September is behind us. Here in Seattle, it was such a beautiful month that it seemed like nature’s compensation for how late the summer started. Unfortunately, with September’s end, we’re on a short track to the onset of winter, which means about six months of short, cold, grey, ceaselessly wet days. Ain’t that just fuckin’ great?

Well, bitchin’ about the winter ahead won’t change one fucking thing. I prefer to think instead about the deluge of new metal that’s headed our way and try (momentarily) to forget about the deluge of rain on the horizon. Which brings us to the latest monthly edition of METAL IN THE FORGE.

You know the drill:  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 album before August, 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. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones. As usual, also feel free to tell us about how we fucked up by omitting releases that you’re stoked about.

Here are four things that got my attention earlier today. I’m betting that everyone who reads this will be interested in at least one of these items. And, just in case that’s a bad guess, we have porn after the jump.

ITEM ONE

I don’t think I have to do anything but excerpt these quotes from the Metal Blade press release. It was enough for me.

Cannibal Corpse has begun recording their twelfth studio album at Sonic Ranch studios in Texas with producer Erik Rutan. The band has spent months writing the album and has recorded at Sonic Ranch in the past, but never with Rutan at the helm. More details on the album, including art, songs, title and more will be revealed in the months to follow. For now, the band is hard at work forging their next death metal offering.

Erik Rutan worked with Cannibal Corpse for both Kill (2006) and Evisceration Plague (2009) and is returning for a third time. Rutan explains further: “I am super excited to work with Cannibal Corpse for our 3rd album together. We are determined to make the best album we possibly can. Everyone is very focused and the new material is awesome. There is a great blend of classic, old school CC with a newer, more heavy, dynamic and aggressive approach. I look forward to the challenge of making one heavy as hell record!”

(more after the jump, including porn . . .)

That eye-catching piece of art above is the cover for Celestial Completion, the next album by Atlanta’s Becoming the Archetype. The original painting was done by Dan Seagrave with art direction from Ryan Clark at Invisible Creature (if that name sounds familiar, that’s the same Ryan Clark who’s the frontman for Demon Hunter). Looks like, when the rapture comes, there will be some interruptions in shipping traffic.

We thought this band’s 2008 album, Dichotomy, was an interesting dish of progressive death metal. The new single they released in 2009 — “Necrotizing Fasciitis” — in addition to being an inventively named piece of music with an unusual metaphor at the core of its lyrics, was a promise of even more interesting things to come. It turned the brutality dial up more than a few notches and jettisoned most of the prog influences, but still included some nice tech-death flourishes.

Now, as a teaser for the next album, the band have released a single for streaming. It sounds almost nothing like “Necrotizing Fasciitis”, but it’s growing on us. And it’s just the first of three teasers we’ve stapled together in this post.

For our second one, we’ve got a mix of the music from the next release by Finland’s awesome Moonsorrow, and to finish off the post, there’s a clip from the forthcoming DVD by Cannibal Corpse. Hey, you can’t say we don’t bend over backwards to bring you variety in metal. (all this stuff is after the jump . . .)

The first month of the year has come and gone. January brought those of us in Seattle some typically ass-sucking winter weather, though it wasn’t nearly as bad as the brutality dished out by the weather gods on our metal brothers and sisters in the Midwest and Northeast of the U.S. And of course, our readers ins places like Russia, and Finland, and Sweden are probably laughing their asses off reading our complaints about our winter weather. So, we’ll just shut up about that.

Besides, January brought all sorts of great new metal to our tender ears, so who gives a shit about the weather anyway? And you know what else January brought? It brought news of still more metal goodness on the way — great bursts of audio sunshine in our collective futures that will part these winter clouds and leave them whimpering in cloudy tatters.

Okay, maybe we should leave poetry to the poets and just get on with this next monthly installment of METAL IN THE FORGE, where we collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last 30 days about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like, or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know them yet. And in this post, we’ve cut and pasted the announcements and compiled them in alphabetical order. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones:

AJATARRA: “AJATTARA — the Finnish band featuring former AMORPHIS frontman Pasi Koskinen (a.k.a. Itse Ruoja Suruntuoj) — will release its seventh album, Murhat (“Murders”) on February 2 via Osasto-A Records. Murhat is available for streaming in its entirety on the AJATTARA Facebook page.”  (much more after the jump . . .)

It’s difficult to know whether to take this seriously:  Northern California’s Embryonic Devourment dedicates their new album, Vivid Interpretations of the Void, “to the people helping to expose the reptilian agenda,” specifically including David Ickes, Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa, conspiracy theorists Phil Schneider and Alex Jones, and “The Sumerians”.

If you don’t know, David Ickes is a British writer, speaker, and former media personality whose writings argue that shape-shifting alien reptoids have been controlling the course of human events for thousands of years and have inserted their own genetically compatible humanoid slaves into positions of power.

