Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

There is a new rage in town, one that sits beneath South Africa’s iconic Table Mountain and lets its musical thumping, beast like savagery and calm collected intelligence seep out across the sea. For Octainium there is better rage than what a set of guitars, the unmasking of a set of drum skins and the growling harmonic bass and vocals provides on their album Suffer The Clock.

South Africa has had more than its fair share of suffering in its, at times, turbulent history but the belief in one man changed that and whilst, as in all corners of the globe, there is inequality, South Africa’s rich artistic wealth is able to stand forth.

To listen to Octainium is to believe also, the grinding buzz of millions of amps coursing through the veins, of the metal synapses shaking, quaking as if the whole edifice of Metal was under attack from the inside. For there is nothing quite listening to a band that doesn’t conform to the normal strata and confines and yet somehow manages to place themselves right at the heart of what you expect from the genre. There is no fading sense of music delusion, no pining for something that only exists in a surreal perfect world, Suffer The Clock is deep down and dirty, anger and control, beauty and brutal, like listening to an Atomic Bomb go off, you can recoil in what’s about to happen but also marvel in the brain power it must have taken to produce something so devastating.

The device at the heart of this is the five musicians, Maritz Booysen, Gerhard Booysen, Kyle Van Wyk, Sven Anderson and Arno Grundling, they tick along in such a way that on songs such as Holier Than Thou, the storming Ineptocracy, Skeletons, The Writings of The Wall and the humdinger of an album finish What’s Your Poison, all you want to is rock that mountain that overlooks Cape Town, to play the music so loud that it reaches right into the Atlantic Ocean and sends Metal shock waves across to the extremes of the Atlantic Ocean. Music with a seismic punch is rare, to want to witness it first hand is singularly exceptional.

Octainium provide a beating heart to a clock that had just been graced with time, superb.

Ian D. Hall