(Today, NCS writer BadWolf inaugurates a new personal series.)

No Clean Singing has made its name in the metal underground by focusing on the undiscovered cutting edge. Bringing relatively unknown, but sweet, bands to prominence is our stock and trade. That said, as our resident grumpy old man, I’ve made a New Year’s resolution: to listen to more old metal albums.

Why? I don’t know, really. There’s no reason to believe that something will be better or worse based on its age—music is not wine. I suppose I just have a renewed interest in retrospective activity, period: I read old books, I watch old movies, listening to old music just feels right. I’m not trying to escape into the past (Obama over Reagan any day of the week, even if I hate them both), but I’m trying to understand what it was like to have a brand new Iron Maiden album in my hand.

It should be noted: I adore Iron Maiden. Their influence on modern extreme metal may be in question to some, but their prowess is never in question. Maiden used to (and on occasion still do) write the best narrative metal songs. They still have the best frontman in guitar music—and the most multitalented! Oh, and they innovated both twin guitar octave harmonies and ‘the gallop.’

Imagine metal without the gallop rhythm. There would never have been a Slayer. I think it’s safe to say that without Slayer there would be no extreme American metal as we know it. There would be no death-chug without Maiden. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Somewhere In Time is one of the Maiden albums I never gave much of a shot for two reasons: One, neither “Wasted Years” nor “Stranger in a Strange Land,” its two most famous songs, ever struck much of a chord with me. Two, Somewhere is known for being the Maiden album covered in synth-guitar. Knowing what synth-guitar did to Judas Priest (the Turbo album), I gave Somewhere In Time pass after pass after pass.

That was a mistake. The lamb’s blood has washed off the door and creeping death is here: Somewhere In Time kills. Iron Maiden used the synth-guitar to great effect here: Most of the songs float ambiguously between power metal and glam ballad—exactly where this lighter, cleaner guitar sound belongs. The melodies, be they vocal or guitar, shine. And, while the synth sound (with a few exceptions) doesn’t create the vague sci-fi aesthetic Maiden shot for, it creates an open midrange for Steve Harris’ dextrous bass work to punch through.

“Wasted Years”

On the second run-through, “Wasted Years” opened up for me. The chorus still tastes saccharine, but the clean plucked guitar hook that opens the song continues to blow my mind. “Stranger in a Strange Land” drags on too long without a rhythmic climax, but it’s still a good song. Truth be told, the only song I cannot stand is the ballad, “Heaven Can Wait,” which strays too far into glam metal without adopting any of the groovy sleaze that makes Cinderella and Motley Crue awesome—the same critique I have of every Ozzy Osbourne ballad ever.

But the end of the record lives up to the quality of its predecessor, Powerslave (my fav Maiden record,  and one of my favorite metal albums ever alongside Master of Puppets, Leviathan, and The Sound of Perseverance). “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner” lives up to its title with an extended play-time and a real sense of isolation punctuated with a soaring Bruce Dickenson chorus. “Deja Vu” quite simply rocks, and has one of my new favorite Iron Maiden riffs—equal to “The Trooper,” as far as I am concerned.

“Deja Vu”

Album finale “Alexander the Great” is probably the last time Maiden ever pulled off an extended epic song–such pompous exercises totally dominate their songwriting now. While it lacks the literary cred of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” (closing track on Powerslave) “Alexander” compensates with more impressive solos, and more concise songwriting.

One song excepted, Somewhere In Time knocked me off my feet. I would pay to see it performed live, that’s for sure. Highly recommended.

Next time I promise I’ll review something a bit heavier!

The genre term “Cascadian black metal”, most often used with reference to bands such as Wolves in the Throne Room and Agalloch, seems to be gaining in popularity. Some purists don’t like it because it’s a geographic reference instead of a description of the music and because it’s both over-inclusive and under-inclusive, i.e., there are black metal bands from “Cascadia” who don’t sound like WITTR or Agalloch and don’t share their philosophical perspective, and there are bands outside Cascadia who do.

Personally, I don’t think about this debate too much, despite the fact that I live in “Cascadia”. Consciously or not, I’m starting to think of a certain style of black metal as “Cascadian”, regardless of where the band is located and regardless of whether they have a nature-centric philosophy, just because it’s a convenient shorthand for a certain kind of sound.

