Song of the Day: This Is The Kit – Inside Outside

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This Is The Kit just recently announced their upcoming sixth full length album Careful of Your Keepers, which is due out June 9 via Rough Trade.

“Inside Outside” is the lead single off the album, a sonically rich track that grabs the listener’s attention for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the lyric “I choo-choo-choose you,” a line that almost certainly must be a Simpsons reference. And really, who doesn’t love a good Simpsons reference?

Check out the video for “Inside Outside” below.

Song of the Day: Nicole Yun – High American

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“High American” is the latest single from Eternal Summers singer/guitarist Nicole Yun‘s recently released sophomore album Matter. Check out the video for “High American” below.

Matter is out now on Kanine Records.

Song of the Day: bdrmm – Be Careful

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“Be Careful” is the latest single from Hull quartet bdrmm‘s upcoming album I Don’t Know, out June 30th on Rock Action Records. Check out the video for “Be Careful” below.

Concert Review: Carcass, April 16, Phoenix Concert Theatre

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There’s a scene in Sam Dunn’s documentary Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey wherein Dunn tells the story of himself and some high school friends sitting around and trying to come up with the most extreme death metal lyrics they can. It’s a great scene and one that likely rings true for a lot of metalheads.

I can certainly recall my circle of metalhead friends doing the same back in high school as we made up lyrics for a steady stream of not entirely real bands. In large part those lyrics were inspired by the works of Liverpool’s Carcass, whose early work especially focused on gore with a particular penchant for using the elevated language of medical textbooks. This set them apart and gave their songs a slightly more sophisticated air when compared to the more straightforward bluntness of many of their peers’ lyrics, and helped to solidify their status as true originals in the metal world. The band’s influence on the genres of death metal and grindcore, both lyrically and musically, is indisputable, even if our own attempts to mimic the band’s particular lyrical style back in the day mostly resulted in semi-nonsensical word salads.

Touring behind their latest, 2021’s Torn Arteries, Carcass made their way to The Phoenix to play a career-spanning set to a packed house on Sunday night. Well, not entirely career-spanning – they neglected to include anything off their debut Reek of Putrefaction, though to be fair, that one’s a bit of an outlier in their discography with its more straight up grindcore sound. I doubt anyone minded its omission too much though, as the band’s setlist for this tour, full of classics like “Buried Dreams,” “Incarnated Solvent Abuse” and “Heartwork”, is a hard one to argue with.

The one quibble I might have with their set is the band’s reliance of working snippets of some of their tracks into the intro or outro to other songs, but I guess it gives them a chance to slip at least some part of these songs into a medley when they otherwise might have been cut altogether, so I guess I’ll allow it.

Despite vocalist/bassist Jeff Walker’s description of himself and his bandmates as the old guys just trying to keep up with the younger acts on the bill with them, Carcass proved on this occasion that there’s a reason why they’re still regarded as one of the greats of extreme metal.