SEEN AND HEARD: RUDRA, OLD SKIN, APHONIC THRENODY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
Oct 112013
 

As explained in my last post, I’ve been diverted from metal over the last three days by activities relating to the old fuckin’ day job. However, I did manage to make a quick slog through the interhole in search of new music and found three diverse items worth sharing. Here they are:

RUDRA

I would venture to say that no one else sounds quite like Rudra. This Singapore band, whose last album I reviewed with lavish praise here, incorporate traditional Indian music, Sanskrit chants and mantras, and themes drawn from Sanskrit literature into a galvanizing combination of black and death metal, calling the result “Vedic Metal”. They’re now on the verge of releasing their seventh album, entitled RTA, through Sonic Blast Media, and today they began streaming the album’s second track, “Heartbreak”.

From its sublime meditative introduction to the jolting main section of the song (which features chants as well as strangling black metal vocals and a serpentine melodic guitar lead), this is an attractive tease for the new album. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: NACHTMYSTIUM AND BITTER PEACE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Oct 112013
 

Hails and horns from sunny Southern California, where your humble editor has had his days and nights consumed by activities related to the old fuckin’ day job since Wednesday morning. This has viciously interfered with my ability to listen and write about metal. I will have a lot of catching up to do after I return to non-sunny Seattle tonight.

I did wake up early this morning in order to make a quick circumnavigation of the interhole in search of new things, and found some items worth talking about. I’m putting one of them in this post and will collect a few more in the next one, and after that I may have to resort to cat memes for the rest of the day. First item:

In a bit of perhaps unfortunate timing, I saw via a press release this morning that Plastik Musik will be releasing a vinyl split by an East Coast black metal band named Bitter Peace and Chicago’s Nachtmystium. I say “unfortunate timing”, of course, because of Blake Judd’s recent arrest for theft and the subsequent outpouring of criticism about Judd (vividly summarized here), which paints a portrait of a con man and ripoff artist.

Continue reading »

DEATH RITUALS: NEW MUSIC FROM ÆVANGELIST, NECROPHOBIC, CARA NEIR, AND VASTUM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Oct 082013
 

Ævangelist album art by Andrzej Masianis

“Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,” or so wrote William Congreve (not William Shakespeare) in his play The Mourning Bride (1697). This is in fact true of some music, but what charms your humble editor is music that’s savage rather than soothing. I have four recent examples of metal savagery for you, in the order in which I heard them this morning.

ÆVANGELIST

The new album by Ævangelist, Omen Ex Simulacra, will be released on November 29 by Debemur Morti. This is a later date than first reported. Based on the band’s previous output and the first two songs released for this album, it will be worth the wait. In July, we featured the first of those two advance tracks (“Abysscape”), and today Debemur Morti began streaming a second one — “Relinquished Destiny”.

This song takes no prisoners. It shoots the wounded in the head and then rips the corpses into small pieces before consuming them. It delivers an atmosphere of alien horror, and the corrosive distortion can’t disguise the experimental-sounding nature of the riffing and drum progressions, which make the song interesting as well as frightening. As icing on this maggot-ridden cake, death/doom descends at the finale. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ARTILLERY, THE OCEAN, “AUTUMN ANNIHILATION”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Oct 082013
 

Here’s a collection of recent items that seemed worth sharing with our esteemed readers, as well as you.

ARTILLERY

I know we have thrash heads in the audience, and for you we present as a public service a new song from Denmark’s Artillery. For those of you born after 1982, Artillery have been recording music since before you were born. For those of you who don’t look both ways before crossing the street, they may still be recording music after you have left this veil of tears. Their seventh album, Legions, will be released by Metal Blade in the US on November 26, and on somewhat earlier dates elsewhere. It features a new vocalist, Michael Bastholm Dahl, and a new drummer, Josua Madsen, along with original guitarists Morten and Michael Stützer and longtime bassist Peter Thorslund.