To me, it stands for a style of music that incorporates not only traditional black metal instrumentation and vocals but also melodic, “post metal” ambience, prog-metal instrumentals, or even stoner-type shoe-gazing jams. So, for example, I think of San Francisco’s deafheaven as playing Cascadian black metal, even though they’re not from the Pacific Northwest and probably wouldn’t label themselves that way.

The music of Wildernessking reminds me of deafheaven’s music and, to a lesser extent, that of WITTR and Agalloch — and I’d throw in Krallice, Cormorant, and Enslaved for good measure. But Wildernessking isn’t from anywhere remotely near Cascadia. They’re from Cape Town, South Africa, and they’re off to a brilliant start.

The Writing of Gods In the Sand is this band’s first album, but you wouldn’t know it. In its song construction, in its performance, in its musical vision, it’s a surprisingly mature and self-assured work. The fusing of diverse genres that occurs so naturally in each song reflects a sophisticated recognition that these styles of music not only can work together, but that harnessing them together creates a uniquely effective expression of power and emotion, a blending of light and dark, soft and hard, beauty and voraciousness.

Recognizing that these styles of music work together well and turning that conception into reality are, of course, two very different things. You get the sense that Wildernessking do such a good job making their vision into living, breathing music because they love all the styles that they weave together. You get the sense that if they wanted to, they could be a fine post-rock band, a very good expositor of Opeth-style prog, or a take-no-prisoners black metal band who relish hosing down listeners with an engulfing acid blast. But what they want to be, and what they are, is a band who get to expresses their feel for, and their faith in, all of that.

They do wear their hearts on their sleeves. No one would mistake the music for the frigid blasphemies of Nordic black metal. There are too many ringing, chiming guitars, too many rock beats and proggy drum progressions, too many passages where the sonic blast falls away and a subdued, entrancing melody emerges through isolated instruments to haunt the listener’s memory.

The clean, rippling guitar notes and solitary bass tones that begin and end the album’s closer, “Infinity”, would be out of place. So would the dual-guitar harmony that begins “River”. So would the tumbling bass-and-drum break that happens near the middle of “Discovery” or the fleeting keyboard notes near the end of the same song. Those and a dozen other small moments here and there — moments that make the music so affecting — would be persona non grata in the misanthropic wastelands inhabited by infernal bands such as 1349.

Yet the music has one taloned foot in that blasted soil, too, because along with the sweeping post-rock soundscapes you also get bassist Keenan Oakes’ shrieking vocals, which will strip the paint from walls; they’re both wounded and wounding. You get gut-churning double-bass and militaristic blast-beats from drummer Jason Jardim (whose multifaceted performance is one of this album’s real gems), and you get massive walls of distorted guitar noise and tremolo drilling from Dylan Viljoen and Jesse Navarre Vos, whose mastery of both beauty and the beast in their guitar playing is a sweet thing to behold.

Kvlt they may not be, but this foursome are definitely on to something here. Whether they can succeed in seizing imaginations around the world from their relatively remote corner of the world remains to be seen, but what they’re doing deserves attention and respect. So if you like what you hear, spread the word.

As usual, I want to play some music. I picked two songs: “Utopia”, because I’m a sucker for the bass intro and because the rest of the song is fucken cool, too; and “Surrender”, because it may be the most openly emotional piece on the album. Even if it’s possibly the least black-metal inflected, “Surrender” is still a plenty intense song.

“Utopia”

“Surrender”

Wildernessking have a Bandcamp page where both “Utopia” and the riveting opening song “Rubicon” can be downloaded for free, and where you can find links for ordering the album on CD and vinyl from Antithetic Records. Last I checked, the entire album is still streaming at Lurker’s Path.

Antithetic is also running a Kickstarter-style fundraiser to help finance production of a double LP vinyl edition of the album, with a variety of packages as a reward for donations (including digital downloads and CDs). The link for that is here. Wildernessking is building an official site, and in the meantime you can follow them via Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/Wildernessking

(TheMadIsraeli enthusiastically reviews the new album from Tasmania’s Psycroptic.)

Napalm explosions of technical-as-fuckity-fuck riffs everywhere. Death induced by intricate, fusion-fueled, machine-precise drum attacks. Soul-rending incantations in the vocals. And, like . . .

EVERY POSSIBLE FUCKING THING THAT CAN BE RIGHT ABOUT DEATH METAL.

