NEW MUSIC FROM HAIL OF BULLETS AND VALKYRJA

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Sep 232013
 

This morning brought the premiere of two new songs from two forthcoming albums that we’ve been eagerly awaiting. You can and should hear both of them below.

HAIL OF BULLETS

The new Hail of Bullets album is entitled III: The Rommel Chronicles and it will be released in NorthAm by Metal Blade on October 29 (pre-orders available here). The new song is “DG-7”, and it follows the previous premiere of “Pour Le Mérite” (featured here).

The hammerstrikes of doom . . . the writhing melodies of dank death . . . the rampaging riff-tanks . . . soloing that’s both flame-spitting and soulful . . . the hoarse howls of the incomparable Martin van Drunen . . . it’s all here, and it’s all so damned fine: Dutch death metal devastation comes your way next. Continue reading »

TENGGER CAVALRY: “THE EXPEDITION”

 Album Reviews  20 Responses »
Sep 232013
 

(BadWolf reviews the wonderful 2013 album by China’s Tengger Cavalry.)

Folk metal is hard. On the one hand, when the genre is executed to my liking, it’s one of the finest sub-genres of metal there is—full of character, interesting lyrics, groove, hooks, and interesting instrumentation. I’m talking about bands like Moonsorrow, Melechesh, and Primordial. On the other hand, most folk metal bands send me flying for the delete key: folk metal bands like Finntroll and Turisas get cheesy quickly, and the sheer earnestness behind that cheese just makes me pity them more—and want less of them in my ears.

File China’s Tengger Cavalry alongside Primordial on my list of folk bands that do it right. Invisible Oranges scribe Rhys Williams turned me on to this band of heathens with a few cuts from their previous album, Sunesu Cavalry. Tengger Cavalry hail from China, and play folk metal based on the myths and legends of nomadic Asiatic tribes such as the Mongols and Huns. What was once a one-man project, led by guitarist Nature Zhang, has since become a full six-piece band. Tengger Cavalry’s second album, and first as a live unit, The Expedition, dropped on Bandcamp early this summer, and it will trample you under hoof.

The tribes of Mongolia once raided as far west as the Roman Empire on horseback. With a name like Tengger Cavalry and song titles like “Black Steed,” horse sounds and imagery compose a big part of the band’s sound. The heavier tracks on The Expedition all use Iron Maiden-style gallops, as well as mid-paced triplets to great effect. The band even use a whinnying noise from one of their two (!) Horse Head fiddle players as accent marks in a manner reminiscent of Gojira’s pick-slide dive-bombs. Continue reading »

A DEATH METAL SANDWICH: BLOOD MORTIZED, ERYN NON DAE., A SMILE FULL OF ALE, CRYPTOPSY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Sep 232013
 

Here are a four new (or new-ish) things I saw and heard since the weekend began that I’m really liking. I could keep them to myself, but I believe that goes against the first rule of blogging: Assume that everyone is fascinated by everything that interests you, and therefore keep nothing to yourself.

You can think of this as a death metal sandwich, two slices of rotting death metal bread on the outside and two unusual goodies in the middle.

BLOOD MORTIZED

We’ve been tracking the output of Sweden’s Blood Mortized since the beginning, and now they’re about to follow up their 2012 album The Key To A Black Heart (reviewed here) with a new full-length — The Demon, The Angel, The Disease. Today the band unveiled a music video for a track off the forthcoming album. To sum up:

The Music: Doing it the flesh-crawling bone-smashing old way, and doing it right. OOOF!

The Video: Gore, gore, gore, gore! And more gore! Continue reading »

THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER / ABORTED / REVOCATION – LIVE IN MANCHESTER, 21/09/13

 Concert Reviews  7 Responses »
Sep 232013
 

(Our Nottingham-based writer Andy Synn reviews the live carnage of The Black Dahlia Murder and Aborted in Manchester, England, on Sept 21, 2013.)

What a line-up, right? There was no way I was going to miss this show. Even going so far as to reschedule a Bloodguard practice for midday in order to give me enough time to get back, get changed, and head out again on my road trip across to Manchester.

