A few years ago bands like Nails, All Pigs Must Die, Trap Them and almost every other release on Southern Lord was all the rage; A feral, snarling mix of grind core, crust, death metal and hardcore rendered with a dirtied up Swedish HM2 buzzsaw tone. Well, the 2018 debut from France’s Nuisible is here to recreate that cantankerous tone and some.
Formed from members of As We Bleed, Nuisible takes the above described sound, adds some tasty Wolverine Blues -ish death n roll and voila, Slave & Snakes, a thunderously impressive, noisy, raucous debut from start to finish with ample amounts of blasting grinding bluster and lots of very hefty, nasty grooves.
The guitar tone is rooted in the HM2 boss sound of Swedish death metal, but grimier, beefier and dirtier with a deadly punk/grindcore sneer. From the more Tragedy on steroids canter of ” … And Snakes”, “Death Legacy”, “Two Sided Integrity”, and “Burning Embers” (with a simply devastating Crowbar ish song ending lope) through Entombed’s death n roll era rumble of “Evil Still” and “Vengeful Blood” to flat out slow burning destruction of closer “Blur the Line”, the album is an impressive display of heft energy and aggression that somehow passed under my radar in 2018, so I’m glad the PR firm decided to finally shoot it my way.
