Artificial Brain – Infrared Horizon


Infrared Horizon (Profound Lore) is a fine title for Artificial Brain’s sophomore offering. It’s cool in that sci-fi/horror kind of sensibility, but judging by the music other titles come to mind. I was thinking more along the lines of Machines of Hate, or Massive Ordinance Air Blast. The Long Island boys went in hard on LP number two. Hard like a cybernetic organism that just became sentient and is convinced that mankind is teetering towards obsolescence.Continue reading


Born of Osiris – Soul Sphere


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Deathcore’s a funny scene. Like many of the fusion subgenres, it often fails to find a convincingly cohesive sound amidst the disparate elements that the bands are trying to marry together. What you usually end up getting is a bit like a kit car built by 5 guys with ADHD who’ve turned up with parts from 3 or 4 different manufacturers and half the required tools.

The first three albums of Chicago’s Born of Osiris certainly suffer from this syndrome, feeling bitty, derivative and repetitive. 2013 marked a turning point for the band with the release of the bemusingly-titled Tomorrow We Die Alive (Sumerian). Whilst still a soup of djenty math- and deathcore, the songs gelled more satisfyingly than the predecessors through stronger song-writing and expanded use of keyboard and synth sounds. They finally sounded like a proper band, rather than a group of music nerds showing off to each other.

Encouragingly, Soul Sphere (Sumerian) continues this development (as one would expect from a band with a 12-year career spanning 5 albums). The main evolution here is the death metal part of their sound is much more at the fore, with strong elements of Soundtrack-era In Flames (Toy’s Factory). The math bits also integrate much better with the rest of the parts, sounding more like lead-ins and accompaniment rather than random ejaculations of musical Tourette’s Syndrome. Less Dillinger Escape Plan, more Protest The Hero. I also wonder if someone in the band’s been listening to J-Metal (a wise move, as there’s a scene that effortlessly manages the kind of musical alchemy hoped for by <insert-flavour-of-the-month>core bands), as the keyboards have more spacey feel and greater presence across the album and serve to add more glue to the sound, providing firmer grounding and context for each song.

Soul Sphere‘s opener ‘The Other Half Of Me’ showcases the band’s progress beautifully. The 80’s horror intro floats throughout the piece, binding the rest of the track together into a symphonic slice of Gothenburg goodness that would do any of the Swedes proud. ‘Throw Me In The Jungle’ is an equally strong follow-up in the same vein, but with slightly more emphasis on math. ‘Free Fall’ harks back to their earlier work, but clever use of synth and industrial guitar effects produce a sound that is both consistent and original; an impressive feat, given what’s in the pot.

‘Illuminate’ is slightly disappointing, as it starts off sounding like a continuation of the previous track and would have benefited from being placed later in the album but ‘The Sleeping And The Dead’ changes gear into straight-up djent from the heavy end of the stable and ‘Tidebinder’ proves that it is possible to successfully combine melodic death with djent metalcore. Seriously Nice.

‘Resilience’ dusts off the math chops for a noodlefest very reminiscent of Protest The Hero. ‘Goddess Of The Dawn’ is a blueprint for what the genre should be. All the elements are present, but working seamlessly with each other to produce a deft end result which finally transcends the sum of its parts. ‘The Louder The Sound, The More We All Believe’ is straight melodic death that sounds like it could have been on In FlamesSoundtrack To Your Escape. ‘Warlords’ is funky djent. ‘River Of Time’ is a bombastic salute to symphonic metal. ‘The Composer’ closes the show with another reversion to previous fractious form, but once again being saved by the excellent synth work, which is given centre stage for an outtro that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Blood Stain Child album.

This is seriously good stuff. Put it in your ears immediately.

 

8.0/10

PHILIP PAGE


Grieving Is Over – Ernie C of Body Count


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It has been quite some time since the world has last heard from Ice T and Body Count. Aside from Ice T’s thriving acting career on Law & Order: SVU as Odafin ‘Fin’ Tutuola for the past 14 years, the band has been relatively quiet until now.

 

Manslaughter is the band’s first new release since 2006’s Murder 4 Hire, and the band is coming back swinging. Band guitarist Ernie C [Ernie Cunnigan] explained the reasons behind their extended hiatus.

 

Last summer, we were at the point where we could really do a record. Last one we did [was] eight years ago. It wasn’t really a record. Ice was in New York. I was in LA. I’d send him tracks and if he wanted to make a change, he’d send it back. It would take two weeks to make a simple change that it would take a second if you’re sitting together.”

 

From last summer, we rented a house in Vegas. We put the band in there and stayed there for six weeks and wrote a record. When he heard something he didn’t like, he’d change it right then, go to sleep and wake up in the morning and say ‘let’s change that.’ So that’s why the record sounds the way it sounds.”

 

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Ice T and Ernie C are the sole original members in Body Count, and the two have experienced many ups and downs throughout the years. They lost three original members [original drummer Victor Ray “Beatmaster V” Wilson in 1996 from leukemia; bassist Lloyd “Mooseman” Roberts from a drive by shooting in 2001; and guitarist Dennis “D-Roc” Miles from lymphoma in 2004], as well as shuffling various lineups throughout the years.

