FUTILITY EP REVIEW

Group members: Rory Maclean, Josh Pedrana, Nick Dennis, Patrick Galen-Mules, and Caleb Jonas.

Where did the band name come from?

st.sinner is all about accepting yourself, being ok with being a saint and a sinner sometimes. The Revelators are probably the name of some porn stars or something idk How did you form? One night after a gig I (Caleb the drummer) got approached by Nick (the guitarist) who got me in touch with Rory because they were looking to start a band. That band eventually became The Revelators and then we introduced Sam (the bassist) a lil later. Describe your sound: If Pangea was still around this music would split the continents. Who/What are your influences, musical and/or otherwise? Definitely gotta give a shout out to my boy Guy Fieri, everything he does is an inspiration for the culinary arts. Sonically though, Bring Me The Horizon, Yungblud, Dead Kennedys, White Stripes, Nothing But Thieves.

What are some of your most memorable experiences as a band? Staying a night in the same room as Nick (the guitarist) has caused us to learn a lot about things we didn’t think were physically possible. What is it that you love about the scene? Your genre’s scene? We love that people fuckin send it in the mosh! Tell us about one of your proudest moments?

Hitting 30k streams on Spotify was a pretty cool moment. It was sick to know so many people were listening!! What are your plans for the future?

Fight Godzilla, get on the cover of Vogue, tell Scott Morrison to his face that he’s an idiot and needs to do his job. What makes you laugh? Funny stuff. Jelly. The colour beige. What pisses you off? The Liberal Government, or any government that doesn’t represent what the people want. Being told you can’t be yourself also pisses me off. Judgment is annoying. Anything else you’d like to add? If you’ve enjoyed the singles we’ve released so far, we have an EP coming very soon that should knock your socks off, on, and then off again. So will our upcoming show! (7 August @ Live at the Polo) Stay tuned and thanks for all the support x

METALISE

[THE WORD ON METAL] WITH JOSH NIXON To kick off this edition of Metalise, Australia’s longest running continuous metal column stretching back to the last millennia, we need to recognise the efforts of someone who has directly contributed far more for the local metal community than just about anyone. Lance Fox has recently sold The Basement to the new proprietors Nicole and Mik Bergersen, bringing to an end a tenure going back to 2014 that saw the venue space change drastically. In times past, the Town Centre Tavern and Pete’s Bar & Grill occupied that space, at a time when Officeworks over the road was a carpark for people to struggle with the chemicals they had ingested, or to settle arguments that began in the bar through the medium of fisticuffs. Actually, that used Lance to happen in the two Fox aforementioned bars as well, but I digress… even when ‘The Basement’ became ‘The Basement’ it wasn’t half the venue is is today, in terms of crowd capacity in pre-Covid times or floor space. This is, in part, due to the fact that the back wall where Chompy’s is today used to be the X&Y Dumpling House or, amusingly, as the decrepit sign with missing letters was prior to its closure would state, the “X&Y Dump House”. Lance and the team invested tens of thousands of dollars on the infrastructure from the PA, to the back wall, to the 500 guitars signed by every band owning a distortion pedal that came near the joint. The renovations were extensive and the scope and ambition decisive as when Lance took over things, Canberra was dropping off of the nation’s and international promoters’ radar, particularly for heavy music. The peak of all of this investment was probably the Phillip H Anselmo & The Illegals show with King Parrot, Potion, and Palm, where the doors of the joint were overflowing and the head banging people stretched all the way from the stage at one end to the bar all the way down the back. Covid stole a lot of this momentum, but again Lance and crew saw opportunity and opened up the riffs for select audiences, with Witchskull kicking off the exclusive events in the lowest ebb for the live music industry ever. The Basement, through Lance’s leadership, provided a model for many around the country to operate through C-19 and negotiate the changing legislative landmines that came with it. Nicole and Mik inherit an institution, and it’s one forged on the back of a hard working team lead by a bloke that has always put the local stuff on the same stage as the biggest bands that came through town. Well done, and thank you Lance. Sadly, the With a Heavy Heart 8 festival of brutal doom metal succumbed to the Covid. But Futility still have their new album Anhedonic available now (full review just over there, and down) and you should all go and order a copy here facebook.com/ futilitydoom/ or at futility.bandcamp.com Dirty Sanchez, a Belconnen two-piece made up of former members of Golden Crop, Precursor, Pod People and All Throth play a special two-set show at The Pot Belly on the Saturday, 17 July and you can go have a look for the grand price of free. Thy Art is Murder rescheduled their Human Target tour and the monstrosity of the Sydneysiders finds the target at The Basement on Thursday, 21 July and you can still purchase tickets, thought undoubtedly not for very long, so don’t be hunted down and die wondering.

