(In response to our pleas for help, our friend Ben C. of Church of the Riff is helping out the currently nonfunctional staff of NCS by contributing this guest post, for which we are pathetically grateful.)

Hey guys. So quite a while ago Islander left me a key to the office (in cinderblock form) and told me to swing by whenever I need a place to sleep or free food (there is a restraining order and a messy legal battle). Seeing as everybody is out carousing for the next week, I figured it would be a good time to take him up on this very generous hospitality.

Sadly, I got bored pretty quickly and with no food in the fridge (Sorry), all the toilets plugged (Sorry again), and a mysterious acidic ooze starting to form in the dining room (Ok, this one wasn’t actually my fault), I decided I should probably write something before, y’know, starting a quasi-legal hobo fight club in the living room (Sorry).

In the last couple years I’ve been slowly drifting away from the standard array of “standard” metal genres, instead finding myself bouncing along to a scathing selection of sludge, ‘cores, posts’, and a variety of other not-quite-metal-but-still-falls-under-the-umbrella genres.

With no particular order here are four albums that have been giving the ol’ earholes a tickle for the last couple months. Two come from relative newcomers and two from long-time underground stalwarts. Continue reading »