SEEN AND HEARD: STAM1NA, NOCTEM, BLACK MASK

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Jan 242014
 

Collected in this round-up are a few new videos and songs I came across over the last 24 hours that I thought were worth your time. This is the first of a two-part “Seen and Heard”. More recommended new things will appear later today.

STAM1NA

I’m a big fan of Finland’s Stam1na, but despite the fact that I really do enjoy their music, I always finding myself writing about them because of their videos (previous posts collected here). And I write about their videos because they’re so damned funny. And here I am again, writing about yet another Stam1na video — but not for the usual reasons.

This one premiered yesterday (credit to TheMadIsraeli for tipping me to it) and it’s for a song named “Panzerfaust” from their new album SLK (due for release on Feb 7). Man, did I get a surprise. First, the song hits like a blowtorch opened all the way up — a jolting piece of jabbing, hammering, thrashing mayhem with a swirling finger-tapped guitar melody and a stomping martial finish. When choral voices and militaristic chants aren’t being heard, Antti Hyyrynen’s vehement voice is raking like sharpened claws. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 9

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  9 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

Welcome to Part 9 of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the two I’m announcing today, click here.

Both of today’s songs are folk-influenced examples of epic melodic death metal — albeit from widely separated corners of the world. They’re both highly infectious, too.

WOLFHEART

When Finland’s Tuomas Saukkonen announced about a year ago that he was shutting down all of his many musical projects — Before the Dawn, Black Sun Aeon, Dawn of Solace, Routasielu, and Final Harvest — it rocked me and many of his other fans, and not in a good way. But what Saukkonen put in their place turned out to be something quite excellent — a new solo project named Wolfheart. In the band’s debut album, Winterborn (reviewed here), he took the best elements from what he had done before and interwove them in this new work, while also finding ways to stretch his talents in new directions.

With lyrics full of imagery of ice and snow, deep woods and frozen lakes, wolves and warriors, darkness and frost — and with dramatic, sweeping, intense music that captures the magnificent purity of loss and longing, struggle, and sacrifice — the album is a collection of highly memorable anthems. Saukkonen has always had a talent for writing powerful, often folk-influenced melodies, and Winterborn has them in spades. Sometimes languid, sometimes erupting with compelling urgency, they are woven into the fabric of the music. The album is an epic achievement, and one of the best releases of 2013. Continue reading »

METAL AS THE MUSE

 Mosh Pit  25 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

(Our Denver-based friend and writer Mike Yost, who remains our friend despite that sportzball thingie that’s being played on Feb 2, wrote the following piece, which I should have posted 6 weeks ago. It originally appeared at Mike’s own blog here. Do you listen to music when you write?)

As an author, I listen to a wide variety of music while I write — from metal to electronic ambient  to classical music.  Camille Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre (Dance of Death) is one of my favorites.  The composition was inspired by one of Saint-Saëns’ own poems where death plays a violin at the stroke of midnight surrounded by skeletons dancing in their shrouds.  Pretty damn metal.

Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) once said in an interview that he prefers to draft novels in the waiting areas of emergency rooms, feeding off the noise and drama unfolding all around him.  Hemingway is often attributed with the quote: “Write drunk; edit sober,” which I often do in noisy bars downing pint after pint of fermented liquid happiness.  But several authors I work with can only pen the future great American masterpiece in complete silence.

For me, silence stifles my ability to write.  It’s deafening.  In truth, silence is really fucking distracting.  It opens the black iron gates to that cacophony of shrill voices in my mind that come crawling out of the obsidian that is my subconscious—their pointed fangs and claws flashing white in the darkness just before sinking deep into my trembling eyeballs.

And it’s not easy to write with bleeding eyeballs. Continue reading »

DESCEND: “WITHER”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

(Here we have TheMadIsraeli’s review of the new album by a Swedish band named Descend.)

Progressive death metal is in an odd place right now. You either have to dive into borderline avant-garde territory that’s not always (and is usually rarely) successful, you dive into the alien and strange like Martyr or Anata, or you have to turn to the more melodic, more methodical sort like latter-era Death, Carcariass, or Opeth. The first school is often unsuccessful, the second school has monumental names behind it that make it hard for a band to make their own way, so the third nowadays is often the best option. At least from my perspective.

Descend are a band I was not familiar with, although they have multiple releases. They fall into that third category I mentioned. Shades of Opeth, In Mourning, Carcass, and Death are mainly what come to mind here. I’ve never checked out Descend’s previous full length Through the Eyes of the Burdened, so I don’t know if there’s been any evolution in sound or not. I do know, though, that their new record Wither kicks a fuck ton of ass. Continue reading »

WATCH A NEW LIVE GOJIRA VIDEO FROM THEIR FORTHCOMING DVD: “FLYING WHALES”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

 

Not long ago a certain web site that referred to the almighty Gojira as “French art-metallers” (wha???) premiered a live video of the band performing “Flying Whales” at London’s Brixton Academy last year, and holy shit, is it good!

The video is included in a CD/DVD of the entire performance at Brixton Academy, which will accompany an art book entitled Les Enfants Sauvages. One of the photos from the book appears above and more can be viewed at that other web site. You can order the book here.

