If someone were to ask me, “Why is Finnish metal so awesome?”, I would answer, “Because it’s metal from Finland, you dork!” — and then I’d give the Nerd Laugh, the one that’s part snort and all-knowing. And if I were being asked by a big hairy dude with no nerd sense of humor, I’d follow that quickly with some examples, one of which would be Before the Dawn.
The band was started in 1999 by the prolific Tuomas Saukkonen (also a member of Black Sun Aeon, Dawn of Solace, and RoutaSielu), and their 2011 album (their sixth), Deathstar Rising, was one of our favorites (I also named a song from the album to our list of 2011′s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs — here). Their combination of hard-driving riffs and dark, beautiful, hook-filled melodies is a great example of the kind of gothic melodic death metal at which the Finns have excelled.
Part of the band’s appeal has been the one-two vocal punch delivered by Saukkonen (whose harsh delivery is killer) and bass player Lars Eikind. Elkind is gone, unfortunately, but of course that hasn’t stopped Saukkonen for a minute. Here’s a January 25 note posted by the band (which I only just saw, thanks to a tip from KevinP):
Finnish melancholic melodic death metal outfit BEFORE THE DAWN returns after living through a phase of changes and uncertainty – cleansed, renewed and stronger than ever! Leaving pieces of both the musical and personal past behind, mastermind Tuomas Saukkonen, lead guitarist Juho Räihä and their new companions get ready for conquering your ears with the finest blend of northern gloom and harsh melodic death metal.
Their seventh studio album and at the same time second release via Nuclear Blast Records is entitled “Rise Of The Phoenix” and will arise from the ashes on the 27th of April 2012!
Very welcome news indeed. After the jump, the track list . . . and news about the next Marduk album.
Since the end of last week we’ve accumulated some small collections of new music that we think are very sweet. In a way, they’re all teasers for longer and grander things to come from some very good bands. Consider us well and truly teased. But this isn’t like getting all hot and bothered with a chick in the backseat of your car and then being denied the payoff. No, this is a good kind of tease.
By the way, I’m so fucking old I don’t even know if dudes and chicks use the backseats of cars as a venue for getting hot and bothered any more. But the no-payoff part? I’m damned sure that’s still happening.
Where was I? Oh yeah, brief offerings of new music from some killer bands. Today, we’re featuring one of them — Sweden’s Marduk (Sweden) — and over the weekend we’ll have some more. If you’re looking for pretty music, I’m afraid you’ll have to keep looking. If you want music that’s dark, powerful, and . . . well . . . skull-fucking, then you’ve come to the right place. First up, Marduk.
One of the true behemoth’s of Scandinavian black metal, Marduk are releasing a new EP called Iron Dawn. Regain Records will release the EP on May 27 at The Maryland Deathfest, where Marduk will be making an appearance. The EP will also be available at six other North American shows that Marduk will be playing in May and June (the Seven Bowls of Wrath Tour) , and then there’ll be a worldwide release of the EP on May 30.
Marduk is also working on a full-length album projected for release sometime in early 2012, but according to the press notice we received, the EP “differs from the concept that is being created” for that album. This EP is anything but a tossed-off gap-filler between full releases. It’s riveting music from start to finish. (more after the jump . . .)
Technically, we should have posted this yesterday, but yesterday was April Fool’s Day, and people might have thought we were making up some of this shit. But it’s all true, and nothing happens on April 2 to plant doubt about truth. Except for what causes doubt to be planted about truth on any other day of the year.
Here we are at the beginning of the second quarter of 2011 — the time when for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, spring is supposed to spring. Where I live, spring has apparently been victimized by a brutal street mugging and is hospitalized at the moment. A few plants have been deluded into thinking it’s spring, but for the rest of our local world, it’s still fucking winter.
Fortunately, the change of the seasons have fuck all to do with the release of metal. What we do with these installments of METAL IN THE FORGE is collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last 30 days (or in this case, the last 31 days) about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know them yet. And in this post, we cut and paste the announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.
This isn’t a cumulative list, so be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming New Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported in previous installments. This month’s list begins right after the jump. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones. There’s some awesome shit on the way. Dive in after the jump.
