enlisting the help of Converge bassist Nate Newton. As the newly reformed group continue to tour the latest opus-like addition to their incomparable legacy, there's a bittersweet aura surrounding the 20 year anniversary of Until Your Heart Stops; both celebrating their enigmatic genre-fluid origins that have been an essential component of why Cave In are still paid such reverence, and a sobering reminder of the loss of such a truly underappreciated artistic voice.

Review: Once hailed by Pitchfork as "the noisiest pop music on the planet", Texan group Cherubs, with Immaculada High, continue their second wave after returning from a two-decade hiatus in 2014. It sees the three piece land on American metal and experimental label Relapse Records - think Mastodon and The Dillinger Escape Plan - with an album that brings a fresh, even a previously thought-lost '90s ethic back to alternative, distorted and noisy metal. This record is no final farewell type gig, with the essence and rawness of tracks like "Sooey Pig" and "Full Regalia" in all its anti-Americana charm shining through as something new. With the Texas-sized, psychedelic racket of Cherubs recorded and engineered by Erik Wofford (Explosions In The Sky, The Black Angels) an undeniable trippy element to the band's punk ethos wilfully resonates throughout, most distinctly in Kevin Whitley's LSD-laced vocals that add a warm colour to a wonderfully muddy mix of lo-fi, distorted post-rock. Get dirty.

Review: Following on from 1988's seminal sophomore triumph Leprosy, pioneering death metal forefathers Death entered into the 90s with a work that would shift perception on, not only their own project, but the entire genre as an entity. Released in 1990, Spiritual Healing marked a notable embracing of more melodious compositions, largely due to the presence of lead guitarist James Murphy, with this LP being his only contribution to the band's discography, along with bassist Terry Butler. Coinciding with the simultaneous maximisation of technicality and melody, the album would also shift the lyrical approach of primary songwriter Chuck Schuldiner, who began moving away from gore and viscera-soaked tales and focusing more on the real-world horrors of drug addiction, poverty, serial killers, organised religion and corrupt faith healers, just like the one that adorns the iconic artwork.

Review: The mid-90s were a time of immense change for the death metal scene, strongly linked to the endless progression of the genre's most vital pioneers Death, who in retrospect, appeared to be reshaping, retooling and expanding the genre for their current and future peers in real time. Having already switched out the lyrical gore obsessions of their early material for the socio-political ponderings of 1990's Spiritual Healing, before turning to more opaque, introspective ruminations on their superbly technical, progressive death metal opus Human in 1991, a two-year gap would occur (a lengthy creative respite in terms of their prolificacy) before the arrival of 1993's Individual Thought Patterns. During this time, metal drumming legend Gene Hoglan (Testament, Fear Factory) would enter the mix along with King Diamond guitarist Andy LaRocque, and this newly refurbished line up would continue to build upon the virtuosic hyper-technical prog-death blueprint of Human, but with a major increase of oppressive, metallic menace, leading many to consider the work to be Death's most mercurial balance of artistic complexity and vicious heaviness.

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Review: Arriving just a year after their seminal 1987 genre-defining debut LP Scream Bloody Gore, Floridian death metal pioneers Death and their creative mastermind Chuck Schuldiner would perfect, not only their own sound, but the blueprint for an entire movement with 1988's sophomore effort Leprosy. The first of their projects to be recorded at Morrisound Recording in Tampa, highly regarded today as the definitive studio home of the death metal genre thanks to the work of legendary producer and engineer Scott Burns (who would go on to cut records at the same space for Sepultura, Deicide, Obituary, Cannibal Corpse), the material marked the first stylistic and tonal shift towards the far more macabre, gory, compositionally and lyrically depraved bedlam that the genre would fully morph into throughout the next decade. In short, this is a death metal classic that requires little to no introduction, complete with virtuosic guitar leads, Morse-code blast beats and inhuman guttural bellows. The initiated should hang their heads in shame if unfamiliar, while those who've never gone looking into the deep abyss of Death, might be better off continuing to live in peaceful tranquillity.

Review: Originally released in 1998, The Sound of Perseverance would serve as the seventh and subsequently final full-length from death metal pioneers Death, before mastermind Chuck Schuldiner's untimely loss due to brain cancer-related complications in 2001. Noted for being the only work with this specific line-up, featuring guitarist Shannon Hamm, drummer Richard Christy, and bassist Scott Clendenin (all members of Schuldiner's equally brilliant but often overlooked side-project Control Denied), this final death breath of fluid progressive tech-death greatness can sometimes fall through the cracks of the band's impeccable discography, and be fobbed off as a latter day addition sans the original core members, but mark our words, even the last Death album puts most modern death metal attempts to utter shame.

Review: Deliverance Of Horrific Prophecies, Onward to Golgotha, Mortal Throne of Nazarene, Entrapment of Evil. New York metal pushers Incantation know how to pick titles for records, with so many references to occult fantasies it almost leave Diabolical Conquest reading a little limp. Not in terms of sound, though.

Released in 1998 after a number of changes to the team sheet, the record stands as one of the group's all time best in terms of musicality, instrumentation and undulating power. Having already carved a blood-stained place for themselves as proponents of a thrashing style somewhere between the slow march of doom and the frantic speed of death metal, for many this is where they really mastered that dark art - confidence coursing through every moment, from moody chugs to runaway freight trains.

Review: Reissued once more on its label comes this shocking sophomore LP from New York death metal/grindcore band Mortician; and with a name like Chainsaw Dismemberment, this should be more than demonstrative of its metallic, electrified bloodlust. One of many Relapse Records releases to enter an informal Relapse hall of fame, this terse, creepy 50-minute-long opus is full of subversive stalker energy, building a sludgy, Babylonian audio-edifice out of the horror movie thematics (think Scream). All tracks, naturally, hear their low-mixed guitars buzz with the grating twinge of a chainsaw against flesh.

Review: While originally formed in 1996, it took five years for the first full-length LP from Oregon stoner-doom trio YOB to materialise. Elaborations Of Carbon serves as a heaving beastly opus of gargantuan variety, combining thunderous plodding riffs with trudging grooves, leading to hypnotic repetitions that enthral and captivate to staggering effect. Clocking in at a weighty and uncompromising 70 minutes, only two of the six cuts feature single digit timecodes with the seismic 'Revolution' and bombastic closer 'Asleep In Samsara' both clocking in at approximately 17 minutes apiece, leading this debut down a caustic abyssal plain not for the faint of heart. Reissued on a lush gatefold 2xLP, abandon all hope ye collect doom metal records.