Sep 242018
 

 

I returned from a three-day vacation in Eastern Washington’s wine country last night. For three days I listened to no new music of any kind, other than a few songs from a gypsy rock band named Diego’s Umbrella because that’s what one fascinating young winemaker started streaming when I asked him what music he would pick to go along with the art on his label and the fabulous Portuguese red wine in his bottles. When I returned to metal for a couple of hours last night, I experienced an episode of synchronicity (or serendipity — I’m never quite sure how those words differ from each other and am too lazy to look up the definitions).

I don’t mean to suggest that the following three selections of music sound alike (they really don’t). But they nevertheless sounded to me as if they belonged together, in part because they’re unconventional, in part because they reveal technical adroitness harnessed to creative adventurousness, and in part because they tend to twist your thought patterns into different shapes while also triggering more primitive responses.

GERYON

Before Geryon, before Krallice, before Nicholas McMaster and Lev Weinstein moved to New York from Chicago, there was Astomatous. That was the band that these two talented folks used as a vehicle for their creative impulses before moving on to other projects (including the two mentioned in the previous sentence). Astomatous released one album in 2006 (The Beauty of Reason), and they had developed material for a second one, but never brought it to fruition. However, they decided to use some of that material as the basis for a new Geryon EP (Astomatous), which they released through Bandcamp not long ago, without advance fanfare. Continue reading »

Jul 202018
 

 

I really wanted to end this week with a big fat juicy round-up, overstuffed with new songs and videos that I’ve latched onto over the past week but couldn’t cram into other round-ups over the last two days. Alas, I’ve run out of time. But rather than just scuttle morosely out of sight, head down and small tears dribbling down my cheeks, I thought I’d at least give you a couple of quick hits.

SENZAR

Today the Irish band Senzar, which rose from the ashes of Coldwar and embraced a name reportedly based upon the works of different philosophers, including Ernst Cassirer and Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, released their first EP, which has their name on it but has no title, through Hostile Media.

After seeing a press release I had made a note a few days ago to check out a new video the band had released, but it wasn’t until receiving encouragement from starkweather’s Rennie today that I did so, and then moved from there to the EP as a whole. Continue reading »

Feb 232016
 

Schammasch

 

Well, today isn’t going quite the way I planned. To follow my musings earlier today about last weekend’s Famine Fest, I had planned to bring you the premiere of a full album stream for a hot-as-hell new release. However, Soundcloud decided to block all of the song streams under a notification of copyright violation. I’m too stupid to realize this is always a possibility, and therefore I didn’t upload the tracks a few days ago to allow time for that to happen, to file my protests, and to have the blocks cleared. Now I’m sitting around waiting for the tracks to be released from bondage.

In the meantime, I thought I ought to whip something else up to pass the time away. So here are a few things I noticed this morning, beginning with a couple of exciting announcements.

SCHAMMASCH

No secret that we are big fans of this Swiss band. Also no secret that we’ve been very curious about the contours of the band’s next album. Andy Synn tried to pry some details from the band’s main man CSR in this interview last month — and received these cryptic answers: Continue reading »

Jan 072015
 

 

Every now and then I feel the need to elevate myself to about 40,000 feet above the Earth so as to more clearly receive extraterrestrial emanations and special guidance from the cosmos itself. I happen to be doing that right now. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology I can snoop the web for news and new music and post what I find, even as I receive mysterious communications from entities far beyond our own sphere.

Actually, to be brutally honest, which is the only kind of honest we know how to be at this site, I’m cooped up on an airplane flying across the country for my fucking day job, and the only emanations I’m getting are from the whine of the jet engines outside my window; I can’t make sense of them.

Although there’s an internet connection on board, it’s not good enough for me to hear music streams or watch videos. So, I’ve picked all but one of the music streams in this round-up based on educated guesses that they will be good. Maybe you’ll leave a comment and let me know if I guessed right. Presented in alphabetical order: Continue reading »

Jul 222014
 

 

So many new things happen every day in the world of metal that if you check out for almost four days, as I just did, catching up is tough. Not that I’m complaining, because I had a blast attending Gilead Fest. I know you’ll want to read all about how much fun I had, in case you haven’t already. But now I’m back in Seattle, and I’m making a small stab at catching up on what I missed while I was neglecting daily metal happenings. Here are three new songs I heard last night that I recommend to your ears.

SÓLSTAFIR

Iceland’s Sólstafir have now shared with the world the third advance track from their next album, Ótta, which will be released by Season of Mist on August 29 in Europe and September 2 in North America. The new one is named “Dagmál”. It cruises like a car on an open road, the top down, the wind in your hair, not another soul in sight, magnificent vistas around every turn. And then your car leaves the road… and glides into the air.  Continue reading »

Apr 132014
 

John Martin: “The Deluge” (1834)

As I mentioned yesterday, the past week brought good song and video premieres in a flood, which was unfortunate only in the sense that I didn’t have time to write about all those discoveries day-by-day as they happened. So this weekend I decided to just flood you with them, leaving behind all but some short snippets of my own sparkling prose and mainly delivering the streams, along with release info.

Yesterday I collected 11 (!) new songs and videos, plus a couple of tantalizing news items, and today I’ve got 12 more, plus a few more news items. Once again, I present them in alphabetical order:

AMBIENT DEATH

The Song: “Apotheosis of the Hangman”
From: Dismembering the Image of God
Release info: self-released by the band on April 7; below is a new video for the opening track

Vicious melodic death metal with flying fretwork that gets more interesting and seductive as the song progresses. Punches pretty damned hard, too. Continue reading »

Jan 172014
 

This will be my last post for today because my fucking day job is taking me out of town and I’ll be disconnected from the almighty inter hole for the next 7 or 8 hours.  That means no new installment of the “Most Infectious Song” list until tomorrow.  However, I did have time to pull together three new things I saw and heard last night — which I obviously think you need to see an dear, too.

ONTOGENY

I received this message from my comrade DGR:

Ontogeny are going again, which is cool. They’re a San Francisco based Tech-death band that includes members of the group Anomalous. They have a new disc coming called Hymns Of Ahriman. It’s been three years since the last one. These guys write epic death metal songs that become whirlwinds at the drop of a hat, and Ontogeny have a tendency to just go straight into grind right in the middle of a song.

“I guess they couldn’t wait to have a fully produced song out so they just posted the pre-pro demo of the song “Phantom Love”. It’s 8:30 of just sheer madness. They put it up on the 10th of last week and it seems no one picked up on it.” Continue reading »