SUNDAY SAVAGERY, WITH ENSLAVED, XEHANORT, FISTULA, AND CATS MATING

The loris compound at NCS HQ has been in turmoil. They apparently expected me to leave grubs for them before I left town last week, and they resorted to cannibalism while I was gone. Must have been a ritualistic aspect to it, because I found them chanting over those big eyeballs of the dead, which had been collected like marbles in a shallow pit.

I thought they would just fast, and some of them had gotten pretty hefty so I figured that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Actually, to be brutally honest, I just fuckin’ forgot to leave food.

Anyway, they’re in a feisty mood, because I guess uncooked loris doesn’t taste as good as grubs. I don’t understand their language, but I’m pretty sure they were chanting something about impaling me on greased spikes. I’m glad I reinforced the fencing and electrified it last month. All my efforts to reason with them seem to have fallen on deaf ears, so I’ve had to resort to stern disciplinary measures.

I’ve been playing them some savage new music I discovered recently, using the compound’s megajoule PA system. It’s causing blood to come out of their ears, but instead of getting docile, it’s causing them to headbang. Very slowly. Because they’re lorises, aren’t they?

I thought I’d share the music with you, too. Not that you need disciplining, of course. Unless you do.

ENSLAVED

Thanks to a tip from MaxR (Metal Bandcamp), I started the lorises off with Enslaved providing a live cover of Led Zeppelin’s classic “Immigrant Song” on the Norwegian TV show Trygdekontoret on October 17 2012. It’s a goddamn glorious cover, with the band blackening the song and then ending it by dropping down into a doomy breakdown with Ice Dale spinning off a psychedelic guitar solo. I thought it was generous of me to give those slow creatures something to watch as well as hear.
 

 

XEHANORT

Xehanort are a progressive deathcore band from Hudson, Florida. I probably shouldn’t have used that “progressive deathcore” label, despite the fact that Xehanort use it to describe their music. It will undoubtedly cause certain minds to close down and move away. Which would be a mistake.

Xehanort have just released a two-song single called “Shinigami” (“death”), which follows their debut EP Birth (2012). The single and the EP are free downloads on Bandcamp (here). I cranked up the single for the lorises.

I think they were puzzled by the intro to the first track, but the puzzlement disappeared when the music exploded like a warhead hitting a bunker and those voracious, deep death growls started in on their auditory nerves. The spacey keyboards probably crossed them up again — but only briefly. The second track features swirling, finger-tapped guitar work, pneumatic rhythms, and more eerie electronic effects (including robotic vocals). I thought both songs were killer. They left the lorieses cowering in fear.
 

 

P.S. Xehanort appears to be the project of a single individual, John Galloway, who composes the music, handles the vocals, and programs the drums and bass, though two session guitarists (Josh Oxendine and Brett Ruch) have participated in the recordings.
 

FISTULA

Fistula are a Cleveland band who’ve been going strong since 1998. Their latest piece of filth is an album entitled Northern Aggression, which is out now via PATAC Records. The album is streaming and downloadable on Bandcamp, and I blasted the whole thing over the compound PA. Which was pretty merciless, even for me.

Northern Aggression is an obliterating avalanche of grimy, gritty, corrosive sludge. It rolls like a megaton battle tank smashing the skulls of the vanquished into micro-fragments beneath the treads, leaking oily fumes from every orifice and belching fire from the exhaust. The mutant riffs are distorted to the breaking point, the vocalist sounds like he’s being gutted with pruning shears, and the drums fall like sledgehammers on a cement slab. Fuckin’ awesome, and one of the heaviest things I’ve heard all year.

Most of the lorises were beginning to get the thousand-yard stare that comes from battle trauma by the time this baby ran its course.
 

 

CATS MATING

I was pretty sure the lorises had been rendered subservient by this point, but I didn’t want to leave anything to chance. So I put the following video up on the big Diamond-vision screen at the compound and turned the PA speakers to 11 so they’d be able to clearly hear what happens at the 1:00 mark of this video. I recommend that you do the same.

And enjoy the rest of your fucking day.