Cerebral Metalhead is a blog we like to visit because it often turns us on to new music we don’t encounter elsewhere and because the album reviews are so well-written. On our latest visit, we read a glowing review of a self-released album called Monolith by an unsigned Atlanta prog-metal band named From Exile. So we quickly got the album, and we gotta agree — this is an amazing piece of work, and we feel compelled to help spread the word.

At its core, From Exile are two very talented guitarists — Eric Guenther and Ben Wetzelberger. On Monolith, they are joined on drums by the ever-awesome Kevin Talley from Daath. And the Daath connection doesn’t stop there. Eyal Levi co-produced the album with Guenther, handled the mixing chores, and provided a guest guitar solo on a song called “In the Faded Silence.” And the Daath connection still doesn’t stop there: Guitarist extraordinaire Emil Werstler added another guest guitar solo on “Apparition.”

Basically, with magnificent help from Talley’s accomplished drumwork, Monolith is a 32-minute treatise on guitar metal. If you found yourself on Pandora with nothing but an electric guitar and you were trying to explain it to one of those blue Na’vi, we imagine the conversation would go something like this: “Yeah, that neural thing you got on the end of your braid is pretty cool, but this thing is a fuckin’ electric guitar, and if you wanna know all the sounds it can make, slot your braid into my iPod and listen to Monolith.” (read more after the jump, and listen to a track . . .)

That may be a slight exaggeration, but only a sight one. The album threads together arena-rock riffs, sublimely beautiful meditations, heavy-as-shit headbanging chuggery, blistering solos, and soaring anthems — among other things. Sometimes one guitar, sometimes two playing in harmony or at counterpoint, this is a work created by people who love the instrument and damn-well know how to use it, and the songs are intelligently constructed to make full use of that knowledge.

A few of the songs include electronically altered vocals, but this is really one long instrumental work, with each song bleeding seamlessly and without pause into the next. As the songs shift in tempo and texture, they evoke a range of feelings and beautiful images. We think of it as the sonic equivalent of those time-lapse films of massive open skies that rapidly display dramatic changes in the weather and the light over the space of a single day. Every time I listen to it, a goofy grin comes over my face. (Correction: a goofier than usual grin.)

Two years in the making, Monolith is quite evidently the product of a shitload of thought, work, and attention to detail. Among other things, the album includes judicious use of various electronic effects, classical acoustic guitar interludes, piano outros, and strings — but nothing happens that isn’t intelligently calculated to contribute meaningfully and effectively to the whole listening experience. And it all works.

It’s evident that we’re completely bowled over by this album. Monolith is the kind of music that appeals to both the right and the left sides of the brain — plus the reptile part that produces convulsive headbanging.

Picking any one song as a sample of the whole is hard, particularly because each one is simply a movement in a well-constructed symphony, but here you go. Have a listen to the first track on Monolith — and if you like what you hear, the whole album is available for immediate download (at a reasonable price) at From Exile’s website.

From Exile: Arrival

P.S.  Attention record label geniuses:  Someone go sign Eric and Ben so they can afford to fill out the line-up for a touring band and come play for us in Seattle.

We didn’t start this blog site until Nov 23 last year.  So when metal bands were releasing albums earlier in 2009, we weren’t around to publicly flap our gums about them. We’ve been trying to make up for lost time by occasionally writing about bands whose 2009 releases really made an impression on us.

Today we’re writing about a band from Toulouse, France called Eryn Non Dae, and their striking 2009 full-length debut, Hydra Lernaïa — an album unlike anything else we heard last year and one of our favorites.

The band was also kind enough to participate in an interview by e-mail, and we’ll run that in Part 2 of this post tomorrow. We tried to come up with some unusual questions, and what we got back was consistent with the music these dudes create.  They didn’t just dash off the first thoughts that popped into their heads — they took their time, and their answers are thoughtful, intelligent, thought-provoking and far from run of the mill. Definitely come back here tomorrow and check it out.

In the meantime, if you’re not familiar with the band, allow us to introduce you to them and to the unique album they dropped on an unsuspecting world last year. (continue reading after the jump . . .)

Originally formed in 2001 under the name “END,” Eryn Non Dae subsequently changed vocalists, recorded an EP in 2005 called Never Ending Whirl of Confusion, and released Hydra Lernaïa last summer.  Before that release, the band signed to Metal Blade records and changed their name to Eryn Non Dae, while hanging on to the acronym END (which we’ll also use here).

Hydra Lernaïa is an ambitious, dark, densely layered, often violent undertaking. It explores nine destructive emotions that human beings try to control or eliminate but that, like the many heads of the mythical hydra, persist in coming back. Driven by that concept, the band sought to make the album a single, integrated listening experience, instead of just a collection of unconnected songs — and they succeeded. While each song can be heard standing alone, interesting things happen emotionally when you listen to the album straight through.

END’s sound on Hydra Lernaïa reflects the acknowledged influence of Meshuggah in the complexity of the drumwork, the math-metal rhythmic complexity and tempo shifting, and the staccato bursts of heavy chugging in the riffs. But the music has a less controlled, more chaotic, more emotional feel to it than we get from much of Meshuggah’s repertoire. Alternating between brutal headbanging heaviness and shrieking turbulent intricacy, the music has a very experimental, discordant, anarchic vibe. It’s dense, intense, grim, sharply angled, and often surreal.

