Beartooth

Below

Beartooth’s latest monstrous musical spawn was birthed in June of this year. Christened Below and unleashed onto the world via Red Bull Records, it slinks and slithers, screeches and roars, chugs and squeals, punches and grips, serenades and beguiles, all in equal measure.

The riffs are heavy and varied, the choruses soar, circle, and dive, the vocal performances veritably erupt, pristine and angelic or grizzled and shearing in turn to carry the weight of the emotions they convey. The disparate sounds of Beartooth’s forerunners — the dirt and rust of Maylene & the Sons of Disaster, the frenetic twisting undulations of Every Time I Die, and of course the ear-grabbing balance of melodic and dissonant still holding on doggedly from Attack Attack — combine into a heady, rich stew that, if you’re a fan of heavy music, you’ll likely be breaking out for midnight leftovers in the light of the fridge bulb. Or maybe openly consuming it on your front porch — wherever you’ve set up your parents’ hi-fi stereo system leftover from the ‘80s.

If the album does lose its way, it’s not until close to the end, when the riffs and rhythms seem to stretch a bit thin and retread some of the ground already won by earlier songs. And while it may seem like splitting hairs (or eardrums), the mastering engineer hit the limiter a little too hard and fried the cymbals. But hey, this is aggressive music, and a little more distortion isn’t going to bother the majority of folks who come to Beartooth to get their hats blown off by way of sonic assault.

And trust us — they will indeed be blown off.