 
Psycroptic are the shit.  I think we all know this, but it’s SUCH a magnitude of the shit that sometimes . . . sometimes there’s a man . . . well, he’s the man for his time and place . . . and . . .

Ok, enough Big Lebowski quoting.  Sometimes an album needs to be defined, because sometimes we’re just not ready for what comes at us through our speakers, headphones, tin cans attached with strings, whatever your preferred listening apparatus is, because Psycroptic will cause said apparatus to melt at scorching hot temperatures and then burn their music directly into your skull so that it infinitely repeats itself with no off-switch.  The pain will be great, but it will also be purifying.

I’ve seen and heard some complaints about this band since the departure of vocalist Chalky and the introduction of current frontman Jason Peppiatt.  Don’t like him?  Time to get over it.  I think he is bringing a much-needed, more-focused approach to vocals that matches Psycroptic’s surgically precise instrumental assault.  He has a powerful voice, he sounds pissed — like he wants to kill — and  that complements the killing music.

NOW WITH THAT SAID…

Joe Haley is a riff archon of the nomadic plains, a shape-shifter and matter-bender and a badass of the highest degree.  So many notes, so many interesting, complex, angular riffs and melodic progressions.  He really is the star of the show here.  Everyone else in the band performs superbly, but this is guitar-driven metal.  To be more accurate, Joe doesn’t just drive the music, he hijacks the music, curb-stomps it, and then blows its head into bits with a shotgun for good measure.

Whether he’s busting out old-school chops, esoteric meanderings, Middle Eastern delicacies, or just plain obtuse, how-the-fuck-did-he-do-that redefining of the guitar as an instrument, he has the skill and the imagination to string it all together in a succinct, to-the-point package.  He is now in an all-star league, up there with geniuses like Schuldiner of Death, Daniel Mongrain of Martyr, and Muhammed Suiçmez of Necrophagist.

But to repeat, the rest of the band is also killer.  Jason Peppiatt is indeed one of the most savage vocalists in metal.  I don’t care if he has more of a deathcore tone than his predecessor. He has lungs filled with fiery acid and his intensity forces its way into your brain with such ease.  The drumming of Dave Haley is otherworldly, so tight and precise.  The bass playing of Cameron Grant also verges on the inhuman, a spider monkey of low-end mind fuckery and demonic clown antics.  The fact he can keep up with Joe Haley in the riff department is just… FUCKING UNFAIR.

Actually, this whole band is just unfair.  This album is unfair.  To listen is to be penetrated by the winding hypnotics of an acid-spewing snake charmer as he conforms you to the will of his tune.  Buy this album!  Buy it digitally, buy it physically, BUY IT IN EXCHANGE FOR YOUR SOUL IF YOU MUST.  This album will replace it for you with something likely to be more metal anyway.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Inherited Repression was released in North America yesterday by Nuclear Blast, and will debut in Europe on February 10. It can be ordered from Psycroptic’s official site via this link, and that site also has the schedule for Psycroptic’s in-progress European tour. The album is also available on Amazon mp3 and iTunes. Two songs from the album can be streamed below:

In the realm of infernally regal blackened death metal, the bands that continue to rise up first in this writer’s mind are Polish juggernauts Behemoth and Hate, despite the fact that the blackening has worn off them over time, at least in sound if not in attitude. Of course, they are not by a long stretch the only bands who have brought about such a strikingly hellish union of those musical styles. Porvoo, Finland’s Coprolith have done it, as I discovered in listening to their new EP, Hate Infected.

This forthcoming, three-song offering is a prelude to the band’s second full-length album, which is projected for release in the fall of this year, and it follows the band’s 2010 debut album, Cold Grief Relief (which I haven’t heard).

The title track sets the hook right away with a thundering riff and a ripping lead melody. It’s a tasty combo of eminently headbangable groove and occult atmosphere. The melodic guitar solo brought a smile to my face, and so did the vocalist’s deep roars and chilling shrieks. The black hasn’t worn off Coprolith’s death metal.

“Chemical Suicide” proves that the title track was no fluke. A dark melodic lead floats over another killer riff that’s prime headbang material. It sounds like a giant industrial machine shaking the girders in some hellish manufacturing facility, implacably punching out war machines while a horned foreman exhorts the demon workers from a bullhorn.