Watch the video after the jump. You’ll be glad you did. Continue reading »

AN A CAPELLA COVER OF FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE THAT WORKS BETTER THAN YOU COULD IMAGINE

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

Dan-Elias Brevig is a wonder. He has taken “The Violation”, by those Italian maestros of utterly bombastic death metal, Fleshgod Apocalypse, and created a completely a cappela cover of the song in a YouTube video. And by “a capella”, I mean that he has not only recorded the growls and falsetto cleans from the song, he has also used his voice to mimic the song’s instrumental arrangements.

Think about the original for a moment, and ponder what this would entail. After you’ve stopped shaking your head and going “No Way!”, move past the jump and see/hear for yourselves. Mr. Brevig calls it a parody, but it’s pretty damned impressive.

(Dan-Elias Brevig is from the vicinity of Oslo, Norway; he has a band named Immetic (whose music may be found here); and his Facebook page is at this location. To give you another example of his pipes in action, I’ve included an Immetic song after the video; it’s partially an exception to our rule, but I’m digging it — and it sort of helps explain his affinity for Fleshgod Apocalypse.) Continue reading »

V IS FOR VAMPIRE, VULGAR TRADE, AND VISCERAL HATRED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

I love it when a plan comes together, particularly when I have no plan until it comes together. Just tripping along through the interhole and the in-box this morning, and I come across one fine new song by a band named Vampire. And then I come across another one by a band named Vulgar Trade. I think to myself, “Self, wouldn’t it be cool if I came across another fine new song by a band with a ‘V’ name?” And then it happened! And here they are…

VAMPIRE

Thanks to a Facebook post by my friend Vonlughlio I learned that there is a newish Swedish band named Vampire. Surely, I thought, that name was taken long ago, and I don’t mean by Bram Stoker. Anyway, after producing a demo in 2012 (available on Bandcamp) this band landed on the Century Media label, which will release their self-titled debut album in March. And through the good graces of said label a song from the album was premiered yesterday by Stereogum on this side of the Atlantic and by Terrorizer on that side.

The new song is named “Howl From the Coffin”. True to the band’s name, it sinks its fangs deep into the jugular with the kind of toothsome, rocking/thrashing riffs that hail from an earlier time and ravenous howls of gruesome glee. Hellishly good soloing, too! Listening is an electrifying experience that will conjure memories of feral death metal from the late 80s and early 90s. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: WILDERNESSKING — “THE DEVIL WITHIN”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

I haven’t written a review in almost a month. The list of releases I want to write about has now grown so long that I know I’ll never succeed in completing all of them. And yet when I saw that Wildernessking released The Devil Within yesterday, I immediately bought a download of the EP, listened to it repeatedly, and wrote what you’re about to read.

I suppose this impulsiveness derived in part from the soft spot I have for bands located in places far from the biggest global markets for metal, and so remote that touring beyond a few cities is almost impossible for most bands. Cape Town, South Africa, is one such place. But mainly it’s because I had such high expectations for the music based on what Wildernessking have done before.

First came their 2012 debut album, The Writing of Gods In the Sand (which became the source of one of our Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs of 2012). To steal words from my own review, it bound together styles from a variety of genres (including black metal, post-metal, and Enslaved-style prog) to create “a uniquely effective expression of power and emotion, a blending of light and dark, soft and hard, beauty and voraciousness.” Continue reading »

WOMANOWAR: THE ARGUMENT FOR BALANCE & EQUALITY — AN INTERVIEW WITH EIGHT BELLS (MELYNDA JACKSON & HALEY WESTEINER)

 Interviews  5 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

(We welcome the return of guest writer Alain Mower and the third in his series of interviews of women in metal. In this edition, he talks with two members of Portland-based Eight Bells – Melynda Jackson and Haley Westeiner — whose 2013 album The Captain’s Daughter turned a lot of heads.)

This series is dedicated to creating discussion and awareness by expressing the observations, thoughts, and opinions of current prolific metal musicians who, in their spare time, also happen to be women. This began as a direct response to the few stragglers in the community who think that there is still a place for misogyny in metal.

If this results in you punching some loud-mouth, drunk sexist at the next show you go to or calling someone out when they question the attendance, attire, or musical capabilities of a woman at a show, then that’s all I could ever ask, and then some. Continue reading »

TWO NEW CANDLELIGHT SIGNINGS WORTH NOTICING: ANCIENT ASCENDANT AND COLTSBLOOD

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Jan 222014
 

The last 24 hours brought news of two new signings by Candlelight Records that I thought were worth some attention.

ANCIENT ASCENDANT

We’ve been following the progression of UK-based Ancient Ascendant (pictured above) very closely, with very positive reviews (by Andy Synn) of both their 2011 debut album The Grim Awakening and their 2012 EP Into the Dark. With the EP, the band transitioned to a somewhat different style than had been evident on their debut album and the EP that preceded it (The Heathen Throne). To quote Andy:

“The thrashier stylings of The Grim Awakening have been drastically pared back to make room for a more cutting, blackened approach, replacing thrashing vigour with blackened vitriol, while maintaining the monstrous death metal heart of the band. The songs now have more of a cut and thrust to them, slashing and slicing with psychotic precision, where before they were, at times, simply content with a more bludgeoning form of sonic brutality.”

They’ve now written and recorded a new album (with Dan Swanö again handling the production) that Candlelight plans to release later this year, and it’s one we’re very interested to hear. Congratulations to both Candlelight and the band on this promising new partnership! Continue reading »

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