SIFTING: DISARMONIA MUNDI, MAJALIS, AUTHOR & PUNISHER, SIBERIAN HELL SOUNDS / TRAVELS SPLIT

 

(DGR wrote this round-up of new music while I was away at MDF, and I rewarded his helpfulness by posting it days later after I got back home. You’re welcome, Dave.)

While most of the goofballs who inhabit this site are off fucking around somewhere in Maryland, one of us has to pick up the slack and bring you yesterday’s news tomorrow, otherwise we wouldn’t be fulfilling our mission statement of always being just behind the curve — but with more words to make up for the delay.

This edition is going to be a little heavily biased toward my tastes, which means we’re probably going to be on the lighter fare of the metal scale, but there was still some damn good music to happen within recent weeks, and most of the bands you folks will be familiar with. There were a couple of interesting discoveries on that front, as a couple of different artists decided to release new songs out to the world, and then in the other two cases, they’ve been out for a bit but we’re doing our best to keep them from flying under the radar.

 

Disarmonia Mundi

Way back in 2009, Disarmonia Mundi released what I think is one of the best melo-death albums in some time with The Isolation Game. The admittedly bloated release was jam-packed with guitar and synth leads for days, as well as some of the catchiest choruses to have hit in a while.

It’s been six years since then and the guys have kept busy, having put out a great release with The Stranded — which saw both of the musicians in Mundi team up with keyboardist Nero Argento and a pro-skateboarder on guitars and then using the DM project as part of the Imaginary Flying Machines releases — which saw musicians from the Coroner Records label covering popular Japanese anime movie theme songs, mostly stuff from the Studio Ghibli spectrum. That said, it has been over six years since we’ve gotten a traditional Disarmonia Mundi release, so to say the hype for Cold Inferno is high on this end is putting it mildly.

Just recently the group put up a video for the song “Stormghost”, which is likely our first chance to hear anything off of this album. It’s a pretty straightforward Disarmonia Mundi song that is purely in the comfort zone for a lot of fans. It features a catchy-as-hell clean-sung chorus alongside some super-fast guitar work and some excellently shrieked highs. The solo in this song is one of the few that I would describe as absolutely delicious.

Basically, it’s like the band never went away after Isolation Game. It’s hard to not just headbang your way through this one.

Editor’s Note: I dragged ass so long in posting this round-up that since writing this, DGR got the album and reviewed it — and I’ll maybe be posting that review tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

Majalis

Boy howdy, it has been a bit since we spoke of Majalis, hasn’t it? Both NCS lead writery person thingy Islander and I absolutely loved their debut Cathodic Black, and so we’ve been keeping them just on our peripheral, salivating at any hint of new music.

Recently, Majalis took part in a festival known as Karmoygeddonin in Norway and have been sharing out some live video that they themselves took. They’ve been slowly doling them out over the course of one a week on Saturdays, and this week marked the second of what the band are calling “Sharing Saturday”. This week they shared video of the song “Notes From The Underworld”, which we might have posted before — also in live form — but this version is much higher quality and shows where the band are in terms of writing new material.

“Notes From The Underworld” is a slightly more up-tempo song than what the band were up to on Cathodic Black, but the song is still heavily rooted in post-doom and gloom, a little bit more sludgy than before, but there are moments in this song that, even live, come across as absolutely beautiful.

It’s a ten-minute groover of a song that flies for its first few minutes then drops into a melodic lead that carries it the rest of the way. Whilst we’re sharing out the group’s live videos though, I figured I’d tack on their live video of “Rusting Sun”, as it is also the same quality as the “Notes” video, meaning we have twenty minutes of solid Majalis live footage right now.

Also; listen to Majalis.

https://www.facebook.com/majalismusic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSkmfLl8IRQ

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXCWV_XCYD4

 

 

 

 

 

Author & Punisher

Allow me to just state this one up-front, you can skip the rest of the drivel I’m going to pass off as writing for this next paragraph: The new Author & Punisher song is fucking relentless and I love it.

I think people should be way more excited about him appearing on the new Cattle Decapitation CD than they are, and if “Callous and Hoof” is a teaser of what the new Author & Punisher disc is going to be like — this album is going to be intense.

I got the opportunity to review the last Author & Punisher album, Women And Children, for this site, and in it I described the music as sounding like an anguished individual slowly drowning in a machine that was overtaking him piece by piece. Since then, it seems like the profile of this drone-doom-industrial project has only grown as more and more people have been welcomed into the fold of witnessing this machine madness.

He’s even made friends with one Phil Anselmo and has him as the producer on the upcoming Author & Punisher release Melk en Honing, which will hit on Anselmo’s own Housecore record label at the ass-end of June. To say I’m excited for this would be downplaying it. I loved Women And Children, as well as his previous work.

I think Author & Punisher is one of the most interesting projects out there — metal by the sheer nature of what you have to do to make the machines that Tristan Shone (creator of this whole project) has built actually work. “Callous and Hoof” is a hell of a lead-off single, and I hope that Melk En Honing is as intense as this first song is.

 

 

 

 

Siberian Hell Sounds X Travels

It seems like only yesterday I was writing about the gentlemen in Australia’s own Siberian Hell Sounds. Yet, here I am again with this elusive hardcore punk band, this time with news of a new split the band put out at the very beginning of May with melodic hardcore band Travels.

This whole split is currently “name your own price” on Bandcamp, and the two songs present are very different from each other. Travels takes on a brooding, meditative journey through hardcore with some passionate vocal delivery and a loud, chaotic midsection on the song “Chasing Circles”. Siberian Hell Sounds responded in kind — by saying, well fuck, they already took the short song on this release, we’re going to make a nine-minute song that DGR can actually type out.

The song’s name is “Ishtar” and it is a slow-moving, almost progressive-rock, journey through the band’s sound — a marked departure from the grinding violence that the band were getting up to on their previous release. The vocals are still voracious as hell, but this time they’re being drowned awash in a sea of melancholy.

The whole split is absolutely worth the time and the “name your own price” aspect of it makes it a fantastic value. The whole split seems like a love letter to a lot of the post-metal aspects that currently seem to be making their way across the hardcore punk scene, so if you dig that then this is an easy-as-hell recommend.

https://siberianhellsounds.bandcamp.com/album/travels-siberian-hell-sounds-split