I listen to a lot of musical genres, but the majority of my music involves loud guitars in some sort of way. Give me loud and heavy guitars and plenty of riffs and I’m a happy little bunny. Every now and then I need a break from the heavy stuff though, like all the sludge, doom and metal and I dive into some proper noise-rock. Luckily we have been blessed with some amazing noise-rock releases this year so far already, with top quality releases from Drunk Dad, Sofy Major, Tyranny Is Tyranny, Dethscalator, Hebosagil, Årabrot, Die! Die! Die! and Ice, Sea, Dead People to name just a few of them.
We can now add Throat to this list as well, who might just have released on of the best noise-rock releases of 2013. When I first listened to their new offering Manhole, I was in love from the very first seconds of opening track ‘Gift Gas’. The dissonant sounding guitars, the broken mathy rhythms, the energy of it all and mostly the intensity of the singers A. Juhakoski and J. Mattila (both also on guitars and it isn’t really clear who sings what) is absolutely stunning. These vocals threw me right back to The Jesus Lizard as at times it feels like David Yow himself stepped in the studio to throw some of his vocals on this record. After that first listen I just couldn’t put Manhole away and for the rest of that day I listened to nothing else.
I am not going to pick out any individual songs as all 9 of them are all amazing and the whole album only lasts just over 30 minutes or so (the last track ‘Bad Heat’ is on paper 22:12 long, but from 4:40 onwards it is a long stretch of nothing followed by a brief minute of feedback towards the end). Just listen to it. If you have a soft spot for dissonance, noise, feedback, distorted guitars, loads of energy, great passionate singing and top quality songs, then Throat is just the right thing for you.
Throat can be added to the list of great noise-rock bands coming out of Finland, including Hebosagil, Baxter Stockman, and probably also to a certain extent Viisikko and Dark Buddha Rising. And there are probably a lot more bands I have never heard of that can be added to this list. It can only be concluded that there’s something good happening in Finland these days. Keep them coming my Finnish friends!