Embryonic Devourment’s fixation with the reptilian threat goes well beyond the album dedication. Lyrically, the songs are all about that, too — that and nothing else: Shape shifters “killing people fast”, the controlling dominance of “eternal ancient gargoyles,” the “messages lying beneath older worldly tablets,” the intertwining “of repto ancestry through history,” “lizard eyes pierc[ing] your mind hypnotized,” and more.  The album as a whole stands as a warning to the merely human: “Beware thy master god of disaster.”

Stranger things than this have inspired musicians, though this is certainly strange enough. But hey, we’re keeping open minds about the reptilian agenda. We run across people almost every day who act like reptoids. Who knows? Maybe they really are.

Plus, we’re keeping open minds as a show of respect for the music — which is an inventive and strangely pleasing amalgamation of cathartically extreme styles. (more after the jump, including an ear-grabbing song . . .)

I’m so fucking bummed I can hardly see straight, and if I don’t get it off my chest, I’m afraid my eyes will stay crossed permanently.

My day job took me and one of my co-workers (he uses the name Ullr when he comments on this site) to Oakland yesterday. We finished what we had to do and we had the whole night to kill before our return flight to Seattle this morning.

To celebrate Cinco de Mayo, we ate some awesome Central American food, including grilled, endorphin-inducing serrano peppers, and pounded down some tasty margaritas with chile salt at a place called Tamarindo, and then Ullr got on his iPhone to see if there was any live music we could hit up.

And what a fucking bonanza he found! The Evisceration Plague Tour was scheduled to play at Slim’s in San Francisco, with the doors opening at 7:00. If you don’t know about that tour, it’s a sick line-up: Cannibal Corpse, 1349, Skeletonwitch, and Lecherous Nocturne.  And it was only 6:30 when Ullr stumbled across that bonanza. What could possibly go wrong? Lots, as it turned out. (more of this suckfest saga after the jump . . .)

Late last year we wrote about the storm surge of new metal over the last few years. Even if you confine yourselves to bands with labels, it’s enough to swamp the average listener. And if you also consider extreme metal being churned out by unsigned bands, it’s impossible to hear everything that might actually appeal to you, even if you’re devoted to only one or two sub-genres and don’t care about the rest.

Given this state of affairs, one of the most useful things a site like this one can do is help you sift through the floodwaters and try to point out the hidden treasures that might actually change your life (or at least your week). And here at NCS, we try to give equal coverage to extreme metal from other lands.

This week we’ve been on sort of a mini world tour of metal. On Monday, we visited Greece and wrote about Gus Drax. The next day we hopped the Atlantic to visit Costa Rica and Sight of Emptiness. And today we’re jumping back across the ocean to Italy and Vomit the Soul.

The first two bands we visited this week produce metal that’s infused with melody. But if melody is what you’re after, you should continue your web-surfing right now, because you won’t find even a whisper of it in what Vomit the Soul blasts out. But if every now and then you like to have your brains scrambled by a visceral sonic assault that completely removes you from what’s going on around and within you, this is a band you should definitely check out.  (more after the jump . . .)

Every now and then we’ve told you about a word or phrase we’ve stumbled upon that has nothing to do with metal, but sounds exactly like it oughta be the name of an extreme metal band. We’ve stuck those posts under the category of “Band Name Fodder.” Now we’ve stumbled across something new: words and phrases that have nothing to do with metal but sound like they could be the names of brutal songs.

You know the kind of song titles we’re talking about — the kind that at first blush (and sometimes second and third blushes) make no sense, but just sound really evil, uncompromising, and vicious.  Songs like:

“Carrion Sculpted Entity” (Cannibal Corpse), “Megacosm of the Aquaphobics” (Cephalic Carnage), “Postmortal Coprophagia” (Devourment), “Prosthetic Erection” (Annotations of An Autopsy), “Diaboloical Submergence of Rebirth” (Goatwhore), “Intestinal Putrefaction” (Abominable Putridity), “Pestiferous Subterfuge” (Aborted), “Gestation of Malevolence” (Abysmal Torment), “Cyclopian Scape” (High On Fire), “Ceremonian Disembowelment” (Impetuous Ritual), “Gestated Human Slurry” (Infected Disarray), “Damnation Pentastrike” (Lightning Swords of Death), “Into the Qliphot of Golachab” (Malfeitor), “Fermented Offal Discharge” (Necrophagist), “Postmortem Dissection” (The Pathology), “Cataclysmic Purification” (Suffocation), “Contemporary Perception Narcotics” (Trigger the Bloodshed), “Cranial Media Parasite” (Magrudergrind). And so on.

Well, just in case the well runs dry for bands like these (or they lose their thesaurus), we’ve found a gold mine of source material. (see what we’ve discovered after the jump . . .)