Islander

Sep 142015
 

ChaosAct-Kingdom of Pigs

 

(DGR reviews three releases by bands he came across while… face-planting.)

The idea that 2015 has been a year that has been moving in fits and starts in my neck of the woods has slowly become something of a mantra. With a sample size of the four or so years I’ve been kicking around these parts, I’ve usually got a backlog of albums about eight deep — which means that if I’m not spending a good chunk of my year listening to the same discs over and over again, telling myself I have to review them, to the point of nausea and then stressing out about it later when I come home so tired from work that I can’t even fathom typing — I figure that I’m fucking up.

However, since 2015 seems to be in a mode that consists of violent seizures of music and then absolutely nothing, I’d hazard to say that with the publication of my Wolfheart review, I was caught up with music for the moment — at least as far as the releases I’d been keeping an eye on were concerned.

The other goofballs that also staff this site have done a tremendous job keeping us up to date, but it also means I’ve been drifting for a bit. My method of drifting, though, usually involves a drunken stumble and a face-plant on the concrete or two, and this is how I tend to discover music these days. I try to keep track, but more often than not I seem to be face-planting into the yards of bands who’ve had releases that hit this year and who seem to be flying just under the radar — so we find ourselves once again sifting through three releases, via Bandcamp, of bands who run the gamut from death metal, to symphonic black and death, to low-end heavy deathgrind, and all three see us travelling a pretty good chunk of the globe.

So, I present to you, my latest edition of foibles that I believe we may find interesting to pick apart and dissect, ones that take us from Latvia, to the good ole’ US of A, and then to our buddies in Poland via Selfmadegod. Continue reading »

Sep 132015
 

crown shyness
photo by Patrice78500

Well, I managed to compile another one of these THAT’S METAL! posts without waiting a month or more since the last one. If I had tentacles for arms, I’d pat myself on the back. (That reference to tentacles is what highly paid literary journalists such as myself call “foreshadowing”.) Today I have ten items for you that I think are metal even though they’re not music.

ITEM ONE

As usual, I’ll start with the image you see at the top of this post. It’s a photo of a canopy of Dryobalanops aromatica trees (more commonly known as camphor trees) at the Forest Research Institute Malaysia near Kuala Lampur. I was first attracted to the image because I thought it would make a cool metal album cover, perhaps for a nature-centric atmospheric black metal band — but also because it’s intriguing.

You’ll notice that the tops of the trees don’t touch each other. There are gaps that look like the channels of a river, or perhaps the branching of capillaries or neurons. There’s a name for this phenomenon, the exact cause of which is uncertain, and the name is the second reason I thought it was cool. Continue reading »

Sep 132015
 

Enshine-Singularity

 

The multinational collective known as Enshine released their debut album Origin in 2013, a record that our reviewer DGR praised as “devastatingly beautiful”, one that “takes us to that snow-filled, cold, and desolate place where we sometimes long to be and lets us sit and watch the world move as it speaks to us.” Now Enshine have completed their second album, entitled Singularity, and today we bring you the premiere of the album’s first advance track — “Adrift” — in advance of its October 18 release.

Origin was packed with atmospheric songs capable of taking listeners outside themselves and transporting them to vividly realized spheres crafted by their own imagination. We chose one of those songs (“Ambivalence”) for our list of 2013’s “Most Infectious” extreme metal songs, and “Adrift” has quickly become a candidate for this year’s list. Continue reading »

Sep 132015
 

The Power and the Glory-Call me armageddon art

 

(Austin Weber prepared this Sunday’s Rearview Mirror post.)

While I’m not the sort of music fan who usually pines for the “good old days”, there are certainly some sounds and styles in the realm of heavy music that are no longer “in”. I’m referring specifically to the early-to-mid-2000s when bands from Botch to Burnt By The Sun and a million others crafted highly volatile yet mercurial mixtures of hardcore and metal. This is the time period when I got into metal, and I was fortunate to catch many of those bands in their heyday.

Of all the bands crafting metallic hardcore crossbreeds around that time, one band still stands out for me, mainly because they never got the respect and appreciation their music deserved, unlike many of their much better known peers. That band, my friends, was the Atlanta based wrecking crew known as The Power & The Glory. Continue reading »

Sep 122015
 

Vastum-Hole Below

 

Hey there, happy Saturday. I’m feeling a little woozy. For some reason Friday nights usually seem to have that effect on me. I had some ambitious plans for today’s posts, but unless I can figure out how to vacuum all the woozy out of my head, what you’re reading now may be all I can manage. These are just a few of the things I spotted over the last two days that didn’t make it into that big slug of round-up posts yesterday.

VASTUM

San Francisco’s Vastum have completed work on a new album, featuring cover art by the Vastum vocalist Daniel Butler. I can already feel the ground beginning to tremble in anticipation of the detonation to come. The album’s name is Hole Below, and 20 Buck Spin plans to nuke the planet from space with it on November 6, because that’s the only way to be sure. Continue reading »

Sep 112015
 

Abigail Williams-The Accuser

 

A few days ago I was in a sour mood because it appeared I might have to go to Alaska for my fucking day job, with the prospect of spending 10 days there in a state of metal sensory deprivation. As things turned out, I did in fact have to go to Alaska — and then turned around 24 hours later and flew back to Seattle. So while the entire escapade was ridiculous (and not worth explaining), the good news is that I can return to normal blogging activity.

