30 May 2018

Illustrated Amateur reviews Hey Colossus's The Guillotine


It reads:

Hey Colossus had been chugging along for a decade before I heard of them. The Guillotine was my first encounter—and it's a stunner. It's something like their twelfth record (depending on how you add it up) so I had some catching up to do. 

Their earlier earlier releases belie why they're lumped in with sludge metal, and (later) noise rock, but Hey Colossus have outgrown such distinctions. There's an hermetic feel to their work—not so much self-referential as ascending out of their past. Their tunes are tightly coiled, and, when they want to be, brutal. The ragged, live edge of the guitar work is miles away from the Helmet model of compressed, percussive blocks of distortion—which is still the template for so much heavy rock today. Instead, Hey Colossus court a sonic murk, always threatens to become too muddy but lending the songs a fathomless depth. They retain just enough clarity to let melodies rise to the surface, when needed.


It all sounds amazing on vinyl, but I fear the rawness of Hey Colossus is the sort that gets diminished by mp3 compression and streaming.

See the review here: Illustrated Amateur

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