CONCRETE WINDS "Concrete Winds" LP (Sepulchral Voice Records 2024) To all death metal lunatics and black metal psychopaths left out there in this toothless and tamed scene, let us proclaim the word! CONCRETE WINDS are back to push spikes, needles, and barbed wire into your flesh and ears.Once again, the noise aggressors slit the veil from beyond and step into our world to pillage and hound to death all what was known, predictable, and comfortable in metal music. Their third album is self-titled for mandatory reasons and shows the band furthermore exploring the EXTREME in extreme metal. This truly is rabies set to music!While their debut, 2019's Primitive Force, was a beacon of strife in stretching and redefining the boundaries of unholy, grinding death metal, the successor, 2021's Nerve Butcherer, pushed the limits even harder and set new standards in the world of audial bulldozing destruction and blitzin' torment. With Concrete Winds, the band now open wide again the portals to the abattoir and continue right where Nerve Butcherer had left the listener helplessly in a sonic wasteland of scorched earth, barren soil, and sheer darkness. They manifest their will to tear the listeners' drumheads out and to creep deep into souls black. As expected, the album is rooted in outrageous speed, heaviest trembling rhythm passages, abysmal croaked curses, turbulent breaks, and repulsive shrieking leads which let you drown in a maelstrom of insanity. But this time, new layers are also added to the pandemonic universe, as weird staccato riffing sections bleed into witching industrial scenarios.CONCRETE WINDS have always gone further than any recent extreme metal outfit and leave out everything that's established in music, cut off what became comfortable in metal, and blow away what still feels "appropriate" in extreme metal. It seems that this once-urgent attitude to explore limits finally has a new helmsman. Nevertheless, they stay ever loyal to the elder originators of bloody metal mayhem, but evolve those inspirations taken from masters like Morbid Angel, Necrovore, and Repulsion to a very unique and nearly "reference-less" hellwitchin’ sound.No less than Lawrence Mackrory - with the help of Matti Mäkelä - recorded, mixed, and mastered this cacophonic eruption mostly at Rorysounds Studios in Uppsala, Sweden. All of it is bound together in nine signature two-word-titled songs that altogether does not exceed the 27-minute mark. Calculators may wrongly estimate it as "short," but measured in CW units, it has the perfect length to die a thousand deaths.CONCRETE WINDS have never been for the faint-hearted. They always killed any scent of entertaining characters straight from the seed. It's easy not to understand them; it's easy not to comprehend them; it's easy not to love them. But it should not be easy to confuse entertainment with art: true art must hurt.However, this is CONCRETE fucking WINDS' third album! And it will definitely not leave anyone untouched, no matter in which way - PERIOD.