A mournful tremolo lead introduces the final track, “Deserting Reality”, and its shimmering melody reappears, moving up and down the register while the granite-hard foundation of the song shakes with massive tremors as the massed armies of the night stomp their martial march in unison.

It’s obvious that I’ve been mixing my metaphors between the warlike and the industrial, but this convulsive music brings both images to mind: It’s the military-industrial complex of the nether regions, an effective fusion of titanic death metal might and melodic black metal hooks. It’s an EP worth getting in its own right and a tantalizing advertisement for Coprolith’s next album.

Hate Infected is scheduled for release as a download on February 15 by the independent Finnish label Violent Journey Records. The album began streaming today at the Finnish Kaaoszine web site, but catch it quick (here) because the stream will end on the release date.

More Coprolith music, including two freely downloadable songs, can be found at their Facebook bandpage (here) or at ReverbNation (here). And in touring news, Coprolith is about to begin a four-date tour of Spain with NCS favorites, Noctem. Details are available here.

These are band links:

http://www.facebook.com/coprolithmusic
http://www.myspace.com/coprolithmusic
http://www.coprolith.com/

Now excuse me while I go track down Cold Grief Relief.

I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, so I prefer to believe that, in person, Portland’s Elitist aren’t as inhumanly corrosive as their music. Yes, they say, “Our fucking lives ended when we started this band”, but they probably love their parents. Unless they killed them and ate their fingers like french fries.

Despite the fact that the music sounds like helpless bodies being dragged through a trough of broken glass and then dumped in a pit of salt so the lacerations will burn like a motherfucker before Elitist pee on them, they’re probably loyal friends and gentle lovers.

The jagged slurry of metallic slag that flows through these songs surely doesn’t flow through the veins of the band members. The tortured screams and ghastly howls in the music surely don’t come from the bleeding throats of caged demons within their bodies. If you were having a beer with Elitist, they wouldn’t really go for your throat like famished hyenas. They’d probably even buy a round.

This is what I prefer to believe — but after listening a few times to the band’s 2011 Season of Mist album, Fear In A Handful of Dust, I wouldn’t bet on any of it.

Most of the time, the music moves at the speed of a drunk driver trying to escape his wrecked, burning vehicle despite having lost both legs in the impact. It’s usually a slow crawl, but there’s a lot of frantic activity nonetheless.

The guitars and bass are distorted within an inch of their tortured lives, and the songs are loaded with feedback — all the better to tear skulls apart without finesse or anesthesia. Heavy fuzz, slamming or massively groaning chords, beefy bass, tremolo needling, and psychedelic swarming: these are among the implements of a wrecking machine that’s utterly heartless and wholly engulfing.

Mixing longer black-hole implosions with shorter blasts of barely controlled grind, Elitist keep the listener off-balance and uncomfortable. “Slowly Fucked and Force Fed” is doom-drenched sludge from start to finish, “Bound and Bent” is a driving blaster, and “Watch As They Worship, Yet Be Silent” is nothing but unstructured noise, without drums or rhythms but with an assortment of demented shrieks that would permanently traumatize the young or frail.

But most songs are a mix of tempos, molasses-drip sludge combining with cauterizing grind and whatever speed best captures the sensation of being stretched on the rack at maximum agony. Similarly, the vocal tone is also a mix, ranging within most songs from completely unhinged shrieks and howls to death metal roars, and every utterance is an expression of pain or vitriol.

Trying to categorize the music within well-accepted genre classifications is a fool’s errand. It harnesses elements of black metal, death metal, sludge, doom, grind, and some kind of experimental shoegaze for the undead.  It’s the kind of music I’d recommend to fans of Portal, Mitochondrion, and 1349, not because Elitist sound quite like any of those bands, but because the music triggers a similar register on the Richter scale of extremity and has a similar disdain for you and your pathetic lives.

I like the way JGD at The Living Doorway ended his review (and it’s his review that first got me interested in this band): “Elitist are coming to collect all of our teeth whether we want em’ to or not.”

Here are two tracks from Fear In A Handful of Dust:

“Burning the Unspoken Gospel”

“Ivory Shavings of the Tools Unknown”

The album is available on iTunes and Amazon mp3, and in hard-copy form from distros you can find via these Elitist links:

http://www.myspace.com/dieselnoise
http://www.season-of-mist.com/bands/elitist
http://elitistpdx.bandcamp.com/

Can you name the band signed most recently by the venerable Century Media Records? Well, you’re looking at them. They’re from Valence, France, and they go by the name NecroWretch. And here’s where you say, “Necro who?”

