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.

Back in April, a video of three 12-year-olds playing music on a Times Square street corner made the rounds on the interwebs. A combination of three things made a lot of people sit up and take notice: the kids were black, they were playing metal, and they were pretty damned good — especially for 12-year-olds. The name of their band: Unlocking the Truth.

I’d like to think that the video would have drawn attention even if these were white kids, but let’s face it, at least in the US you don’t see many black kids of any age playing underground metal. But as I said, that’s really only part of the reason why the video grabbed some attention. It happens that these dudes have got some really good chops for their age, especially the guitarist.

Many other videos of Unlocking the Truth playing in public have surfaced over the ensuing weeks, and this weekend several friends sent me a link to a short documentary about two of the band’s members — Malcolm Brickhouse and Jarad Dawkins — that went up last week, and it’s an awesome (and endearing) thing to watch. Yeah, these are young kids, but both of them seem really committed to what they’re doing, and they’ve got big ambitions. More power to them.

(DGR provides this round-up of artwork, new music, and new videos.)

Apparently nobody else got the memo that last week was E3 week and, goddamnit, that I was going to be away from the computer, because holy crap did the news updates come fast and furious throughout the week of June 10th. A lot of these bands are going to look very familiar to readers of the site because a lot of them are in fact the same groups featured in my last round-up. However, here at NCS we try to stick with really substantial stuff since a tracklisting usually means dick to the reader unless it has something attached to it.

This week, these bands delivered in spades – some with cover art, most with new songs or videos, one with a whole new release. Regardless, it was a smattering all across the board if you love music and love shit just being heavy as hell. I’ll attach my thoughts along the way, of course…otherwise this article is going to look all sorts of wacky.

MECHINA

That picture you see above is artwork for Mechina’s upcoming Xenon release, which the group stated in this here post would be hitting on 1/1/14.

In recent days two bands I’m very high on have released teasers of music from albums I’ve been waiting on for a long time (with a level of eagerness that hasn’t diminished as the months have rolled by).

BLODSGARD

Norway’s Blodsgard haven’t yet released a full-length album, only three demos — but the debut album is on the way. Its title is Monument and it will soon be made available both digitally and on CD via a label called The Oath (an exact release date hasn’t been announced). Yesterday, the band unveiled the killer cover art for the album (above), created by one of my favorite metal artists, Mark Cooper (Mindrape Art), as well as excerpts of all the songs.

When I first found out about Blodsgard in September 2011, the most recent demo — a four-song offering called Solve et Coagula— hadn’t even been released for public distribution, and the band had no plans to do so. I got a chance to hear it and then obtained permission to provide a link to a special 3-song download for our readers, which included two tracks from Solve et Coagula plus another even more recent song, as a companion to my review. All three songs, which are still available for free, will appear in remastered form on the forthcoming album.

Hell-raising Friday nights bring apocalyptic Saturday mornings, and so it is that on this Saturday morning my ass is dragging through the wreckage I made of my life. I’ll probably feel normal by about sundown, if I’m lucky. I do have some things our other writers sent me overnight, but the words are all blurry at the moment. While I wait for my eyes to focus, I’m going to give you a video to watch and a song to hear, to pass the time in a pleasant way.

The video is brand new and comes from a Swiss band named Promethee. The song is named “Life/Less” and appears on their debut album, Nothing happens, Nobody comes, Nobody goes. The music is a mantic, frantic burst of melodic, metallic hardcore. It includes a lot of frenzied, spastic guitar exercises, but the notes ring out in chiming waves almost as often as they give your head a good shake to see what might come out of its orifices. And in the mid-section Promethee settle into a groove that will get your head slamming something fierce (or at least that’s what happened to me, which may explain why printed words look kinda blurry at the moment). Also, vein-bursting vocals and a bass guitar that gets a moment to shine near the end.

But regardless of how you might react to the music, the visual part of this video is worth watching all by itself. It was filmed in black and white, with the band in silhouette against a white screen most of the time, and it has a cool kaleidoscopic quality (along with other eye-catching visual effects).   Also, a really pretty woman.

This post is about a video from the band Mumakil. Their new album Flies Will Starve is coming out on June 25 in North America (and on slightly earlier dates in Europe). The video is for a song called “Death From Below”.

I can’t watch the video. I’m not in a place where I can watch it. I know nothing about it. I have only these words from my NCS comrade DGR, who sent me the link: “I’m attempting to write this sentence while seizing up. It’s Difficult.”

The video is after the jump. If you’d care to, please feel free to leave a comment and tell me what happens, and any reactions to the song, which I can’t hear at the moment.  Thank you for your attention. I’m going back to work now.

This will be an unusual day for us. My fucking day job is going to keep me away from a computer all day and my comrades who write for the site are also otherwise occupied. So the odds are this post will be the only one we have for you today. Therefore, I’m going with something that will open up your abdomen and leave your guts in a steaming pile at your feet. Because that’s just the kind of friends we are.

Ævangelist’s 2012 debut album De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis was stunning. On the scale of stunning things, it was right up there next to the seven-inch steel bolts fired into the foreheads of corn-fattened cattle who’ve reached optimal slaughter weight in a feedlot. No one knows about the emotional life of penned cattle, but as a normal un-penned human, I found that album both galvanizing and frightening.

I have friends who subject themselves to the risk of death on a weekly basis, but if you live a life less filled with the death wish, as I do, then you hunt for that special feeling of impending extinction in your music. Ævangelist grants your wish. And now they have something that’s both new and old, something that will efficiently turn you into rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, and brisket.

Here are a trio of things I spied on the web this morning. The first two are in the nature of coincidental follow-ups, since our last post was a review of Dark Tranquillity’s new album, and since yesterday we frothed at the mouth over the newly announced North American tour involving Exhumed (headlined by Dying Fetus and also featuring Devoured and Abiotic). And then the last item is a semi-obligatory check-in with Finnish metal.

DARK TRANQUILLITY

The August issue of DECIBEL magazine (order-able here) includes yet another installment in the magazine’s Flexi-Disc series, and this one is a previously unreleased song by Dark Tranquillity entitled “Sorrow’s Architect”. The song was recorded during the sessions that produced the band’s new album Construct. DECIBEL kindly began streaming it today on SoundCloud.

To my ears, it sounds much in the vein of the more “experimental” songs on Construct, predominantly mid-paced and moody, with dreamlike, synth-assisted instrumental passages that add a dark ambience to the song (nut no clean singing). I do like it. Go HERE to listen.

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.

Herein, a selection of four items I came across yesterday that I guarantee will appeal to you. Assuming that your tastes are identical to mine. Otherwise, no guarantees. But have no fear, the bands featured here are so diverse there’s bound to be something that will turn you on.

WATAIN

As we previously reported, this Swedish horde have a new album named The Wild Hunt coming on August 19 in Europe and August 20 in the US via Century Media Records. A two-track single (“All That May Bleed”) will be released on June 21.

Yesterday Watain unveiled the album cover, which you can see above. It’s a painting in oil and mixed materials by the phenomenal Zbigniew M. Bielak, who created (among other things) the artwork for Watain’s last album, Lawless Darkness, as well as the cover for the single.

More info, including the track list, can be found at Watain’s official site (here).