Miocene – ‘9mm High & Rising’

Ahead of the curve

Metal for the avant-garde

Useless tinpot drums

Miocene at it live

Micoene were one of those bands that we didn’t appreciate when we had them, and now they’re shockingly overdue some kind of retrospective praise. Pre-dating the current resurgence in intelligent UK metal such as The Arusha Accord (there’s more to UK metal in 2008 that Bullet For My Valentine, thank fuck…), Miocene were one of a clutch of British metal bands making music outside of trends around the time of the millenium.

The band eventually released three full-length albums, and a mini-album (of which today’s track is taken). It was the mini-album that really grabbed me at the time – I’d just read Watchmen for the first time, and the rorschach blob on the cover of Refining The Theory lept out at me almost as much as the music it packaged. Closer to earthtone9 than the nu-metal apologists that made up most of the rest of young UK metal at the time, Miocene injected a spiky sense of IQ into my teenage listening habits.

And – guess what? – they’ve split up. Hey, it’s a Heavy Metal Haiku tradition now. The London four-piece might not have sold a million records, but I like to think they had a impact on everyone who ever bought one of their CDs or caught them playing live. On the rare occasions I bump into another fan at a gig or something, then everyone always seems to a have a war story to share about them.

Okay, so the production on the drums is fucking horrible. But it was the dawn of a new century, and people were too busy angrily demanding a refund for all their redundant Anti-Millenium Bug software to care too much about drum sounds.

Anyway, your download’s below. There’s more where that came from on Miocene’s old MySpace page.

Miocene – ‘9mm High & Rising’