In 2003 a Ukrainian black metal band called Drudkh (the Sanskrit word for “wood”) released their debut album, Forgotten Lands. One of the long songs on the album was called “Eternal Turn of the Wheel”. Nine years later, Season of Mist is about to release Drudkh’s ninth album — Eternal Turn of the Wheel.

I’ve not heard much of Drudkh’s music — a song here, a song there, including a great (long) track called “Skies At Our Feet” from the Estrangement album that I featured in an NCS post about a year and a half ago and another great song called “Furrows of Gods ” from the Blood In Our Wells album, which Johan Huldtgren put on his list of the best 10 albums of the last 10 years in this guest post.

Late last week, NPR premiered a song from the new album, one called “When Gods Leave Their Emerald Halls”. Season of Mist described the song this way: “”When the Gods Leave Their Emerald Halls” witnesses Ukrainian Black Metal heroes musically returning to their dark roots. Taken from the album “Eternal Turn of the Wheel”, which represents the ancient pagan cycle of the seasons, this track portrays the blue skies and Ukraine’s golden fields being harvested. The wheel turns to the twilight of autumn and leaves wither from emerald green to fiery red and blazing yellow gold before crumbling to the black and brown of winter…”

Unfortunately, the NPR page no longer includes the audio stream, but the song has surfaced on YouTube. And it’s quite a song.

This is really the fourth installment of MISCELLANY, but I like my photo caption better as a title than “Miscellany (No. 4)”.  And actually, seeing the photo up above was part of my morning’s journey around the webz, so it’s a legitimate part of this post.

The eye-catching image at the top is a new addition to the photo albums on Grave’s Facebook page. I don’t know whether the person executing the autograph is a member of Grave or another band, but his penmanship is amazingly good, under the circumstances. (To see our review of Grave’s new album, go here.)

The rest of this post is a log of my morning’s browsing around the internet, randomly checking out music from bands I’d never heard before. The way this MISCELLANY thing works, I have no advance idea whether the music will be good, bad, or indifferent, so I can’t offer you any guarantees either. I just dutifully set out what I found, and presume you’ll be interested.

Here are the bands I checked out this morning: Drudkh, Sickening, Psycho Enhancer, and Infinite Tales.

Oh yeah, as icing on the cake, we’ve got a stupendous Gojira video to close out this post.  (all this shit, after the jump . . .)