So that’s what I did. Finished practice, pelted to the car, shot home, sorted my shit, out and dived back in the car. 80.5 miles. Approximately 2 hours travel time. Easy.

Hit a bit of traffic on the way, but no major issues. Navigated Manchester town centre without hassle (I grew up round there, so have a bit of an advantage) and parked up, finally rocking up to the venue just before seven…

Shit…

I missed Revocation. Continue reading »

THE CASE FOR COMPARING BAND X TO BAND Y IN MUSIC REVIEWS

 Mosh Pit  26 Responses »
Sep 222013
 

(It’s been a while since we received a guest post from Dane Prokofiev (who writes everywhere and has his own blog at Zetalambmary), but today he returns with an argument about why it’s worthwhile to use band comparisons in music reviews.) 

I used to dislike comparing a band whose album I was reviewing to another band in my written reviews and only resorted to doing so when I found absolutely nothing interesting about the band’s music to be worthy of description through the use of metaphors. Ever since my exposure to Saussurean semiotics, however, I have changed my mind.

Saussurean semiotics posits that there is no intrinsic connection between words and their meanings. That is to say, it is not natural for the word “dog” to refer to the concept of dog-ness. The word “dog” is a linguistic construct, something that is distinct from the concept of dog-ness. What English-speaking people label as “dog” is labeled as “الكلب” by Arabic-speaking people , “chien” by French-speaking people, “hunder” by Icelandic-speaking people, “犬” by Japanese-speaking people, and “狗” by Mandarin-speaking people. The fact that people use different words for the same object in different languages means that there is no particular connection between the word “dog” and the thing that we refer to as a “dog”.

The product of this arbitrary relationship between the signifier (“dog”) and the signified (the concept of dog-ness) is called the sign, which is the mental image that is conjured in a person’s mind when he or she sees the signifier and understands that it is referring to the signified, aka certain properties that constitute the thing-ness of something. Continue reading »

DYSMORPHIC: “A NOTION OF CAUSALITY”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Sep 222013
 

(DGR reviews the debut album by French metal band Dysmorphic, out now on the Unique Leader label. Click that stunning album cover by Stan-W Decker to see a bigger version.)

Unique Leader has become the quintessential modern tech-death label at the moment. It’s likely an easy thing to do when you’re composed of members of Deeds Of Flesh, but the label has really been good for picking out the technically heavy, crushing style that seems to have really gained popularity over the past few years. While they’ve stuck to the States with a lot of their recent signings, they have reached across the whole country and the Atlantic Ocean as well in order to pluck out a young band by the name of Dysmorphic, a group that had existed under the name Necrocism for about a year before taking on the mantle of Dysmorphic in 2009.

Prior to their recent September release of A Notion Of Causality, the group had only released one song and a self-titled EP. Claiming to have heavy influences in the Suffocation and Decrepit Birth range must have made a hell of an impression because here the band now stand, Unique Leader signees and with the aforementioned A Notion Of Causality unleashed for the world to hear.

The disc contains some older material from the group’s EP but otherwise comprises new stuff. It’s made up of worming riffs, otherworldly melodies, unrelenting brutality, and angular time signatures, all buttressed by a heavy dosage of blasts and high roars; their lyrics and themes also have a strong philosophical bent. They’re part of the current tech-death wave that is sweeping the metal scene, but does A Notion Of Causality do a good job making the band stick out from everyone else? Continue reading »

AUS DER TRANSZENDENZ / LUSTRE SPLIT: “VIXERUNT / LIFE FLOWERS OF GOLD”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Sep 222013
 

I mentioned in passing on 9/11 that Lustre’s 2013 album Wonder may be the most beautiful record I’ve heard this year. So when I noticed yesterday that Lustre has also contributed to a forthcoming split, I had to investigate.

The split will be jointly released on vinyl next month by I, Voidhanger and ATMF, with cover art by Francesco Gemelli. Lustre’s contribution is a song entitled “Like Flowers of Gold”. Like so much of Wonder, the song casts a hypnotic spell, its seductive melody repeating in an extended loop against a backdrop of deep, groaning tones and ghostly/ghastly whispers. Atmospheric music such as this need not be complex nor instrumentally intricate to be emotionally affecting, but it does need to be well-written, and this Swedish one-man band does have that talent.

