Metal 286 Items

180g vinyl!

In the kitchen of the Byron Bay home of Winston McCall stands a refrigerator, adorned on one side by a quote from Tom Waits: “I want beautiful melodies telling me terrible things.” This, the Parkway Drive vocalist says, is a pretty good summation of himself. It holds true, too, as one of the guiding principles behind Darker Still, the seventh full-length album to be born of this picturesque and serene corner of north-eastern NSW, Australia, and the defining musical statement to date from one of modern metal’s most revered bands. Darker Still, McCall says, is the vision he and his bandmates – guitarists Jeff Ling and Luke Kilpatrick, bassist Jia O’Connor and drummer Ben Gordon – have held in their mind’s eye since a misfit group of friends first convened in their parents’ basements and backyards in 2003. The journey to reach this moment has seen Parkway evolve from metal underdogs to festival-headlining behemoth, off the back of close to 20 gruelling years, six critically and commercially acclaimed studio albums (all of which achieving Gold status in their home nation), three documentaries, one live album, and many, many thousands of shows. While Darker Still remains irrefutably Parkway Drive, it finds the band sonically standing shoulder to shoulder with rock and metal’s greats – Metallica, Pantera, Machine Head, Guns N’ Roses – as much as it does their metalcore contemporaries. “I wanted a classic guitar tone for this record,” explains Ling, who credits much of his inspiration to the connection his riffs have with a crowd in a live setting Emerging from the darkness of the past few years, this is the true face of Parkway Drive: redefined and resolute, focused in mind and defiant in spirit. Tracks 1.

There’s a sick irony to how a country that extols rhetoric of individual freedom, in the same gasp, has no problem commodifying human life as if it were meat to feed the insatiable hunger of capitalism. If this is American nihilism taken to its absolute zenith, then God’s Country, the first full length record from Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is the aural embodiment of such a concept.

Having lived alongside the heaps of toxic refuse that the band derives its name from, the fatalism of daily life in the American Midwest permeates throughout the works of Chat Pile, and especially so on its debut album. Exasperated by the pandemic, the hopelessness of climate change, the cattle shoot of global capitalism, and fueled by “...lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of THC,” God’s Country is as much of an acknowledgement of the Earth’s most assured demise as it is a snarling violent act of defiance against it. Within its over forty minute runtime, the album displays both Chat Pile’s most aggressively unhinged and contemplatively nuanced moments to date, drawing from its preceding two EPs and its score for the 2021 film, Tenkiller. In the band’s own words, the album is, at its heart, “Oklahoma’s specific brand of misery.” A misery intent on taking all down with it and its cacophonous chaos on its own terms as opposed to idly accepting its otherwise assured fall. This is what the end of the world sounds like.

"Ablanathanalba" will be even more bluesy, powerful and psychedelic.It will be an album in which we will venture into territories still unexplored by us and will be strengthened by all the experience gained both in terms of song writing and recording techniques. It will be a record that will tell these crazy times.. in which nothing is true anymore but everything is ephemeral and the opposite of itself. We will sink into this madness and return perhaps with something more than when we left.

Bonus CD is missing

Gold coloured vinyl.

Cover with bumped corner

Do you remember the final scene of “The Fearless Vampire Killers”? The one with dozing Professor Abronsius in his coach, unaware of what he’s bringing back with him from the east? 50 years on, Kadavar did the exact same thing. They ventured east – and brought something with them: A gothic horror story turned doom rock. With a decidedly morbid turn, Europe’s hardest working rock band unearth their dark and twisted roots, once and for all defining their unique brand of retro rock, doom and proto metal.

Purple and Pink Blend splatter vinyl. Poster insert included.