Conan w/ Psychic Trash, Lair
Conan: (UK)
Hear the roar of battle. Smell the stench of spilled blood. A thousand heads piled high like a grim mound of suffering. England’s doom metal masters CONAN strike back again!
Following their much acclaimed 2018 full-length, Existential Void Guardian, and their Live at Freak Valley record released just last year, the trio is gearing up for the release of their fifth studio album, entitled Evidence of Immortality, due out on August 19, 2022 via Napalm Records.
Psychic Trash: (Detroit, MI)
For the better part of the last 15 years, the duo of Max Dameron (guit/vox) and Sam Ford (drums/vox) have been too weird and too wild for this lame-ass planet. After enjoying vagabond stints living in Portland, Los Angeles, and Brooklyn, they now call Detroit home. Here they rebuild, out of the scraps and wreckage of the 21st century, something which casts aside any rules or adherence to banal tropes.
Specializing in the unexpected, Max and Sam have wrought an individual sound that’s as much post-Melvins sludge punk as it is futurist prog metal. Their forthcoming self-titled debut, recorded in 2022 at High-Bias in Detroit, puts on display the fruits of their metamorphosis. From the soaring triumphal fuzz of “Uncanny Valley” or the sweep and thrust of “House of Butterflies” their craft is precise, they’re just making up their own shapes to sculpt.
Times change and artists mature: now under the name PSYCHIC TRASH, Ford and Dameron come to Riding Easy Records as veterans turning a fresh page, reinvigorated at the prospect of forging a new path and the beneficiaries of about a decade and a half’s slog through the underground. Psychic Trash’s self-titled debut is unmistakably uncompromising, a little theatrical, intermittently manic, and deceptively broad in style for just how much punk rests beneath.
Lair: (RVA)
For all the smothering slowness of Lair’s bleak and meditative doom; for all its patient, enveloping heft, the Richmond, Va. trio has never succumbed to stasis. With their self-titled 2019 debut and 2021’s expansive EP, At Our End (Hand of Death Records), Lair proved themselves adept at arranging lengthy pieces that moved with tectonic force, propelling powerful dynamics and captivating contrasts.
The band’s latest effort, the full-length The Hidden Shiv, builds upon that already impressive foundation with a newfound sense of urgency and a willingness to move more fluidly and frequently into faster tempos. Still, the band has lost none of the deliberate and scathing heaviness of its past effort, but rather augments it with a driving death metal influence that feels as much like Coffins as Conan, and as much indebted to Bolt Thrower as to Bell Witch.
