May 282010
 

A few days ago, we started a post by saying, “Sometimes when we listen to metal, we just want to get mentally pulverized.” If you never feel that way, well, please go on about your business and come back tomorrow when we’ll probably be writing about something else.

But today, we’re in that mental-pulverization mood. And in case you’re also in the mood to have your brains scrambled, have we found the right short-order cooks for you: Aeon and Exhale. Coincidentally, both bands are from Sweden. They each employ different techniques on the grill, but their new albums both get the job done in masterful fashion.

AEON

With a few of the inevitable line-up changes, Aeon (pictured above) has been playing for more than a decade, and Path of Fire (released on Metal Blade) is their third full-length album and the first since 2007. The album was mixed by Erik Rutan and mastered by the ubiquitous Alan Douches.

The name of the game is technical death metal, and it’s as sweet as it is punishing. With few exceptions, the songs depend on low-end, driving riffs and hammering double-kicks that put us in mind of an inexorably charging train, scattering sparks and belching smoke. The picking is fast and dynamic, yet there’s no flash-for-the-sake-of-flash going on here — each song is built around a defined rhythmic structure designed to burrow heavy grooves into your skull.  (more after the jump, including songs to stream . . .)

To persist with that runaway-train metaphor, the sparks fly when Zeb Nilsson injects swirling guitar leads into the rapidly chugging rhythms. They’re always brief, but they spin like a funnel cloud.

Tommy Dahlström’s growling vocals are full, deep, and nasty. They’re the kind of uncommon gutturals that are fully intelligible — and what he’s singing about is an incessant, vicious, and highly personal diatribe against Christianity. So, you know, if you’re sensitive about that kind of thing, this probably isn’t the album for you.

Cannibal Corpse bassist Alex Webster has been quoted as saying: “Aeon’s musicianship is among the best in death metal, but their songwriting is what truly sets them apart. It’s rare to find a death metal band that is simultaneously crushingly brutal and infectiously catchy. Aeon is one of those rare bands!” That’s a pretty damned good summary of Path of Fire. Here’s a brain-scrambling track from the album for you to test-drive:

Aeon: The Sacrament

EXHALE

This five-piece band of badasses is also from Sweden, and they’ve just released their second album (Blind) on Dark Balance.

They’ve cross-bred pure, bat-out-of-hell grindcore with death metal to produce a barely controlled brute animal straining to run right over you. The rapid-fire vocals trade off between vein-bursting shrieking and gut-rumbling gutturals, and the instrumentation runs like a flat-out Formula One machine with brake failure.

The music is chaotic, combustible, cacophonous, and crushing. It’s down-right blistering in its power. And yet, somehow, Exhale preserves a rhythmic groove and variability in the song construction that prevents the album from turning into a single indistinguishable mass of freaked-out noise. In a nutshell, we are really diggin’ this fascinating mix of grind and death.

Make no mistake, you don’t want to listen to this unless you’re in a serious brain-scrambling mood. But if you are, look no further: Blind will do the trick quite nicely, and bring you back for seconds.

Here’s a track from that album. The whole scampering collection of mayhem is available from iTunes and Amazon mp3 downloads.

Exhale: Fools

  6 Responses to ““I’LL HAVE MY BRAINS SCRAMBLED, WITH HASH BROWNS AND TOAST””

  1. The weather in Seattle today sucks , but the really nice mention in Metal Sucks (one of our main inspirations for starting this site and one of our must-reads every day) has just blown away the leaking clouds and put a big ray of sunshine into our day. Thanks dudes!

  2. I have been waiting to see when you would review “Path of Fire” Aeon is a fucking awesome band. This album has been on my must have list for a long time. I am glad its finally here. Rise to Dominate and Bleeding the False are two of my favorite albums.

    • And congrats on the Metal Sucks nod. Glad to see you getting some well deserved props. Keep up the kick ass good work.

      • Thanks for that! It was really dumb luck that I listened to Path fo Fire, because I wasn’t familiar with Aeon before this recent release, and I could easily have overlooked it (only so much time in the day to listen to new music). That would have been a big miss!

        • Aeon is smashing death metal, if you’re just getting into their records, you should check out the Dark Order EP that came out in 2001. That was my first introduction to this awesome band and it’s still great to this day.

          Also, I’d like to add that I’m glad MetalSucks pointed me to this site, as this is a place I will regularly visit now.

          • Thank you! We are really indebted to MS for that nice mention. We will do our best to make your future visits worthwhile! And I’m definitely sold on Aeon, and will track down Dark Order. It’s amazing how much great metal is out there that I still haven’t discovered (and I listen to a shitload of music).

 Leave a Reply

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.