Mathieu Nogues‘s vocals are reminiscent of the kind of higher-range hardcore vocals you’ll find in Converge, but include spoken-word interludes, chanting, and electronically altered passages — all geared toward combining with the instrumental work to create a particular mood or emotional impact, whether it be rage, fear, despair, or resignation.

Most of the songs are fast and furious, but even the real pummeling blasters include unexpected, slower instrumental interludes or concluding passages that bring a pronounced prog-metal or doom flavor to the banquet. “Lam Tsol Oua” is a purely instrumental piece that begins with bleak ambient noise and evolves into a moody, synthesizer-driven melody, while the concluding song, “Pure,” is a discordant, mid-tempo, experimental piece that clocks in at over 10 minutes in length and displays little of the tempo-shifting so much in evidence elsewhere on the album. It’s more a series of variations on an a drone-oriented apocalyptic theme.

Hydra Lernaïa is an adventure in the unexpected. It’s obviously the product of considerable thought, extensive work, and a high level of technical proficiency in the playing — nothing less could have succeeded in realizing on such an ambitious game-plan. This is dark math metal with brains as well as brawn, and emotional power as well as rigorous complexity. And in that sense, Hydra Lernaïa achieves a kind of “balance,” but it is “balance” at its most extreme.

Not long ago we read a superb piece posted by Daath‘s Eyal Levi on the Metal Sucks site. Among other things, he said this:

“The more I go on the more I appreciate and respect bands that play real music, whether or not I listen to them. . . . Most people in bands completely underestimate the audience. They think that they need to dumb down their sound to make it suitable for mass consumption. . . . Seems like people forget that this is metal, not pop or mainstream radio rock. . . . You can do whatever you want in music, just be great and honest with it and at it, and the audience will come. True artistry wins. . . . I’m hoping this means that we’re transitioning into an era in metal where bands that have real, challenging, fearless music to offer are taking the cake.”

When he wrote this, Eyal could have been talking about Eryn Non Dae. Hydra Lernaïa is “real, challenging, fearless” music. We’re anxious to see what these dudes do next.

Before you go, check out this artistic video of END’s “The Decline and the Fall.”  Its swirling colors and flashes of disturbing images suit the music quite well. And be sure to come back to NCS tomorrow for our interview with END in Part 2 of this feature. You’ll find some interesting info about where END has been, where it’s going, the band’s creative process, and even some interesting recommendations for other metal being produced in France.

VIDEO “The decline and the fall” !!!!

Eryn Non Dae. New WEBSHOP!!! | MySpace Music Videos

Here at NCS, we’re putting a different spin on year-end listmania. Ours isn’t a list of the best metal full-lengths of the year. It’s not even necessarily our list of the best individual extreme metal songs of the year. Ours is a list of the most infectious extreme metal songs we’ve heard this year. We’re talking about songs that produce involuntary physical movement and worm their way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get ‘em out (and wouldn’t want to).

We’re not ranking our list from #10 to #1 because that would be too much fucking work (and your co-Authors would still be arguing about it this time next year). So, our list is in no particular order. We’re also dribbling the songs out one at a time because your lazy Authors are still debating what belongs in the remaining slots. (Yes, still.) Our list heretofore:

1.  Asphyx:  Sorbutics

2.  Mastodon:  Crack the Skye

3.  Amorphis:  Silver Bride

4.  Goatwhore: Apocalyptic Havoc

5.  August Burns Red:  Meridian

6.  Pelican:  Ephemeral

7.  Scale the Summit: Age of the Tide

And to see our eighth entry on the list, continue reading after the jump.

Our last two entries to the Most Infectious list were a pair of progressive-metal instrumentals played by two bands with amazing technical chops. Today’s entry is also from a group of dudes with top-shelf technical skills, but with a very different sound.

Someone is going to have to come up with a new sub-genre category for Daath. None of the existing labels really fit to a tee. Their 2009 release, The Concealers, is recognizably death metal, but though it’s heavy as shit, it’s groove-oriented, packed with pyrotechnical guitar work from Eyal Levi and Emil Werstler, melodic in just the right places, and feverishly infectious from start to finish. Sean Z’s scorching vocals and the instrumental work of Levi, Werstler, drummer Kevin Talley, and bassist Jeremy Creamer are completely integrated into achieving a well-planned design for each song.  As we said, very heavy, but very catchy from beginning to end.  Daath is on the road to defining a unique sound that is distinctively its own. Daath Metal? Daathcore? Whatever the label, it’s death metal you gotta move to.

There’s nothing bland on The Concealers — every song is distinctive, and every track is capable of worming its way into your brain and making a home there. But there’s one song we come back to again and again. It’s probably not the best, most fully realized song on the album — but shit, is it catchy!

“Wilting On the Vine” establishes itself with an epic riff, plays around with variations on that riff (augmented by Sean Z’s syncopated vocals), then drops into a lower gear to launch a shredtastic guitar solo by Werstler, which accelerates back up to the original tempo where the earlier infectious riff makes a triumphant return. Unadulterated, headbanging fun. (And speaking of guitar god Emil Werstler, if you didn’t catch the series of jaw-dropping videos posted last month by Metal Sucks, definitely watch them here.)

There you have it. The eighth entry on our Most Infectious list is “Wilting On the Vine” by Daath. Have a listen:

Wilting on the Vine

And as a bonus, here’s some vid of Daath performing “Wilting on the Vine” in Paris two months ago. The audio is not the best (listen to the audio stream above to really hear the song), but the video quality is decent and it’s fun to watch the guys rip into this song: