By It’s our Bandcamp Picks of the Week, featuring C Turtle’s joyously messy EXPENSIVE THRILLS and Balmora and Since My Beloved’s punishing split SIX PACTS ETCHED IN BLOOD!
C Turtle – EXPENSIVE THRILLS
Genre: Indie Rock
Favorite Tracks: “Melvin Said This,” “How Many Birds”
I spend heaps of time on TikTok. (I wouldn’t recommend.) The prevailing thread from influencers is that there’s no new music—everything’s a death rattle of your parents’ 8-track collection. While I could counter with this, now’s a great opportunity to address newness in 2024. What’s really new music, how it’s connected to the past, and what does it all mean? And I have a great teaching aid: EXPENSIVE THRILLS from London’s own C Turtle.
C Turtle are proper retro-philes. “Melvin Said This” is the universal baseline for lo-fi, vaguely danceable indie rock—heavy on the fuzz and unassuming sex appeal. The title track reminds me of Yuck-by-way-of-Pink Floyd, a dynamic emphasizing the band’s mix of rock romanticism and ugly, overt madness. Meaningful expression isn’t in reinventing the wheel, but tweaking it to suit your specific creative aspirations. Still, C Turtle are quite daring—it’s about ingenuity over flashy displays. “How Many Birds” undulates passionately between sentimental ballad and fuzzy freakout. “More Insects” does much of the same, and that specific repetition is almost a new way to explore drone. Again, a deliberate, measured sensibility does wonders, helping C Turtle achieve fresh perspectives by reapproaching ideas with both intention and pure joy. These are the foundation—tunes that are weird and confrontational and always thrilling. But I think the album really comes alive when you consider more “abstract” offerings: “Splitter” is 90-ish seconds of staring at a chipped bong and listening to Velvet Underground, “Shooby” is seemingly a communication with a fifth-dimensional imp, and “Sniffing The Jesus Hole” is six-plus minutes of blown-out guitars and junk noise, like two art students spilled their final projects together.
It’s less about liking these cuts more, but rather understanding their significance. They weigh down and drag the album’s “better half”—showing what happens when C Turtle gives into the pursuit of experimentation. They’re not bad, but they lack the heart, charm, warmth, and potency of those other songs, and thus feel like a commentary of sorts. A message about creative exploration, the role of limitations and restraint, and how bands operate in the spectrum of tradition and innovation. I took it as “Here’s what happens when we have no edit function,” but it could’ve just as easily been, “See what freaky delights C Turtle can really muster?” Regardless, we get a powerful rock record and also an artifact for this newness “conversation.” A thoughtful way to prove that what’s old is new, what’s new is old, and the resulting distinction and value lies with listeners. That it’s about what you put in and take out, and that the best bands operate in a way to confront listeners while keeping the onus on pure creative expression. In C Turtle’s case, they play around with time and influences to craft an album that stretches and distorts ’90s alt-rock and Britpop into directions that are increasingly sharp and interesting. Really, who cares what’s “new new” if it’s this damn good. Listen to it now over on Bandcamp. [Chris Coplan]
Balmora / Since My Beloved – SIX PACTS ETCHED IN BLOOD
Genre: Metalcore, Melodeath
Favorite Tracks: “Your Unyielding Light,” “Falls Narrow Corridor”
Last year, both Balmora and Since My Beloved put out two of the best EPs in the recent wave of throwback metalcore, each putting their own spin on the genre while sharing a fondness for melodic death metal riffs and poetic lyricism; Balmora’s WITH THORNS OF GLASS AND PETALS OF GRIEF was mosh-ready and expansive, while on ONE DAY AWAY Since My Beloved borrowed from black metal. So it makes perfect sense for the two to team up, and SIX PATHS ETCHED IN BLOOD, their new split out now on rising metal label Ephyra, finds the both at the height of their powers.
Balmora’s three tracks lead off the split, beginning with the shortest offering from either band. “Only the Rain Will Remember I Was There” would fit neatly on WITH THORNS OF GLASS AND PETALS OF GRIEF, three minutes of brutal tremolo riffs and pit-opening breakdowns, and “Unlike the Times Before” is cut from a similar cloth, although it features an uncharacteristically catchy clean vocal run—the first in Balmora’s brief catalog. But the six-and-a-half-minute “Your Unyielding Light,” longer than their first two contributions combined, is the highlight of their half. For three minutes the track speeds ahead, chugging along at a ferocious pace, and then fades out. The band spends the rest of the song building back up, culminating in one of their nastiest, heaviest breakdowns to date. “Your Unyielding Light” is the most impressive and most dynamic track they’ve ever released, a great sign for one of the buzziest bands in metalcore today.
Where Balmora is an up-and-coming band with insane hype, Since My Beloved’s side comes with a different weight—the band just announced a series of farewell shows in their native Texas (with Balmora, among others, as support). That’s doubly a shame, as the three contributions here, which amount to about a third of the material they’ve ever released, are their three best songs yet. To an extent, the production on SIX PACTS ETCHED IN BLOOD plays a role in that—Since My Beloved’s two EPs sound much cleaner than the scuzzier, more cluttered sound of these three songs, which lends them a sense of urgency. “Color of Carnelian” wastes no time differentiating their half from Balmora’s; Since My Beloved’s music is fast and punishing, where Balmora’s is more atmospheric and technical, Paul Cole sticking to an anguished, guttural shriek contra the range of growls that Balmora’s mononymous vocalist Senti employs across their songs. At four-and-a-half minutes, “Color of Carnelian” is among the longest tracks Since My Beloved’s ever released, and nearly every minute of the track pulls it in a slightly different (and increasingly heavier) direction, leading nicely into the melodeath barrage of “Falls Narrow Corridor,” a blisteringly heavy track that manages to sneak in a surprisingly melodic bridge; as on “Unlike the Times Before,” the brevity of the clean verse makes the breakdown that follows hit even harder. “Along a Treelined Path” closes out SIX PACTS ETCHED IN BLOOD on perhaps its heaviest note, essentially consisting of three breakdowns strung together with increasing intensity.
It’s been excellent watching this sound gain purchase over the past few years. We know hardcore is having its moment, but a sect of mainstream metalcore bands like Bring Me the Horizon, Bad Omens, Sleep Token, and Spiritbox have similarly seen massive success by watering down the best aspects of the genre to make the sound more palatable for general audiences. With SIX PACTS ETCHED IN BLOOD, Balmora and Since My Beloved make no such compromises; their more melodic tendencies present here feel more like natural outgrowths of experimentation rather than pandering. The same week that SIX PACTS ETCHED IN BLOOD dropped, SeeYouSpaceCowboy and Foreign Hands, who represent yet other unique takes on the genre, both released singles from their upcoming albums. It’s about time for this sort of metalcore to get its flowers, and SIX PACTS ETCHED IN BLOOD could be the kicking open of a door. Grab it on Bandcamp. [Zac Djamoos]
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