(Andy Synn reviews the new, self-titled album by Norway’s Blood Red Throne, which will be released May 25 by Sevared Records.)

I think even the members of Blood Red Throne would admit that their line-up over the years has been far from stable. Though core-member Daniel Olaisen (a/k/a Død) remains a consistent thread throughout their history, the band have by my count now had 4 vocalists, 3 guitarists (so only one change there, luckily), 2 bassists, and 5 drummers. That’s a lot of members.

Funny thing is, I don’t think the quality of their output has suffered in the slightest. There are albums I personally prefer, but you’d be hard pushed to argue that BRT have any weak links in their musical chain.

The group solidified a new permanent line-up in 2011, just after the recording of Brualitarian Regime, an album that featured the final recorded appearances of long-time vocalist Vald and original bassist Erlend Caspersen. However, although both Ivan Gujic (gutiars) and Emil Wiksten (drums) made their debuts on Brutalitarian Regime, new vocalist Yngve “Bolt” Christiansen and new bassist Ole Bent Madsen have, so far, only been introduced to the band’s fanbase via their appearances on the band’s many tour dates and live shows. So this is the first chance we’re all getting to hear the new iteration of the band as a recording entity, and to see what the newly redefined collective brings to the table.

Self-titling the record is certainly a bold statement to make, right from the start. A self-titled record is a way of stamping out your identity and core sound, a defining moment. So the band must be feeling pretty confident that a) they’ve come together for the long haul, and b) that their whole is even greater than the sum of their parts.

And you know what? I’ve got to give it to them. This certainly earns the right to bear the title Blood Red Throne.

Marrying the demented aggression of Cannibal Corpse to the teeth-grinding groove of Pantera at their most abrasive, shot through with touches of subtly complex guitar work a la Death at their most focussed and hostile, BRT’s seventh full-length album captures every aspect of their sound in microcosm, while also being their shortest, most refined, record since 2003’s Affiliated With The Suffering.

There’s pretty much something for every death metal fan on this record. You want writhing guitar grooves and scything flurries of razor-sharp tremolo? Check out opener “Soulseller” then, which also introduces you to the grinding gutturals and ravening high screams of the band’s new vocalist, who (arguably) adds a more extreme edge to this side of the group’s sound.

How about a raw and bloody helping of bulldozing death metal, flavoured with subtle blackened anti-melody and touches of ominous, soft-spoken menace? That’s what you get with “In Hell I Roam”, matching jerky, neck-snapping violence with an array of cold and calculated hooks.

If you’re in the mood for a real crusher to break the ice with a new date, you might consider “Hymn Of The Asylum”. Twitchy shifts between pneumatic, pounding groove, frenzied blasts, and ear-scraping dissonance make this 3-minute bruiser an instant shot of hyper-adrenalised mayhem.

“Primitive Killing Machine” starts off like the aborted love-child of Cannibal Corpse and Pantera, its belligerent grinding rhythms encased in concrete and lined with pure snake venom, before unveiling a serial-killer’s taste in malevolent melody and a warlike, suitably primitive vocal hook.

If you’re still not satisfied then I’d recommend you check out the chugging, mechanised steel of “Deatholation”, one of the heaviest cuts on an album almost crushed by its own weighty sonic violence. Brutal riffage hammers away at you, drums shift between bone-shaking groove and skin-flaying blast-work, everything locked in like some monstrous murder machine.

Not a song to take home to meet your parents, the aural assault of “Torturewhore” pummels away with a combination of death metal dissonance and unerringly tight rhythmic shifts. Thrusting and pounding with savage, sexual force, it thrashes and burns, batters and bleeds, in an ugly copulation of turbo-industrial death metal drums, viper-like leads, and massive, throbbing riffs.

If you’re after something with a touch more melody at its heart, then “Exoneration Manifesto” is the song for you. It practically pulsates with oily, suppurating bass-lines, haunting leads and black/death hybrid tremolo parts. That said… damn, it’s heavy. The chug-heavy, elephantine riffs and taut, rippling bass-lines that make up the song’s low-end are just crushing.

For those of you busy corporate high flyers who don’t have time for anything but an immediate fix, the 2:58 sonic beatdown of “Dodens Makt” should fit like a well-tailored suit. Minimalistic, focussed, and bursting with primal aggression, it simply welds together a sequence of bone-breaking riffs and gut-wrenching kick-patterns, sprinkles a touch of dark lead melody on top, and unleashes it without restraint.

