This is Part 19 — the final Part — of our list of the most infectious extreme metal songs released in 2011. Each day since we started this list, I’ve been posting two songs that made the cut. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the Introduction via this link. To see the selections that preceded this one, click the Category link on the right side of the page called MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011.
All good things must come to an end, and today I’m ending this list with the final three songs. Yes, there are three songs today instead of the two per-day that appeared in every previous installment of this series. And that means the list is ending with 39 songs — an odd number for a list (in both senses of the word) — but wtf, I myself am odd.
In the next day or two, we’ll pull together every song we’ve named to this 2011 list in a single post where all of them can be streamed, and with links for each one back to the original features where we added them to the list. Tomorrow, we’ll also have an “Honorable Mention” list, though it’s not really a list of extreme metal songs that narrowly missed being included here. I’ll explain tomorrow. Now, let’s wrap this thing up.
KRODA
Schwarzpfad is probably my favorite 2011 black metal album of all the ones I heard last year. You could probably figure that out based on how often we wrote about Kroda last year. Our latest mention was in a post that included video of the band playing a live set on December 18 at the OSKOREI festival in Kiev, Ukraine. Before that, Schwarzpfad showed up on Andy Synn’s list of the year’s Critical Top 10 albums, as well as his list of 2011′s Great Albums.
(We’re fortunate to have a return visit from our guest contributor The Baby Killer, with his review of the new Immolation EP released for free by Scion A/V.)
We all love hearing success stories in death metal; bands withstanding the test of time and consistently pumping out quality tunes for years and years. Everyone knows the big names like Cannibal Corpse, Suffocation et al, but one name you don’t hear often enough is Immolation. More than two decades have passed since the band first put music to tape, and they’re still standing strong, ready and willing to go toe-to-toe with any modern death metal band, and as their brand new EP Providence shows, these New York veterans still pack a mean punch.
If one were to sum up this EP in one word, it would have to be “ominous”. Each of the five songs has its own individual flow and feel, but they are all tied together by a sense of foreboding, something Immolation have always been good at capturing in their music. From the opening track “What They Bring” to the closer “Swallow the Fear”, the band’s twenty-plus years of expertise in all things dark and evil shines through, permeating everything from Ross Dolan’s signature monstrous growls to the beefy, precise drumming of Steve Shalaty. Many newer bands would do well to take notes on Immolation, because if you’re trying to sound evil, it’s not about how low your guitar is tuned or how many dead priests you have on your album art — it’s about the tone, pure and simple.
Another thing that stood out to me about Providence was that it seems to follow a much steadier beat than the majority of the band’s previous efforts. When they first came around, Immolation were notorious for their syncopation and unconventional time signatures (I’m pretty sure “No Jesus No Beast” is in 3/3, or something close to it), but this time around they seem more focused on creating a steady, driving rhythm tailor-made for head banging and scene-kid stomping. This is obviously not a bad thing, though, and for two reasons. (more after the jump . . .)
As I did my daily perusing on the interhole last night, two new videos caught my bloodshot eyes. They made me gnash my teeth and scowl. They made me want to bust up shit, but since I owned all the nearby shit and was too lazy to go next door and bust up my neighbor’s shit, I refrained. They made me want to drink blood and dine on fresh fetuses, but all I could find was a beer and a chicken breast. However, I scowled and growled while I ate and drank, because it is death fucking metal and it is black as rotten teeth.
Only five days ago we wrote about Scion A/V releasing a free EP of Immolation songs called Providence. In a bomb-burst of enthusiasm, I called it one of the best death metal releases of the year. I picked my favorite track from the EP to stream with that post, “Illumination”. In a testament to the wisdom of clean living and human sacrifice, I was rewarded last night by the release of an official video for that self-same track, financed by Scion A/V. I hope Scion A/V gets at least one new car sale out of this. I don’t know why they would, but they fucken deserve it. And you deserve to download the EP, which you can do HERE.
The other video is a French band called Svart Crown playing two songs at the Evening of Metal Festival at the Salle Aragon in Saint Dizier, France on October 8. I discovered this band almost exactly one year ago when I reviewed their second album, Witnessing the Fall. Coincidentally, I compared them to a joint venture between Immortal and . . . Immolation. I still fucking love that album, and finally, through this video, I now get to see Svart Crown put a skull-creasing beatdown on a live audience. Vidz after the jump. Death fucking metal. Fuck yeah, as they say in French.
