Unsigned and Unholy: Pin Your Wings, Helms, MouthBreather

The whole DM-2 / Entombed thing has been done, re-done and then chopped up and done again in recent years, so what is it about Sydney, Australia’s Pin Your Wings that’s tickling my pickle today? In one word: swagger. There’s a sense of braggadocio about these guys that comes across in the music — confident, swinging, grinding — that’s absolutely infectious. Check out their latest EP Betrayal Pt. 1 below.

One-man project Helms comes from a similar school as Pin Your Wings but takes things in a decidedly more black metal direction, both melodically and vocally. The drum-machine powered beats are straight-forward and punchy, and they’re just what’s needed to communicate the music’s extra-bleak death metal darkness. Think Goatwhore, but a touch more hardcore.

Church Road Records, the U.K. micro-label that’s putting out MouthBreather‘s 2017 EP Pig on CD, suggests that the Boston outfit sounds like “The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza but with a Pig Destroyer twist.” They’re not wrong: Pigs displays the sharp jabs to the head of the latter with the body blows of the former, and the result is a gut-churning, visceral amalgamation of that era of noise/grind/whatever.