Denver doom metal trio PRIMITIVE MAN have unveiled full streams of their new split recordings with UK’s SEA BASTARD (Dry Cough Records and Black Reaper Records) and Milwaukee’s NORTHLESS (Halo Of Flies Records). Without sacrificing any of the brutality and heaviness akin to their previous recordings, these 2 noisy trips reveal their most overwhelming of recordings. Listen for yourself.
PRIMITIVE MAN: Denver’s Primitive Man’s music matches its name: a savage, sparse mix of death metal, blackened noise, and doom riffs. The three-piece was formed in February of 2012 by Ethan Lee McCarthy, Jonathan Campos, and Bennet Kennedy (all current and former members of Vermin Womb, Withered, Clinging To The Trees of A Forest Fire, Death of Self and Reproacher). All of Ethan McCarthy’s projects have been prolific, and Primitive Man is no exception – the band released four splits between 2013 and 2015, and dropped another bombshell of nihility in 2015 with its Relapse EP Home Is Where The Hatred Is. Despite their primeval, bludgeoning approach, Primitive Man wouldn’t exist without their savage awareness of modern humanity: simultaneously old and new, atavistic and groundbreaking, Primitive Man stands to redefine current conceptions of hope, faith, and metal music.
NORTHLESS: Northless deals in volume. Great, shuddering washes of sound and texture, pummeling rhythms and intense guitars. Hate. Anger. Pain. Disillusionment. Abuse. Formed in 2007 by Erik Stenglein, Northless is a reaction to the erosion of the future. Drawing influence from various heavy sounds, Northless has placed a boot firmly in the realm of sludge and doom.
Northless delved deep into its side of the split: “Deleted Heartstrings” is a nod to the endgame of someone who has been pushed too far, and has begrudgingly embraced violence as a means to an end. Musically, imagine Unsane and Godflesh had a grimy kid born with a knife in their hand. “Wasted Breath” expresses the desire to have one’s entire likeness be wiped entirely from the earth once they themselves have passed. Seething ugliness and uncomfortable melodies meet a more progressive arrangement than much of what the band has done in the past.”
March 2016 will see the release of quite possibly the heaviest record Dry Cough has released so far.
If you like heavy music – and doom in particular – then you’ll no doubt be familiar with these two behemoths. After a joint UK tour earlier in 2015, they decided to put a record out together, and this skull-crushing split LP is the result.Denver trio Primitive Man are one of the hardest working and most prolific bands around right now, releasing an LP and a slew of splits & EPS since 2013, whilst seemingly being almost permanently on tour. The two tracks they’ve recorded for this split are as harrowing and ferocious as any of their prior output, in fact before I’d heard them, ELM informed me that they were the bands’ angriest songs yet!
‘Cold Resolve’ is one of the slowest tracks the band have recorded and it’s an uncomfortably claustrophobic listen that brilliantly builds the tension to an almost unbearable level: ‘Servant’ follows, and whilst hardly fast, the gradual increase in tempo almost feels like a blessed relief. Unfortunately for your ears and nerves, the respite is brief and band continue to violently lay waste to your senses for a further fraught 6+ minutes.The flipside features one mammoth track (is there any other kind?!) from Dry Cough alumni – and one of the UK’s finest doom outfits – Sea Bastard. This is the third record of theirs I have had a hand in releasing, and with each one they’ve blown me away.
‘The Hermit’ starts off fairly low key, the pace probably best described as ‘crawling’, but this is what the band do best: slow, bludgeoning repetition, luring the listener into an almost trance-like state before an expertly executed change in tempo takes things up several notches and the song explodes.
In terms of riffs, Sea Bastard have always offered up some of the most aurally satisfying ones one could wish to hear, and this track is no different, it’s full of them. If one word were needed to describe this song – and this band – then I think ‘hefty’ would do nicely!
