LP REVIEW 3 STAGES OF PAIN 1. IF X WAS EQUAL TO Y
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The Doncaster quintet 3 Stages Of Pain,
have released their debut album on Undergroove suitably entitled ‘With Chaos In Her
Wake’, an album that has brutality to spare and uses it to cruelly bully anything it
meets into instant submission.
Starting off with some rather dubious American race car commentary - which has you initially hoping that they aren’t going to be nothing more than wannabe yanks - you soon find out it’s just clever beguile as a bouncy One Minute Silence style opening explodes, before changing to the very British sounding sludgecore of ‘White Lines…’. As the album further unfolds it becomes obvious that this is a crushingly heavy band with the ability to switch on intensity - for example ‘Forget The Lies…’ - and produce a sound that’s going to be very difficult to actually describe. There are songs that contradict, like ‘Conflict Of Self Interest’ that manage to be so vehement and yet have a disobedient elegance and temper some melody in the disturbance. Then there’s ’18 Wheeler’ and ‘Hell Driver’ which rubs your face into the ground with pure grinding heaviness. Often coming across like a pissed off Entombed, they take the slower sludgy feel of Charger, mix it at the pace of Mistress while inseminating the seed of angst from The Icarus Line into the carcass of Iron Monkey. It’s a truly deranged hybrid that crushes riffs of heaviness into intense bruising songs and intersperse slow grinding darker moments that somehow add a balance of pace, allowing a very small amount of room for melody. It might be deranged, but it's a fucking good album that’s what it is! Rigsby (31st December, 2002) |
