Well, don’t the hits just keep on coming from Australia?

And by hits, I mean huge, punch-the-wind-out-of-your-guts haymakers, one after the other… It seems like only minutes ago I was enthusing about Werewolves, then Flaming Wrekage, and now here are more of their Fosters-swilling countrymen, The Harvest Trail, axes sharpened, grinning lasciviously at me from the photo accompanying their PR blurb…

This lot hail from Perth, and by cracky they’ve cooked up a fearsome noise on debut effort Instinct. It’s barely an album – weighing in at quicker than Reign In Blood, always my yardstick for such things (it’s an album – now get on with – Ed), but fitting in more metal per square inch than you could seriously expect in such a comparatively brief space. Every track is rammed with riffs, growls, grunts, howls, razor sharp solos, hooks… you get the picture. Vocalising guitarist Brendon Capriotti is also in WA symphonic black metallers Claim The Throne, and occasionally vocally you’ll get little influences of that, but for the most part this is stripped down, utterly basic melodic death metal.

By ‘utterly basic’ I do of course mean rip-roaringly brilliant. Just listen to penultimate track Strangled, for instance; all the components you’d hope for are there, but somehow the trio (rounded out by another guitarist, Ian Binet, and drummer Ashley Large) twist the song’s component parts just enough to give the whole thing what amounts to a fresh coat of audio paint. It’s familiar… but at no point do you find yourself blurting out other tracks you’re reminded of whilst listening.

Opening brace Victims and War are as vital and exciting a kick-off as you’ll hear for a while, the latter especially whipping up a host of raw-throated Swedish and German-inspired emotions as it batters it’s way into your consciousness. Capriotti whips up a storm vocally and instrumentally, the whole thing being pretty hard to resist if you remember the early to mid nineties as the glory days of this kind of mullarkey. War is hell, as Capriotti roars in the lyrics, but it’s pretty heavenly too it would seem if you love old school death metal…

Instinct releases on March 12th.