As featured in this week's edition of Beat magazine:

Every now and again, a metal album smacks you so hard that you're left bleeding in the gutter, fumbling to give change to anyone who will drive you to the hospital.

The debut release from Melbourne metallers House of Thumbs (HoT) is such an album. A flawlessly-constructed concept piece about a guy who chops off people's thumbs, Crossing the Rubicon is metal at its finest; an instant classic sure to dominate end-of-year lists.

HoT's music is relentless, bucking and churning through a huge assortment of styles including old-school death, modern thrash, mathcore and groove. With polyrhythms, blastbeats, thrashfests, lead breaks and breakdowns throughout, there's a reason here for everyone to queue for a healthy serving of sandpaper to the face. Matching the musical multi-personality is vocalist Linden Audino, who executes a plethora of different styles and voices (from Jens Kidman to John Zorn) with pinpoint precision.

The production here is A-grade, as good as I've heard in a local release, and the material sits comfortably alongside world-class bands with no perceivable reduction in volume or tonal quality, but the real win comes from the band's relentless energy. Point in kind is album opener Tourian, a grooving mass of patterns that could have easily wound up as mid-paced snorecore. In the hands of the Thumbs, however, the tempo is cranked to create a frenetic assault not unlike a platoon of combat boots to the head outside an inner-city nightclub. Listening to Crossing the Rubicon, I was 16 again – raging with the angst of a recently-failed maths exam and a weekend of female rejections. Wrapped up in the psychotic thrash of Impulse, it took all my restraint not to start head-banging the wall, and all of my flatmate's restraint to stop me tearing our couch cushions into a million little fibres... and I'd only heard two tracks!

Of the nine remaining songs, only Shura offers any respite from the pummelling and by album's end, I was exhausted. Still, I found myself returning to the lyric sheet, artwork and website for more clues on the thumb-cutter and surely that means the band has done its job.

In recent times, Australia's metal scene has morphed into a factory of familiarity where most bands are largely indistinguishable. Floating into unknown territory on a refreshing raft of originality is House of Thumbs. Not to be missed.

John Stavyes