PROTEST THE HERO
Fortress
(Vagrant)

CALDERA
Mist Through Your Consciousness
(Radar Swarm)

DISMEMBER
S/T
(Regain)

SEX MUSEUM
Fifteen Hits That Never Were
(Locomotive)

IN FLAMES
A Sense of Purpose
(Koch)

ASCEND
Ample Fire Within 

(Southern Lord)

PAINT IT BLACK
New Lexicon

(Jade Tree)

MORE REVIEWS

The French rock scene is criminally underrated. It is not all about Gojira, baguette and cheese, you know? Just to name two sonic adventurers; there is Monarch! who craft this exhausting deafening monotony and then there is Year of No Light, who rock so post it may all just happen long after you check them out. There are plenty of quality acts doing the rounds in the Gallic circuit and sustaining an underground music culture that is as rich as it is apparently hermetic to outside contact should be a difficult enough task it could have died a few years ago was it not for the latent talent of bands like the above mentioned and Nancy’s Caldera.

Presenting Caldera’s debut is almost a royal act. Why? Because these garcons rock so hard you’ll have to pad your ears with a mattress. Basically, all they need to do is play. No vocals, just shut the fuck up. Stuff yourself with some pain au chocolat and then give this baby a spin. Caldera’s post-rockisms are mainly manifested through their mute approach, but still, to their credit, they care very little about build outs and ambitious and pretentious songwriting. Perfect for us that they just rock out and that their riffs borrow freely from many genres; there is, of course, post-rock and doom tendencies, and then there is alternative rock without the whining lumberjack t-shirt factor.

There is nothing clichéd here. As some smartass scribe put it a handful of years ago, Mist Through Your Consciousness shall be classified under ‘instrumetal’, but that’s not to say that the guitars slay with frenetic speed, or that staccato playing is updated through the silence of a non-existent vocalist or that there are hints of thrash, death, grind or power metal here. There aren’t even any long-ass songs. These are three-to-four minute cuts. Caldera has a modern edge that is also sludge-friendly, for that let’s think of a less flexible and vocals-less Taint or Baroness. Though not as gruff as either, Caldera manages to rock as hard as both. Warning; there is another Caldera band that hails from Belgium and that plays hardcore. I couldn’t talk shit about ‘em because I am not familiar with their music.

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