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.

G&P review: Trap Them

Trap Them
Seizures in Barren Praise
Deathwish
Trap Them’s episodic songwriting is a little like leafing through the diary of some emotionally shattered zombie apocalypse survivor. Just sub in fear, anxiety, misanthropy and Oedipal outrage for a crushing mob of shambling, necrotic brain munchers.
Days 19 through 31 on Trap Them’s third release finds our survivor no better off than before, if not a little worse, as vocalist Ryan McKinney shouts into the void over the riotous amalgam of Tragedy, Entombed and Converge his co-conspirators bang out beneath him. Fair warning, I’m about to coin a really horrific genre name, but Trap Them, right now, are the leading lights of the recent 'Tombedcore movement, Frankensteining Wolverine Blues’ booty shaking death ‘n’ roll to crusty, furious d-beat.
Kurt Ballou channels prime Sunlight Studios circa 1991 in his production work, swiping the fabled studio’s trademarked pitch black guitar tone and turning it into a blunt object to batter the listener into emotional submission without ever sacrificing subtlety or clarity.
While Seizures in Barren Praise largely expands on the palette Trap Them nearly perfected on last year’s Séance Prime, the band does stretch their limbs, exploring new moods on “Mission Convincers,” which swipes Grief’s junkie stumble for a seven minute body blow session to the Torso.
While I hope McKinney’s day to day life isn’t the psychological Walking Dead episode it appears on record, I hope he never manages to outrun the stumbling horrors that propel some of the finest hardcore being made today.