The 2015 Arsies: January 20, 2015

January 20, 2015 arse

What is up, metalheads!
Montreal's Beyond Creation start the fracas tonight with their second album, Earthborn Evolution, and it's delightful. If early 90s Cynic had stayed on their original course, and gotten a little darker along the way, I imagine that this is what they'd sound like. Once again, the fretless bass antics of Dominic "Forest" Lapointe are front and slippery center, an easy appeal to my sensibilities. But the rest of the music is also top notch, jazzy and maudlin, culminating is the most excellent Fundamental Process. A+++ WOULD LISTEN AGAIN.
From a very opposite and dark corner, Godflesh fires back with A World Lit Only By Fire, their first full-length album in 13 years, which apparently is a long time to listen mutely to one's own inner demons. A lot of Godflesh's hallmarks are here: sloppy automatons, the subversive dissatisfaction you always get from British industrial, and a blessed reliance on overdriven bass. But the band seem to have taken some of their snark of years gone by, and repurposed it into pure malice, in direct opposition to the punk party route that Pitchshifter took. Make no mistake: this album is fucking heavy, and fucking nasty. And the brilliant thing is that, for the most part, they haven't had to update their sound. The intervening years have been just long enough for their Pretty Hate Machine drum machine aesthetic to come back, for a resurgence of the lo-fi DIY that they've embodied all along. Hell, their detuning is fairly djentish these days. For all of its weight, the album is a joy to listen to, and stands up to multiple plays. This is some of Godflesh's finest work ever, and it catapults them above Beyond Creation for the win tonight!
Tune in tomorrow, when Zig returns to pronounce judgment on Dead Congregation and The Haunted! But first, I'll decide between Every Time I Die and He Is Legend!

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