In their careers as musicians, they’ve led something of a charmed life. Before being signed by one of the largest and most prestigious of metal labels, they had produced a grand total of two demos (in 2009 and 2010) and a four-song EP in 2011 — Putrefactive Infestation. The signing announcement came yesterday and it included this quote from Jens Prüter, head of A&R at Century Media Europe: “The Putrefactive Infestation 12″ dominated my turntable for some months and I’m sure the upcoming album will be as sick and heavy!”

Yes, of course, there will be a forthcoming album — though it hasn’t been written yet. The label that released the 2011 EP (Detest Records) first plans to release a 7″ NecroWretch EP titled Now You’re In Hell on March 10 at Asphyx’s album release party at the Turock club in Essen, Germany, where NecroWretch will also be performing. That new EP will include an original NecroWretch song and a Death cover.

Of course, I became curious about the Putrefactive Infestation EP — this four-song collection that landed an unheralded French death metal band on Century Media. I tracked it down and spent time listening to it yesterday, and it’s a very promising find — an authentic throw-back shrouded in cemetery stench and Sunlight Studio sonics, flavored with hair-raising blackened vocals and, of all things, hooky (but evil) melodies.

The title track takes a half minute of start-stop lurching before the song tumbles into a groove, a groove encrusted with barely dried viscera. The rhythm dynamics play a vital part of what makes the song cool — it’s part d-beat Dismember-ing, part death ‘n’ roll, part death-doom. Yummy.

A blackened air infects “Sepulchral Pleading”, with vibratory guitars drilling holes and a disease-ridden melody sticking with you ’til the end. And the vocals are once again supremely evil, their hateful shrieks echoing off crypt walls as the chainsaws roar all around them.

The third track is a rancid spree called “A Rancid Spree”. It’s a fine example of graveyard robbers on a corpse-stealing mission. After a classic death-doom intro, the distorted guitars spin up to speed and start cutting through meat and bone, with echoing banshees screaming for the old blood. A skittering melody comes and goes, and tempo dynamics keep the attention fixed.

“Sadistic Expiation” finishes off this all-too-short musical offering. It belches out more of the old-school gore, tremolo chords insinuating themselves ominously through the massive grinding and the muffled pounding of the drums. Both monstrous and catchy, it’s an authentic capture of shades of Grave and Unleashed.

This is some sweet sickness. Based on the evidence of Putrefactive Infestation, I’m fucken stoked that we’ll be getting a full NecroWretch album and a Century-worthy distro of it when it’s done. Check out the title track in this widget, along with a trailer for the 7″ EP to be released in March (which I’m also separately including in a YouTube clip below).:

And here also is a clip of the song “Sadistic Expiation”

 
MORE INFO:

When Putrefactive Infestation was recorded, the band was a three-piece unit and looked like this:

The drummer has now moved on (“due to a total lack of motivation”), and for the time being, the band is functioning as a duo consisting of vocalist/guitarist Vlad and bassist Amphycion.

Here are various band links:

http://www.facebook.com/NecroWretch

http://necrowretch.net/

http://www.reverbnation.com/necrowretch

And finally, here’s a video of the band performing live last November (with a drum machine):

(Yesterday, a new splash-page photo greeted visitors to the official web page of Killswitch Engage — part of which you will see after the jump in this post. It shows a new figure front-and-center in the line-up, Jesse Leach apparently back in the fold. So, it’s fitting that today we’re launching TheMadIsraeli’s series on his all-time favorite albums with this post on a record by Jesse Leach-fronted Killswitch Engage.)

This is the beginning. This will be my Top 20 albums of all time.  Yes, an all-time list — the bane of any music lover, including me, but I cannot deny the effect that certain albums have had on me.  Whether because of their musical merit or more personal connections, I’ve never been able to drop these 20. No other albums in recent memory, no matter how good, have come close to knocking these off their pedestals.

I originally chose from a pool of 50, and from among those I’ve had  a list of 20 planned out for a while, though a few of those have changed as I’ve thought more about it (although the majority have been forever constant).

