I’ve written about California’s P.O.O.R. (Point of Our Resistance) before, but not as much as they deserve. Their debut album Extinction of Trust, released earlier this year, is a goddamn pulverizing grind assault. The riffs are massive and crushing, the off-the-hook drumming packs a visceral punch, and the songs deliver a ton of groove to go along with a vicious beating.

Extinction of Trust is a genuine sonic rampage, but it never falls prey to same-iness. P.O.O.R. pick just the right moments to shift into lower gears before opening up the flamethrower again and shooting a blast of ignited gasoline straight to the listener’s head. And despite the generally balls-to-the-wall attitude of the whole thing, there are some memorable melodies and a lot of rhythmic and riffing variety woven into the mayhem. It’s definitely a grind album, but you’ll get the feel of death metal, thrash, punk, and even a bit of Motörhead and Bolt Thrower along the way.

All of which is to say that P.O.O.R. do what a lot of grind bands do not do: They give each of their songs its own personality — which is saying something, because Extinction of Trust includes 24 songs.

I know a lot of NCS readers have got a taste for doom. I’ve developed quite a strong taste for it, too, and my mouth juices started filling up my gob when I saw this piece of news: Our blog brethren at CVLT Nation have compiled a free doom mixtape that’s loaded with killer bands who specialize in the slow and low.

There are 19 tracks on offer, including music by the likes of Dopethrone, Bongripper, Loss, Primitive Man, Graves At Sea, Batillus, Atriarch, and Seattle’s own Bell Witch. There’s a lot of strong, devastating music on this comp (2 1/2 hours of it to be precise), and it’s even sweeter because, as mentioned, it’s FREE!

Go HERE to download it, and if you’d first like to see the whole tracklist and listen to the tunage, move on past the jump.

Here’s a nice piece of news that I missed when it happened a few days ago: Prosthetic Records has created a free summer sampler that includes 13 songs from 13 new and forthcoming albums by members of the label’s roster. I won’t take the time to list them in the body of this post since you can see them quite clearly in the graphic above. I’m familiar with 12 of the 13 bands (Zodiac being the outlier) and they are all very good (and the music’s very diverse)

I mentioned that the sampler includes tracks from forthcoming albums as well as new ones released earlier this year. To be specific, it includes songs from yet-to-be-released albums that we’re eagerly anticipating from Sweden’s Darkane (due on July 2), Denmark’s Mercenary (out July 30), and Boston’s Ramming Speed (to be released June 25).

To get the sampler, you’ll need to go to Prosthetic’s Facebook page via THIS LINK and download a .zip file of the music. When I tried it, it didn’t require surrendering of an e-mail or anything else — just a straight, immediate download of the file. In other words, painless. And that’s a hell of a line-up of songs.

We’ve mentioned The Violitionist Sessions twice before, but you may have forgotten. In the words of the site’s proprietors: “The Violitionist Sessions are 3 questions and 3 songs with bands from Denton and passing through Denton, Texas. The sessions are all recorded live in a living room with no overdubs and no fancy tricks. The goal is to document a moment in time. This is what happened in Denton, Texas.”

Yesterday, The Violitionist Sessions put up videos of the three songs recently performed in that living room by Savannah’s Kylesa. They also made the live recordings available for free download on Bandcamp. And they also included an interview of the band. The three songs are “To Forget” (Spiral Shadow), “Said and Done” (Static Tensions), and “Hollow Severer” (Time Will Fuse Its Worth). All of that is collected here, though I’m also going to embed the videos after the jump.

As has been true of every recording I’ve heard from The Violitionist Sessions, the sound quality is outstanding, and Kylesa were really hitting it hard in these sessions — tight, tough, trippy, and plenty heavy. I’m not well-versed in Kylesa’s music — hadn’t heard any of these songs before — and it was an eye-opener for me. “To Forget”, in particular, made a big impression when I watched and listened to these videos.

The first time I listened to Evolve by Chicago’s Of Wolves I had more “what the fuck?” moments than I’ve experienced with any other album this year. I listened to it as the band wants it to be heard — straight through, letting each song run right into the next one. It was a breathtaking (and breathless experience), with something unexpected lying in wait around every corner, and with more corners than a roller-coaster ride.

These three working men in Chicago are fed up, frustrated, and pissed off. They vent their fury at everything from churches to governments to pervasive greed to the treatment of Native Americans to the mass of their fellow citizens (aka “sheep”) who allow themselves to be brainwashed, duped, and distracted from protecting their own self-interests — and they don’t mince words about it. As they say, “Life has been rough, the music is therapy.”

Apparently, the therapy consists of taking a whole kitchen sink’s worth of musical influences and interests and letting them spill out in a flood of exuberant creativity.