Finally, you might want to brace yourself for the unrepentant extremity and singular savagery of “March Of The Undying”, the album’s longest, most intricate, and probably best, song, without a doubt.  This one has it all, a predatory atmosphere, a thick, choking low-end, choppy, eardrum-rupturing riff-hammers, crazed, spiralling bass lines, and a pin-precision barrage of ferocious, devastating drums.

For all their extremity – and there are moments on this album where the mind-bending blast frenzy, the ravenous banshee howls, and the crushing meltdown riffage combine into an eruption of absolute face-melting extremity -  Blood Red Throne are a band with real character. That, along with their monstrous, inhuman tightness (and unbelievable ability to consume alcohol) is their key strength.

You know a Blood Red Throne song when you hear it. You know a Blood Red Throne song when you feel that murderous groove taking hold of something inside you. And this album contains nine of their best, most focussed compositions to date. On this album they’ve taken all the key elements of death metal, mixed them up with a dash of primal groove and blackened misanthropy, and served each one with a distinctive twist all their own .

Masters of their trade, students of the game, kings among men. Bow down and worship before the Blood Red Throne.

https://www.facebook.com/BloodRedThroneOfficial
http://bloodredthrone.bandcamp.com/

The album can be ordered at the band’s Bandcamp page, at iTunes, and at Amazon. Below are an album teaser and the official video for “Primitive Killing Machine”.

You may remember that last August Converge and Napalm Death released a split, both digitally and as a 7″ vinyl record. (If you missed that, it’s still available here.) Converge contributed two songs to the split, a song called “No Light Escapes” and a cover of Entombed’s masterful “Wolverine Blues”. The cover song included a multitude of guest vocals. It turns out that when Converge created the cover track, each of the guest vocalists recorded a full version of the song, which Converge then used to compile the final version included on the split.

Today, Converge released a digital EP entitled Pound For Pound: The Wolverine Blues Sessions, which includes the complete mixes of each guest vocalist’s recording (as well as Jacob Bannon’s and Nate Newton’s), presented as five unique versions of the song, to wit:

1. Wolverine Blues w/ Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, etc)
2. Wolverine Blues w/ Jacob Bannon (Converge, Wear Your Wounds)
3. Wolverine Blues w/ Kevin Baker (All Pigs Must Die, The Hope Conspiracy, etc)
4. Wolverine Blues w/ Nate Newton (Converge, Doomriders, Old Man Gloom, etc)
5. Wolverine Blues w / Tomas Lindberg (Disfear, At The Gates, etc) and Kurt (Converge, etc)

Check out a full stream of this unusual EP right after the jump. You can get it here.  Cool cover art, too.

In today’s first post I commented about the fact that we usually don’t post press releases, or much of anything else that doesn’t involve the release of actual music, as opposed to forecasts of music to come. One exception to that general rule, as happened in that first article, occurs when we find disclosures of eye-catching album art. We’re making another exception in this post — because it involves fuckin’ CARCASS!!!

The news is this: After weeks of hinting around, Carcass has revealed that they’ve signed with Nuclear Blast for the release of Surgical Steel, their first album in something like 18 years. We’ll have to wait until an unidentified date this fall to get our mitts on it, but since we’ve been waiting for 18 years, what’s a few more months?

As noted, there’s no music to be heard, yet, but we do have this statement about the new album by Nuclear Blast owner and founder Markus Staiger: “It is a perfect mixture of Heartwork and Necroticism with a massive production to boot. The album is without a doubt just as perfect and lethal as surgical steel itself, and exactly what both old and new fans have waited for eagerly all of these years!”

Be still my beating heart.

If you haven’t been following the news, the new Carcass line-up consists of original guitarist Bill Steer and bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker , plus new drummer Dan Wilding (ABORTED, TRIGGER THE BLOODSHED) and guitarist Ben Ash (PIG IRON, DESOLATION, LIQUEFIED SKELETON). We’re told to expect some guest vocals from original drummer Ken Owen as well.

As the kids say, my body is ready.

“American Black Metal” probably isn’t a valid genre label. There are too many variations in the music created by American bands who have been using, to greater or lesser degrees, the traditional elements of black metal. In fact, newer bands such as Castevet, Cormorant, deafheaven, Krallice, Nachtmystium, Oak Pantheon, Panopticon, VHÖL, and Woe probably have more differences in their approaches than they do common characteristics. In fact, I wouldn’t fight you if you argued that a few of those outfits I just mentioned shouldn’t be called black metal bands at all.