It’s fitting that I should start the series with this album on this day, given the recent signs that KSE’s original vocalist Jesse Leach has returned to the band. For me and many others, that’s a sign of hope that Killswitch Engage will finally rise back up to metalcore prominence.  Maybe it won’t, maybe I’m just nostalgia-driven at the moment. We’ll see.

When Alive Or Just Breathing emerged in 2002, I had just made my official transition into metalhood.  I had abandoned my shameful nu metal past and adopted the ways of the brutal and the fast.  The first two metal albums I ever bought (at the same time no less) were Slayer’s Reign In Blood and In Flames’ Whoracle.  This was around 2001-2002, I can’t remember exactly.  What is important is that the metalcore movement was about to take its first steps into prominence.

We all know the big four of metalcore: Killswitch Engage, All That Remains, Shadows Fall, and God Forbid.  They all had debuts out in this timeframe, but those were relatively overlooked releases at the time.  Those bands were all onto something, but very much still developing their respective sounds.  Little did most people know what the product of this refinement process would become.

Fast forward to 2003.  I’m looking through my local Sam Goody (ANYONE REMEMBER THOSE FUCKERS?!) and I see the cover picture shown at the top of this post.  As I recall, hilariously enough, it had one of those stupid ass “for fans of” stickers.  What were two of the bands mentioned?  That’s right, In Flames and Slayer.  Obviously, my curiosity was piqued and I bought the album.  I was not prepared for what awaited me.

The first minute of “Numbered Days” hooked me instantly.  I was dazzled, confused, awe-struck, overwhelmed.  Here was a band combining the melodic sophistication and grace of the Swedes with the balls and grit of the American hardcore aesthetic.  The riffs were catchy, beefy, and brimming with anger and energy; the vocals were filled with conviction, passion, and agony, accompanied by Mike D’s monstrously huge bass and (at the time) Adam D’s ferocious, yet pop-infused drum assaults.

FUCK, did these guys know how to groove. No doubt, the band could thrash as well, as evidenced by blazing numbers like “Sons Of Man” and “Self Revolution”, but Killswitch functioned best when they got down and dirty with songs like the stomper “Life To Lifeless” and the band’s signature tune “My Last Serenade”.  It all had such an attitude about it, a convincing one, and a powerful one.

This was also my introduction to real metal with clean singing in it.  As you might guess, my formative foundation in Slayer and In Flames had left me totally uninterested in anything that didn’t follow suit, that is until Alive Or Just Breathing.  Jesse Leech just has “it” when it comes to vocals.  It’s one thing to be a band’s cheerleader at live shows, or to be the guy who makes brutal grunting noises on the mic, but it’s another thing when a vocalist can convey true emotion and passion through his voice.  Jesse had this capacity in spades, both in his clean vocals and in his monstrous howls and shrieks.  He is THE metalcore vocalist.  Always will be.

And he had all this combined with explicitly Christian lyrics that were sincere, devoid of ham and cheese, and refreshingly stripped of any patronizing preachiness.

I remember the days when you could look at the band’s booklets and see God first and foremost in the thanks. It’s funny to reflect on a band reaching their musical peak when they were proposing what many understand to be the most un-metal thing in the universe — religion, and especially Christianity.  But for me, given my own religious beliefs, something about this album made me feel that I could still have a place in the metal world.

This was also one of the few albums at the time with which I connected emotionally, and I still do.  I relate to every lyric on this album in one way or another, and it has never failed to edify me, regardless of the stage of life in which I’ve found myself.

We all know the Killswitch story as it unfolded following this album.  KSE fell into mediocrity after they decided to follow a more secular route and recruited Howard Jones, who I found to be a totally lifeless, purely mechanical vocalist. All the inspiration in the band just seemed to fade away and be gone.  They reclaimed some of it on As Daylight Dies, but not enough.

But this album — this album defined a generation.  A whole movement is owed to its existence.  The imitators will never reach this level; none of them ever have.  Powerful yet melodic, refined yet raw, potent yet controlled, all of this is why Alive Or Just Breathing is one of my top 20 albums of all time.

Can KSE now reclaim their throne?  Let’s hope so.  We will see.

(Today, NCS reader/commenter KevinP review Lacrima Mortis, the new album by The 11th Hour, which is being released today in the U.S. The album was written, performed, and produced by Ed Warby (Gorefest, Hail of Bullets), with harsh vocals provided by Pim Blankenstein of Officium Triste.)

