Feb 252012
 

According to the National Park Service, Florida’s Everglades swamp is “the largest subtropical wilderness in the United States.” It’s home to a wide variety of rare and endangered species, many of whom you would not want to meet up close and personal, including alligators, crocodiles, cottonmouths, Boa constrictors, Burmese pythons, rattlesnakes, and poisonous toads.

But there are other, far more menacing creatures in Florida and they’re crawling out of the abysmal swamps to eat your face.

I’m referring to the metal bands whose music is collected in a killer comp that’s available for free download on Bandcamp. Naturally, it’s called Swamp Abyss Sorcery, and it was packaged up by Satanik Recordings (who also released that Prostitute album we praised not long ago). The comp includes music by a few bands we already knew about and liked here at NCS, including the tar-choked, grungy, inexorable sludge metal of Shroud Eater and the crusty blackened thrash of Hot Graves. But man, they’re just part of the nasty menagerie of slavering  creatures crawling and flying out of this download.

I’ve embedded the Bandcamp player after the jump so you can sample the sounds. Seriously, there’s some mighty fine shit to be had here. To do the download, go HERE. Continue reading »

Feb 062011
 

Well, I thought I’d be able to get up another MISCELLANY post during the past week to help myself catch up, but that obviously didn’t happen. (Yesterday’s MISCELLANY post was a hybrid, since I already knew two of the bands, so that didn’t really count.) At least this time I didn’t let two or three weeks go by before readying another installment.

This time I visited four more bands whose music I’d never heard, and it turned out to be an unusually diverse listening experience — and in one case pretty far outside the usual bedlam of the NCS asylum. Per the usual MISCELLANY rules, I randomly picked these bands off our running list of music to check out and tried to limit myself to one song per band (and failed). After the jump you’ll get the chance to hear the music for yourselves if the write-ups get you interested enough.

Today’s picks are Shroud Eater (U.S.), Eschaton (Austria), and The Omega Experiment (U.S.) — and in a late addition, The Villain Avian Symphony (Canada). If nothing else, these bands have a knack for picking good names, don’t you think? And, as a bonus, it turns out that almost all the music is free.

(Yes, this is a lengthy installment, but for fuck’s sake, it’s Sunday. What else have you got to do? Oh wait — it’s Super Bowl Sunday. Well, fuck me, maybe people outside the U.S. will wade through this . . .) Continue reading »