But despite the fact that no common set of traits makes it possible to anoint “American Black Metal” as a discrete genre, the term does suggest (at least to me) an approach to black metal that both pushes the boundaries associated with first- and second-wave Scandinavian bands and pulls inside those boundaries musical ideas from other metal genres, and sometimes from outside metal altogether. It’s that creative, genre-bending approach that makes bands such as those listed above so interesting.

And now I have another band whose name needs to be added to that list: Autolatry. To be clear, I don’t mean that this Connecticut group is just another example of a band who use the traditional tropes of black metal along with a lot of other musical influences. I mean they’re so damned good they deserve to be talked about in the same breath with those other excellent bands.

I first came across Autolatry last year when I enthusiastically reviewed their four-track EP, Of the Land. For a four-song offering, the music was quite varied and really well-performed. But Autolatry push the variability of their music even further on their forthcoming second album Native, and the skill of their performances and compositions has taken long strides ahead as well.

On top of that, Native is a true album — not merely a collection of songs, but a musical suite in which the changes in the music and the order in which the songs are arranged make listening to all of it, from start to finish, a richly rewarding experience.

The four longest songs on the album (each of them between 6 and 8 minutes in length) — “Colony”, “Unrest With the Tide”, “Pale Dishonor”, and “Native” — are fueled with high-octane gas. They’re fast, exuberant, and extravagant. They have a jagged edge, with segments of blasting percussion, ripping guitars, and shrieking vocals bathed in lye, mixed with hoarse roars (and one passage of gritty “clean” vox in “Pale Dishonor”). But that’s not all of what they offer.

These are intricate, technically demanding, multi-faceted compositions. And so the two guitarists continuously spiral around each other, with a variety of musical ideas unfolding in a kind of complex double helix. They hammer hard, they ring out in post-metal-style chords, they execute lilting tremolo melodies, they engage in extended prog-ish flights of melodic creativity. Fiery, flashy guitar solos erupt in jaw-dropping displays of fleet-fingered shred. The very prominent bass bounds about like a deer in flight, matching the guitar work in technical expertise and inventiveness. And the drummer’s expert rhythms and fills are also in constant flux, significantly adding to the already significant interest of the music.

The instrumental performances on these songs are tight as can be, and impressively skillful. Because all the instrumentalists in the band are so good, Autolatry made the right choice in the way the album is mixed: it’s very balanced, with no one instrument dominating the others. Everything can be heard, and is worth hearing.

But I said this album was like a musical suite, and there are indeed other movements in the midst of those four high-octane tracks. “Waning Moon” is a song that includes not even a hint of black metal in the mix; it’s a progressive metal instrumental track built around a beautiful lead guitar melody. And — brace yourselves — “Setting of the Sun” is a slow, light, contemplative, smooth-jazz piece performed on acoustic guitars and a tenor sax.

If you’re thinking to yourself that these two songs must have been stuck into the album as nothing more than a way of saying, “Hey, look! We can make music like this, too!” — don’t. Trust me, it works, and it works really well in enhancing the overall attractiveness of the album as something to be experienced from start to finish.

Vocalist Karl Chamberlain says that Native was a fully collaborative effort among all the band members with an underlying concept rooted in history, “telling a tale of Native American assimilation at the time of the colonial settling in New England.” He goes on to say that it was “created to flow conceptually, lyrically, and musically together” — and so it does. The thought and care with which the individual songs and the album as a whole were created is abundantly evident.

I guess it’s also abundantly evident how much I like this album. Native is top-shelf, expertly performed, tremendously interesting progressive black metal that deserves a wide audience.

Autolatry will be going on a US tour to support the new record this July and August. They will be touring New England with Infera Bruo and then around the US for a month with Obsidian Tongue. Dates are still in the works for the longer tour with Obsidian Tongue, but the dates with Infera Bruo have been announced. Tour info can be found here.

The album will be available June 18 digitally on Bandcamp and all other digital marketplaces. Digipack CD’s will be available from Autolatry’s merch portal. The relevant links are below, followed by the song “Pale Dishonor”, which premiered late last week.

https://www.facebook.com/Autolatry
http://autolatry.bandcamp.com
http://autolatry.storenvy.com

 (NCS contributor Tyler Lowery wrote this review of the new album by Vancouver’s Anciients.)

