Tombs
Fear Is The Weapon
Relapse

Fuck melody man – you don’t need it, right? No one does. It’s for the weak. Tombs don’t deal in the weak; they deal in huge impenetrable fortresses of sound and that pulsating, nausea of terror and excitement. ‘Fear Is The Weapon’ is a compilation of the band’s early material, such as their self-titled EP, a split with Planks and a collection of demos. As you can expect; it’s suitably intimidating. ‘Course of the Empire’ is fucked-up garage-sounding noise metal; that is akin to Pissed Jeans trying to play Melvins songs after lobbing a guitar through a speaker. The eerie, disorientating wails and dense bludgeon of sound is certainly a wake-up call.

For some reason Tombs have elected to use a wind tunnel on ‘Marina’; a track that sounds like a nuclear storm meeting an inconceivable amount of random noises and non-sequitur events. ‘Monuments’ on the other hand, retains that swagger of gritty grunge-tinged noise rock; from the barbed vocal roar down to the sharp crash of the guitars. ‘Cypress’ begins a rather melancholy piece; with the first part devoid almost entirely of vocals and instead relying on sparse instrumentation before an impressive build to some roaring, bass-heavy metallic-punk noise that morphs into stark, barbaric thrash. In contrast, ‘Cheval Noir’ is a dirge of almost post-rock build; relying on a progressive sheet of droning sound; ethereal (possibly female) vocals, that have been distorted and buried under layers of scrawling feedback.

For demo recordings; tracks such as the raw scrape of ‘Merrimack’ and ‘Beneath the Toxic Jungle’ both sound like finished articles – there’s very little to distance them from the other non-demo tracks; save perhaps the rather buried vocals, but that seems to be a necessary element of the Tombs sound. Scraping, acerbic metal that not so much bites; it chews your hand clean off.

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Review by Ross Macdonald