[Review] INDUSTRIAL PUKE - ‘Alive To No Avail’ LP.
We’re about to talk some serious crust/ d-beat inspired goodness with this review, folks!
And if you’re landing on this blog page for the first time/have no idea what the frig I’m on about, I’d like to direct you to a previous article by Yours Truly (via Musolegion.com). The (article) in question is particularly pertinent to the review. Specifically, it traces the history of both crust and d-beat as both genres pertain to the nation of Sweden which Industrial Puke call home. While you’re there, be sure to follow an incredible heavy/alternative music community, one which I’ve been proud to be part of the admin team for years.
I thought I’d add that in there not as self-promo, but as a header note given the relative obscurity both subgenres still have to this day in the heavy music collective-unconscious. That and it’s always nice to have additional like-minded music-lovers in this day and age, right?
Now. Speaking of crust, d-beat and Swedish history - you can effectively consider Industrial Puke’s latest barn-burner of an album, Alive To No Avail, a natural and very timely extension of said discussion.
Slake your dopamine-overloaded modern brains’ thirst for content with our humble review, then dine on some more puke of the industrial kind via artist/album links below.
Peace, Love and Sandwiches with the Crust Intact (Chortle) xoxo - Brady.
As mentioned in my little preamble, Sweden is no stranger to genres that invoke the more jagged, rusty and corrosive elements of the heavy-music spectrum.
From everyone’s beloved HM-2 death-metal groovers Entombed (from which the band certainly derive an influence) through to Disfear and many more, the nation holds a more caustic and filth-ridden musical scene than the brighter, jauntier lilts of Swedish melodeath, prog and the like might otherwise imply. To the casual listener, at least.
Alive To No Avail is an homage to its’ own namesake; in totality, it’s a grimy but sharp and focussed barrage but is also interspersed with enough curious moments to help avoid being formulaic.
Let’s zoom out a little and get a birds’ eye view amongst the decaying warehouses, see if we can’t get a grasp on the performers as a whole.
With a vocalist originally hailing from one of my favourite Swedish post-metal acts, Burst, Linus Jägerskog provides us an excellent performance throughout. Melding the worlds of death metal, hardcore and punk with a more upper-register, throaty rasp than his tenure in the aforementioned band, there’s a distinct Tomas Lindberg/Johannes Persson (At The Gates/Cult of Luna) flavour to his snarky growls and screeches.
Throughout this album, you’d also be forgiven for thinking his bandmates had just finished performing a set with Terror or Madball, too. Gang-shouts and chants are dime-a-dozen throughout the album, giving it a slight tinge of New York vocal thuggery. Together, the vocal attack is as staunch as the musical accompaniment in being pidgeonholed squarely within one distinct heavy/alternative genre, and it works well.
As for the overall aesthetic and lyrical flavour? Rusted, corrosive and hazardous are just some adjectives that come to mind. Alive To No Avail, as an overall piece, is clearly a cathartic purge of collective disdain shared by many as we stumble confusedly into April.
‘Daily Chest Pain’ exercises no subtlety in relaying such a sentiment, immediately snarling bitter, misanthropic and acerbic lyrical themes that permeate both the opening track and the album writ whole. It’s a savage punk-and-metalhead tag-team combo expressing the near-universal sentiment most of us not in a privileged position are currently sharing.
What a cluster-fuck of a time we find ourselves in, eh? Really. I’d just like to acknowledge the absolute absurdism of the present day, and I feel Industrial Puke have channelled that frustrated, bewildered exasperation very effectively.
To drive these roared, shouted, jeered and projectile-spat vocals into our earholes via, well, industrial-grade mechanical force Jonas is joined by a talented crew indeed. The opening track is just one brief, powerful example of Marko Partanen (Rentokiller)’s ability as lead guitarist to duck and weave around the nimble, serpentine riffage plied by rhythm guitarist Jens Ekelin (also of Rentokiller). And if you’ve noticed a repetition in the brackets, that’s because bassist Erik Harald rounds up a trio of Rentokiller(s), adeptly holding the low-end crush with heft alongside his Rentobandmates and the fluid dynamics of skinsman Mattias Rasmusson (Blessings, Obstruktion, Modern Guilt).
