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Raw Power was formed in 1981 by two brothers from Poviglio, Italy, Mauro on vocals and Giuseppe on guitars. Land of the Rising Spaghetti commemorates their 40th Anniversary release and their pre-Covid 19 tour of Japan with the Ananas opening. The line-up for Raw Power's side of the record includes Mauro Codeluppi on vocals, Marco Massarenti on bass, Paolo on guitars, Berta on drums and Giuseppe in spirit. Sadly, Giuseppe left the planet on October 6th, 2002 but his guitar can still be heard screaming from the gutters. He was with Raw Power for slightly over a quarter of a century and is the driving force between Mauro's desire to keep the band functioning until he too passes on. Executive producer, David Ulysses Portnow first saw Raw Power in 1986 at the Gorilla Gardens all-ages club where he worked until its closure. "Funny thing about that night, the opening band was Guns & Roses," he recalls. In 1987, Raw Power returned to the US and headlined a massive US and Canadian tour with the Dayglo Abortions and Dehumanizers in tow. Raw Power have also performed with the Ramones, Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, Adolescents, DOA, Agnostic Front, Suicidal Tendencies, Motorhead and a list of heavy hitters that goes on and on, including Japan's female fronted Ananas. PIG Records was searching for more female representation in punk and found it with the Ananas. PIG Records wants to emphasize the importance of women in rock. Mauro gave his full support to the concept and describes front lady Karina Friday as the modern-day version of Mr. Chi Pig from Snfu, may his soul rest in peace as well. The Ananas are from Kyoto, Japan and Karina is supported by Junichi on guitars, Awaji on bass and Kazu on drums.

Steamrolling and rumbling death metal. Drawing influence from Florida, Sweden, and their heritage, Bloodphemy distinguish themselves with aggressive death metal mixing modern and classic styles. This is particularly true in their fourth studio album, “Blood Sacrifice”, the first to be released after the Dutchmen signed a record deal with Emanzipation. Cavernous deep roaring vocals, heavy slow crawling dirges and up-tempo psychotic slaughtering providing heavy listening that hits you in the chest and to bang your skull heavy! The album is aptly led by a great concept: During the 1800’s, in a rural area of the US, a priest leads the congregation of a small village. He is obsessed by the sins of the people around him. He is convinced he has direct conversations with god and this drives him to see the actions of his own family as sinful. In visions he sees the destruction of heaven and the victory of the forces of hell if he lets the sinning go on. With this in mind he decides to end the sins by killing his own family. In the end he ends up in an insane asylum surrounded by only sinners and driven completely mad. Bloodphemy was created in 2000 and is based in Amersfoort, Netherlands. In 2002 they released the album “Section 8”. Shortly after they disbanded, only to be revived in 2015. Since then they released the EP “Blood Will Tell” (2016) and the albums “Bloodline” (2017) and “In Cold Blood” (2019). The band is also known for being an unrelenting live force, with appearances registered in stages across Germany, Luxemburg, Czech Republic, Austria,

Wretched Soul is a modern sounding British Blackened Heavy Metal outfit formed in the historic city of Canterbury. Following periods of relentless gigging around the UK, the band has honed an exciting and unique sound all its own, with their potent melding of Death, Thrash, Black and Traditional Heavy Metal offering brutality and melody in equal measure. The cornerstone elements of melody, aggression and conviction allow Wretched Soul’s music to resonate with a vast cross-section of fans, regardless of any specific sub-genre preferences. Described by Zero Tolerance Magazine as "refreshingly difficult to categorise", they have also been hailed by Terrorizer Magazine as "one of the UK's most promising underground Thrash bands.” Appearances at Bloodstock Festival and Incineration Festival has gained the band a healthy and loyal fan-base.

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks.

Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

Still shrink wrapped but opened.
Record is slightly warped but still enjoyable.

Messa’s rising trajectory hits the stratosphere on their immense new album “Close”. Soaring up out of the Italian Doom Rock underground in 2014, Messa have been rapidly garnering a frenzied throng of devotees, in thrall to their monumental and broad-ranging sound craft. Releasing two widely celebrated cult records, the latest of which “Feast For Water” in 2018 was a critical breakthrough success, with Rolling Stone calling the whole album “captivating, wringing maximum drama out of its savvy stylistic clash,” Messa have had everyone on tenterhooks, waiting for what was next.

New album “Close” draws us further into Messa’s spellbinding textures and immersive dynamics. Described as “Stevie Nicks fronting Black Sabbath,” singer Sara’s colossal voice omnipotently carries the listener on an emotional rollercoaster ride where the sonic cauldron of Iommi guitars gives way to Arabian oudh and progressive solos in a masterful style-clash that well befits Messa’s incendiary reputation.

