I try and keep myself open to covering things that normally don’t float my boat, hence me taking a break from deathcore and technical death metal to take stab at the third album from the UK’S black/crust act Wolfbastard.

But they had a couple of things going for them; ‘Wolf’ and ‘Bastard’ are two of the coolest words in metal, and so is ‘Hammer’. And also my history with the label Clobber Records who have some of the UKS better black metal acts in Argesk, Shadowflag, Wolvencrown and ...And Now the Owls Are Smiling.

However, Manchester’s Wolfbastard is not like any of those bands, being a filthy, crusty, mid era Darkthrone smeared version of Martyrdod or other d- beat, ‘DIS’ type band, and their sneering 13 song, brisk Slayer-esque, 31-minute assault, is a feral, snarling, sneering release is a perfectly nasty reprieve from all the other stuff I listen to.

I’ll make this as short and to the point as the album. With song titles like “Fear the Exxxekutioner”, “Nun Krüsher”, “Graveyard Slag”, “Pissing on the Sacred Ground”, there’s no surprises as to what you are getting here. Punky, ripping, power chords with some blackened furor and sneering, gravelly vocals spewing things like ‘leather studded boots, sweat-drenched denim, face shredding riffs,  relentless ripping hell, pissed stained floors’, (“Fear the Exxxekutioner”), the sound is hammered home (see what I did there?) with confident, hateful ferocity from start to finish.

Some more sneaky, pure black metal, tremolo-picked ‘melodies’ appear here and there amind the hard-charging crust as heard later in”Morbid Fucking Hell” or “When Will It End”, but for the most part, its mainlining black/crust heroin into your veins at high-pressure numbers, like “Returning Evil”, “Death Creeping In”,  “Buckfast Blasphemies” and”Black Friday” and a killer, nasty little romp of a record.

[Visit the band's website]

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