Feb 012016
 

Seven Sisters of Sleep-photo by Forrest Locke

photo by Forrest Locke

(For this 68th edition of The Synn Report, Andy takes as his subject the discography of SoCal’s Seven Sisters of Sleep — including their brand new album due for release by Relapse on February 5.)

Recommended for fans of: Eyehategod, Acid Bath, Soilent Green

After traversing the parched, sun-beaten wastelands of Texas in last month’s edition of The Synn Report, this time we’re travelling West to the city of angels, Los Angeles, to catch up with inveterate noise-mongers Seven Sisters of Sleep.

For those unfamiliar with the band, here’s a warning. This is some nasty, unrepentantly nihilistic stuff, straddling the blood-crusted nexus point between filthy Sludge, groaning Doom, buzzing Drone, seething Hardcore, and grim Old School Death Metal… with more than a few splashes of venomous Grind thrown in for good measure. Suffice it to say, this is definitely not music for the faint of heart.

By the same token though, it never feels like the band have just mashed-up all these sounds into one big, messy Extreme Metal sundae. Rather their sound comes across like a distillation of each of these styles down to their shared essence, filtered and refined to produce pure Extreme Metal moonshine, that’s just as likely to make you bang your head and scream your guts out as it is to make you go blind… and scream your guts out.

Though the band have a fair few splits and EPs to their name, I’ve elected to stick just to the full-length albums for this edition of The Synn Report, in particular their about-to-be-released third album Ezekiel’s Hags. Continue reading »

Jan 232013
 

Between last night and this morning, I finally found a little time to resume my usual spelunking through the interhole in search of metal nuggets of interest worth sharing. And here are a few of the items I found.

FINNTROLL

I found that Finland’s Finntroll have been rolling out versions of the cover art for their forthcoming, as-yet-untitled 2013 album. The artist is Samuli “Skrymer” Ponsimaa (whose FB page is here). They began with a pencil sketch of the cover and today they added the fully inked version that you see above. Presumably, we will eventually get the color version (the images are appearing on Finntroll’s FB page). Fuckin’ cool, no? To see a larger version of the art, click the image above.

NECROWRETCH

I first discovered (and wrote about) this French duo  a year ago when I saw they had been based solely on two demos (in 2009 and 2010) and a four-song EP in 2011 — Putrefactive Infestation, which I reviewed in that first post. Later, I also reviewed a two-song 7″ named Now You’re In Hell. I’ve been looking forward to their debut album, Putrid Death Sorcery, scheduled for release in North America on February 5 (order here). I previously featured the eye-catching album art by Montenegran artist Milovan Novakovic (which you can see again next). Continue reading »

May 162012
 

A389 is a new discovery for me.  A389 is a DIY record label and distro based in Baltimore, Maryland.  I found out about them through a FB post by Masakari, a Cleveland band whose music you should get to know if you don’t already.

Truth is, I’m not familiar with the majority of the bands whose music A389 distributes, because the music tends to be in genres that I don’t follow closely. But I do know about some of them, and the ones I know about are adept at using music to split skulls and ignite the bloodstream.

A389 have just compiled a digital mixtape for free download. There are . . . wait for it . . . 52 tracks on this thing. It includes a mix of previously unreleased or forthcoming songs plus material from recordings that are already in circulation. As before, I didn’t recognize most of the bands on this comp, but the ones I did recognize are strong:

Ilsa
Ringworm
Young And In the Way
Gravehill
Full of Hell
Trapped Under Ice
Masakari

Now a comp this big will take up some room — 211MB on your hard drive. Fortunately, you don’t have to take the plunge blindly, because A389 is streaming every song on the comp. And after the jump, I’ve picked out a few songs to stream here — yeah, I downloaded this comp already, and I’m glad I did. It’s a mix of styles — death/doom, hardcore, crust-punk, d-beat, grind, and more — and it will beat the holy hell out of you. Continue reading »