BAND OF THE DAY: OBSESSOR

Painted in definite shades of Relapse's hair-teased anime Bathory worshippers Toxic Holocaust, Obsessor is one man - Brandon Farrell, ex of Direct Control, Government Warning, Wasted Time and Municipal Waste, and full-time record store owner. People surrounded by music tend to craft really detailed love letters to the things that excite them - they tend to act out on whims and, hurf, obsessions, like train spotters retreating back to their damp, dark basement to add another tiny tree to the scaled down embankment facing Wakefield Westgate railway station, its passengers permentantly trapped in amber disembarking from the 12.03 Trans-Pennine Express.

Obsessor is full on dork music. We should all stop pretending these kind of guys are cool, goat-worshipping babe-magnets, because the whole business of expertly crafted retro metal - especially retro metal that taps into a very specific, tunnel vision aesthetic like metalpunk - clearly draws on the same part of the brain that makes Angel/Spike slash fiction happen, and convinces fat girls to cosplay characters from Tokyo Mew Mew.

With that caveat delivered, Obsessor's absolutely great fun. Two tracks from the debut Tankcrimes EP are up for your downloading pleasure and to return to the opening comparison, it don't feel nearly as claustrophobic and generic as Toxic Holocaust, despite the similarly reduced line-up and reference points (English Dogs, Venom, Sodom, Bathory, Onslaught, and so on). Production is suitably biscuit tin bad and cavernous, like a rehearsal in a crypt, but it's rousing and rifftacular, begging you to cut off your sleeves and bellow along.

Metalpunk ended up like every other micro movement about six minutes after its genesis - boring and predictable. The latter is a given, but that doesn't mean the former is unavoidable, and we have Obsessor as proof.