Low Places

So yeah, I have been meaning to post something about this band ever since their first release came out, but was constantly sabotaged by various reasons. Again, even after their selftitled release saw the light of day I was quite far out of touch from it and as you can see it took me some time to get to it. But finally here it is, despite the fact that all of you probably know a thing or two about this band already.

To start off, there is a low amount of technical info about "Low Places". They hail from Los Angeles and amongst the band there are members of "CTL" and "Duke Nukem Forever". The dudes started out with a plan to do a series of four cassete releases and so far two of those have already hit the shelves (with the selftitled also coming out on vynil with "Recession Records"). First of the two releases, "Violent Hunger", came out during the summer of this year and it clearly suggested that we don't have a typical hardcore band in front of us. The said release brought us three songs with roughly six minutes of music and despite the short duration of the EP they managed to incorporate just enough genre elements to show us that what they bare is unique. They managed to entwine standard hardcore sounds with sludge and making it sound quite interesting and flowing, a task where a lot of bands fail if I may say so. Most of the times those sludge parts end up dull and you just sit tight and wait for those blasting hardcore riffs, but with "Low Places" there is no boredom in sight. The two genre elements fit extremely well together here and it is equal enjoyment with both sides so to speak. Their genre twisting further continued on their second release, the selftitled. You are instantly greeted with an excellent instrumental sludge song, a buzzing and brooding distortion filled track. "The Storm" fades over to "Malcontent", continuing with the sludge tone only to agressively explode into a violent hardcore beat in the mid. The third song, however, is a 39 second beast of a song, probably wrote in constrast to the sludgy tone of the first song, which is actually pretty cool and I enjoy when bands to this sort of thing. Worth mentioning is that the selftitled release also has the songs from "Violent Hunger" which stand on the second half of the album.
It is pretty clear that we have a very actively playing band here, since the time span between releases was rather short and it makes me quite happy. I enjoyed this project more than I actually expected and right now I am eager to hear some more material from them. All of their songs can be heard and downloaded on their bandcamp page, so no need for me to upload. While you are at it, get in touch and give them some praise, this is excellent work!

http://www.lowplaces.bandcamp.com/