SHORT BUT SWEET: DESPERATE CRY / PRIVATE PRISONS / SILURIAN

(Andy Synn offers up three bite-sized bursts of brutal flavour for you to sink your teeth into)

No matter how big of a music lover you are there are always going to be times when you’re just “not feeling it”.

Case in point, I’ve been circling the idea of doing another edition of the “Best of British”, as well as a Death Metal-centric collection, but just haven’t found the right albums/artists yet to fill up a full article of either (a minimum of three is always preferred, and in both cases I’m struggling to find that third band or record that really inspires me to write about them).

Thankfully all it took was a quick shift in focus – away from considering full-length albums towards a trio of recent short-form releases – to get my proverbial juices flowing, so let’s stop wasting time and dig into today’s hand-picked selection of EP-sized extremity, shally we?

DESPERATE CRY – OVERCOMING THE FEAR OF REALITY THROUGH THE ACCEPTANCE OF MORTALITY

In a world full of pre-packaged, over-produced, hyper-polished music it takes real balls to go against the grain and track things live in one room as a band… but that’s exactly what Aussie crossover crew Desperate Cry did for their new EP (and you can watch them do it here).

That doesn’t mean that Overcoming the Fear of Reality… has low production values by any means (the mix is strong and powerful, favouring raw energy over pristine performances, while still granting the listener a rich, ruggedly-textured sound for their expectant ears), but what it emphasises is just how tight the trio had to be (while allowing for the occasional inevitable drift away from quantised, click-aligned perfection) and how much they must have drilled and drilled and drilled these five tracks in the practice room prior to the recording session.

Of course, “tracking all together in one room” (with the vocals the only thing being recorded separately) would probably feel like a bit of a gimmick if the resultant output weren’t up to scratch, but you’ve probably already guessed that the group’s killer combination of Death, Thrash, and Hardcore – which owes a great debt to the likes of Bolt Thrower, Incendiary, and early Sepultura (hence the band name, one must assume) – is more than capable of kicking your ass up one side of the street and back down the other.

And while it’s kicking seven shades out of your eardrums it’s also making sure to do so in different ways, from the gargantuan grooves and thrashy bursts of speed which propel “Suffer No More” and the punky stomp and chunky chuggery of “The End Becomes Real” to the ultra-hefty bludgeon ‘n’ blast of “Plead My Case” and the riff-heavy, almost doomy, delights of the instrumental title-track (with only the short, sombre interlude of “Self Obliteration” easing off for a mere minute of relative calm), ensuring that as consistently bruising as this EP gets, it absolutely never gets boring.

PRIVATE PRISONS – THE YARD/THE HOLE

Excommunication, the second album from gruesome Californian Doom/Sludge gang Private Prisons, was one of the most unpleasant surprises – in the best possible way – of 2024 (read more about it here).

And upon discovering that the group’s third album, Theo Lacy, was set for release at the end of this month (making them a prime candidate for the next edition of The Synn Report, as it happens) I also found out that they’d dropped a new EP as well, comprising two tracks from the same recording session which didn’t quite fit with the rest of the record but which the band still deemed worthy of releasing separately.

It doesn’t take long to get why, either, with the opening siren sound of “The Yard” summoning you to a bleak, enclosed space where brooding, dust-caked guitars transition into heaving, sludge-soaked riffs, while rattling drums beat out the tempo of a hundred aching feet pounding the hard, unforgiving earth.

It’s an ugly, oppressive number that’s for sure – the grit and grief of Johnny Cash meets the filth and fury of Primitive Man – and one that’s effectively counterbalanced by the mournful melancholy of “The Hole”, contrasting the collective punishment of the former with the solitary confinement of the latter, which eventually climaxes in a frenzied explosion of abrasive metallic anguish that owes as much to Dragged Into Sunlight as it does Old Man Gloom.

It may only be two tracks, but those two tracks should be more than enough to win the band over some new fans, while also priming their existing audience for the upcoming release of their new album (which, if all goes to plan, you’ll be reading more about here come the end of the month).

SILURIAN – PARATETHYS

Considering that the three members of Silurian also serve time in such other NCS-friendly acts as Sunless, Suffering Hour, and Grand Demise of Civilization it should come as no surprise to learn that their new EP, Paratethys, is an absolute scorcher, blending deathly technical delivery and delirious blackened dissonance into an absolutely blistering combination that cranks up the extremity and the intensity to almost ludicrous levels across these three tracks.

What really makes it interesting, however, above and beyond the rapid-fire, down-picked riffage of “Bosphorian Desolation” and the seething blastery and finger-twisting technicality of “Listless Passage”, is how much melody the trio have crammed in alongside all the furious distortion and fire-breathing discordance, with the hypnotic fretwork and nimble acoustics of the former recalling the Leviathan-era Mastodon at their proggiest, while the lithe (and far from “listless”) leads and limber bass-lines of the latter err closer to the bleak beauty of the Icelandic Black Metal scene.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that Silurian have “gone soft”… and if you need any more evidence of that just give the climactic title-track a listen, which throws an almost torrential stream of caustic, contorted riffs at you over the course of just over four-and-a-half minutes, really showing off the frankly ridiculous technical talents of guitarist/bassist Lucas Scott, while also incorporating an unexpected plethora of nasty, piercing hooks that help make the song as catchy as it is complex.

Hopefully we won’t have to wait another four(!) years for more from the band… maybe even a full-length, if we’re very lucky?