If you were to build a secure facility, miles away from civilisation, surround it with barbed wire and electrified fencing and mine the outlying region, then you may, possibly, have a facility secure enough to breed an enraged Kerry King with hardcore legend Ian MacKaye and Aaron Turner in an effort to create the perfect hybrid of punk aggression and metallic dissonance. However, should you not wish to go to all the trouble of locating said facility and breaking quite a few articles of international law, then the next best thing would be for you to track down ‘Flesh hammer’, the second album from Danish loons Fossils, whose meat obsession is swayed (but only just) by a perverse desire to create instrumental metal that positively fizzes with punk attitude and subversive intent. A ten track tsunami of noise it lasts a mere twenty minutes and sounds like the apocalypse condensed into one furious, feedback strewn blast of unholy noise.
‘Carnivore arrest’ sets the scene with a thunderous beat underpinning a distorted wall of bass that sounds like it’s being played through an amplifier that blew some years back. It’s ugly, brutal and abrasive as hell, and yet like the bloodied remnants of a tenth floor diver, it’s impossible to turn away and before you know it you’re in the fugazi/system of a down hybrid that is ‘Critical mass’, a song that veers between nimble bass and a torrential flood of metallic noise. The delightfully titled ‘pelvis crust’ thrusts jarring slabs of white hot noise in the general direction of the listener in the hope of penetrating vital organs and the result is a song that sounds like an instrumental ‘angel of death’ being played in a cement mixer. ‘Lard obstacle’ … is a heart-felt ballad on piano and harpsichord?? Nah, just kidding (although it would be a hell of a surprise right?) It is, in fact, a dark-hearted and throbbing slice of crust covered neurosis, the bass distorted into a tangled mess of screaming pain that leads, without too much fuss, to the unhinged ‘cat stalker’, a cyclical hell of catastrophically (sorry!) heavy riffs and Per Silkaer’s stunning percussive work, only to descend into an eerie funk workout that sounds like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers covering Isis.
Only ten minutes in and already half way through the album, what the album lacks in length, it makes up in savagery, with ‘Filet Horizon’ seeing Simon Thornby treating his bass with admirable disdain as he tears into it like a carnivore into a plump man’s head. ‘Stun’ does exactly what is promises… in fact I’m too dazed to describe it further. ‘Spamtasic’, does little to let up, in fact it is well compared to spam for both appear to stretch into infinity once you remove the lid and view the deeply unappealing contents. The noise is relentless, the drums cracking overhead as the bass attacks your bowels and if your adrenalin is not pumping by the time you hit the arty, awkward ‘flesh pillar’ you’re clearly listening to the wrong music. The album closes on ‘crack horse’, a song that sounds like Motorhead played at the wrong speed, the drums all but disappearing into a blur of cracked cymbals and spit-covered punk beats.
If you love your music loud, unapologetically violent and with the atmosphere of a bloody street brawl about it, then Fossils are the band for you. This is music so unhinged it should carry a health warning delivered by two red-painted, meat-obsessed maniacs with a grudge against humanity. Released on super limited vinyl and digital, this is a must have for fans of underground noise. Fossils demonstrate once and for all that, to create great rock and roll, you only need attitude and skill – auto-tune, pro-tools and the rest of it are for pussies, this is what real music should sound like.
