Standing somewhere near the intersection of Judas Priest, Gary Numan, the Fucking Champs, and video game music, Portland, OR based electro-metal duo False Metal are clearly not taking cues from any of the obvious places. With two guitars, a laptop, and no singer, they manage to rip through a tight set of old-school metal riffage, backed by electronic beats and fuzzy synths played through a bass amp.

Composer and guitarist David J. Weiner, who by day writes music for video games and beats for nerdcore rapper Schaffer the Darklord, creates backing tracks using an iPhone app, which he and co-guitarist Troy Schmiedeknecht (it’s pronounced “shmee-duh-connect”, dude) then wrap with distorted guitars, creating a triumphant and sincere homage to the metal gods of old. Lead lines sear across the top in place of vocals, which the pair have dispensed with in favor of a sound more focused on “awesome”, rather than on “my feelings”. Metal purists may scoff, but rock believers will recognize this for what it is - rad riffs and a cool sound, without any of the pretensions of the current crop of “true metal”. This is, after all, FALSE METAL.

Download the five-song debut EP "Devil In The Details" at http://falsemetal.bandcamp.com/ Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.