Worship Metal Album Of The Week: My Wooden Pillow – Uncomfortable

Source // MyWoodenPillow

This week’s recommendation comes courtesy of My Wooden Pillow’s Uncomfortable.

We confess, we’ve been slightly misleading with our title here as not only is My Wooden Pillow’s Uncomfortable an EP and not an album, it’s also 4 months old (how we didn’t hear about these guys sooner is beyond us)! Regardless,  Uncomfortable is so damn good we had to herald it as our recommendation of the week as it’s practically been on repeat play since we first heard it.

Hailing from Manchester, UK, My Wooden Pillow have self-released an EP that takes the best bits from Death Metal, Groove Metal, Nu-Metal(!), Hardcore and good ol’ fashioned Rock ‘N’ Roll and crafted 4 superb songs which no doubt slay in the live environment.

First track “The Line” opens with a blood-pumping old-school thrash riff before Carcass-inspired vocals shift the band into Melodic Death Metal gear. Arch Enemy are an obvious comparison but My Wooden Pillow are savvy enough to carve their own path. Replete with huge chorus, ingenious hooks and a monumental sound that demands immediate body-slamming approval; take it from us, “The Line” is a mosh-pit anthem waiting to happen.

It only gets better from here on in.

“Call To War” is where MWP’s countless influences blend together perfectly and is quite frankly the greatest song our Metal-ravaged eardrums have heard in a long, long time. Opening with a sound reminiscent of anarcho-rap-metallers One Minute Silence, MWP’s convergence of disparate styles then invites a Devildriver-esque Extreme Metal battering to the party before U-turning completely into a cleanly sung bridge that’s both massive and magnificent. This loop of insanely contrasting techniques seriously impresses and while “Call To War” has no right to work, we guarantee that once heard you’ll be utterly addicted to its charms.

“Decapitalist” then hits with a Death Metal groove highly reminiscent of the mighty Bolt Thrower, lumbering menace and elephantine heaviness contrasting with another cleanly sung passage that still drips with barely contained violence.  The mid-tempo groove continues with EP closer “MWP” before a Skindred-derived vocal line places us firmly in Party Metal territory, compete with flaming guitar solo. Again, if this all sounds absurdly inconsistent and incompatible, rest assured that My Wooden Pillow are masters at making the impossible possible; these 4 tracks really do work and they are a revelation in a modern Metal scene that seems to embrace pigeonholing for the sake of identifiable classification.

Oh, did we forget to mention MWP are a female fronted band? A fact that always seems to require acknowledgement when encountering a Female vocalist in Heavy Metal and yet means nothing when vocals are delivered with this much conviction. MWP are a truly great band who show much promise, gender don’t mean sh*t.

Next step, album please! 9/10