Yesterday, I devoted three separate posts to three new songs by three different bands (not counting that track by some djent band named Meshuggah). Though I don’t plan to make a habit of this, I’m doing it again today, because yesterday and today I spotted three more songs worth sharing around. But unlike yesterday, today’s songs come from bands whose music I already know.

First up is Borknagar. We already splashed the eye-catching Marcelo Vasco cover art for their new album Urd (here), and now we have the first song from the album — “Roots”. Here’s what Borknagar mastermind Øystein G. Brun had to say about the song on the band’s official site:

“In regards to the depth, diversity and magnitude of our new album, “Urd”, it almost feels painful to slice off just a tiny bit of the bloody roast for the very first official “starter”. I would argue that each and every song on the new album stands on solid ground, but as usual with our music, the songs empower each other in the context of a full album.

That said, “Roots” is probably the song on the album that gives you the most representative impression of “Urd”. Musically it contains most of the elements that framework the musical universe of BORKNAGAR, and lyrically this song is gnawing on the very spine of our lyrical tradition. Hope you enjoy this song, the first tiny glimpse into our new opus. The beast is about to be unleashed…”

The song debuted yesterday exclusively on DECIBEL magazine’s on-line site and on Metal Hammer’s site. I’d recommend a visit to either place, because the song is worth hearing.

In my observation, nearly everyone who’s a serious fan of metal started out in one particular genre. But I think if you’re passionate about music, the more you listen, the more your interests will expand to encompass different styles. It’s not necessarily the product of boredom with where you started, though that might be part of it. Sometimes, it’s the listener who is changing, and a different kind of music begins to appeal to a different you. And sometimes as your sophistication and knowledge as a listener grow, you simply begin to understand and appreciate aspects of music that once held no interest.

In my case, I’m developing a new-found enjoyment of heavy-riffed stoner metal, a school of music that for me used to start and stop with Mastodon. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not going to replace more extreme forms of metal as my favorites, but I’d be lying if I denied that I’m having fun with it. Most recently, I’ve been having fun with the forthcoming album by long-running UK band Orange Goblin. It’s titled A Eulogy For the Damned, and Candlelight Records is scheduled to release it on February 14. I don’t know if we’ll review it here — I don’t feel particularly qualified to do it myself — but we’ll see.

However, it doesn’t take deep knowledge of the genre to spot a good video for a good song, and that’s what I did this morning. Orange Goblin and Candlelight just released a black-and-white, part-performance, part-animation video for a new track called “Red Tide Rising”. The song is a titanic motherfucker of a headbanging romp, with hooky melodies rising and falling, evil lyrics addressing the rise of Cthulhu, and instrumentation that does its level best to break necks. All those who worship at the church of the riff, come forth and lend your ears to this:

I listened to a lot of albums in 2011, most of them new releases. I made mental lists and written lists of the ones I wanted to review, not because I think I’m particularly good at it, but because I want to do my part to help spread the word about music I admire and to support good bands so they’ll continue making music that makes me happy ( yes, it all comes down to selfishness in the end).

Of course, I fell down on the job miserably. I just didn’t get around to reviewing everything I wanted to praise in 2011. With the new year under way, I know that psychologically I’ll feel motivated to focus on new releases this year instead of trying to catch up on writing about 2011 albums.  But if I never write about another 2011 album, there’s one I cannot leave unheralded — Rengeteg.

If this 2011 album from Thy Catafalque consisted of the 9 minutes and 20 seconds of “Fekete mezők” and 51 minutes of mind-numbing elevator music, I would still be happy. “Fekete mezők” is one of my favorite songs of the year. But that song is just the beginning of an album’s worth of musical marvels — and no two of them are alike.

The songs flow into each other without pause, pulling the listener along with them as they cross a constantly changing landscape of sounds and emotions. The idea of crossing a landscape isn’t just the feeling conjured by the movement of the music. It also emerges from the lyrics.

The words are in Hungarian, but they’ve recently become available in English translations, and I found them interesting to read while listening to the album (for the umpteenth time). If there’s a concept I can discern, it is one about the unity of life and matter, about the connectedness of human beings to the Earth, and more than the Earth, to the star-spawned matter of which we and it are made.

Alcest are from France. Many people I know like their music. In two days, their third album will be officially released by Prophecy Productions. Its title is Les Voyages de L’Âme. It’s now streaming in full on Prophecy Productions’ YouTube channel — which you can find via this link.

I’ve been listening to the album this morning for the first time. It’s beautiful, often hypnotic, one of those albums that pulls you in. You swim in it, it swims in you. Almost all the singing is clean, but Neige has a beautiful voice. Occasionally, he lets rip with black metal shrieking. When that happens, the intensity of the music also increases and the effect is galvanizing.

But mainly, this is just beautiful stuff. Not our usual fare around here, but I’d like to stream one of the new songs for you after the jump anyway. You can get lost . . .

This is Part 3 of our list of the most infectious extreme metal songs released this year. Each day until the list is finished, I’m posting two songs that made the cut. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the Introduction via this link. To see the selections that preceded this one, click the Category link on the right side of the page called MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011.

The first song in today’s feature comes from Deathstar Rising, the 2011 album released by Finland’s Before the Dawn. The band was started in 1999 by the prolific Tuomas Saukkonen (also a member of Black Sun Aeon, Dawn of Solace, and RoutaSielu), and that 2011 album is their sixth. Although I reviewed the band’s immediately preceding album, Soundscape of Silence (2008), I neglected Deathstar Rising on this site. Actually, I believe that qualifies as criminal neglect, because I enjoyed the fuck out of that record. As punishment, I’m hoping for probation instead of hard time.

