Are you tired of your metal bands jumping from genre to genre in order to fill up 10 minutes? Or how about their overuse of wussy acoustic guitar interludes? Or arrogant, meretricious guitarists using their guitars as  a masturbation tool?  And are you just sick and tired of some jack-ass belting, belching, crooning, whining and/or vomiting onto a microphone just to pass themselves off as a ‘singer’? If you answered yes to these questions, then you might want to listen to Loincloth‘s new album – Iron Balls of Steel. They want to strip down metal to just punishing riffs, trimming all of the fat that has built up on it for the past 40 years.

Iron Balls of Steel starts with a sludgehammer of an opener, “Underwear Bomb” (something that happens after stuffing oneself with Chipotle) goes into a staccato riff rampage but doesn’t build up to anything further. Sure, it’s an introduction track which for most bands are just fillers, unfortunately for Loincloth, most of their songs don’t go anywhere musically. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of cool riffs on here. “Long Shadows”, “The Poundry” and “Shark Dancer” (I like to imagine sharks dancing wearing sombreros and mariachi outfits) all have fantastic riffs; especially “The Poundry” with it’s sludge-thrash feel that is changed up around 1:09 to give it more of a sludge-djent feel then it just ends.

Granted not every song has to have an epic finish, they could at least develop the songs a bit more, giving more peaks and valleys to really accent the sludge coated djent riffs. “Theme” is a great example with quick start-stop action that slows down around 1:25 to great effect only to fade out about a minute later leaving the listener curious as to what happened to the rest of the song. The riffs are there, there is just no real flow between them, with slight variations throughout such as on “Hoof-Hearted” and “Beyond Wolf”.

There are a couple of tracks on here that sound developed such as “Stealing Pictures.” Starting off with a great mid-tempo riff that is slowed down midway to eventually bring it to a gradual halt at song’s end. “Angel Bait” is another fantastic track on here with its use of staccato riffs.

What is on Iron Balls of Steel is extremely promising, I just hope that Loincloth steps up their songwriting for the next album to really get the punishing metal edge that they want going.

[Visit the band's website]

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