Turnstyle

One of the metal scene's most consistent crews, Turnstyle celebrates its fifth furious year with a new four-song demo that offers no concessions to flavor-of-the-month sounds. The quartet's strength has always been its ability to balance rugged grunge-style melodies with battering breakdowns, as it does expertly on such crunching tunes as "Blanket" and "Fallen." Anchored by rumbling basslines and persistent double bass-pedal percussion, Turnstyle's low-end-heavy compositions mesh nicely with Corey Sweet's gruff vocals, which range from moody mumbles to on-key singing and intimidating shouts. When this group started, its members were in their mid-teens, and although they've obviously matured, Turnstyle remains rooted in the music popular at the time of its inception -- early Machine Head, Slayer's Divine Intervention, Pantera's Far Beyond Driven. It was a solid period for straightforward, high-volume metal, before hip-hop beats and artsy experimentation entered the formula, and attending a Turnstyle show allows riff-loving purists to step back into those simpler times.