Evil Inside – Trishula

One of the year’s bets new labels continues its good run with a very tasty artist album from Psyfactor, an artist whose compilation tracks have created a well-founded buzz. Shitty Bastards opens up brilliantly, perfect start-of-set material that’s all about building tension and an atmosphere of phoreboding phatness. Ghost kicks the album off properly, and it’s firmly how we mean to go on. Big crunches, an enormous bassline, and a deliciously twisted midrange riff that keeps it all buzzing. I’m So Happy has one of the cheekiest riffs I think I’ve heard in this style, very twisty and with a hint of mischief, like a dog who’s been caught licking his balls while your gran’s over for Sunday lunch. The off-beat stabs in the mid and end sections are just sublime, a very nice trick that has a hypnotic effect that’s especially rare with darker psytrance. Child Of Darkness (probably not named after me) is a more straightforward affair… there’s a couple of tricks going on, in the “up the stairs” bassline, but it’s mostly all about this massive, massive riff that comes into play for the end section… sounding like heavy metal without (yay!) any guitars, this is really going to get the dancefloor moving. Hell Raver does more or less what it says on the tin, a huge atmosphere going on, with squelches and squeaks and… just the most insane patterns going on, a very intricate feel throughout. Brain Destruction is a winner right from the start, and has a real journey running through it. Large, foreboding sounds kick it off, and a series of low-set riffs and topend spookytickles drive it onward. The breakdown sounds like you’re listening to Gamma Goblins after ingesting DMT, before a huge huge HUGE sweep comes in and dominates. Add the kick and bassline (perfect), drop in some hats (perfect again), take it all away then thunk it back in, accompanied by a delicious midrange that gets you grinning in joy while running in fear. Top. Angry Goblin is all about harsh drops, nice little tricks and more class-A riffage, especially in the final run where things really come into their own. Fear Square, meanwhile, is fascinating… building up into a series of melodic pads underneath the hard and gnarly midrange, which itself falls effortlessly into a friendly and morning-friendly pattern. The transition is incredible: you’ll think it was two tracks. Finally Good And Evil does exactly that, starting out with a gnarly, angry vibe before things start to get acidic and floral, with some seriously good topend and some of the best melody bending heard in a long time. Quite suddenly it breaks, and heads fully back into gnarl-mode, building aggression and tension before dropping itself back into chummy, and gradually fading away…. Bloody nice all round, in other words. Not many of the darker psy artists have got the intelligence and variety to pull off a whole artist album, but psyfactor does. When you take the ideas, and add to that the pure kick-ass darkpsy movement and sheer energy squeezing out from every orifice, the overall product is as surprising as it is loveable. Oh, and kickass.