Revisionist Western

First thing's first. That album title is amazing. "Satan is Our Liberator, We Deserve Freedom Without Shame?" Come on. Poetry. Now that we've got that out of the way, Coward Punch are a relatively new doom band from Sydney, Australia. Like (DOLCH) , Coward Punch straddle industrial and doom, but where (DOLCH) took the formula of driving drum machine beats and heavy riffs in the direction of something pretty and ethereal, Coward Punch move in a grimier, uglier direction. While there are truly gorgeous ambient passages in these songs, the bulk of the album is thick sludge riffs with throat ripping vocals layered over them. An obvious comparison would be something like Godflesh, but the band they actually most remind me of is Hyatari , the underrated drone/doom band from the early-2000s, albeit with some screaming vox in the mix. I'm not always a fan of the mixture of industrial and sludge (the aforementioned Godflesh doesn't really do much for me), but the ...

Dumange is a Spanish neocrust band and this appears to be their first release. Dropping a single, 40 minute song as your first release when you're a crust band is a gutsy move, but Dumange pull it off with this release. Writing long songs when you're a hardcore band always means that you have to use every trick you have to keep things interesting in a genre whose tools are designed to give you minute long bursts of energy. Dumange combine a variety of sounds and textures in this song, ranging from driving, post-rocky parts, to gentle passages with whispered vocals over them, to full on raging d-beat. The end result is something that, to me, sounds like melodic crust like Remains of the Day or Deszcz mixed with Envy or City of Caterpillar. If any of that is your jam, this is PWYW over at Bandcamp. I'd recommend it.   Entre ratas by Dumange