ABACUS - THE RELICS EP

ABACUS is surely a big name for everyone interested in rock music. There are five artists with the name Abacus. 1. An American Rock 'n Roll/Punk band. 2. A German progressive rock band. 3. A British glam-rock band. 4. An electronica artist. 5. A powerviolence/hardcore punk 1: An American Rock 'N Roll/Punk band founded by singer/lyricist Jim Nobodie in 2009. After about two years of playing with the first incarnation (the band on 404) it was shortly disbanded but later reformed in 2011 with a heavier sound and stronger line up. Now ABaCuS is poised to take the world by storm, leaving whatever stands in their way broken and mangled. With their "take no prisoners" attitude, they are surely a band to reckoned with. "What have we got to lose?" was Jim Nobodie's response when asked, "why?" 2: A German band formed in 1971 who made their breakthrough at the Germersheim rock festival, where ABACUS drew no less applause from the 300,000 visitors than PINK FLOYD, SANTANA or ELP who appeared on stage as well. Jürgen Wimpelberg plays keyboards, guitars, drum programming as well as handling vocal duties. After a lengthy absence from the recording scene, "Fire Behind Bars" was released in 2001. They develop Pop melodies into a wide instrumental manner, with gorgeous neo-classical and symphonic sequences. In a vein near GENESIS, GREENSLADE or PINK FLOYD. ABACUS offers a modern and attractive Progressive Rock music. 3: A British glam rock band. 4: Spencer Stephenson, a young multi-instrumentalist and sample-based producer operating in Denton, TX. He plays drums/writes music with Denton band, Sleep Whale, of the Austin-based label Western Vinyl. 5. Abacus is powerviolence/hardcore punk from Columbia, South Carolina. At large, metal finally seems be opening its borders, shedding subgenre orthodoxy to chart new courses. At this point, nobody’s going to out-blitz Napalm Death’s 1985 LP Scum or outlast any of Sunn O)))’s intricate and maleficent quarter-hour drones. And with blasphemers like Deafheaven and Liturgy offering new on-ramps to the left-hand path, the old guard is increasingly old hat. But we needn’t ring the death knell for metal. Take, as an example, Columbia’s own Abacus, whose full-length debut, En Theory, mines generations of heavy music — from acrobatic math-rock to blunt-force hardcore — inviting heads to be both banged and scratched. Where the band’s 2013 EP skewed hardcore, volleying between crust-punk’s straight-ahead charge and the jagged, erratic eruptions of ‘90s hardcore, En Theory more fully synthesizes the band’s inspirations. On “Loyal Death,” a raw, grindcore blast beat rolls into a d-beat stomp that drives momentum behind a corkscrewing post-hardcore riff. The rhythm stays bullet-straight as guitars make jagged, short-blade cuts. “Nothing Is Sacred” closes the album with bleak black metal, riding a blast-beat barrage with tremolo-picked chords carving a spartan melody from the deafening din. Rather than a series of stylistic exercises stitching together disparate scraps, Abacus treats these elements as cut from the same cloth. The results are thrilling. The ominous acoustic passage “A Figment” flows gracefully into the angled blues-metal riff that opens “Bodies of Water.” It’s not a gambit or a gimmick — neither a prog-metal lark or a calculated break for sensitivity — but a new shading of familiar contours. In freeing itself to embrace all things heavy, without the burden of context, Abacus has produced a fresh, exciting and righteously heavy album. In such hands, metal remains alive and well. Abacus is: Josh Bumgarner - guitars Alex Strickland - vocals Paul Huff - percussion Kevin Scruggs - bass Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.