Raging Speedhorn - Nightwolf
How the hell this band ever got associated with nu-metal back in 2000 was a travesty inflicted by indolent music hacks hired to cover a musical style they didn’t fully understand and magazine editors in a rush to meet deadlines to compile free CDs. Raging Speedhorn’s pugnacious racket has more in common with Sabbath, sludgecore and UK hardcore such as Iron Monkey’s demented grime than the generic nu-metal fannies. The band were very young upstarts when they released their self-titled debut in 2000 but it remains a spiteful throat punch of a record. Try listening to it now and match it up with the Kerrang! front cover pish of that era.
The decades have passed, beards have greyed, beer bellies have stretched and the band probably lost count of how many members they’ve been through. Despite that, RSH have never strayed too far stylistically (the slightly alternative tinged Before the Sea was Built released in 2007 was a marginal exception). The main evolution in their sound has been a steady morphing from thuggish, snarling street sludgecore steeped in violence, substance mis-use and psychological dark places to a more light-hearted, celebratory, drunken ode to Motorhead, rock excess and metal oafishness. The likes of Every Night’s Alright for Fighting and DOA have beer-stained, good time riffs that are hugely appealing and glory in headbanging dumbassery as does the daft party metal of Comin’ in Hand and Dead Men Can’t Dance.
RSH can still dial up the ugly-o-meter with corrosive, bluesey sludge reminiscent of their early days. The Blood Code and Can’t Stop are rumbling, lurching caustic sludgecore, with deep wibbly wobbly base lines, doomy discordant riffs and unrelenting pan-fried screams. It is brutish and uncompromising.
Like RSH’s other albums, Nightwolf doesn’t hang about and is a terse, uncomplicated bar brawl and that is for the best. It ties in pretty neatly with Hard to Kill (2020) and is, perhaps, the stronger album overall. Whether it is their squalid, deprived street sludge or staggering, swaggering ballsy rock metal, Raging Speedhorn are never subtle. You always need bands like Raging Speedhorn and their snarling, mad metal records in the good times and the bad.
Nightwolf was released via Spinefarm