hard rock

This one was sent to me by Yvo, a friend of mine. That might be a bit strange since I know Yvo from the world of noise and dark ambient while Jerkbait is a straight forwarded hard rock band. Then again, Yvo knows a thing or two about rock 'n roll fun and that is exactly what Jerkbait delivers.

The band was formed in 2013 in Stadskanaal, The Netherlands. Since then, they have been writing songs, playing gigs and looking forward to record their first full length. That full length is named 'Paralyzed', but that is the last thing you want to be when you listen to Jerkbait.

The album opens with 'Predator and Prey' which immediately comes up with the infectious riffs and the heavy rocking tempo. Old hard rock and stoner rock bands and eighties thrash metal bands like Metallica, Rainbow, Ramones, Kyuss... must have been great sources of inspiration for these youngsters. 'No This Time Too' follows its predecessor's example while '72 Days' seems to nudge towards the power metal scene.

The album mostly makes me curious about the future direction of the band. Throughout the album, the Metallica influences seem to become bigger, especially in the vocals on 'Because Of You' and the massive rocker 'Commin' Get Ya' - my favorite track. This album is good, interesting and rocks pretty nicely but perhaps there are a few things to work on. One, and perhaps the most important are the vocals which in my opinion could use a bit more force and roughness.

Second, every band has one or a few solidly identifying songs. Nirvana had 'Smells Like Teen Spirit', Pantera has 'Broken', Green Day had 'Basket Case'. The eight songs on 'Paralyzed' are strong, well written and varied enough to be valuable live tunes, but I miss that one identifying song. We'll see if that one appears in the future, but for now, I'll enjoy these stompers regularly, especially the pounding title track. Check it out, this rocks!!!


​Serge. 

alternative rock

I have to admit that I was a bit misguided by this album's cover. Usually, these kind of covers appear on dark ambient, power electronics and noise albums, rarely on anything else. However, when I read the biography and listened to the music, something completely different appeared.

Let's start with the beginning. Ulster Page is a band from France. The members were born in 1992 and thus grew up with nineties rock and grunge. With these influences, they wrote and recorded an album that seems to take the awesome sound of that era into the future.

The album opens with a blast. 'In The Explosion' is a tremendous outburst of energy and a solid reference of what the quartet is capable of. I think this remains my favorite track throughout the entire album. 'Memory' and 'Straight In The Eye' are excellent alternative rock tracks with plenty of energy and dynamics.  'Right As Violence' is a strong rock ballad with a nostalgic eighties hard rock feel, but still, 'In The Explosion' definitely stands out. 

'All Or Nothing' seems to push the whole thing into a post-punk direction and even drags in a bluesy slide-guitar. I like that, it gives the album the necessary amount of variation and it's certainly able to surprise the listener. There are more great songs to be found on this album. All of them are well written rock songs, some uptempo, some slower. 'Eternal Candle' is another world class track, my second favorite here.

You can feel that there is talent in this band, not only in instrument handling but also in songwriting. With 'Memory', this quartet has released an excellent debut but perhaps time will tell that this was merely their debut. It's a very promising album, that's for sure but I think that these guys can and will come up with even more impressive music in the next few year. So yes, this comes highly recommend to all rockers out there.


​Serge

southern rock / hard rock

The Strong Man & the Sea is an album by hard rock act Trawler, released on August 26. With nine tracks – Run, Passion, Waves, Level O'k, Matter of Choice, Never Give Up, Michael, Go To Hell and Little Girl –, this album is absolutely awesome. Simple, but strong, sincere, direct and energizing, The Strong Man & the Sea has a powerful musicality, that can be better described as maximizing the poetic melancholy of an everlasting emotional rapture, with the aggrandizing redemption of a life that will slowly collide with a rebel and absolutely lethal, but satisfactory eternity of serene solitude.

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With a heavy sound, that nevertheless compresses the wild elements of its sincerely infuriating desire for placid calmness, there is an increasingly fragile softness in the surface of the music that paradoxically intensifies the most promising and extraordinary qualities of Trawler’s style. With constant melodies that break the limits of its primordial strength, the salutary harmonies of the songs denounce very simple musical structures, that, by its turn, expose quite profound and dynamic sonorous arrangements, intelligently sidelined at the apex of extremely virtuous creative abilities, that wisely subvert from the peripheral division of its expansive organic range the ambitious elements that makes The Strong Man & the Sea to be such a phenomenal, electrifying and peculiarly interesting album. 

Despite the fact that The Strong Man & the Sea is relatively concise, and its overall structure is fundamentally simple, the final result is absolutely marvelous, wonderful and extraordinary: exceedingly vigorous songs driven by wildly acid, explosive, dense and infuriatingly dispersive guitar lines unquestionably categorizes this album as a tremendously skilled and astonishing work of art.  

A fundamental record that has worked out right every possible quality musically available in the genre, The Strong Man & the Sea has everything to please ardent and passionate enthusiasts of hard rock. With a wild, impatient, abrasive, consistent, expansive and whimsically delineated style, that grasps over a major horizon of vivacious hallucination, this is a work of pure adrenaline, absolutely fantastic and tremendously amazing! You cannot miss the chance of listening this lucid, meritorious, powerful and magnificent state of the art work.  


Wagner

hard rock

One of the most cringeworthy things a music fan can say, is "rock is dead", "punk is dead", or any other genre for that matter. In fact, whenever I hear a musical style vocally being put to rest, I immediately lose my respect for that person's musical taste. Genres never die. They often turn up again and sometimes even better and more convincing than before. Take hard rock for example. Since Guns 'n Roses very few people follow the genre but it's still alive and kicking. And here too, things often turn up that are perfectly capable of making an old rocker's heart beat a little faster. That being said, here is Night, from Sweden, ready to take over the classic rock scene.

This album seems to come directly from the late seventies and early eighties, when New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was about to become the next alternative rock trend.  It was a heroic time for the hard rock scene, with bands like Iron Maiden, Kiss, Manowar, Deep Purple and Saxon. The members of Night have been listening to these bands a lot, so it seems. Their music is a beautiful amalgamation of the aforementioned bands. Helloween also come to mind, especially in the epic 'Under the Gallows".  Old Iron Maiden comes up when I listen to 'Time' while Manowar is hidden in plain sight in 'Surrender'.

Yet, although all these bands often come to mind, the whole album is a well worked out and coherent sounding rock album. In today's hard rock scene, Night would fit perfectly on bills with Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats, Kadavar, Blues Pills and so on. But perhaps it might be best to push 'Raft of The World' back in time and place it among your favorite classics. It's loaded with classic rock smashers that every self respecting rocker can appreciate. So yeah, I recommend this to everyone. I wouldn't be surprised if Night becomes the next big thing on some of next year's summer festivals.


​Serge

When I started these Brieviews series over a year ago, the initial idea is to empty my inbox by writing shorter reviews for EP's, reissues, singles and a few full length albums. Back then, I was talking about 900 unread emails. That amount has tripled since then and we're already at part 25. That's a lot of short reviews if you ask me. Anyway, here are some more Brieviews for your reading and listening enjoyment. 

dark ambient

heavy metal

black metal / thrash metal

post rock

drone / dark ambient

bandcamp

stoner rock / hard rock

gothic metal / symphonic metal

black metal

Larval Productions

post punk / gothic rock

grindcore

Serge

grunge / alternative rock

black metal / death metal

doom / black metal

psychedelic rock

psychedelic rock

grindcore

black metal 

ambient / electronic

progressive metal

alternative rock / blues

black metal

hard rock

facebook

Serge