Album Review: Chickenhawk - Modern Bodies

With a mix of dirty tharsh punk and mighty metal riffs, Chickenhawk return with 'Modern Bodies' and sees the band developing their sound towards being more structured yet more chaotic, as 'Scorpieau' shows; noisy guitars, thrashing drums and loud vocals. From start to finish the bands adrenaline-filled noise-rock takes over with tracks like 'Son Of Cern' and 'My Name Is Egg' being dominated by the aforementioned riffs.

However the band also show their ability to adapt to a (slight) math-rock side, as 'The Pin' and 'Hate This, Do You Like It?' shows but this isn't quite obvious on first listen, as the bands wall of noise proves to be a distraction. Whilst 'Kerosene' is broken in to several pieces, but does not differ from the bands core sound.

For fans of frantic metal with a slight hardcore/math influence, you'll probably like this but for others this will quickly become repetitive, as the bands thick, heavy sound eventually becomes too much. Nonetheless Chickenhawk's musicianship is good enough to keep you interested, as their structural ideas are good and somewhat surprising.

3.5/5

'Modern Bodies' by Chickenhawk is available now on Brew Records.

Chickenhawk on MySpace

Sean Reid