Sunday’s usually aren’t big days for news about the release of new metal. But this morning brought my bleary eyes a few revelations (and no, I haven’t foreseen Armageddon). One discovery concerns a Norwegian band called Hellish Outcast who we’ve featured here before. The other came via an e-mail recommendation from ElvisShotJFK – a reader who’s been with us since early days at NCS. It’s a slice of instrumental metal from a German band called Nimbatus, whose entire discography happens to be available at no charge.

This music is all really good, despite being on nearly opposite poles of the metal sphere. So, I thought I’d throw this post together on the spur of the minute. For those of you who couldn’t be bothered to wade through that book-length post we put up a bit earlier today, all you’ve got to do with this one is just close your eyes and listen.

HELLISH OUTCAST

The last time we checked in with this band (about a month ago), they’d just released an official music video for a song called “Face Forced Down”, which appears on their debut album, Your God Will Bleed. (Go here to check out that video.) We thought that song was a crushing aural onslaught by some dudes who know what the fuck they’re doing: Thebon (Keep of Kalessin‘s vocalist), Mads Lillevedt (a/k/a Alkolust, the drummer for Byfrost), bassist Max Morbid (BREED), and guitarist Martin Legreid (66Crusher). As of this morning, we’ve got two more new songs from the album to set our heads on fire. (more after the jump . . .)

I’m still in guerilla mode (or gorilla mode) here at NCS — short on time and only able to burst through the door, throw randomized pieces of music your way, and then vanish, while relying on our other regular contributors and guests to do the real writing. In this post, I’ve got new songs from three Norwegian bands whose music covers a wide swath of the Norwegian metal landscape: Hellish Outcast, 66Crusher, and Taake. We’re even making an exception to the normal rule around here with some clean singing. All this music is righteous, so do check it out.

HELLISH OUTCAST

What do you get when you combine Thebon (Keep of Kalessin‘s vocalist), Mads Lillevedt (a/k/a Alkolust, the drummer for Byfrost), bassist Max Morbid (BREED), and guitarist Martin Legreid (66Crusher)? You get Hellish Outcast. We first came across this band for one of our MISCELLANY posts last July (you can read about that here). At that time, Thebon had just joined the band, and they were working on a debut album. Lacking new music, we focused on a 2008 EP called Raping-Killing-Murder, which we liked a lot.

Hellish Outcast has now finished that full-length — Your God Will Bleed — and Terrorizer has just premiered an official video for the song “Face Forced Down”. My reaction? I think someone left the gates of Hell unlocked and these dudes got out. (more after the jump . . .)

Time for another installment of this Twitter-ish log in which I presume you’re interested in how I spent my morning, skipping over such vital details as what I ate for breakfast, what I’m wearing, and where my cat is licking himself right now.

Have no fear, this is just a log of the metal I listened to and watched in my latest internet browsing session — following up on press releases, MySpace add requests, and e-mail recommendations, and just some general fucking around. In all cases (with one exception), I had no previous exposure to the bands, and so no real clue whether what I found would be good, bad, or indifferent.

So, here’s what I did, in order of doing it, with no filtering and no guarantees that any of this will be worth your time — though I’m guessing most of what I found will be as new to you as it was to me. The bands I checked out are: Hellish Outcast (Norway); Citi (California); Episode 13 (Turkey); Darkness Dynamite (France); The Forrest Gump Mile High Marathon (Mars); and the one exception mentioned above, Bloodbath (Sweden).

HELLISH OUTCAST

I started off by exploring the music of Hellish Outcast, which is from that historical hot-bed of black metal, Bergen, Norway. We’d received a press release announcing the news that Thebon, frontman for the awesome Keep of Kalessin, would be joining Hellish Outcast as its new vocalist. (Have no fear KOK fans, Thebon hasn’t left that band, he’s just pulling double-duty). And then I found out that one of Hellish Outcast’s founders and its current drummer is Mads Lillevedt, who’s a member of the also-awesome Bergen band Byfrost. (We reviewed the latest albums by KOK and Byfrost here and here.)

That was more than enough incentive to visit the band’s MySpace page (here) and listen to some tunes from their 2008 EP, with the inviting title, Raping – Killing – Murder. And I’ll tell you what I thought — after the jump.