ninehertz

Shove Records are as reliable a label as you could imagine, but normally for top drawer screamo; here they venture away, into metallic crust yet unsurprisingly it is still excellent with this “Tragedy meets Neurosis” as they temptingly describe Plague Thirteen, from Belgium.

Excitingly, it’s not an overly fanciful comparison either, you hear it immediately. It’s closer to the former in its core, but with the nous ad grandness of the latter. Its energy is infectious, a feeling like being swept along in a tsunami of punk noise has you on the edge of your seat, vocals signalling the odd charge forth, within truly hefty metallic crust.

There is variance on the penultimate track Eroded, practically double the length of any other, which opens with a mournful cello, which ultimately heralds a guitar that sounds mountainous. It is incredibly heavy – and slow too, before it eventually gathers pace and powers forward, like a bludgeoning blackened hardcore rampaging leviathan.

Plague Thirteen prove here that they’re not content to rest on what is an impressive set of laurels, which they’d have been entitled to do. Indeed, the final track changes again, where an acoustic beginning gives way to post-metal at its most impactful, merging in its crust like a bulked up emoviolence number for an ecstatic ending. It is a breathless, magnificent ride.