Car Bomb’s Shape Shifting Metal

Galloping churning riffs that shift between time signatures like a lycanthropic cave creature… Car Bomb is a mathcore progressive metal band that revels in disorientating listeners.

For 20 years this band has been building on their experimental and aggressive metal style – self-releasing albums, building a studio and even constructing their own microphones (presumably because most conventional designs would simply disintegrate if placed anywhere near this band at full throttle).

Car Bomb’s independence is reflected in their uncompromising sound – they are quite at home when using discordant intervals and hypnotically off-kilter grooves – hear Lights Out and Fade Out for evidence of this.

Listen to ‘From the Dust of this Planet’ as the first minute and a half gives you a pretty good overture of the Car Bomb approach: the drooping down-tuning guitar riff breaking into Michael Dafferner’s throaty growl, before a slightly psychedelic plain-sung section ascends from the murky swamp.

The idiosyncratic pick scrapes and harmonic dive bomb gurgles add flavour to Greg Kubacki’s guitar playing stew – the opening riff of Scattered Sprites will cause tectonic plates beneath Dingwalls to grind and pull at the stage.

You can hear that this band’s writing process probably involves taking an idea chopping it up, reversing it, warping the time signature and repeating this process until it sounds snarling and unpredictably off-beam.

Fans of Messhugah and Dillinger Escape Plan take note! Metal-heads with a penchant for refreshingly disorientating experiences must head to Dingwalls on March 28th.