This opening track leaves literally nothing to the imagination. No cavernous death metal cosmic themes, no grandiosity or pomp. Just a blistering basket-weave of thrash metal, bruising hardcore and Entombed-styled grooves. Whilst that statement might put the odd patrician offside (I don’t give a shit, to be honest), I think anyone but the most dim-witted forumite neckbeard serious about their extreme heavy music will appreciate the meth-addled stallion’s gallop that marks both the first track and the album wholesale.
Clocking in at a total of 28 minutes across 12 tracks, it’s clear these Swedes skipped Daddy Akerfeldt’s Song Length Class to snort their mates’ Adderall instead. ‘Hoax Mongers’ is a track that less-so happens to you, and more a two-minute gutter-brawl punch-up of snarky vocals, punky riffage and sneaky tremolo. Feeling like one of those anime characters set upon by an enemy so fast it takes a few good seconds of immobility before the diced, dismembered pieces fall apart, the track is in the distance as fast as it came charging at you.
And, just as the cartoonishly-sliced slabs of think-organ housed in your skull start separating, the gang-chorus of “FU-CKING USE-LESS!” reverberates in the leftover space.
As if to circle back and carve up the remainder, the hilariously-titled ‘Skid Textures’ ensures your meaty chunks now resemble more of an aurally-slashed casserole than a thick cut of listener rump steak. Slicing, dicing and riffing. I’m about this, my dudes. I’m indeed all about it.
Pictured: Listener attempting to keep up with flat-stick no-holds-barred Industrial Puke riffs (2025, Colourised).
Source: DragonBall Wiki.
Notching up the tempo ante but sticking primarily within a playful Discharge-coded backbeat, the drumming serves as a stoic backdrop to some deceptively twisted riffing. Props to producer/engineer Mikael Andersson of Studio Soundport on this one for achieving a very comfortable balance between clarity and guttural sadism on the chef’s-kiss tone throughout. The aforementioned third track (and by extension, the entire album) is a fine example of having just enough mud and iron shavings clotted in the mix to give a copper-tasting industrial tang, but not so much as to bury the Swedish buzzsaw completely either.
‘Flaccid Provider’ conveniently emphasises this point even further. The track kicks off and maintains a burst-fire of nimble riffing that primarily evokes classic Slayer, perhaps even Morbid Angel in places, but also ain’t afraid of punk-friendly moshpit territory by the track’s end.
As someone who listens to a lot of crossover, thrash and metallic hardcore, my grin is widening as the album progresses. As the LP races past, I’m beset with mental imagery of just how wild an Industrial Puke mosh must be in live form. (Psst, want to come to Australia so we can test this experimental hypothesis, guys…?).
Speaking of live performances, often crust/d-beat/adjacent bands unleash a similar amount of kinetic potential in the studio as the energy expenditure you’d find at their slot on a local matinee. ‘Alive to No Avail’ is testament to this claim, I feel, the title track bringing out some lead-guitar fretboard gymnastics that are patently Svenska.
Elsewhere, it almost runs the risk of diluting the track with more generic tropes with some overtly heart-on-sleeve classic metal lead-work. I’m reminded of Cephalic Carnage’s ‘Dying Will Be The Death Of Me’ with this one, in fact. It’s clearly a homage and almost tongue-in-cheek in the addition of these classic guitar refrains - but the delivery is brutal, swift and technical enough to help the track transcend satire and remain sincerely thuggish as its’ own beast.
‘The Regretful Climb’ implements doom-metal levels of song structure, finishing up with an epic four minutes and twenty three seconds run-time. I know, right? It’s just missing the keyboard solo… thankfully. No, there’s no time for secondhand King Crimson meandering or lengthy interludes. These dudes might have a slightly longer track, but that just means more time to go fast, and to riff like thrashers. Which they do. The entire time. With turn-on-a-dime single string riffage that brings The Haunted to mind set right amongst thick chords and grating, fuzz-laden bass, this ain’t no plodder.
