As you may know, we were fucking blown away by the rabid madness and insane heaviness of Augurs‘ debut EP, the 2012 Demo. After that crushing (but brief) load of heaviness was deployed on our sorry skulls last year, almost leaving us fucking crippled in its destructive wake, the wait to hear the follow up to that release has been that of endless impatience. It’s always awesome to meet a band of extremely skilled musicians at its inception and after discovering that they are beyond awesome, to follow their activity and see how they can evolve and what they can pull off next. Well, the wait is over, their new 7″ EP Old Ways has just landed, and needless to say, it is fucking unbelievably heavy, ridiculously crushing and just all around fucking awesome – once again.
What sets Augurs apart from other bands is the sheer heaviness of their music. I mean, this is not a heaviness that even feels normal. It’s beyond what is even in the easily describable realm of things. The guitars sound like having molten lead poured down your ear canals while an elephant stomps your head under its foot. It’s literally spine-bending how heavy this band is. They are as heavy as Sunn O))) but they play fast, or kinda fast at least, imagine that. Imagine Sunn O))) rocking out and playing some Scum-era Napalm Death, or some His Hero Is Gone mid-tempo crusty breakdowns and you would get an idea of how fucking heavy this band is. Downtuned and thick as fucking tar guitars grind their way through a thundering warzone of drums, and all the while, singer James Lord’s hateful bark spreads through out like screeching plague. Seriously, everything this band plays sounds like it is taken to an unbelievable extreme of heaviness. At moments, shit gets really slow, doomy and almost totally comatose, thrust forward by sluggy, mammoth fucking Corrupted-style riffing. But then these boys play so tight and crazy that on a dime they change trajectory, with no apparent logic or notice, and launch into insanely heavy d-beat gallops that pulverize everything in their wake. Then they slow down again, pacing themselves and ripping back and forth between crusty mid-tempos and insanely destructive full-blown sprees of mauling grindcore.
Not only are Augurs heavy as fuck, incredibly mean and armed with riffs to fucking spare, but they are also really original and extremely hard to classify. The opening track, Drunk for instance, has a slight old school death metal vibe to it, reminding us of Fear Emptiness Dispair-era Napalm Death. After that one comes a pulverizing and obese overload of black metal and d-beat that sounds like the bastard son of early Nachtmystium, Iskra, Nausea and Warton. One and half minutes of unadulterated, merciless blackened fucking violence. Closing the feat, the the title track, Old Ways, a little over four minutes of a sludge-grind clobbering so grand and fucking huge that you will feel like your knees are about to snap under its uber-ugly and violent overload of rage and downtuneage. And as the final notes of Old Ways slither away, here we are, once again crippled and beat to a pulp by Augurs’ pulverizing music, once again starving and waiting to get their next load of wrath unloaded on our sorry bones. But word is that they just recorded three more tunes for a split to be released sometime in 2014, so if all things go as planned, your eardrums will have little time to recover. JOY.
Recorded and Mixed by the world famous Billy Anderson, and mastered by James Plotkin – what else do you need? Grab a copy of the Old Ways 7″ vinyl EP from the ultra-awesome folks of Hash Crimes, right fucking NOW.
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