Sometimes happy accidents happen. There’s no rhyme in the chaos of the world at any given moment, but under the perfect circumstances, we sometimes happen to stumble upon things that are amazing. Such is the method by which I have come across Anciients. You see, this Vancouver troupe just happened to be added to a Lamb of God tour after Terror had to back out, and this tour just happened to be dropping by a city close enough to me to make attending worthwhile, and I happened to learn about the tour the day of the show. I won’t lie, I trucked it from Knoxville, TN to Chattanooga for Decapitated and Lamb of God, but when I got there and heard these guys rip into the crowd, I knew I was going to walk away with an album that night.

Anciients tread a fine middle ground between progressive metal and sludge / stoner rock. Now, when you first read that, the word progressive almost immediately makes you lose interest, right? Then you add messy riffing and stoner ramblings on top of that. What would you expect to come from that? It sounds like a cluster-fuck, right? However, these guys toe the line with expert measure. From album opener “Raise the Sun” to closer “For Lisa”, this band keep all the meandering intentional, in the way that Colombo would always act like a naïf until the suspects gave themselves away. By the way, if you got that reference, you, sir or madam, are old.

(photo by Thuja Knox)

More than anything else, this is a stoner album. The likes of High on Fire and Earthship come to mind here. The riffs are split between airy clean passages that elevate the atmosphere and rolling riffs that chug along like a rock ‘n’ roll train headed for good times. These guys have fun when they play, and it’s obvious in their music. This isn’t a shoegazing affair, my friend. When the riffs rumble out of the speakers, you’re moving. No ands, ifs, or buts about it. The drums crack away in the background, pushing the music forward. The bass rolls right next to the guitars, happy to put its two cents in whenever it damn well pleases.

Now, a sludge album is all fine and good, but what makes it progressive is that it pulls in an Opethian-tinged death metal influence and incorporates it. The blistering solos and dreadful riffing aren’t just there to be there, they are needed. Not one instance feels out of place or even spur-of-the-moment. While the vocals on this album are generally sung in a grungy rasp, the screams and growls are in earnest, from the depths of the heart.

In addition to the death metal tinges that corrupt the music, a swath of old psychedelic riffs also pop up every now and then, tinting the groove with a nostalgic vibe, just enough to get your head bobbing instead of banging. In a genre-bent world where “progressive” is tagged to every album that throws in a random jazz interlude or clean keyboard solo, this is a breath of fresh air. As of three days ago I didn’t know who Anciients were, and now, I’m really glad that I do. Check out their album on Bandcamp. And as a side note, they are currently on tour with Decapitated and Lamb of God.

http://anciientriffs.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ANCIIENTSRIFFS

Last night I was talking with my NCS comrade DGR about the fact that we never just copy and paste PR announcements, and about how uninteresting we find most announcements about new music that don’t include actual music. But of course there are exceptions, such as the two featured in this post, where the artwork alone is enough to catch my interest. Also, I’m more inclined to make exceptions when I’ve been out carousing late the night before and have awakened with a hammering hangover and all of today’s posts in various stages of incompletion. Hypothetically speaking, of course. I’m not saying I did that last night. But would you please speak very, very softly for the next few hours?

REVOCATION

I have no new music from Revocation to share with you, unless you count the few song fragments that appear in the studio videos I’m going to stick in this post. What I do have is the artwork (above) for their fourth album, which I really like. It’s by Orion Landau, who has created album covers for the likes of Dying Fetus, Obscura, and Nile.

I also have a release date: August 6 (via Relapse). I have the track list, but I don’t know who really cares about song titles. There are ten of them. I also have the album title: its name is Revocation.

And then I have those two studio videos that have been released so far, plus I have tour dates. Most of these dates are for the SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour. Come to think of it, I don’t think we’ve yet posted the SUMMER SLAUGHTER schedule, so that might be interesting to some of you. Mainly I’m writing about Revocation because I’m a big fan. Also, could you please try whispering?

REVOCATION Headline Dates:

7/14 Reading, PA @ Reverb
7/15 Peoria, IL @ Brass Rail
7/18 Reno, NV @ Knitting Factory

THE SUMMER SLAUGHTER TOUR (All Dates from July 19 – Aug 16 with/ The Dillinger Escape Plan, Animals as Leaders, Periphery, Norma Jean, Cattle Decapitation, The Ocean, Revocation, Aeon, Rings of Saturn, Thy Art is Murder)

7/19-San Francisco, CA @ The Regency
7/20-Los Angeles, CA @ House of Blues
7/21-Santa Ana, CA @ The Observatory
7/24-Oklahoma City, OK @ Diamond Ballroom
7/26-Dallas, TX @ House of Blues
7/27-Houston, TX @ House of Blues
7/29-Orlando, FL @ House of Blues (NO CATTLE DECAPITATION)
7/30-Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade
7/31-Knoxville, TN @ Old City Courtyard
8/01-Myrtle Beach, SC @ House of Blues
8/02-Silver Spring, MD @ The Fillmore
8/03-Worcester, MA @ The Palladium (NO NORMA JEAN)
8/04-Philadelphia, PA @ The Trocadero
8/07-New York, NY @ Best Buy Theater
8/08-Toronto, ON @ The Sound Academy
8/09-Montreal, QC @ Heavy MTL
8/10-Albany, NY @ Upstate Concert Hall
8/11-Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre (NO DEP)
8/12-Chicago, IL @ House of Blues
8/13-Milwaukee, WI @ The Rave
8/14-Minneapolis, MN @ Station 4
8/16-Denver, CO @ Ogden Theatre
8/17-Salt Lake City, UT @ The Complex
8/19-Seattle, WA @ Showbox SODO
8/20-Portland, OR @ Roseland Ballroom

REVOCATION Headline Dates:
8/21 Richland, WA @ Ray’s Golden Lion
8/22 Spokane, WA @ The Center
8/23 Billings, MT @ Railyard
8/24 Cheyenne, WY @ Ernie November Record Store
8/25 Des Moines, IA @ Vaudeville Mews

MISERY SIGNALS

A week ago I wrote about the ending of Misery Signals’ indiegogo album-funding campaign and the immense success they enjoyed with it, raising $104,295 (!!!). This morning I found evidence that they weren’t just sitting around waiting for the campaign to end and then saying to themselves, “Holy shit!  Look at all this fuckin’ money!  What the fuck do we do now?!?”

The first piece of evidence is the fact that they’ve already got finished artwork for the new album, which you can see above. I really like this artwork, too. Unfortunately, the press release I received didn’t identify the artist, which is really bad form in my opinion. It’s bad form for labels, it’s bad form for PR people, it’s bad form for bands. When you make an announcement about album art, you should give credit to the people who create it!!  That seems obvious to me, but you’d be surprised how often it doesn’t happen. I will hunt for that information in the case of Misery Signals’ cover and update this post when I find it.

While you’re waiting breathlessly for the next full installment of THAT’S METAL!, I have a couple of items I’d like to share, to make the pain of waiting somewhat less traumatic.

ITEM ONE

For my first item, I give you the mantis shrimp. Not long ago, The Oatmeal prepared a comic strip about the mantis shrimp that made the rounds on the interweb. It described facts about this creature that make a strong case for anointing it the MOST METAL THING ALIVE, including some of these (I sourced other facts included below from this article):

Our eyes have three types of color-receptive cones (green, blue, and red). Butterflies have five, enabling them not only to see two colors we don’t even have names for, but also a massive spectrum of color that our brains can’t process. The mantis shrimp has sixteen color-receptive cones.

The mantis shrimp is one of the most creatively violent creatures on earth. It has two hinged arms normally held under its head. In the “spearer” species, the arms end in an impaling spike, while the “smashers” wield crushing clubs.

“The smashers deliver the fastest punch of any animal. As the club unfurls, its acceleration is 10,000 times greater than gravity. Moving through water, it reaches a top speed of 50 miles per hour. It creates a pressure wave that boils the water in front of it, creating flashes of light (shrimpoluminescene – no, really) and immensely destructive bubbles. The club reaches its target in just three thousandths of a second, and strikes with the force of a rifle bullet.”

The front surfaces of the clubs are made of crystals that are stronger than engineered ceramics forged at 1,500 degrees Celsius.

Aquariums usually don’t house mantis shrimp because they tend to slaughter every other creature they share a tank with. Also, because they can break aquarium glass.

As for the impaling thing, watch this:

And once you’ve seen that, then you have to see the next video, which surfaced last week. I received the link from my friend Ullr, who originally sent me a link to The Oatmeal strip many weeks ago. The song in this video isn’t metal, but as Ullr wrote, music about the mantis shrimp is metal. The lyrics are pretty fuckin’ funny.

Onward to Item Two . . .

Yeah, right.

ITEM TWO

Frequent visitors to NCS know that I’ll seize on any excuse to run some Finnish through Google Translate. I don’t mean an actual Finnish person, I mean something (anything) in the Finnish language. Because the Finnish language is to Google Translate as the mantis shrimp is to a hard-shelled crab: it cracks it down the middle and lets all the delicious juices spurt out.

I used to think that whoever was responsible for the Finnish part of Google Translate had just been drinking way too much fuckin’ olut or viina. But NCS supporter jeimssi (who is himself a Finn) recently pointed me to the following table of derivatives from the Finnish word for reason, sense, or intelligence. I think all of us native English speakers can now get a better sense of the challenges confronted by Google Translate.

By the way, jeimssi verified to me that everything in the table is grammatically correct, with nothing made up. A language this confusing and impenetrable is by definition metal. And you thought you had trouble with spelling.

(DGR bears witness to the May 18 performances in Sacramento of The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Faceless, Royal Thunder, and Journal.)

It’s been a bit of an odd concert season so far this year. I heaped tons of praise on the Sacramento music scene last year because it seemed like there was show after show, after show, hitting within the span of a few months, to the point that between seeing local bands and bigger acts I actually wound up doing something like seven shows in one month – which was fucking awesome. This year though, work has overtaken a lot of what I’ve been up to. The year has just devolved into an endless stream of overnighters on the job, which have insured that in the span of five months….I’ve seen a whopping three concerts.

This one in particular was very exciting because it meant I’d get to see The Dillinger Escape Plan again. I’d seen them once before with Mastodon, which was a very weird experience. That time it seemed like a lot of people were there because they wanted to hear that one song that Mastodon had on the radio, so something like Dillinger was going to sail right over folks’ heads. This time though, you had a crowd who really wanted to see them and were enthusiastic as hell about it — and no band can create a feedback loop of energy quite like Dillinger can.

Of course, there were other groups on the bill, and whilst I had no idea what I was in for with Royal Thunder outside of the basic description from their Facebook, I did want to see Journal (again) and The Faceless for the first time on this end.

Journal

A quick introduction for those who don’t know about Journal: They are a local Sacramento three-piece instrumental group. We’ve spoken of them before and they’ve gathered a bit of a following among web denizens. They are highly technical and very accomplished as musicians. You’ve likely seen their name brought up a lot and not noticed it, but I highly recommend you rectify that oversight by checking these guys out. Given the recent explosion of instrumental guitar works over the years, they deserve far more publicity than what they’ve gotten.

I’ve caught Journal before – given that they are local it’s usually pretty easy to cross paths with the guys and get to see them live. I’m not within the circle of people who get the privilege to jokingly heckle them yet, but alas, one day. I know that, musically, what they do can be incredibly abrasive because all three of those guys just beat the crap out of their instruments. They fly across those two guitars and that drum kit almost effortlessly.

As someone who has heard their CD and seen them enough to catch some familiar parts of songs, I’ll fully cop to the fact that I have no idea how in the world they keep track of what’s going on within their own songs. As someone who has played music, the sheer technicality these guys always put on display is incredible to watch. The joking, self depreciating humor that they have about what they do on stage is pretty great as well – which can lead to all sorts of goofy stage antics like the one pictured above, or the gathering of photos that a friend of the band uploaded to Flickr. If those shots look like the guys stomp around and spin on the stage a whole lot, that’s because it’s exactly what they do – in between every riff that sounds like a swarm of insects just popping back and forth.

It’s unfortunate that they ran a little long and had to be cut off right before their last song, but they managed to attract a whole bunch of different onlookers who seemed very intrigued by what was going on.

Royal Thunder

Royal Thunder were an interesting proposition on this bill because they were the most different act from the other groups present. The tour was already going to be pretty varied with just The Faceless and Dillinger sitting on opposite ends of the spectrum, plus whatever local openers would be added, but Royal Thunder definitely filled a role that’s becoming increasingly familiar on recent tours (in addition to being the most starkly different from the rest of the bands). It seems that tour promoters have now been specifically seeking out a slower opening band to contrast with the higher speed/energy groups that will take the stage later. Royal Thunder’s brand of psychadelic acid rock/sludge fits that bill almost perfectly.

They had a half hour or so long setlist and in that amount of time kicked out about four songs – one of which picked up the pace at the end, but the other three of which were super-meditative, burying themselves in full bass tones and some crawling guitar work that played the lowest notes possible to create an overall rumble.

I’ll qualify this by saying that I could absolutely listen to these guys outside of a show, so I was actually okay with following them on a brief interlude into the world of hazy colored lighting. But I can definitely imagine how they might have had the house stacked against them by being the literal polar opposite of the high intensity freakout of Dillinger, who would come on close to an hour after them – or hell, in the case of this show, by following the high-intensity freakout of Journal before them.

