Herb Your Enthusiasm – Skin Back Alley

Boss Keloid announce new album and worldwide record deal

04/12/2017 by skinbackalley, posted in News

Britain’s finest heavy psych-proggers Boss Keloid have announced a new record deal and teased their forthcoming new album.

Following widespread acclaim for their 2016 collection Herb Your Enthusiasm, the band have signed a worldwide deal with the renowned Holy Roar Records and will release their third long-player, Melted On The Inch, in Spring 2018.

Say the band: “We are delighted to be signing to Holy Roar for the release of our new album, Melted On The Inch. They’re a progressive and passionate label with an ethos that we strongly admire and relate to, so it’s really cool that they’ve shown a great deal of interest and passion in our music. It’s an honour to join such a musically strong and diverse roster.

“For us, Melted On The Inch is a strong progression from Herb Your Enthusiasm. It draws from a much wider pond of influence than our previous. It is more progressive, more uplifting, more melancholic, more emotional, more dynamic, there is a greater emphasis on light and shade, it is heavier, it is more delicate, it has more beauty, it has more darkness.”

Check out the teaser for Melted On The Inch below.

You can read our 2016 interview with Boss Keloid here, and check out our review of previous LP Herb Your Enthusiasm here.

Connect with Boss Keloid at:
Facebook: facebook.com/bosskeloidband
Twitter: twitter.com/bosskeloid
Bandcamp: bosskeloid.bandcamp.com
Holy Roar: www.holyroarrecords.com

Boss Keloid share video for colossal new track ‘Lung Mountain’

16/03/2016 by skinbackalley, posted in News

UK progressive sludge outfit Boss Keloid have premiered a video for their track “Lung Mountain.”

The song is lifted from the band’s colossal new album, Herb Your Enthusiasm, due for release on the 8th of April via Black Bow Records.

Speaking with Metal Hammer, Boss Keloid guitarist Paul Swarbrick says of the video: “The theme of ‘Lung Mountain’ is about engaging with and fulfilling personal, creative energies. This is a constant thread throughout Herb Your Enthusiasm. The video represents the journey through the ‘Lung Mountain’ filtered through the eye of the ‘Keloid-o-scope’ in search of the holy grail of bespoke knitwear and creative fulfilment.”

Check out the psychedelic new clip for “Lung Mountain” via the stream below.

Speaking of new album Herb Your Enthusiasm in a recent interview with Skin Back Alley, Swarbrick said: “We’ve always been focussed on creating new music that we’re proud of and are constantly trying to better ourselves as musicians and as a band.

“With the new songs we focussed on giving the riffs and vocals more room to breathe and incorporating a greater sense of melody and depth. We spent a lot of time getting the tone and vibe exactly how we wanted this time around.”

You can check out our review of Boss Keloid’s new album, Herb Your Enthusiasm, right here!

Album review: Boss Keloid, ‘Herb Your Enthusiasm’

20/02/201609/02/2019 by skinbackalley, posted in Album Reviews

Artist: Boss Keloid
Album: Herb Your Enthusiasm
Our Verdict: 8/10
Release date: 8th April, 2016
Find it at: bosskeloid.bandcamp.com
Review by: Graeme Blackwell

Boss Keloid are back with an album more dense than the immeasurable singularity of a neutron star.

“Nothing has changed” bellows Boss Keloid’s Alex Hurst on Herb Your Enthusiasm album track “Axis Of Green.”

And yet absolutely everything has changed.

By taking a doom-laden metal template and remoulding it in their own kaleidoscopic image, Wigan’s finest purveyors of all things psychedelic and sludge-like have effectively reset the bar.

Building upon the heavyweight foundation and cult-acclamation of their debut full length The Calming Influence Of Teeth, on Herb Your Enthusiasm the ‘Keloid have stripped away the more frenetic math-based elements of their auricular tapestry and made audacious progress through the development of their production, arrangements and melody.

For beneath Boss Keloid’s spiked and leathery skin lies a pulsating progressive heart, sinewy and muscular guitars winding rhythmically through the sonic nether, rumbling percussive blasts crushing blood and bone through sheer force of will.

The temptation is to place Herb… in the canon of Clutch or Conan, the latter of whose own Jon Davis makes a guest appearance here on both “Chabal” and “Lung Mountain”, but while they work in the same aural space, the similarities between bands are only surface.

What ultimately impresses most about Boss Keloid’s new collection is the layers of sophistication that lie beneath the quake-inducing intensity. For all its nascent desire to pound everything into submission, Herb Your Enthusiasm is in many ways light, agile and dynamic on its feet, its ability to contriturate so total precisely because of its spacious production and clarity of detail.

Hurst’s ravaged and sand-blasted vocals add strength and texture to Adam Swarbrick’s worn and scabrous low-end across many of these cuts, and when the pair lock into a groove with Ste Arands’ drums and Paul Swabrick’s guitar on the like’s of “Escapegoat”, “Hot Priest” or the aforementioned “Axis Of Green” – the latter bolstered further by the synapse-firing inclusion of Eastern-tinged rhythms and chant-like vocal tones – the effect is paradoxically both electrifying and hypnotising.

To cut a long story short, I’m telling you this album’s bloody great.

At times more dense than the immeasurable singularity of a neutron star, at others more enlightening and expansive than the mind-altering nature of the cosmos itself, Herb Your Enthusiasm is – whisper it – a very early contender for album of the year.

You can pre-order ‘Herb Your Enthusiasm’ from the 26th of February and it will be released on the 8th of April via Black Bow Records. If you can’t wait that long for a sneak peak, check out the album’s video teaser below.