Indifferent Engine – Tachikoma
There’s certainly an art to screaming. Learning how to avoid blowing your throat muscles through your nose requires a good deal of practising and preparation. Similarly, managing to put together the screams with similarly distorted, abhorrent sounds courtesy of guitars and drums, in the form of screamo takes a fair deal of planning and careful execution. These styles, after all, much like the metal subgenres, are the gym workouts of rock music.
Hardcore has always had a “spring cleaning of the mind” kind of feel. The early hardcore shows were not only an exercise in speed and aggression but a kind of emotional confession of all the things stuck in the old noggin and stopping progress.
Indifferent Engine’s manga and anxiety inspired single Tachikoma is such a tune. Like others in its style, the focus is on the vocals that shift from mildly irritated tones to full-blown eruptions of mental anguish. The instrumental is just as angry, albeit in intention more than in tone, including some nifty bass and drum work for good taste. If you’ve ever found yourself silently screaming into your brain, you might have just found a soundtrack for that feeling.
Voodoo Bloo – MMA
With all the energy drinks and enough sugar to give an elephant seizures all floating about, it’s interesting to note just how tame much of rock n’ roll music has become nowadays. That’s at least true of the rock that occasionally makes it onto the increasingly more anodyne playlists of big radio stations.
Well, Voodoo Bloo have spared no expense and little of their health in downing, what seems to be, an impressive amount of energy-inducing substances while writing and recording MMA. The result is a youthful sounding record. It’s the greatest trait is doing very little to chop off the edges, instead of allowing the group to play naturally in all their unsupervised teenage glory.
Rory McDonald, the group’s singer and leader, is blessed with the kind of vocal tone designed to get people’s attention. It’s an unfair advantage for sure, but one that the group cleverly tosses naturally into the mix. MMA sugary adolescent sucker punch you might have not even known you were looking for.