 

First of all, we lost three members over the years. Now the band has to grieve. I’ve been doing different combinations of people but the band has to grieve. So we’re at a point where we’ve grieved.”

 

Remember we’re one removed from the original member. Vince is my second bass player. Will [Ill Will ie Dorsey] is my second drummer. Juan [Juan of the Dead – Garcia] is my second guitarist and he came from Evildead, which everyone knows him. Vince [Vincent Price – Dennis] is been with me for the past ten years. Will is new but he works out just fine in the band. The thing of it is it just works well. Everyone works well together. The band sounds best as it sounds in the last ten years.”

 

Once they resumed the band, they began working on new material over an extended period of time and slowly worked its way back into business.

The topics on here are really good. The first record is still relevant. ‘Cop Killer’ is still a relevant song. Nothing’s really changed. I’m going back to the first record with songs about racism like ‘Momma’s Gotta Die’ and ‘KKK Bitch’ which is still relevant today, with Donald Sterling proved that everything is still relevant. That record is still a current record. We had to write a record that’s contemporary. So we started writing songs and we wrote a lot of music without Ice’s lyrics. It takes more time to think about the lyrics than me writing the riffs.”

 

 

He talked about some of the songs on Manslaughter.

Like a song called ‘Back To Rehab’ – I went to a rehab. I quit drinking about five years ago. Not like back, back, back to rehab…but it’s relevant. We have a song as a tribute to our soldiers – ‘I Will Always Love You’. Ice is an airborne ranger. That’s relevant. We wrote songs like ‘Talk Shit, Get Shot’, which is a rule of life. Every song is a single by itself. That record, you know it or not, plays from beginning to end…it’s sequenced. We wrote a record that’s sequenced like our first record, where you put on and play. People are used to buying on iTunes one song at a time. They don’t know you can buy a record and play it from beginning to end and take it to a whole new experience.”

 

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Ice T and Body Count nearly coined the phrase ‘Fuck the Police’ from ‘Cop Killer’, where the line repeatedly comes up throughout the song. The song came out at a time when racial tension in Los Angeles arose during the infamous Rodney King police beatings and the LA Riots in 1992.

But 20 years plus has passed since those days, and the phrase often gets overused. How does the band feel about it looking at it now?

 

It’s a slogan and nobody acts on anything. Now it’s just cheering – I’m just mad…can’t do nothing about it. Over the past two weeks, we’ve done a lot of national television. We’re one of the first heavy metal band to play on The Tonight Show. People were still uptight about it. We haven’t changed. We’re still the same band. But now America changed around us to accept us into their living rooms. That’s Middle America”.

 

It’s ok to say “Fuck the Police”. That’s what that says. That makes it more so it’s a chanting slogan. That’s not really a cause. They put us on TV…”we didn’t say fuck the police”. But 20 years ago when we were saying it, it was like shut it down.

 

Another interesting point in the battle of metal versus rap, is whether metalheads were closet rap fans and if that stemmed into the problems. “I really don’t know. The metal fans listen to everything. I hang around musicians. I don’t talk to them about anything outside of…some metal fans just listen to metal. They discriminate before they know what it is.”

 

 

But despite all of the controversy, Body Count found itself on the annual Rockstar Mayhem Fest alongside bands such as Avenged Sevenfold, Korn, Trivium, Asking Alexandria, Cannibal Corpse, Suicide Silence and others.

 

The relation goes back years and Ice T had previous done select shows for tour co-organizer Kevin Lyman on the Vans Warped Tour.

 

We’ve only play select shows on Warped Tour. We’ve never done an entire Warped Tour. Kevin [Lyman] and John Reese are partners. I’ve known John Reese forever from Guns N Roses. So I’m out here like old times. We haven’t hung out with him in 24 years on tour. It’s like friends.”

He was [under] Ice T [on Warped Tour]. He was out there with Eminem. Eminem wasn’t out there as Eminem. He was 187. He was out there with those guys. Ice was out there doing his thing.”

 

So what should the crowd expect this summer from them? “Our set is an hour and a half. Our set here is 25 minutes. Our normal set Ice talks for 25 minutes. So I said ‘you can talk for 30 minutes.’ We’re gonna play some old songs. We’re playing three new songs. We’ll play ‘There Goes The Neighborhood’, ‘Cop Killer’ and mix it up. We can only play so much. There’s enough for people to know there’s a new record and see if they like it.”

 

As far as future touring, Cunnigan would not commit to exact schedules due to Ice T’s acting schedule. “After this, Ice is going back to Law & Order. This is his summer vacation like high school. Coco is coming out with the dogs. Everybody’s watching the shows. The dogs are on tour. It’s a party. It’s a lot of fun.”

 

 

Body Count on Facebook

Ice T on Facebook

 

REI NISHIMOTO