Jan29

Review: Anguish

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ANGUISH – ABSOLUTIST

If there’s one thing we love in Australia it’s sport. From Australian Rules down in Melbourne, through to Rugby in the northern states, people loose their minds when they see grown men chasing a ball. Now in summer everyone forgets about all the football codes for one thing. The Cricket. One of the greatest cricket players of recent time has been Ricky Ponting. Now things haven’t always been smooth sailing for Ricky. Back when he was first selected in the Australian team, the young fella did himself a bit of a mischief by having a cheeky bet on the dishlickers, then copped a resulting fist to the face for his efforts. While the country was stunned at the events, the locals in Tasmania only reinforced the fact that he deserved exactly what he got. This kind of brutality is not only limited to the states sport stars with young death metal outfit Anguish, just releasing a violently brutal new album.

Producing some ridiculously talented death metal is something that Tasmania is no stranger to having the likes of Psycroptic dominating the world with their brutal tunes. The younger generation is now starting to come through and Anguish are looking to step up and be noticed. The band has now been around for just over two years, and have worked hard to release a number of demos without the assistance of any fancy recording studios. 2011 saw the band head back into the studio to begin work other their debut EP and now we have seven tracks of crushingly heavy that is sure to leave a lot of fans with a stiff neck fro excessive windmilling.

There’s no messing around with this EP. Anguish waste no time exploding into the first song on this recording with a series of chugging guitars and impressive drum work. Leaning towards the more modern death core take on metal, the band rolls from crushingly heavy riff to riff via a series of highly technical shred sections and aren’t scared to throw in a few bass drops that are so deep your CD is almost in danger of skipping.

While bands in this genre can easily fall into trap of writing boring and repetitive song after song, Anguish have shown off their producing skills on this EP by putting together a recording that flows well and creates an end product that will leave you nodding along the whole time. The strength lies in their slower sections with everything finding it’s groove and slamming the listener like a kick to the side of the head.

While the death core genre is definitely not what it used to be, Anguish have certainly managed to put together a really good debut EP. While it may only be seven tracks, we look forward to seeing what the band will produce next and how they might look to evolve as a whole. It’s no coincidence that this young band have managed to play alongside a swagger of huge metal bands in their home state already, and we think that it’s not going to take long before they are continuing that trend all over the country.