Free song downloads are good. They are better than simply getting the chance to stream a new song, which requires you to be hooked up to your computer or some other device with a solid net connection. They sound better when you play them back, and you can carry them around with you so you can listen while you’re out and about doing whatever scintillating things you do while out and about, or even when you’re parked on the throne in the midst of an eye-watering bowel evacuation.
Yesterday I discovered three free song downloads from bands we like around here: Hypocrisy (Sweden), Graveworm (Italy), and Immolation (U.S.). The songs? We like them, too. Quite a lot, in fact. And the Immolation offering was a very pleasant surprise — while only one song was promised, the download link provides an entire EP of music, and it happens to be one of the best death metal releases of the year.
HYPOCRISY
On October 21, Nuclear Blast will release a new DVD/CD combo from Hypocrisy called Hell Over Sofia – 20 Years of Chaos and Confusion. The disc will contain film of the band’s February 27, 2010 concert at the Blue Box club in Sofia, Bulgaria — which Hypocrisy called “one of our best shows ever in our history” — as well as a 90-minite documentary about the band’s 20-year history. Yesterday, Nuclear Blast made available for free download (at this location) one of the live performance tracks — “Roswell 47″, from the band’s 1996 album, Abducted.
Oh baby, did yesterday bring some titillating musical teasers. Actually, only two of the four teasers featured in this post are actual music. The other two are simply forecasts of music that will become available shortly.
By the way, I’m writing this in a hurry because I’m about to leave for the airport. The old fucking day job is sending me to the East Coast for a couple of days. I’ll tell you, the life of a coke mule isn’t as glamorous as it’s cracked up to be. The prospect of parking my tender, balloon-filled butt in a cramped airplane seat for 5+ hours isn’t appealing. But it comes with the territory, y’know? Anyway, when I ignore all your comments until tonight, it won’t mean I don’t love you.
THY CATAFALQUE
This talented Hungarian band has already teased us about their new album on Season of Mist, Rengeteg, which won’t actually see the full light of day until November 11 and fucking January 10, 2012 in North America. Yes, last month we got some snippets of music (featured at NCS here) — not even a full song, but certainly enough to stir our loins in anticipation. Now we have a full song, the first to debut from the new album. It’s called “Fekete mezők”, which means “black fields”. And guess what? Season of Mist has made it available for free download HERE. Listen up (right after the jump):
We’ve been using these SHORT BUT SWEET entries to catch up with new EP releases by bands both well known and not so well known. It’s safe to say that Gorod falls into the well-known category — and if by chance you haven’t yet explored their music, the time has come.
It’s not uncommon to see this French band branded with the label “technical death metal”, but over three albums, they’ve been outgrowing it; it has become too limiting as a description. With the band’s new EP, Transcendence, it may need to be discarded altogether. Hell, even the term “metal” may now be too limiting. Gorod has reached the point where no familiar shorthand term can any longer capture the exuberant originality of their music.
Transcendence could be interpreted as simply a way-station between albums, or as a transition from what has come before to whatever comes next, or maybe even as simply a convenient way for Gorod to collect songs that they don’t know what else to do with.
After all, Gorod has self-released this EP, three of the five tracks are re-recordings of previously released songs, and a fourth is a cover of a Cynic song that Gorod recorded about three years ago for inclusion in a tribute to Cynic’s Focus album; that tribute album was released last year by something called Metal Factory Records and got almost no attention.
But don’t be misled — this EP is an unqualified triumph of songwriting skill and instrumental brilliance and a testament to Gorod’s diverse talents. Every song is worth hearing — and most especially the one completely new song, a 15-minute extravaganza of metallic deliciousness. (more after the jump . . .)
Merry fucking Christmas.
Wait a minute, that was pretty rude. Let’s start this again.
To all of you who look forward to Christmas and will be celebrating the day with your families in a spirit of cheer and good will to all, Merry Christmas and have a safe and joyous holiday.
To everyone else, Merry fucking Christmas. We have for you a special edition of THAT’S METAL!.
Yes, that blessed day is finally upon us — blessed, in our minds, because it will now be another year before we have to endure all the shitty holiday music and non-stop force-feeding of advertisements for the gifts we should buy family members, whether we want to be in the same family with them or not.
