UNSIGNED AND UNHOLY: ABSVRDIST, HOLINESS MOVEMENT, A PHANTOM OF BLACK HOUNDS,

Life is short and then you die. Listen to some new music today before it’s too late.

• Absvrdist: Absvrdist may be the side project of The Faceless drummer Lyle Cooper, but don’t expect any Faceless-y tech-death-isms here: this band is fast, furious, and way more inspired by hardcore than Cooper’s day job, although the drumming is just as impressive.

• Holiness Movement: Kinda like if Nachtmystium’s Blake Judd and Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme got together and created a hard-driving black n’ roll band.

• A Phantom Pack of Black Hounds: This is the kind of gritty, downtuned, metal-tinged hardcore that makes me seriously fear for my live. There’s something about it that just sounds so scary, the “beat up in a back alley by a bunch of jacked crusties” kind, not the corpsepaint / faux scary kind. The relatively raw production, fuzzed-out guitars and strained vocal delivery set forth the mood perfectly.

-VN