SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MALTHUSIAN, UPON STONE, BEFORE THE DAWN, CASTRATOR, ENTRAILS, A CAT IN THE BRAIN, LOMMI, BOMBUS, GLUED MOUTH

(written by Islander)

This Saturday selection of new songs and videos provides a lot to take in, and lots of twists and turns in the musical path as you move from one to the next (which is what I hope you’ll do).

Fair warning: I’ve included a pair of songs that feature entirely clean singing, and another where singing trades off with harsher expressions. Today’s collection is also a mix of well-known bands (at least well-known to yours truly) and others that have scoured my ears for the first time this week.

 

MALTHUSIAN (Ireland)

We’ll start with a band well-known in underground circles, though it’s one that by rights should be a lot better known, and now probably will be thanks to their signing with Relapse Records for the release of their second album, The Summoning Bell. In addition to that news, last week brought us a video for the album’s title track.

Prepare for: dismal, dissonant, yet also wickedly delirious and spasmodically deranged fretwork, avalanche drums (which also fire like weaponry), monstrously abyssal gutturals, and screeching howls, plus spectacular scenery in the video. In all of its twisted developments, it’s an unnerving song, especially in its closing convulsion of madness.

The Summoning Bell will be out on August 8th. It features cover art by the fantastic Mitchell Nolte.

https://www.relapse.com/pages/malthusian-the-summoning-bell
https://malthusian.bandcamp.com/album/the-summoning-bell-2
https://www.facebook.com/malthusianDM
https://www.instagram.com/malthusianire

 

UPON STONE (U.S.)

January 2024 brought us the debut album of California-based Upon Stone, a fairly eye-opening debut since it was released by a big label (Century Media) despite the fact that the band didn’t have a lot in their discography before then. And then four months later our own DGR gave the album (Dead Mother Moon) a lavish review here, and that’s what finally induced yours truly to dive all the way into it, with very satisfying results.

Surprise, surprise, Upon Stone are already back, with a new three-song EP named End Time Lightning that Century Media released yesterday. The label pitches it as “a bloodthirsty barrage of melodicism and menace”, and that’s certainly true of the song and vampire-themed video that was also released yesterday, “Fury My Master“.

Prepare for: a hard-charging and head-hammering melodeath spectacle, filigreed with loads of darting, swirling, and exuberantly shrill guitars, and fronted by ravenous screams and monstrous roars — with a jazzy and sultry instrumental interlude and soloing that will pop your eyes wide open.

I haven’t yet listened to the other two songs on End Time Lightning, one of which is a Manowar cover (“Outlaw”). It features cover art by Andreas Marschall.

https://uponstone.lnk.to/EndTimeLightning-EP
https://www.facebook.com/uponstone/

 

BEFORE THE DAWN (Finland)

Now we go back to another very well-known and much-beloved band, a band that thrived in the first decade of the current century, died when Tuomas Saukkonen shelved it (along with all of his other projects) in order to launch Wolfheart, and was re-born at the beginning of the current decade.

The re-birth led to the release of Before the Dawn‘s 2023 album Stormbringers, and the re-birth seems to have been successful because Before the Dawn now have a new album named Cold Flare Eternal headed for a September release on Reaper Entertainment.

Paavo Laapotti has been the band’s vocalist since the re-birth, and his performance is one of the key strengths of the next song in today’s collection, “Stellar Effect“. He ranges from tenor singing to power-metal style falsetto (though I’m not sure he actually breaks into falsetto) and the howling of a wounded wolf.

Other strengths include the song’s heavyweight, head-moving bass-lines, the rapidly darting leads, Tuomas‘ neck-cracking drumwork, an electrifying solo, and the music’s compelling amalgam of gothic doom and sweeping Nordic magnificence. And it’s lots of fun to watch the video of the band-members recording the song too.

The album’s cover art was created by Gogo Malone.

https://lnk.to/StellarEffect
https://www.btdmetal.com
https://www.facebook.com/beforethedawn
https://www.instagram.com/beforethedawnofficial

 

CASTRATOR (U.S.)

I’ve tended to confuse the all-woman death metal band Emasculator with the all-woman death metal band Castrator. Why do you think that is? It’s not because their music is the same. Must be some other reason.

Well, the band Castrator are following up their rumbling, roaring, and flame-throwing debut album Defiled in Oblivion (vividly reviewed here by our DGR) with a new full-length named Coronation of the Grotesque. My next selection today is a video for one of the new songs, “Covenant of Deceit“.

Prepare for: viciously churning, brutally slugging, poisonously throbbing, and feverishly insectile fretwork, plus recurring bursts of militarized percussion, malicious howls, rabid barks, and a fret-burner of a solo. They pack a hell of a lot into this tempo-dynamic song, some things thuggish, some things elaborate, including wisps of melody.

Coronation of the Grotesque will be released by Dark Descent on August 15th. The album’s grotesque artwork was created by the great Jon Zig.

https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/coronation-of-the-grotesque
https://www.facebook.com/CastratorBand
https://www.instagram.com/castratorband

 

ENTRAILS (Sweden)

Seeing the news that Entrails have a new album opened up my Swe-death salivary glands, and the drooling got heavy when I heard the two songs from it released so far (I can tell I’m level-headed about this because the drool leaked out of both sides of my mouth).