Of course, while I was distracted with all this nonsense, dozens of new songs and videos appeared that were worth recommending to you. Our pal Leperkahn stepped up and wrote a 3-part post that we published earlier today featuring 16 of them. However, that collection did not cover everything on my own list of goodies, and in addition Austin Weber sent in a couple of suggestions himself. So in this post I’ve included Austin’s two songs (and I’ll identify which ones they are when I come to them), plus a couple of my own. At the risk of driving you into sensory overload, still more will follow from my list over the weekend.

ABIGAIL WILLIAMS

Last fall we debuted demo versions of two awesome songs from Abigail Williams’ new album, The Accuser, but today brought the premiere of the album’s first track. I actually got wind of it yesterday through an e-mail alert from Bandcamp that the song had appeared on Candlelight’s page for the album. The song’s name is “Path of Broken Glass“. Continue reading »

Sep 112015
 

Speedtrap=Straight Shooter

 

(Here’s Part 3 of Leperkahn’s round-up of new music for this Friday. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.)

SPEEDTRAP

Prior to finding a full stream of their new album Straight Shooter on Noisey, I hadn’t heard of Finnish troupe Speedtrap. If you’re in the same boat that I was in, I’ll tell you that these guys sound pretty much exactly like you think they will, in that they love Motörhead, as everyone should. This thing is chock full of blazing riffs and cheesy lyrics sung by an oddly bluesy power-metal-type singer — I’m in love.

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/speedtrap-straight-shooter
https://www.facebook.com/speedtrapmetal
https://speedtrap.bandcamp.com/ Continue reading »

Sep 112015
 

Riwen-The Cold

 

(Here’s Andy Synn’s review of the new album by Sweden’s Riwen.)

Although I don’t listen to as much of it these days, there’s still a part of me that holds Hardcore very dear to my heart, as this was the music that really started my love affair with the howling distortion of a clanging, chugging, buzzing electric guitar.

Of course I’d been exposed to music before this – my Dad was (and is) a big Prog aficionado, and as a result I was lucky enough to grow up with the sounds of Pink Floyd, Yes, Rush, King Crimson, Queen, et al, as the soundtrack to my formative years – but when it finally came time for me to start spreading my own musical wings, it was the sound of Hardcore that first drew me in, possibly (probably) because it was the direct antithesis of Prog in so many ways!

I tell you this because if there’s one thing I’m sure of it’s that The Cold, the debut full-length by Scandinavian brawlers Riwen (whom I last mentioned several times in conjunction with their EP release), really recaptures that primal, gritty essence which initially drew the younger me to Hardcore all those years ago. Continue reading »

Sep 112015
 

Genevieve-Escapism

 

(Austin Weber introduces our premiere of a song from the new album by Maryland’s Genevieve, coming soon from Grimoire Records.)

Much like Dark Descent, Grimoire Records has really been on a fucking roll as of late. They’ve somehow managed to release several of my favorite records of the year. And it would seem from the press I’ve seen elsewhere for Dendritic Arbor, Bearstorm, and others that it’s not just our site that has been latching on to all the great things the label is doing. So with that being said, we are very proud to let you hear a song called “Charnel Flow”, the first song to drop from Grimoire’s next release, an album entitled Escapism by a Maryland group known as Genevieve.

Don’t let their innocent-sounding name fool you, because Genevieve’s music dwells in the very pits of despair and disgust. They traffic in a particularly dark blend of black and death metal that’s very noisey and stomach-churning. Listening to “Charnel Flow” brings to mind the warped riffing and unconventional nature of Portal in its death metal moments, which is intertwined with equally warped and odd black metal passages that remind me of the deliciously twisted black metal band Imperial Triumphant. Continue reading »

Sep 112015
 

Mephorash-1557 - Rites of Nullification

 

(Leperkahn compiled this second of at least four round-ups of new music we’ll be presenting today. Part 1 is here.)

MEPHORASH

In my infinite wisdom, I totally forgot that the Swedish black metal band Mephorash’s new album 1557 – Rites of Nullification had already been released (despite Andy Synn’s glowing review) until I saw that Mephorash posted a stream to a track other than the advance track they had previously presented on their FB page. This “new” track, entitled “Phezur – Dissolving the Sea of Yetzirah” has me strongly regretting that lapse in memory.

The song masterfully conjures a deeply evil, occult, Luciferian atmosphere with its stirring riffs and caustic snarls, and the riff that comes in about a quarter of the way through the song is certainly quite the earworm. It moves through periods of chaos, groove, eerie calm, and infernal majesty, all while maintaining a truly nefarious aura. Make this the soundtrack to your next black mass if you know what’s good for you. Continue reading »