The second band on the split are new to me. Austria’s Aus der Transzendenz produced a debut album (Breed of A Dying Sun) last year, and this new song “Vixerunt” appears to be the band’s first new music since then. Where Lustre’s track brings a moonlit, pastoral ambience, “Vixerunt” races like a storm front, yet it is also an atmospheric piece of music. Continue reading »

TEASERS: EYE OF SOLITUDE AND VALDUR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Sep 222013
 

I was already eager for the new albums headed our way from the two bands featured in this post. I really didn’t need to be teased about them, because I’m impatient enough as it is. But they obviously didn’t get the memo.

EYE OF SOLITUDE

This UK band’s 2012 album, Sui Caedere (“to kill one’s self”) was really excellent. So was The Deceit, a three-song EP they released early this year (reviewed here). Both of them are still available on Bandcamp, and I encourage you to check them out. The new album is entitled Canto III and it will be released by Kaotoxin Records on November 25 in Europe and December 3 in the US.

Seems that it’s going to be a monster — six tracks that are lyrically based on Dante’s Inferno, with a total run-time of over 66 minutes. It appears that the album will also include guest contributions by violinist Casper and vocalist Anton Rosa from the Russian band Dominia. It further appears that the band will be adding some black metal touches to their orchestrally enhanced blend of funereal doom and death.

Yesterday I heard a teaser of music from the album that you’ll have a chance to hear momentarily. It’s titanically heavy and sweeping, but of course it’s way too short. However, brief as it is, it’s a potent reminder of how gargantuan Daniel Neagoe’s vocals are. Check it out: Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: CULT OF ERINYES, LORN, AND NOSFERATU

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 212013
 

When I staggered to bed last night I had a few ideas percolating about what I would post today. When I staggered out of bed this morning and started wandering through the interhole those ideas went out the window, and instead what you’re about to hear took their place. By chance I listened to three new songs in a row that really grabbed me. By chance, they’re all shades and phases of black metal, with interesting twists. I wasn’t familiar with any of the bands before listening to these new tracks, and with luck like this I should probably buy a lottery ticket today.

CULT OF ERINYES

This three-person Belgian band have recorded their second album, Blessed Extinction, which will be released in digipak format on October 21, 2013, by the Italian label Code666 Records. They’ve just begun streaming an advance track named “自爆 (Jibaku)”, which I discovered thanks to a Facebook post by Nico at Kaotoxin Records, who’s an acquaintance of mine and a friend of the band.

If the song consisted of nothing but the hurricane of cutting guitars, thundering percussion, and acid vocals with which it begins, I’d be happy enough, because that first phase of the song shoots a megawatt charge straight to the brainstem. But the song holds in store much more than that. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CULT OF FIRE, CLERIC, HOT GRAVES, AND GEHENNA

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 202013
 

Here’s the second part of my effort to collect worthwhile new music discovered over the last 24 hours. You can find Part 1 via this link. All the music in this Part is different, but all of it is just fuckin’ evil.

CULT OF FIRE

In May I gave a laborious description of how I had found the Czech black metal band Cult of Fire. It started with a shirt. It ended with a track from the band’s 2012 debut album Triumvirát that was included on a free comp from Demonhood Productions. As reported in that earlier post, Cult of Fire are now signed to the German label Iron Bonehead for release of their next album (which should be coming in 2013). Yesterday, I found a stream of the first advance track from the album.

I’m unable to write or pronounce the name of the album or the song, but I can show you what they look like: The song is “मृत्यु का वीभत्स नृत्य” and the album’s name is “मृत्यु का तापसी अनुध्यान”.

I took a chance and put those titles into Google Translate and, lo and behold, it turns out the language is Hindi. The song title translates to “ghastly dance of death” but Google Translate failed me when it came to the album name. I did find this statement about the album by the band: “It’s a homage to the Goddess Kali, the Aghoris, the funeral rites in India and its close surroundings.” Continue reading »

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