I’ll admit to being a Warby Weenie.  I love Gorefest as well as Hail of Bullets, so I followed the production process of this album (via  Facebook) more than any other album before.  I was naturally excited for its release, but also a bit worried, as I had hyped it up in my mind.  Most albums never quite match my expectations and they seem like a letdown initially.  I’m happy to say this is one of those rare instances where the hype was exceeded.

What you get here is 52 minutes of doomy death metal across 7 tracks, filled with clean and harsh vocals, soulful piano melodies, along with some (dare I say) uplifting guitar riffs.  It does everything the first album did and improves upon it 10-fold.  This is the way you want a band to improve:  Stay true to their sound and keep polishing and refining.  Frankly, this album is so stunning, I have no idea where they go from here.  It will be a daunting task to follow up.

I can’t pinpoint any specific song over the others, as the entire album is so strong, everything about it just works and falls into place.  And if I sound overly “gaga” about this, I AM.  I don’t find many doomy death records you can just put on over and over again and enjoy this much.

Ed Warby’s clean vocals are a breath of fresh air, without being all that different or overly remarkable.  They just work perfectly.  The same can be said of Pim’s Blankenstein’s harsh vocals.  Rogga  Johansson was a fine growler (on the first album), but having Pim’s voice on this just gives it that extra new feeling of someone we don’t hear enough of.   I’m sure this will only help as a carryover to the live performance, which Pim has been handling since the debut album.

What I feel is the true brilliance of this record is that it caters to many types of listeners, without compromising what it is or feeling the least bit forced.  If you like death, doom, or atmospheric heavy metal, there’s something for you.  No one element seems to overstay its welcome.  Unless you are a hardcore Nightwish or Nile fan and won’t listen to anything else, almost any metalhead should find something they like.  Lacrima Mortis doesn’t break any new barriers, nor try to, yet it doesn’t really sound like anyone else in the genre either.

You also won’t find a better sounding album this year.  Everything has a wonderfully earthy clarity to and retains all the doomy heaviness you could imagine.  It sounds expertly crafted and meticulously gone over with a fine tooth comb, while retaining a very natural vibe.  It doesn’t reek as too polished and run through a computer 7 million times.  No small feat indeed.

You can just feel how personal this is for Ed.  It comes across not just in his vocals, but in the interplay between all the elements.  We know these solo projects are always done for personal satisfaction.  But this feels so genuine and cathartic it’s hard not to get sucked into it all.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lacrima Mortis is being released today in the U.S. by Napalm Records. It’s available as a CD through Napalm’s store and at other fine retailers, and you can download it at Amazon mp3. For more information about The 11th Hour, visit their Facebook page here.

The song “Bury Me”, which we featured in a previous NCS post, is still available for free download here. Here’s one more song for your listening pleasure:

“Tears of the Bereaved”

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album from Orange County’s Bleeding Through, which is out now on Rise Records.)

Anyone who was around when the metalcore explosion was happening and followed its development should know who Bleeding Through are.  Their revolutionary (and unmatched to this day) combination of hardcore brawn, black metal venom, thrash metal fanaticism, and death metal brutality — all with symphonic overlays courtesy of the only female keyboardist in metal worth a living fuck — has yet to get old for me.

I remember when people were pronouncing Bleeding Through’s demise when founding guitarist Scott Danough left the band after The Truth and thought they would start sucking, but Bleeding Through has been proving everyone wrong ever since, writing their best material on their last two albums, Declaration (2008) and Bleeding Through (2010), which showed that Scott apparently didn’t have much to do with the song-writing process at all.  So what’s the verdict on this band’s new album The Great Fire?

This is their most brutal yet most experimental effort yet.

This is a much faster, much more visceral and frantic Bleeding Through than we’ve ever heard before.  At the same time, this is also the oddest Bleeding Through, mainly due to Marta Peterson’s new-found sense of adventurism in the keyboard and symphonic department.  Adding instruments and sounds that were begging to be incorporated into Bleeding Through’s music — organs, harpsichords, fucking electronic-as-all-get-out pad sounds that are lo-fi as shit — she has helped create a much more blackened atmosphere than has been heard before.

On another odd note though, her more blackened inclusions are counterpointed by the rest of the band, who focus on a much more death metal bent.  It’s an interesting contrast that in this case works where perhaps it shouldn’t.