Unless you can call a bunch of weighty, distorted palm-mute chugs and sped-up breakdowns ‘plodding’, in which case you might’ve overdosed on powerviolence.
If that’s indeed the case, not to worry!
Let’s do a Gwyneth Paltrow and claim the poison is the cure - follower ‘Strangled From The Inside’ does what it says on the tin and offers a homeopathic dose of frantically-paced poison throughout it’s relatively quicker 3-minute runtime. The addition of subtle effects on both guitar and bass is a nice touch here, almost lost on those too busy licking their wounds from the albums’ relentless battery so far.
A battery aided by a drummer who’s playing feels more relentless than my ADHD brain on no sleep and five coffees. Man’s busy and unrepentant throughout, and could easily replace a full cardio routine with, heck, playing Industrial Puke tracks. Who says exercise has to be boring?
I want to pause for a moment and just remind folks that in essence, a lot of the heaviness here is derived from the speed. I don’t want to give false pretences and set an expectation that you’ll cop a more metallic, 300bpm Vyraemia-style drilling.
We’re not examining ultra-brutal death-grind with this album, so don’t be misconstruing my words of sonic harshness with more traditional metalhead idioms of what constitutes ‘brutal’. At it’s core, like any good crust/d-beat influenced death metal album focused on outdoing Sonic The Hedgehog whilst half-drunk, Alive is effectively the DnD Fighter class of your listening party mid-brawl in the local fantasy tavern.
Is that to say this band/album aren’t heavy? Apffsh. Get the fuck out of here with that assumption, too!
‘Nothing More To Give’ dishes enough classic death metal fervour and tempo-number-goes-up into two brief minutes of cacophony that even the crustiest grind-fiends such as myself will have their blast-tummies well satiated. Yummy, yummy, yummy.
Threatening to burst our up-tempo stomachs past full, it’s possibly a blessing that the even-faster follow-up track ‘Inverted’ has a single minute airtime. Like a stimulant-induced act of stabbing that leaves a victim with wounds in the double digits, this track rips through you like an aggressor on PCP.
‘Rational Asshole’ has little time to lament or hear your complaints, either. Like a bully finishing a pants-drop with a blinding overhead wedgie, the sheer sarcastic snark that pervades this quick bruiser feels like someone else came along, also likely substance-affected on horrendous street drugs, only to sweep your legs out and finish what the prior started.
As if to musically declare “haha, it was just a prank bro!”, ‘Biblical Corpse’ is where the punk ethos really shines. As the penultimate track, this one feels like the encore at your local opener’s set. You know, the one where everyone who wants to be tagged on Instagram so they can pretend to be friends with Frontman X from Band Y of ZIP/Postal Code Z? Yeah. The gang-chanting borders on Dropkick Murphys’ level but is mercilessly underpinned by the savage viral-infection gargles, rasps and roars. As if to make one last Predator-handshake meme between metal and punk, Mattias busts out an epic guitar solo you could easily mistake for early-aughts Gothenburg/thrash. Great fun.
‘Average Dicks’ is musically and lyrically a fantastic epilogue to both the prior track and the album. No nonsense, no horseshit, no brigading - just a bunch of dudes riffing hard, fast but also employing a lot of dime-stop twists and turns you’ve heard elsewhere on the album.
And there you have it.
In less than half an hour, you’ve experienced twelve tracks of something absolutely patriotic and unashamed in its’ Swedish influence, but also a lovechild borne out of wedlock with the US/UK. Industrial Puke don’t waste time, and neither should you in checking this one out.
A tried-and-true lasagne bake with some extra spices strewn throughout. Hungry for speed (musically - what you in your own time’s your business)? Well, dig in - Alive to No Avail is a crust/death metal UberEats opus you won’t regret ordering.
LINKS:
Industrial Puke
Suicide Records
Full-Album Stream, courtesy of Suicide Records: