Cannibal Corpse will be headlining SUMMER SLAUGHTER this summer and they’re about to leave for a tour of Europe. But in between those events, they’ll be headlining a 23-city tour of the U.S. beginning in April.

Today, the band announced the U.S. Torture Tour 2012, sponsored by Metal Blade Records, Good Fight Entertainment, and dB Drum Shoes. It starts on April 5 in Jacksonville, Florida, and ends in Gainesville, Florida, on May 3.

Their support on this tour is first-class: Exhumed, Abysmal Dawn, and Arkaik. That will be a must-see show for death metalheads within spitting distance of any tour stop. Sadly, yours truly will be missing this tour, because the closest it will get to the Pacific Northwest is Colorado, and I can’t spit that far.

The full schedule is after the jump.

October is over, except for Halloween, which continues to go on and on here at the metallic island that NCS calls home. Your humble editor spent the end of the month and the beginning of this new one grinding away at his fucking day job, which explains why this installment of METAL IN THE FORGE is late. It also explains why it’s more than typically incomplete, but more on that later.

Here’s the deal:  In these posts, we collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last month about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including occasional updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know their music yet. In this series, we cut and paste those announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

Remember — THIS ISN’T A CUMULATIVE LIST. If we found out about a new forthcoming album before September, we wrote about it in previous installments of this series. So, be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported earlier.

This month’s list begins right after the jump. I fell down on the job of monitoring the interhole and press releases to catch news about new albums that looked potentially cool to me, so I know I missed announcements of new releases that should be included here. So, feel free to leave Comments and tell all of us what I missed. Let us know about albums on the way that  you’re stoked about!

What have we here? It’s another Par Olofsson album cover! And just a few days after we showcased some other album covers by this prolific Swedish artist (here).

Wonder what’s inside? Hey, whaddaya know!  It’s a CD!  Wonder what it sounds like? (putting CD in music player . . . and listening)

Fuck yeah! (pumping fist in air) This is some sick shit!

(Strike that. This is supposed to be a high-brow extreme metal site, rendering sophisticated musical analysis in literate journalistic prose. Start over.)

The band is called Arkaik. They’re from beautiful Riverside County, California. They’ve shared the stage with the likes of Suffocation, Necrophagist, Dying Fetus, and Decrepit Birth. Their just-released debut album on Unique Leader Records is called Reflections Within Dissonance. And what’s the music like? Fuck yeah! This is some sick shit!

Damn. We gotta do better than that. Let’s use some adjectives besides “sick.” How about: insanely fast, technical, pummeling, rhythmically dynamic. How about some metaphors? Like standing right next to a jet turbine already spooled up to a full roar while an assault squad is blasting at your head with M4s on full auto — in a hurricane. (read more after the jump . . .)