This is a relatively short album even by the band’s standards — 14 songs that clock in at just barely 39 minutes.  Bleeding Through has decided to emphasize their hardcore roots in their composition; most of the songs are one- to two-minute blitzkrieg-caliber assaults full of transitions and twists and turns.  The relative brevity of most songs makes the longer ones stand out though. “Final Hours”, for example, is fucking vicious.  When the main riff of the song comes back, after a small symphonic bridge, it makes me want to kill things.

Thankfully for all kvrmvdgeons in the audience, this album really goes light in the clean singing department, much as the self-titled album did.  It’s refreshing to see a band who, instead of “progressing and expanding”, has decided to stop fucking around and, for the most part, inflict a full-on rage explosion.

I’m not sure that much else really needs to be said.  Bleeding Through is a kick-ass band, always has been.  The album is great, but at the same time it’s essentially Bleeding Through doing what Bleeding Through does — you are either one of the people who digs that or one who doesn’t.  I’m in the former camp: This band deserves support for soldiering on as excellently as they do.  I’ll post a few songs, but the whole album is actually streaming up on the Rise Records YouTube channel.

For anyone who thinks we’ve been insufficiently faithful to the name of this site in recent days, I have a few things for you this weekend that will set you straight.

As record labels go, I think Throatruiner has to be a short-listed finalist for best label name ever. They have also been putting out some tasty releases, if your taste runs to unstructured violence. Take this one for example. It’s a three-way split with international flavor. The three bands are as follows:

AS WE DRAW •• Described as a French “post-metal” band, their contributions to this split follow up their 2010 album, Lines Breaking Circles. Throatruiner recommends them to fans of Ken Mode, Breach, and Old Man Gloom.

EUGLENA •• A Russian band whose preceding release was an EP called An Anxious Surface. Throatruiner compares their music to that of Buried Inside, Plebeian Grandstand, and Botch.

HEXIS •• This is a Danish band that slathers together hardcore, black metal, and sludge. By coincidence, they were recommended in a recent NCS comment by Old Man Windbreaker.  Before contributing to this split, they released a self-titled EP and then a full-length album called XI that debuted last year. Throatruiner recommends them to fans of Celeste, Crowpath, and Blut Aus Nord.

Each of these three bands contributed two songs to the split. I have some quick reactions to them them after the jump, along with a stream of the whole split — which can be downloaded for free or for any price you think is fair.

As We Draw – The two cuts from this band — “Fingers To Point” and “Fingers To Stab” — have a distorted, thick, sludgy undercurrent pierced by shrill feedback and shrieking screamo vocals. The music is marked by variable tempos, unpredictable riffs, surprising melodies, and a pervasively bleak/unhinged atmosphere. They remind me a bit of their countrymen Eryn Non Dae. Discomforting and violent, but cool.

“Fingers To Point”

“Fingers To Stab”

Euglena – This band’s songs, “Before After/After the Before” and “Renaissance”, are similar in some respects to those from As We Draw: similar sludgy distortion in the heavy low end (except even more fuzzed-out), similar vein explosion in the vocals. But Euglena have an even more pronounced take-no-prisoners approach — the music relies more on feedback than melody. In fact, the first half of “Before After/After the Before” runs at the pace of cold tar, with one wave of ugly feedback after another and very little structure. The second half accelerates and gains shape, but without losing one bit of ugliness. Extreme, fucked up shit. You could bang your head to some of this if it weren’t already clamped in a crushing vice.

“Before After/After the Before”

“Renaissance”

Hexis: Based on the description by Throatruiner and Old Man Windbreaker, this was the band who most intrigued me. I stayed intrigued by the music. “Crux” is the longer of the two songs at more than six minutes, and it embodies Hexis’ fusion of styles: veering from blast-beats and cauterizing riffs to glacially slow sludge with funeral-doom style drumming. The whole thing is shot through with massive distortion and the same kind of I’ll-eat-your-face berzerker vocals as the first two bands deliver.

“Nex” clocks in at less than 2 1/2 minutes, and it’s a scary, misanthropic, blackened (or blacked-out) explosion of demonic turmoil.

“Crux”

“Nex”

Now, here are download links for the split:

[DOWNLOAD FROM BANDCAMP] • [DIRECT DOWNLOAD FROM MEDIAFIRE]