New Zealand Music Month: Stone Angels, Creeping, and Mosquito Control
It’s New Zealand Music Month this May. New Zealand’s annual celebration of homegrown music. Generally, that involves a lot of mainstream media highlighting a lot of mainstream acts. So I’m here to try and redress the balance a bit. I’ll be posting a link to some rowdy New Zealand music for you to check out every day over the next month. Some bands will no doubt be familiar; others I hope will be fresh to your ears.
Stone Angels
The debut from Christchurch band Stone Angels, Within the Witch, was a heaving, raw, and monolithic exorcism. Replete with corrosive sludge, doom, and oppressively thick atmospherics, the album had no sympathy for anyone’s nerves. And nor should it have. Within the Witch was born from tragedy, and Stone Angels’ gut-wrenching riffs and vocals were smothered in a fittingly abrasive and unnerving ambience throughout.
Creeping
I’ve already mentioned the excellent devil-rock troupe The House of Capricorn in this series. Two of the band members, bassist and vocalist Marko Pavlovic, and guitarist Scott Blomfield, also play in the outstanding blackened doom metal band Creeping. The Auckland trio’s not been active of late, with Creeping’s last release being a 2011 split with French band Glorior Belli. But I’d highly recommend you make every effort to track down Creeping’s full-length releases, particularly their phenomenally black-hearted and ferocious 2011 album, Order of Snakes.
Mosquito Control
If you’re a fan of bands like Noothgrush, Burning Witch and Khanate, then you should definitely hunt down the debut from Auckland duo Mosquito Control, Destroyed Beyond Redemption. The album was a harsh, warts-and-all screed, with ear-piercing shrieks rising from low-end catacomb noise. Forget any high-octane pacing, Destroyed Beyond Redemption was a massive and magnificently dirty crawl through bruising basement doom and sludge.