To help you endure the day, we have just a few items, to really help get you in the proper holiday spirit of endurance: A heart-warming story about creativity with beer cans; a couple of videos that really bring the fucking Christmas cheer; and our own, specially selected NCS version of holiday carols (you know what we mean — blasphemous headbanging carols, the kind you won’t hear at the mall or in any church).
Enjoy all our Christmas presents for you . . . after the jump. And don’t eat the yellow snow.
When you mentally strip away all the small and large luxuries of life, you are left with the basic rudiments of existence, the core elements necessary for subsistence — food, water, shelter, and in our case, death metal. Nothing fancy, mind you, just the stripped-down, fuzzed-out, palm-muted, drop-tuned, guttural-voiced, percussive approach of the old school, preferably played at a galloping pace.
Rhythmic dynamics and squalling guitar solos are plus factors. Melody is not required.
Eye-catching album art is also a plus, like that busy piece of black-and-white ghoulishness up above by an Indonesian underground artist who calls herself “Oikwasfuk“, depicting the Virgin Mary being impaled by a flying-v guitar while five zombies eat her alive. You know, fun for the whole family! Bring the kids!
Yes, when the band wrote us, they cleverly used that piece of art to hook our attention, like fish caught in a gill net — that, and the band’s viciously cool one-word name. But that was only the beginning. The art and the name only lured us into the music, which in this case (to persist with our commercial fishery metaphor) works like a processing plant — removing the head, guts, and pin bones and then blast-freezing the carcass.
The band is Carcinogen, the album is a five-song EP called Unholy Aggression, and the very satisfying sound is death/thrash of the old school. (more after the jump . . .)
On July 5, we tried a little experiment. Indulging in the same kind of presumptuousness that motivates people to tweet about their latest meal or the last time they washed their underwear, we just described the music we’d randomly checked out that morning — whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. None of the bands was known to us, and we didn’t actually like everything we found, but we wrote about all of it anyway — just because that’s what we heard.
A few readers actually seemed to like the idea, and we’re desperate for approval, so we’ll do it again. But not today. Today, we’re doing something that’s a little more focused and we’re exercising a bit more judgment. But in a way, this post started just as impulsively as the one on July 5.
We were over at Steff Metal‘s blog and got into a sick mixtape she had created (here), the subject of which was music with an ancient Egyptian theme (though not played by bands from Egypt). That got us to thinking (always a dangerous pastime) and we realized that we knew very damned little about Egyptian metal bands.
So, we started exploring, and the path we wandered hooked us up not only with some really good Egyptian metal, but also with metal from some other North African countries — Tunisia and Morocco, to be precise. We found enough interesting shit that we’re dividing this post into three parts: One band today (Scarab) and the next three over the two following days.
To be clear, we’re not pretending this is some kind of authoritative survey. We didn’t do in-depth research, and we didn’t listen to dozens of bands and then selectively whittle down the group. We’re way too half-assed for that. We just jumped into the fast-moving current of the internet and waited to see where we’d be washed up on shore.
And by sheer chance, we wound up with a little bit of everything — some death metal, some oriental black metal, and some progressive/folk metal — but what we found was awesome. So open your minds and your ears and we’ll show you what we found. (beginning after the jump, of course . . .)
Miseration‘s new album, The Mirroring Shadow, is not at all what we were expecting — but it’s a most welcome surprise.
Our expectations were based on the band’s first album, 2007′s Your Demons – Their Angels. That album was a particularly melodic rendering of melodic death metal, marked by the same mixture of clean singing and harsh growling that vocalist Christian Älvestam brought to his former band, Scar Symmetry. In fact, the similarities to Scar Symmetry were far more dominant than the differences.
That wasn’t a bad thing (cuz we liked the old Scar Symmetry just fine), but it seemed to us that Älvestam’s partnership in Miseration with guitarist/drummer Jani Stefanovic had become less a catalyst for change than a vehicle for continuing on with the songwriting style and musical sound of the band Älvestam had just left.
But on The Mirroring Shadow, Miseration has become a different breed of cat altogether. And we mean something like a prehistoric sabretooth — big, fast, powerful, vicious, and with teeth the size of carving knives. (more after the jump, including songs to hear and a digression about album artwork. . .)