Thy Art Is Murder

Witchskull copped a severe wing clipping for their upcoming March of Winter tour with dates in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane having to drop due to the Covid. The final form of the Canberra leg at The Basement on Saturday, 24 July is still up in the air a little with three of the five bands on the support bill being from Red or Orange Zones. The current line-up is still Witchskull, Mental Cavity, Mountain Wizard Death Cult, Astrodeath and BC but keep an ear to the ground through the ‘Skull socials to see what’s finalised.

Mental Cavity will no doubt be raring to go with their new album dropping earlier this month. Mass Rebel Infest is another slab of punk-inflected death metal with a pleasing crust of d-beat in spots that is being very well received around the heavy press world wide. I’ll have a review of my own up here real soon, with the disclaimer that the guitar solo in the first song is both A) very good and B) played by me.

Melbourne melodic death brutalisers Orpheus Omega are due here on Sunday, 25 July as a part of their Bleed The Way 10th Anniversary tour. Bringing fellow Mexican death metal act Triple Kill you can still get tickets at this point.

Newcastle band The Witching Hour bring the Gen-Z Tour to The Basement on Friday, 6 August with Black Heart and Tundrel. The guys’ single Sleep with the Stars has been getting radio play the world over, including Alice Cooper adding it to his TripleM playlist.

The Witching Hour

Cryptic rumblings last month from the Canberra Metal Fest announced for 14-15 January, 2022. Only a couple of bands announced so far to add to the detail on the promo of “Two Days of Aussie Metal”, but Brisbane’s Misery and Melbourne’s Reaper being the first two acts announced bodes very well indeed. We will be watching with interest as to what materialises in the coming weeks. That’s all for this month. Join us next month where Australia’s longest running continuous metal column will extend that run just a little further.

FUTILITY ANHEDONIC [ ]

There’s something mischievously ironic about calling your album Anhedonic, the adjectival form of anhedonia—a psychological condition characterised by an inability to experience pleasure in usually pleasurable acts. But perhaps it’s fitting when it’s from a doom metal band called Futility. The third album for the Canberra band, which features Brendan de Bear (vocals and bass), Kurt Neist (guitar), Mat Newton (lead and rhythm guitar) and Dan Nahum (drums), is a distended sonic affair spread across five tracks. The opening volley, A Visceral Melancholia, immediately transports us to Futility land; hefty, sustained notes providing a truly immovable foundation for accents and a series of guitar lines that sound more pageant-like and celebratory than one would expect. Of course, by the two-minute mark, the guttural presence of the death metal monster arrives, bringing into line the band’s ear-demolishing capabilities. As this opener progressed, I gradually realised the similarities between Futility’s brand of extended musical forays and, hear me out, classical music. Despite the apparent differences, there is an alignment more about an approach rather than purely technical characteristics: grand dynamics, the counterpointing, the juxtaposition of searing moments— such as the anticipated guttural vocal style—with quite reflective nuances, as the guitar lines here oft invoke. The following track, A Man of Great Appetites, presents a torrent of disproportionate angst, with some rhythmic diversions that go on to establish, if I may appropriate more formal terminology, certain suitably colliding movements. As heard in the other tracks, the landscape here might intone a sense of desolation, but there are a few moments amid the structured bleakness that provide many salvaging breathers. On Soliloquy, my classical comparisons are emboldened by the band’s use of canonical material; yes, Shakespearean is an oft used term, but Futility has seized the possibilities here by harnessing the Bard of Avon’s work outright: slings and arrows indeed! The normally pleasurable act of listening to music comes in all forms. For those who like theirs substantially heavy, distortion-led, and as dense as post-apocalyptic fall-out, then Canberra’s Futility has just the record for you. VINCE LEIGH