The hushed Fender Rhodes piano intro on opener “Suspended,” picks up where Messa left off on their previous album “Feast For Water” but then collapses gloriously into Jazz guitar and widescreen impassioned crushing riffs, lighting our way for the odyssey ahead. The scene is set magnificently for the journey that “Close” expertly takes the listener on, with Messa’s obvious care and passion for the album as a pilgrimage of sonic experience. Heavyweight tracks like “If You Want Her To Be Taken” or “0=2” are modern Doom Rock classics that expertly upgrade and leave the genre reeling in their wake. “Pilgrim” and “Orphalese” are woven with tapestries of Mediterranean sounds where oudh and eastern chord phrasings expand Messa’s cinematic palette with a panache that is all their own. Atmospheric and grandiose belters like “Rubedo” and “Dark Horse” build into an almost limitless climax of discord and harmony where blast beats and saxophones descend into a thrilling cacophony that’s a masterclass in artful cutting edge Doom.

Referencing bands like Dead Can Dance, Swans and Om, Messa have created an album where song, experience and atmosphere are focused into a crystalline modus where high art flawlessly embraces good old fashioned riff-worship. Transcending the occult and noir-tinted atmospheres of their past works, “Close” confidently weaves Messa’s multifarious influences into a singular breath-taking sound that leaves the listener enthralled. Perfection or something extremely close, Messa’s “Close” is not just a Metal record, but it’s definitely one of the best things to break out of the confines of Metal in a long time.

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.

Modern day Amsterdam is a bit of an oxymoron. On the one hand, the city proudly brandishes its reputation for alternative and sub cultures, pushing back against lawmakers and their incoherent policies to adopt approaches that are more realistic and levelheaded. On the other, its a place of such rampant commercial development the local government actively discourages visitors and new hotel developments. Look closely, though, and you can still feel the spirit of what, during the latter half of the 20th Century, made this place so special. Paradiso is one of those spots. A waterside cultural venue with a history first as a church, then an illegal squat, before becoming what it is today, the walls themselves seem to pervade a sense of brave, adventurous heritage. An ideal place to catch one of the most defining bands of the 1980s in their heyday, then, here Depeche Mode deliver an astounding set in a space with the atmosphere to match.

Formed in 2019 by creative duo Julie Docteur and Benoît Sangoï, and following their critically acclaimed 2020- debut EP, Indigo Raven welcomed a third band member to round up their line-up, bassist Jean Green (also in Mourir). The trio’s sound emerges from the Peaceville Three’s influence with a modern sludge approach. A simple but not unsophisticated instrumental foundation of the band, coloured by a shamanic sound and these occult, haunting vocals, make Looking for Transcendence a captivating yet heavy as hell debut, that will most likely see Indigo Raven stand out as one of Europe’s underground best and up and coming bands.

Experimental hardcore outfit Rats Will Feast draws their musical landscape from extreme aggression and hallucinatory chaos. Hailing from Jyväskylä, Finland, the band has been touring actively in its current form since 2018. Varying between crushing hardcore, noisy psychedelia and more mellow postrock sounds on their 2019 album Scarcity, 2020 EP Songs of a Racehorseand 2021's Malady, the band's new album Hellhole continues the development of the bands destructive chaotic hardcore sound. Hellhole is the culmination of the band's all the previous work. It's a bruising demonstration of the bands core sound: chaotic rhythms, battering drums, screeching vocals, varied guitar melodies and crushing riffswith gritty low frequencies. Characteristic of the band, the album is defined by the twisted song structures and desolate, emotional lyrics which deal with the artificiality of the modern world.Hellhole is the culmination of the band's all the previous work. It's a bruising demonstration of the bands core sound: chaotic rhythms, battering drums, screeching vocals, varied guitar melodies and crushing riffswith gritty low frequencies. Characteristic of the band, the album is defined by the twisted song structures and desolate, emotional lyrics which deal with the artificiality of the modern world.

Thanatopsis (a Greek word meaning “Meditation Upon Death”) was formed towards the beginning of 1992 in the San Francisco Bay Area, producing several demo tapes and touring the surrounding area. After a long hiatus, the band regrouped in 2015 and decided to create new material, giving some of the timeless songs from the past the chance that they deserved. The resulting output is eight songs that take the listener on a emotionally twisted ride of violent, catchy, thrashy death metal. These are timeless songs reminiscent of the days when bands had their own distinctive sound while also maintaining a modern edge. ‘Initiation’ contains eight songs that take the listener on an emotionally twisted ride of violent catchy death metal. With themes that include corruption, occultism, murder, revolt, and loss of faith, Thanatopsis have delivered an album that keeps the listener engaged from start to finish, wth a sound unlike any other.

Intolerant, as a project, arose from the need of putting the hate and social distress built up during the years of Antihuman War Machine and Soul Devourer into music. "Primal Future" is the first chapter and will be released by Time To Kill Records. The album has 10 tracks inspired by the mid 90s Black/Death Metal scene, with an experimental touch (cyber-drumming) and noise/industrial elements. Lyrics go about apocalyptic scenarios where man, victim and perpetrator, gets back to a pure trivial survival existence. Deprived of any modern comfort, man must face social violence, cannibalism and human sacrifices with magical purposes. This album is a written version of the human race's future.