Sometimes the hands of blind coincidence shuffle the cards of life and deal you a flush. And so they did for me last night. In addition to other blog-related activities, I had time to listen to four new songs, and by happenstance they all turned out to be from the same suit — and they were also a winning combination. I know four cards don’t make a flush, but one of the songs is 18 minutes long, so I think that counts as two cards (at least).

The songs are actually from somewhat different genres of metal, but when I say they’re from the same suit I mean that they have this in common: BASS

I’m dividing this post into two parts, with two songs in each one. The next post will come later this morning.

GERYON

The first song I listened to was brand new, the first track released by a new band named Geryon. I listened to it mainly because Geryon is composed of two members of Krallice, Nicholas McMaster and Lev Weinstein, and the song was produced by a third, Colin Marston. I do like me some Krallice. But there were two other reasons, and you’re looking at one of them at the top of this post.

Fuckin’ Torture Division have just released a new, free, three-song demo — The Worship — and it fuckin’ destroys, as pure Grade A undiluted death metal should.

For those who somehow remain ignorant about Torture Division, here’s a quick primer: The three members of the band – Lord K Philipson (guitar), Tobben Gustafsson (drums), and Jörgen Sandström (bass/vocals) — collectively have over 60 years of combined death metal experience, including membership in bands such as Grave, Entombed, Vicious Art, The Project Hate MCMXCIX, Vomitory, and God Among Insects.  In their words, “we know what we do, we love what we do and that we will keep on doing it until the end of days.”

They also have an unusual approach to recording and distributing their music. Their modus operandi is to release short demos and give them away for free. And today they made available The Worship as the latest installment in the series. It was again mixed and mastered by the masterful Dan Swanö, and is now available for download (along with a booklet) from his Unisound web site.

But first, you really need to read Torture Division’s introduction to The Worship, which is funny as shit. Plus, if you love what Torture Division are doing and how they’re doing it, as I do, then you need to throw them a donation to help finance the continuation of this fine demolition project. And to do both of those things, go HERE.

Thanks to a tip from KevinP, I learned this morning that the French label Klonosphere has recently released a free sampler of music from 18 different bands. I’m an enthusiastic fan of many of the bands on this compilation, including Hacride, Klone, Lokurah, Magoa, and Otargos, all of whom we’ve written about at NCS. I’m not familiar with other bands, but the chance to discover new music is one of the reasons why samplers like this one are worth having. And just based on the music I do know, this is a really diverse collection of sounds.

Many of the songs previously appeared on recent albums or EPs, and some are being released for the first time on this sampler — including exclusive demo versions of tracks that will appear on albums projected for release later this year. One of those advance demo tracks comes from a long-running French band named Loudblast who we last visited at NCS all the way back in April 2011 (here). I liked what I heard of them then, and so I was especially interested in the chance to check what they’re up to now.

They’ve released six studio albums to date, and based on the description of this new demo track, it appears their seventh is on the way. The new song is entitled “The Abstract God”, and it’s a beefy, malicious death metal monster that stomps, rips, roars, and wails like a tormented spirit. It’s prime headbang material, so loosen up your neck muscles and stream it right after the jump.

Many of you already know how this MISCELLANY game works, but for everyone else, here’s what it’s about: Using no rhyme or reason whatsoever, I pick bands whose music I’ve never heard (usually bands whose names I’ve never heard either), I listen to one recent track from each of them (though sometimes I cheat and listen to more than one), I write my impressions, and I stream the music for you so you can judge for yourselves.

Every other musical feature on this site, other than this one, involves metal that I or the other writers have heard in advance and want to recommend. MISCELLANY, on the other hand, is a shot in the dark. I don’t know what these selections will sound like. We’ll both find out together. Today’s bands are from all over: Serpent Omega (Sweden), Crematoria (Denmark), Purefilth (Ukraine), and Asphodel (Greece).

SERPENT OMEGA

I found out about this relatively new Swedish band via a Facebook recommendation from another band whose doings I follow. They’ve recently released a self-titled debut album via the Mordgrimm label, and it turns out that they have a female frontperson (Pia Högberg). I decided to check out their music in part because of that recommendation but mainly because I thought the new album’s cover art was cool.

In this post I’ve collected a small group of new songs that I came across while wandering through the interhole over the last 24 hours.

COPROLITH

I’ve been keeping an eye on this Finnish band (pictured above) since hearing their 2012 EP Hate Infected. When I reviewed it, I characterized the music as “the military-industrial complex of the nether regions, an effective fusion of titanic death metal might and melodic black metal hooks” and compared the band to the likes of Behemoth and Hate. They now have a new album on the way entitled Death March, which will be released in the fall of this year by Violent Journey Records.

Yesterday they released a music video for one of the new songs, “Life=Disease”, which is now available digitally through Amazon and probably elsewhere. The song reminds me less of those Polish behemoths than Hate Infected. It has more of an old-school death metal flavor, with a bit of a charred crust. It hammers and howls forcefully, with teeth bared and claws raking.