Royal Thunder was an experience to see on a show like this, because even as a three-piece they still fill a room. I just think that they had a supremely high wall to climb in the face of the people who were there because they wanted to see The Faceless or Dillinger. I am, however, glad that a bunch of folks still stood out instead of trying to hide in the bar or smoking area and watched the whole thing and got one hell of a different experience for it.

The Faceless

It may have taken some time, but I finally got to see The Faceless live. Granted, this was the latest incarnation of the band, in which Michael Keene is the only surviving original member, but the guys with whom he has chosen to surround himself are all skilled enough to hang with what the music is doing. One of the things that really surprised me about their set was how quick it was. The group played seven songs and there was very little in the way of stage banter or introduction. They got up there, hammered out the songs, and then just as quickly jumped off. I don’t know if we caught them on an off-day, but you could’ve missed these guys had you blinked at the wrong time.

Their setlist is pretty Autotheism-heavy, which was fine by me. You get five tracks off of that disc – including the opening trilogy of songs, which was cool to see live – and then two off of Planetary Duality. At this point, saying they play those songs to the letter seems a little silly, but these guys nail every weird section that comes up perfectly.

Their current vocalist is also crazy good with some highs that I think are criminally underused, although he seems to want to wander the stage more than the space he is given. I caught sight of him actually walking off the stage to go to a different section of the venue a couple of times – including one where he wound up standing in the corner of Ace Of Spades with his hands resting behind his head during the instrumental section of part 2 of the Autotheism tracks. I’m surprised he doesn’t get bothered more by fans of the band when he does that. My friend thought it was something bordering on stage fright, but I’m not so sure. It was just odd to see, although if they gave the guy a wireless mic, that might actually be turned into a pretty cool aspect of the band since you could then get vocals from anywhere during the show. Anyone else see stuff like this during this tour?

Dillinger Escape Plan

I’m just going to come out and say it – you could tell me Dillinger were going to play the back alley behind a 7-11 and that show would probably jump up to one of my favorite live shows I’ve ever seen. These guys are simply second to none when it comes to high-energy performance. When they really get going, there is almost no stopping them. That they also play the insanely complicated stuff that they do is just mind-boggling.

They had fifteen songs, but I’ll be damned if I noticed the passage of time, simply because I was so locked into their performance, When Greg ascended the PA (alongside Ben on the other side) and then leaped into the crowd, my whole night was pretty much capped off. Hell, you could probably construct a pretty nice photo gallery of nothing but sweet-ass amp dives that Greg has taken over the last year. I submit to you two images, one from Sacramento and the other from San Francisco the following night, plus a video of the Sacramento jump, just to get things started.

I say this with all my conviction: You don’t even have to like the band to have a hell of a time watching them live. It’s infectious as hell. I was stoked on the performance alone, much less how balanced their whole set was across all their discs. I love hearing stuff from Miss Machine live, even years after that disc was released, and the stuff fits in perfectly alongside the newer music they have. I haven’t heard One Of Us Is the Killer yet but Badwolf liked it a lot and those songs hold up insanely well live.

Coming off of a show like this, you can’t help but be enthusiastic about everything that band does. It’s preaching to the choir when I say this, but if you ever get the chance to see these guys live, you jump on that shit.

(This is the second part of a feature by NCS contributor Austin Weber that we began yesterday (here). Today he reviews new releases by Adfectus Exundant (South Carolina) and The Omega Man (Texas).)

Adfectus Exundant - Adfectus Redundant

Beyond Nile and Through The Eyes Of The Dead, not a lot of well known metal has come from the state of South Carolina. As a former decade-long resident of that state, that makes me sad. Fortunately, I recently heard of a fantastic group of forward-thinking metallers from Columbia, S.C., that are amazing. Their name — Adfectus Redundant – is a bit of a mouthful, to the point where I think it’s so uncatchy that it’s uniqueness returns it right back to being catchy.

Overall, Adfectus Exundant are shred-heavy death metal, but are prone to frequently chopping and bookending their aggression with softer progressive moments and interesting jazz breaks that in some parts remind me of Psyopus. All of that is accompanied by an underlying wall of grooves hovering in the backround. Adfectus Redundant is a complex work that takes multiple listens just to take it all in. This is due to their skill in writing long songs that never lose your interest, music that carefully navigates through multiple movements with a reservoir of calm repreives, and softer clean sung passages.

