Emerging from a politicised music scene in England’s capital city, Senser dipped into the genre-blending alternative punk/metal pool of the early 90s. Although they don’t specifically enjoy being referred to as rapcore, they perhaps surely paved the way for other UK acts such as One Minute Silence and even stretched out to third-wave skacore bands such as Capdown andSonic Boom Six. After the relative success of 1994’sStacked Up the band somehow fizzled out. Under the gaze of New Labour they meandered through the latter part of the decade and early 2000s at a time where rap rock/metal was at its corporate zenith and symbolised by that red baseball cap.

Everyone liked Limp Bizkit at some point (yes, you did), but instead of banging on about fast cars, your “homies” around the world, or getting caught up in “millennium shit”, Senser’s early music combined the aggressive political stance of Public Enemy with guitars from metal and psychedelia. They pointed their fingers at the failures of the Conservative government, and covered various issues such as gun crime and racism alongside other bands as diverse as Asian Dub Foundation. This is a reason why the band decided to record Public Enemy‘s “Don’t Believe The Hype” with its beat-boxed drums, and the “Angel of Death”-sampled “Channel Zero” for this EP. Musically this sounds similar to their early output, punk-tinged but with heavily-saturated guitars – especially on theEric B and Rakim cover “Follow The Leader”. The dark guitar sound and deep bass is punctuated by subtle strings or synths, and coupled with the turntable scratching and explosive chorus, it brings back memories of early (hed) Planet Earth. The band maintain that “this is really the music most of us grew up with, to us early hip-hop represents a parallel with folk music, or the jazz standards – a lexicon of classics”.

Biting Rhymes serves as an aperitif to Senser’s 5th full-length, which is destined for release at some point in the future. 2009′s How to do Battle didn’t totally rekindle interest in this genre (grabbing an uninspired 1/5 from Onemetal in the process), so it would be an upward struggle to create the same kind of following as they had just over fifteen years ago. Just don’t call it a comeback…

[Originally published on Onemetal]

One of the obvious and important aspects of starting a new band is of course what you decide to call yourselves. It doesn’t really matter what your name is as long as your fan base are able to both remember and to a certain degree spell it. In a previous existence, The Soulless were known as the cryptic sounding Ignominious Incarceration. Yes, quite something. A few years down the line and a few mixed interpretations across the web, the Bath-based five-piece decided a change was in order: “we wanted a new name which was easy to remember and say […] The name has a dark, edgy feel to it, but is not instantly recognisable as metal and it’s easy to say. We feel this represents us a lot better, as well as our new music.”

For their debut Winter Born, Ignominious Incarceration played controlled and death-heavy riffs similar to Decapitated and At The Gates, with a few leads, licks and solos that looked towards Necrophagist and In Flames. Essentially it concentrated on pushing the heaviness through the mid-to-low end in a way that pleased quite a lot of punters. For Isolated, the band climb the upper scales of their intricate playing, with stop/start deathcore breakdowns laying a base for the twiddling of harmoniously entwined guitars and rampant shredding riffs. With tracks such as ‘New Perspective’ the band also mix a little aggressive thrash and current Brit metal such as Malefice into the album. On ‘Unaltered’, ‘Earthbound’ and ‘Without Heart’ the band bring out the fluid melodic side of some death metal, but in some ways it sounds similar to August Burns Red or even the metalcore of As I Lay Dying. It certainly is different, and in some respects you definitely can’t blame the band for wanting to try new sounds and experiment a little. The talent in guitarists Steve Brown and Kristan Dawson is obvious, and their particular pairing complements each other well — listen to ‘Clones’ and ‘Unite Us’.

The downside of this is that if you don’t push things far enough you will be engulfed by the bands you tour with or who have been on the scene a lot longer. The only difference from some of the current crop of bands such as August Burns Red is that there is no vocal melody along with the throaty roars. And so if you don’t like that “emo” voice “ruining” your metal, then check out this album.

[Originally published on Onemetal]