Power Trip: Nightmare Logic (2017)

Since I have been doing this blog thing, no band has taken home Album of the Year honors twice.  Now, I really have not been doing this THAT long, and it is not as if bands have not been in the Top 10 more than once.  This year, that COULD change.  Power Trip's debut album was my Album of the Year in 2013 and this follow-up is definitely a contender for 2017.

Crossover is a genre that I have really gotten into in the last few years, and a lot of that has been due to Power Trip, who sounds like Nuclear Assault on steroids.  Power Trip manages to stick a little closer to thrash metal than punk on this release, but maintains the punk aggression and attitude.  The riffs are straight out of the early days of thrash metal, but are delivered with a fresh and modern flair so that the music does not fall into the trappings of the retro thrash wave of a few years ago.

Second track "Executioner's Tax" is led off by a fucking steamroller of a riff.  It is the clear highlight of the album, though Power Trip never wavers in intensity and each song is a neck-breaker.  This is a relatively short release, at just over half an hour in length and with just eight tracks, but it is a non-stop, crushing album from start to finish.

Nightmare Logic is a worthy successor to Power Trip's monstrous debut album, further refining their take-no-prisoners approach and contending for Album of the Year on this blog once more.

FMA Reviews: Nails: Obscene Humanity

Originally reviewed here.

It was with a lot of trepidation that I agreed to take a listen to this release. I was not familiar with Nails before so I had to look them up. What I found concerned me even more. Nails is a hardcore band. I do not care much for hardcore music. Nails is often associated with Converge. I really do not care for Converge. And Nails is on Southern Lord Records. With the exception of Lair of the Minotaur, I have never really cared for that label. But I did agree to give this a shot, and the fact that the release is three songs from an upcoming seven inch, I figured it would not be too painful. I can probably handle ten to fifteen minutes of hardcore.

Yes I can. This is a very impressive release, which is likely made better by the fact that it is so short. I am not sure I could listen to a full album of this, but I can definitely listen to these three songs.

This is a short but very intense release of metallic hardcore. And no, not metalcore in the sense of Avenged Sevenfold, etc. It is all pummeling riffing, pounding drums, and shrieked vocals. The third track "Lies" is the highlight as it features a very quick guitar solo and one hell of a breakdown leading to the end of the release.

The complaints are typical for this style of hardcore. There is a bit of a lack of dynamics, particularly with the vocalist. He shrieks all the way through. Other than the closing breakdown, there is a lack of any real tempo shift throughout the runtime. And the first two tracks are basically the same song. The third track stands out due to the soloing and the tempo shift but it basically starts the same way as well.

This is not likely something I would listen to often, but I can see some good things in it.