Yesterday, Meshuggah released the name of their new album — Koloss. That’s all the Meshuggah news we had, but we wrote about it anyway, explaining: “It’s really not much news, but frankly this is one of those albums where every tiny morsel will receive and deserve attention.” Today, we have more Meshuggah morsels. First, we have the album art — which is utter coolness. We also now have the track list. I’ve never figured out what good it does to have a track list before the music is released, but here it is:

01. I Am Colossus
02. The Demon’s Name Is Surveillance
03. Do Not Look Down
04. Behind The Sun
05. The Hurt That Finds You First
06. Marrow
07. Break Those Bones Whose Sinews Gave It Motion
08. Swarm
09. Demiurge
10. The Last Vigil

So, chew on that shit until we have the next morselage. And meanwhile, you can feast your eyes on another eye-catching piece of album art for another album we’re highly anticipating around here — the new one from Belgian black metal band Enthroned (after the jump).

I’m a day or two late reporting the schedule for Amon Amarth‘s European tour, but I forgive myself. What other U.S. metal blog is going to say anything about a European tour at all?

Exactly.   So there.

Yes, Amon Amarth will be embarking on a 15-country tour of the UK and the Continent beginning on October 12 in Stuttgart, Germany. Can you guess who will be supporting them on that tour? Go ahead — close your eyes so you don’t see the answer and take a guess.

If you guessed As I Lay Dying, then you’re a fucking genius. I sure wouldn’t have guessed that match-up, even though I like both bands and they’re both in the Metal Blade stable. If you do a word-association exercise, and you say the first band that comes to mind when someone says “AMON AMARTH!”, the odds are you’re not going to say “AS I LAY DYING!”

A band like Entombed would have been closer to what I would have guessed. But as it happens, you can sort of have that cake and eat it, too, because LG Petrov of Entombed provided guest vocals on “Guardians of Asgard” with Amon Amarth when the band played the Metalfest festival in Switzerland on May 29 — and of course it was captured on video. This is fan-filmed footage, so the audio quality isn’t ideal (though it isn’t terrible), but the video quality is pretty good.

Plus, I mean, it’s LG Petrov singing with Amon Amarth on “Guardians of Asgard”. If you’re as big a metal geek as I am (no need for you to confess out loud), you know you have to watch this, just so you’ll be able to die happy if you get flattened by a beer truck while crossing the street today. So, after the jump — Euro tour dates and that video.

In recent years, people have written books with the intent of dispelling various so-called “myths” about wolves. I haven’t read any of them, but they’re probably trying to tell us that wolves are actually warm, loving creatures who are good parents and self-sacrificng friends.

I haven’t read those books because I’d rather continue to think of wolves as vicious, red-eyed pack animals that would just as soon rip out your jugular as look at you. Life is too civilized as it is without having someone domesticate my mental image of the wolf.

Besides, that would detract from the awesomeness of Wolvhammer as a metal-band name. It would turn it into something like Puppyhammer. Or Puppyhummer. Or something equally tame. And Wolvhammer is anything but tame.

We first heard about Wolvhammer’s debut album, Black Marketeers of World War III,  via a feature in the current issue of DECIBEL magazine, which punched many of our buttons — so much so that we ran out and bought the album fast. And we are so glad we did.  (more after the jump, including a mixtape of music inspired by Wolvhammer . . .)

START OF TRANSCRIPT:

Me: Hey man, can I get a light?

Random Metalhead Outside a Club (“RM”):  Yeah, help yourself.

Me:  Thanks man.  (firing up a coffin nail) So, what did you think of that last band, Early Graves?

RM:  Mayhem, man! Just absolute fuckin’ mayhem!

Me:  Exactly!  It was like bein’ hit by a big fuckin’ truck, wakin’ up with tread marks embedded in your face.

RM:  Fuck yeah! That was some amazingly heavy shit. What the fuck were they playin’?

Me: All those songs were from their new album, Goner.

RM:  Good name for this kind of music, that’s for sure. It’s just, raw, eye-gouging, fuck-it-all shit. It’s like punk rock except with the heaviness dialed into the red zone.

Me: Yeah, I’m with you on that. Kinda reminded me of early Entombed, except faster, Entombed on a grindcore binge. Definitely heavy. That fuzzed-out bass is really up-front in the sound, and the fucking drummer just crushes his shit, absolutely fuckin’ berserk. But you’re right about the punk rock thing. It’s definitely got those punk rhythms and pacing.

RM:  But, you know, it wasn’t all just non-stop scorching. There was that one song that just started grinding down into a sludgy, crusty rhythm. That shit reminded me of this sweet car I used to have, the day the fucking engine just seized up on me. Sounded like the whole fuckin’ thing was coming apart and then it just stopped. Gaskets were just corroded to shit. I had to rebuild the motherfucker with money I didn’t have.

(more after the jump, including a song to hear . . .)

Sometimes simple, blunt-force trauma works just fine.

Evil Power, the recently-released album by Chicago’s Lair of the Minotaur, is a grab-bag of different musical styles. But the songs do have some things in common: They’re all nasty, stripped-down, unpretentious, in-your-face headbangers, and the album as a whole is a real bright spot in the year’s new releases to date.

The songs have one other important thing in common: They’re packed with more heavy, grinding bass and guitar riffs and power-hooks than any one band ought to be allowed.

As for those stylistic variations, the album includes thrash-metal stylings, sometimes mixed with hard-rock chords and drum fills (“Attack the Gods”), metal-infused punk rock rhythms (“Let’s Kill These Motherfuckers”), old-school death-metal riffs that could be straight out of Metalocalypse or Wolverine Blues-era Entombed (“Riders of Skullhammer”), stripped-down, blackened metal with plenty of tremolo-picked chords (“Goatstorm”), and sometimes combinations of almost all the above (“Blood From the Witch’s Vein,” “We Are Hades”).  (more after the jump, including a song to stream . . .)

In “Leviathan,” the philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that the life of man is “nasty, brutish, and short.” And that pretty much sums up the new LP from Austin’s Mammoth Grinder. Extinction of Humanity is 21 minutes of  distorted, stripped-down, feedback-accented, in-your-face, slash-and-sludge mayhem.

If you knew nothing about the band other than its name and that awesome, smoking, skull-faced, album cover above, you’d prudently prepare yourself for some ass-kicking, and you’d be right. Mammoth Grinder has thrown an unusual grab-bag of ingredients into the blender — garage-punk drum rhythms, a mash-up of grindcore pacing and sludgy trudging, harsh vocals somewhere between a hardcore howl and a death-metal growl, and a smorgasboard of heavy, fuzzed-out guitar stylings.

The resulting concoction is massively intoxicating. If you could really drink this venomous brew, it would lead you on the kind of romping binge that leaves you wondering at daylight what the hell you’d done the night before and where all that blood on your hands came from.

To find an analogue to what Extinction of Humanity delivers, scroll back through your catalogue and listen to Wolverine Blues (1993) from Entombed or (not quite as close a fit) Dismember‘s Like An Ever Flowing Stream (1991). Extinction is not strictly old-school death metal, but more like old-school, Swedish-style death ‘n’ roll — except maybe even more visceral in its appeal.  (read more after the jump, and listen to a song . . .)