Lifer - Cursing them Out

LIFER
CURSING THEM OUT
Label: House of Doom

When you're like us, and you're of a certain age, and you've been a metalhead for more of your life than you haven't been a metalhead, you qualify as a lifer.

LIFER, from Swansea, certainly are that.
Featuring members of such luminaries as Acrimony, Rectify and Black Eye Riot (I fucking loved that band, especially No Hope, No Future, No Worries!) have an impeccable pedigree, and meld together all their influences on debut Cursing Them Out, which sounds just like a gang of lifelong metalheads recording an album. They couldn't have called the band anything else!  There's everything here, from Crowbar-esque sludge riffery, to some COC sounding grooves, and a feel like a more modern version of Exhorder thrashing in parts.

With a band bringing together such experience and distilling it onto CD there would be room for it to not quite work, but this album never lets up, and never hits any flat points, it's all go, all the time.Web and Roy knock out some top riffs, like I say able to go from thrash to groove to sludge effortlessly, Dibble and Greg are a rhythmic force to be reckoned with Greg's drumming in particular make me raise my eyebrows and try to tap my feet along to Reach, which also saw me headbanging around the living room.  I keep doing this to Broken Bones too, from around 2:36 to the end.

When I was a 13 year old, I'd have killed for this album, I'd have worn the tape out in my walkman, staggering home from the woods full of warm cider..
I don't have to kill for it now, but I'll always be full of warm cider, and I might just wear the CD out because this week I've realised... I AM A LIFER.