November is now in our rear-view mirror. December lies ahead of us: A perfectly good stretch of road marred by the speed bumps of the cataclysm that is Christmas. And on the other side of those speed bumps is the end of the year – the roadkill that is New Year’s Eve. And you know what the run-up to year-end brings — year-end lists. It’s already started, but the coming weeks will bring us a slew of Best of 2010 album lists. We’ll probably do our own Best of 2010 list — not the best albums of the year, but, as we did last year, the most infectious extreme metal songs of the year.
But we’re not quite ready to launch that list. Instead, we’re looking off into the future, not backward at the music that’s rattled our skulls over the past year. Yes, it’s time for another monthly installment of METAL IN THE FORGE, in which we cobble together a list of forthcoming new albums, cribbing like rag-gatherers and lint-pickers from PR releases and metal news sites like Blabbermouth in order to construct a line-up of new music that we’re interested in hearing.
All of our previous monthly updates can be found via the “Forthcoming Albums” category link on the right side of our pages, and because we’re not keeping a cumulative list, you might want to check the last couple months of these posts if you want to get a full picture of what’s coming. The list that follows, in alphabetical order, are albums we didn’t know about at the time of our last installment, or updated info about albums we’d previously heard were on the way. After the jump, of course . . .
Yes, Christmas Eve is upon us again. Unless you’re very lucky, you’ve already heard during this holiday season a rendition of ”Santa Clause Is Coming to Town” by one or more of the thousand douchebags who’ve recorded it. First performed in November 1934 on Eddie Cantor’s radio show, and the fucking thing just won’t go away. The song has been inflicted on generations of kids, basically as a way of scaring them into being “good.” You know the lyrics:
He sees you when you’re sleeping,
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake.
Seriously, that’s some nasty shit. And you, gentle readers — that song can’t make you feel very cozy. If you’re reading this site, then you can’t possibly have been very good — and as the perpetrators of an extreme metal site, it goes without saying that we hope you’ve been very, very bad.
Of course, that means your home won’t be visited tonight by the jolly old elf with the rosy cheeks and the “Ho! Ho! Ho!” You’ll be visited by the nasty looking orc up at the top of this post who’s decided your liver would taste yummy with a nice chianti and a side of fava beans. When he shrieks “Ho! Ho! Ho!”, it’s an accusation.
Santa Claus appears to have his roots in pre-Christian pagan traditions prevalent in Northern Europe. (See, e.g., our post earlier today about burning the goat.) So if even the jolly Santa is fundamentally a pagan figure, just imagine how brootally pagan Evil Santa is. No doubt the soundtrack accompanying his grisly visit to your abode tonight will sound something like this:
And in case you have trouble deciphering the lyrics from Evil Santa’s aforesaid theme song, here’s a taste:
Ever faithful — to unfaithfulness
Endlessly truthful — to untruthfulness
[We're skipping this line to, uh, protect the children]
Thus my Ascension bound — to boundlessness
Nighty night! Don’t let the bed bugs bite.
I don’t read The New York Times regularly. I’ll make a wild guess: I bet most visitors to this site don’t read it either. If you do, you need to rearrange your priorities. There are only so many hours in the day, and you’d be happier if you spent more time here at NO CLEAN SINGING, or any of the linked sites over to the right, and less on The New York Times. But though I don’t read that paper regularly, I’ve got friends who do, and three of them e-mailed me about an article that appeared there today entitled “Thank You Professor, That Was Putrid.”
The word that first came to mind after I read it was “bizarre.” The second word was “fucking pretentious.” The article describes a six-hour symposium on black metal held last Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nigthtclub in Brooklyn. The symposium, called “Hideous Gnosis,” was attended by an odd combination of pointy-headed academics (including two who traveled from England for the event), music critics, and at least one actual black metal musician, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the frontman and guitarist from Liturgy. (That can’t possibly be his real name, can it? Gotta be a black metal stage-name.)
The academics presented papers with such mouth-watering titles as “The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances,” “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya,” and “Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration.” I can sum up my reaction like this: “Reading About Hideous Gnosis: Regurgitating in My Lap.”
The day job has had my head in a fucking vise for the last week but now that’s passed. To celebrate last night, I had a few adult beverages with a couple of buds and then some total immersion in Wormwood, the latest offering from Swedish black metal band Marduk. You know what I mean about total immersion. Get either semi- or completely wasted, get comfortable on the floor in a chair or bed, crank up the volume past NIOSH limits, close your eyes, and then just focus your brain on the music. Well, Wormwood turned out to be just what the doctor ordered — if your doctor’s last name happens to be Frankenstein or Faustus.