SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): MESHUGGAH AND ASPHYX

 

Earlier today I posted Part 1 of a planned two-part Seen and Heard round-up of new music, with the first Part prepared by my comrade DGR. What you’re looking at now isn’t the Part 2 that I had planned to write, because while I was toiling away on that, Meshuggah and Asphyx released songs from their new albums. Rather than tack them on to my original selection of cuts for Part 2, which is already pretty large, I decided to throw them at you now, and convert my original Part 2 into Part 3. Unless something else pops up and Part 3 becomes Part 4, because I haven’t yet figured out how to make time stand still.

MESHUGGAH

The title of Meshuggah’s eighth album is The Violent Sleep of Reason. Nuclear Blast plans to release it on October 7. That’s obviously a big deal, given how vastly influential Meshuggah has become over the years, not to mention the high quality of their music. The first single from the album, “Born In Dissonance” premiered not long ago at Rolling Stone, along with an interview of drummer Tomas Haake, who as usual wrote the lyrics for the song.

 

photo by Olle Carlsson

 

The interview is a worthwhile read, and the new song is most definitely a worthwhile listen. It thunders. That distinctively odd interplay between the drum rhythm and the percussive bass-and-guitar hammering takes center stage, while the song also includes a swirling, brain-twisting guitar solo and other alien guitar machinations as the pace of this industrial-strength piledriver slows. Very nice.

The cover art for the album was created by Keerych Luminokaya, who also created the cover art for Koloss and The Ophidian Trek. The new album can be pre-ordered at iTunes and Amazon.

https://www.facebook.com/meshuggah/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ASPHYX

The new album by Asphyx is named Incoming Death, and Century Media has set September 30 as the worldwide release date. In my own personal pantheon of death metal bands, Asphyx is there, looming like a hooded, multi-armed golem wielding sledgehammers, axes, chainsaws, and a very bad attitude.

The first single from the new album is the title track, which is accompanied in the YouTube clip by live footage from the band’s performance at Brutal Assault Open Air 2015, edited by Carl Assault. The press release we received included this commentary by His Eminence Martin van Drunen:

“Incoming Death was music-wise composed in perhaps 10 minutes when Husky and Paul were checking the sound in the Perle am Rhein studio for the flexi recordings. When we all freaked out on it, we knew we had the title track for the album. It’s so typical our ASPHYX death metal style. Straight forward, no nonsense, three riff, in-your-face death metal. Not that we were looking for a title track that would be in the tradition of ‘Death The Brutal Way’ or ‘Deathhammer’. It just came out like this. It’s a damn neck breaker to raise hell to when playing live and that’s why the choice for the track was only natural. Stanza, chorus, repeat, bridge, stanza, chorus, end. That’s how it’s done. On Instinct. Lyricwise three times death and gore by plague, aliens and zombies. And some metal beasts are even shorter than two minutes! So grab a beer, bang that head and scream along. This is fuckin’ ASPHYX and we always deliver the goods!”

The song is only two minutes long. It’s a rampaging ravager of a track, with the kind of pulsating riffs that for me are the mark of an Asphyx up-tempo destroyer (we’ll have to wait for later to indulge in the doom crushing). And of course, Mr. van Drunen is in fine vocal form.

Incoming Death is being offered in a variety of formats, including one that includes two bonus cover tracks, “Servants Of The Warsmen” by Winter and “Master” by Master. Pre-sales begin here on September 2. The very nice cover art is by Axel Hermann.

https://www.facebook.com/officialasphyx
http://www.asphyx.nl