Both songs, “Untreatable Decay” and more recently “Wings of Death“, feature exhaust-belching chainsaw riffage, bowel-loosening bass heaviness, vertebra-cracking and gut-punching drumwork, screaming guitar-soloing, and bloody raw and ragged (yet intelligible!) vocals.

Both of them are berserk as well as barbaric and bludgeoning, but the soloing in the second one is also eerily wraithlike. They’ll chew you up and leave you bleeding, your pulse still pounding.

The album’s title is Grip of Ancient Evil. It will be out on July 18th via Hammerheart Records.

https://entrails.lnk.to/gripofancientevil
https://hammerheart.bandcamp.com/album/grip-of-ancient-evil
https://www.facebook.com/entrails666
https://www.instagram.com/entrailsofficial

 

A CAT IN THE BRAIN (Italy)

As a lifelong cat lover and slavish servant of the species I couldn’t resist checking out the self-titled debut EP of A Cat in the Brain, especially because they alluringly brand their music “Italian Horror Grinding Death Metal”.

Prepare for: mauling and brawling madness, a combination of berserker riffing corrosive in tone, clobbering beats, bestially haughty gasping growls, and strangled snarls — with a change in speed and atmosphere lying in wait at the end.

In the title song they also include headlong gallops and bursts of madly darting and vividly swirling fretwork. With “Nightmare Concert” they again give free rein to multitudes of fretwork insanity and again fire up the song with relentlessly jaw-dropping drumwork, but also include a nasty slugfest, slower moments of hellish imperiousness and oppressive decay, and ruthlessly noxious vocals, some of which sound like a crocodile being garroted.

And with “Last Bloody Letter“, the slowest of the three, they create musical visions of hulking and lurching monstrosity and blood-congealing torture-chamber agonies. As before, the vocals are horrifying all by themselves — including the wretched cries of a woman that they layer in near the end.

This is a hellish and startling debut, and I sure hope A Cat in the Brain will bring us more fresh hell soon!

https://acatinthebrain.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/acatinthebrain
https://www.instagram.com/a_cat_in_the_brain

 

LOMMI (Sweden)

I warned you that today’s collection would include two songs that exclusively feature singing, and this next selection is the first of those. When I first listened to this one (“Down”) I didn’t realize there would be singing, because I was lured into listening solely by the cover art.

The high-flown singing, which displays grit in the gears, is quite good, the burly riffs quite menacing, the enormous (and pleasingly mercurial) bass-throbs and sharp snare-cracks quite muscle-moving. The band switch up the tempo repeatedly and also move the moods of the song. It proves to be both sinister and malicious, both psychedelic and ghoulishly frightening.

The song is from Lommi‘s new album 667788, which will be released by Majestic Mountain Records on August 1st.

https://www.facebook.com/lommisweden
https://www.instagram.com/lommiofficial

 

BOMBUS (Sweden)

Now for more singing!

The occasion for it is a performance video just released by Bombus for the song “Take You Down” off their new album Your Blood (out now on Black Lodge Records).

I’ve been following Bombus for some years now, even though they’re not as extreme as my usual appetites, and this song is again very appealing. It displays a side of the band that, while still pulse-punching, head-moving, and as heavy as bunker-busting bombs, is more melodically mythic and captivating, but also melancholy (even anguished), and quite memorable. The vocals are outstanding — singing with a serrated edge.

https://orcd.co/your-blood-bombus
https://bombus.bandcamp.com/album/your-blood
https://www.facebook.com/bombusmusic/

 

GLUED MOUTH (Canada)

And to close, I picked a song from another band I knew nothing about. The big lure for this one was the name of the song and its lyrics, which I read before listening to a single riotous sequence of notes.

The name of the song is “Chartreuse“. I love Chartreuse, in both its green and yellow varieties. I love it in cocktails and love it straight. I love its unique history. I don’t drink nearly enough of it, because it ain’t on the shelf of the kind of bars I tend to frequent, and it’s become damned difficult to buy (as you’ll discover from this very interesting recent article, even if you haven’t been personally defeated in trying to find it yourself).

What I don’t love is what happens if I over-indulge, which is a serious risk since I tend to forget where the off switch is after I start imbibing. Based on the vivid lyrics of the song, Glued Mouth also seem to forget where the chartreuse off-switch is.

As for the music, it’s just fucking savage. It does pack some hard-punching, head-butting rhythmic grooves and neck-snapping snare-work, but around those reptile-brain attractions the dense riffage inflicts viciously brazen chords and maliciously swarming assaults, accompanied by bursts of screaming string torture.

The vocals are a fine match for everything around them, which is to say they’re ravenously and rabidly ugly, a changing range of gruesome gutturals, rabid howls, and deranged yells. The song also includes an enormous rumbling percussive avalanche and a rapidly whining guitar motif that sounds jubilantly crazed.

If you give this one a chance, and especially a few chances in a row, I think you’ll also find that it turns out to be infectious as well as physically traumatic and mentally mangling.

Glued Mouth appears to be the Montreal duo of Anthony Roy and Rod Crow. Their Bandcamp page also includes a “Doomer Version” of “Chartreuse“, in which they slowed down the song and added reverb, with really foul results.

https://gluedmouth.bandcamp.com/track/chartreuse
https://gluedmouth.bandcamp.com/track/chartreuse-doomer-version
https://www.facebook.com/GluedMouth