G&P review: Black Ships

Black Ships
Omens
New Romance for Kids
The globe is infested with literally thousands of lesser punk and metal bands that would gladly walk the left hand path or swim against the everflowing stream for a snatch of the cyclopean citadel wall-thick guitar tone that bleeds out Omens’ opening song, “No Eulogy.”
Quebecois hardcore pirates Black Ships follow up their staggering Low EP, released earlier this year, with one of the finest hardcore records of the year, an amalgam of His Hero is Gone, a beefier Ghostlimb and every batch of basement kids who ever resolved to play short, fast and loud. Excise the melody from Ghostlimb or the Converge-isms from Trap Them and you have Black Ships, who work the same simple but convincing territory with an intelligence and sincerity that’s in far too short a supply in modern punk.
Antepenultimate song “The End,” a clear standout, rips through a decimated Grecian landscape like a scourge of slavering, yowling banshees, driving pestilence and disease before them like cattle.
The frontman’s frigid croak, which would find a welcoming home on many a norsk black metal record, drives icicles into what’s left of your psyche while the boys in the band scrape nightmares from the inside of your skull, leaving behind a 25 minute path of destruction to which Cthulhu, Pinhead or Nicke Anderson would proudly lay claim. It would be indecent and obscene for this to remain clandestine.