Before the Dawn’s success comes down to two principal factors, which are fully displayed on Deathstar Rising: skilled song-writing that effectively combines hard-driving riffs and rhythms with dark, beautiful, hook-filled melodies; and, on the last four albums, an amazing one-two vocal punch delivered by Saukkonen (whose harsh delivery is killer) and bass player Lars Eikind, whose clean vocals are just as remarkable. (Yes, this band is one of our Exceptions To the Rule.)

TesseracT isn’t the kind of band we typically feature at NCS. Y’know, because of all that clean singing. BUT, I do like the band and their music. The songwriting is creative, the instrumental work is sharp, the mix of heavy, Meshuggah-style rhythms and penetrating melodies works well, and I tolerate the clean vocals because I like the instrumental work so much.

A few hours ago, a new music video appeared for the song “Eden”. The music on the video is is a revision of the song that appeared on the band’s album, One. It’s shorter than the original, and it includes the band’s new vocalist Elliot Coleman instead of the now-departed Dan Tompkins. I know there’s been a mountain of shit-talking controversy among the band’s fans about Elliot Coleman joining the band — not that I really care all that much about the issue — but I don’t hear a huge difference between the two performances of this song.

As for the video, it’s well-made and interesting to watch. Coincidentally, it’s the second video we’ve featured today that involves mermaids. Granted, the sea creatures in this video don’t have tails, and they seem to have glowing boxes in place of hearts, but it’s close enough. The video is after the jump.

Metsatöll is a band from Estonia who released their first demo in 1999. Four albums plus assorted splits, EPs, and singles have followed that first effort, and the fifth album — Ulg — is due for release via Spinefarm Records on November 1. Until today, I had never heard their music. I’m not even positive I had heard their name. Just to display my ignorance even further, I wasn’t even sure where Estonia was, other than having a vague recollection of a Central European location (which turns out to be wrong)..

And then today I saw the album cover for Ulg, which is above, in conjunction with a notice that the album is streaming in full on yet another Finnish web site, Imperiumi (that Lantlôs album we discussed earlier today is streaming on Finland-based Inferno). There’s something about that cover that really hooked me, even though it’s not as “metal” as most cover art for the albums we feature around here. So, I decided this would be a fitting test subject for our continuing investigation of the hypothesis that cool album art correlates with cool music.

So, I cranked up that full album stream and started listening. Now, I warn you that because of interference from my fucking day job, I haven’t yet finished listening, which of course hasn’t stopped me from posting about this anyway. (more after the jump . . .)

I’m afraid I don’t have any new Gojira music for you today. The wait for the Sea Shepherd EP continues . . .

BUT, I do have new Gojira artwork for you. Today, the band made available for free download a pack of 5 wallpaper images, the first of which is up above. They are all cooooool.

You can download them by going to THIS PAGE.

After the jump, the rest of the wallpaper art . . . and an old Gojira song, because I really can’t be mentioning Gojira without music.

I know regular readers must get tired of me explaining what this MISCELLANY game is about, but amazingly, the traffic on our site continues to increase, providing further proof that there are many confused people in the world. For the benefit of new readers, therefore, I continue to explain:

We keep an ever-growing list of bands whose music we’ve never heard. The names come from many sources, including the bands themselves. Every now and then, when time permits, I randomly grab some names off the list and listen to a song or two from each one. I then babble about what I heard in these MISCELLANY posts and play the songs for you, because no one could possibly be so confused that they would just take my word for something without listening for themselves.

For this post, the names I chose were The 11th Hour (The Netherlands), Sacrament Ov Impurity (U.S.-Washington), and Öxxö Xööx (France).  Here we go:

THE 11TH HOUR

I heard about this band via an e-mail from NCS curmudgeon reader Kevin. This wasn’t quite the stab in the dark that most of my MISCELLANY picks are, because every tip Kevin has given me so far has turned out to be a winner. Also, this band has an impressive pedigree. The main man is Ed Warby, whose name you may recognize from Hail of Bullets, Demiurge, Gorefest, and many other past projects. He handles all the instruments on the recorded songs, as well as clean vox. Harsh vocals were provided on the band’s sole album by Rogga Johansson (Demiurge, Bone Gnawer, Ribspreader, and many more). So, I figured the odds were good that I was going to warm up to this music.  (more after the jump . . .)

Sólstafir is an Icelandic band whose fourth album — a double CD — will be released by Season of Mist on October 14. Andy Synn has made passing reference to them in a positive way in a few of his NCS reviews of other bands’ music, but until this morning I’d never heard what they have to offer. But we now have the promo of the new album, Svartir Sandar, and at the same time I discovered that the Finnish web site Inferno began streaming the album in full today (and for one week hereafter).

So, while doing something else I went to Inferno and began streaming the music. The first song on the stream is called “Ljós í Stormi”. It’s more than 11 minutes long. It stopped me dead in my tracks, almost immediately. I ceased what I was doing and just drank in the riveting music. I suppose one could call it post-black-metal, for lack of a better short-hand, but that seems so vague and, frankly, kind of dull — and the music is anything but dull.

After an almost two-minute instrumental intro that’s slow, cold, and hypnotic, the song explodes in rush of crashing chords and convulsive rhythms, supercharged by Aðalbjörn Tryggvason’s vein-bursting vocals. The pacing eases back, with echoing guitars introducing a dark, melancholy melody, accented by strange pieces of electronica, and those slow passages trade off with a distorted rolling gait. It’s both icy and fiery, otherworldly and passionate, as much prog-rock as metal, and worth your time.

GO HERE to stream this album on Inferno, and if I can’t persuade you to do that, at least go past the jump and check out “Ljós í Stormi”. We’ll have a review of this album in the future.