Though I generally wouldn’t, I feel comfortable calling Adfectus Exundant progressive metal. Unlike most bands with that label, they are a very aggressive strain of prog, though an ethereal edge and experimental itch is evident in fragments throughout. It boggles my mind to know this is just a two-man band, with Joseph Carrabotta handling all instruments and drum programming along with clean singing, and Cameron Harvard handling primary vocals.

For a demo, Adfectus Redundant sounds remarkably good, with only a scattered handful of moments where the audio sounds rough. They are recording a new album right now, so buy this and support their future!

http://adfectusexundant.bandcamp.com/album/adfectus-redundant
https://www.facebook.com/AdfectusExundant

The Omega Man – Rebirth

Having listened to far too many bands lately playing within a  “progressive metal” Venn diagram of similiar influences, it takes a group with creativity in both playing and songwriting to pique my interest. The Omega Man from Texas are such an act, as they artfully tackle a technically adept brand of death metal with a cosmic atmospheric vibe complete with some occassional djent flourishes. This might sounding boring to some on paper, however that couldn’t be further from the truth, as they are a creative group clearly doing their own thing.

The Omega Man deliver plenty of spacey, lush guitar-work with densely melodic riffs, and they have a flair for letting their softer instrumental segments develop instead of being mere brief interludes. Their music flawlessly shifts frequently as they organically twist and turn to build toward a breathtaking climax. The sparingly used clean singing is very effective in a Between The Buried And Me sort of way, taking the moment higher while avoiding sounding like pop.

In an abstract way, their melodic fetish reminds me quite a bit of Between The Buried And Me, but beyond that influence they don’t sound like anyone else. Rebirth is chock-full of gorgeous music with a relaxed sense of restraint, music that unfolds soaked in a Latin feel with jazz overtones. The Omega Man have a penchant for music that organically transitions from their unique twists-and turns while tastefully utilizing clean singing occasionally. They also give prominent weight to the bass guitar, which is not only highly audible but further enriches the EP’s uplifting melodic focus.

These guys are onto something special here. Take note because their future is bright.

http://theomegamantx.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/TheOmegaManMusic?ref=br_tf

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.

Check out the video for “Life=Disease”, and below that is a teaser clip about the new album.

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

ORPHANED LAND

Orphaned Land remain a unique presence in the metal scene — an Israeli band that has devoted considerable effort through their music to combat the hostility between Jews, Muslims, and Christians in the Middle East and to create musical ties with the Arab world. Their sixth album, All Is One, is scheduled for release by Century Media on June 24 in Europe and June 25 in North America. The cover by French artist Metastazis (Paradise Lost, As I Lay Dying, Sonne Adam, Watain) visually meshes with the album’s title, unifying the symbols of the region’s three main religions.

Yesterday, a lyric video debuted for a song from the album named “Let the Truce Be Known”. The band explained the song’s subject as follows:

The main inspiration for the story behind “Let The Truce Be Known” lies with the famous World War 1 story called – “The Christmas Truce”.  We were simply blown away from that story. From the way that those holyday songs were the trigger to bring the enemies to co-exist and celebrate together as brothers for one night in No Mans Land. And yet, the next day they just got back to bomb and kill each other.  It is an outstanding story that shows us the eternal hope of mankind, the power of music and the tragedy that despite all of that – evil still prevails.

(To learn more about the Christmas Truce, check out this article.)

The song includes a sweeping melody (with an Oriental flavor, of course), strictly clean vox by Kobi Farhi, string orchestration (recorded in Turkey — the only Muslim country where Orphaned Land is permitted to perform), and a message . . .

A lyric video for another song from the album, “Our Own Messiah”, appeared about a week ago, and I’m including it below, too.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Orphaned-Land/8776213035
http://www.orphaned-land.com/

POWER TRIP

I discovered this Dallas band one month ago because the cover to their new album was painted by one of my favorite metal artists, the devastating Paolo “Madman” Girardi. The album is named Manifest Decimation, and it’s due for release on June 11 by Southern Lord.

The album’s title track premiered last month (featured here), and yesterday Southern Lord released a second track for free download. This one is named “Conditioned To Death”, and it’s another swift kick in the head (with a killer breakdown), blending thrash, punk, and crust into something that’s fuckin’ irresistible. The band’s motto seems to be “steel, speed, and destruction”, and that’s no lie.

The link for download of the song is right here:

And below the following handy links you can stream both of the tracks released so far. I should tell you that I’ve now heard the whole album, and it fuckin’ rips from beginning to end. Pre-order it here.

http://www.facebook.com/powertripTX
http://www.powertriptx.bandcamp.com/