Yesterday, an advance track was made available for streaming. The introduction to “Chill My Bones (Burn My Flesh)”, with its hand drums and exotic melody, is a surprise, and an immediate hook into the rest of the song. Thrash lives or dies by the power of the riff, and this song has got some good ones going on. I’m also told by a long-time fan of the band that the new vocalist is reminiscent of former vocalist Flemming Rönsdorf, last heard from on the band’s fourth album in 1999. Continue reading »

AEON DISCOVERIES: SATAN’S WRATH, THE ORDER OF THE SOLAR TEMPLE, HANNES GROSSMANN AND THE RADIAL COVENANT

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Oct 072013
 

Here are a few new songs I came across in my adventures through the interhole today. I came across other songs, but trust me, you don’t want to hear them. These, you want to hear. Serendipitously, they all have something to do with the word “Aeon”.

SATAN’S WRATH

It was only last year that Metal Blade released Galloping Blasphemy, the debut album by Satan’s Wrath, a two-man Greek “Satanic blackened thrash” band. But lo and behold, the label is already planning to release a second full-length, Aeons of Satan’s Reign. What’s more, it began streaming a new song today by the name of “Die White Witch Die”.

Poor Jesus, once again made the source of refreshment for the goat lord, but I do like the colorful cover. I also do like “Die White Witch Die”, voiced as it is by one of the goat lord’s hellish minions and filled as it is with rockin’, thrashin’, bloody minded riffs, plus an infernally good slowdown. This isn’t old school, this is roughly three old schools packed into one. Sick guitar solo, too. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC FROM IHSAHN: “NaCL”

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 072013
 


Ihsahn’s fifth solo album, Das Seelenbrechen, will be released by Candlelight Records on October 22 in North America. It can be pre-ordered here. Last week a song from the album named “Hiber” was made available for listening on Soundcloud, and today we get the chance to hear another one. Entitled “NaCL”, it’s streaming as a lyric video and it’s available for purchase on iTunes (here, for US fans).

NaCL is the chemical notation for sodium chloride, otherwise known as salt. Whereas “Hiber” was heavy, dark, and occasionally dissonant, on “NaCL”, Ihsahn indulges the more purely progressive side of his solo explorations. It’s anchored by a punchy, complex, and ridiculously compulsive rhythm over which Ihsahn weaves a memorable melody. All clean vocals this time, but they sound great.

Listen next. Continue reading »

MOOD MUSIC

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Oct 052013
 

Metal is mood music.  A few recent cases in point:

RAWHIDE

“City Kids” puts you in the mood to pound six shots of whisky in rapid succession, rip your shirt off, start busting up the furniture, run out into the street and expose yourself to passing cars, pick fights in the nearest bar, black out, and wake up wondering how all that vomit got on your pants and whether that’s your blood in your mouth or someone else’s. Death punk ‘n’ roll.

 

Continue reading »

TOURISM: CLERIC ARE COMING

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Oct 042013
 

We don’t usually report news about tours unless they involve nationally or internationally known bands, because providing comprehensive daily news isn’t really part of our mission statement. But I’m making an exception in this post because the band is so damned interesting and because some friends in the Pacific Northwest provided the impetus for making this tour a cross-country reality.

The band’s name is Cleric and they’re from Philadelphia. I came across them in August through a recommendation by Ryan Schutte, guitarist for the awesome Seattle band Lb.! (pound) (who has since then helped Cleric arrange shows up in my part of the country). Back then, I listened to one long song from the band’s 2010 album Regressions that just completely blew my mind, and I wrote this:

This song is one of the most eye-popping, jaw-dropping, extravagant pieces of music I’ve heard all year. It’s almost 20 minutes long, and I was transfixed (and somewhat scared) the whole time. It’s an out-and-out barrage of freakazoidical, destructive, synapse-severing mayhem. It doesn’t follow a straight line, it doesn’t play nice, it doesn’t let up. A thoroughly brain-puréeing, remorselessly spine-crushing experience. Something like Portal, Blackjazz -vintage Shining, and Behold… the Arctopus communing in a hurricane. During an earthquake.

Four months after Regressions came out, they were robbed in Philadelphia “of nearly everything that helped to build and eventually portray their sound, and the closest they came to touring was driving to pawn shops looking for stolen gear.”  The story I received in a press release today continues: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SOLIUM FATALIS, SÓLSTAFIR, EYE OF SOLITUDE, DYING OF THE LIGHT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 042013
 

You want something new in your ears?  I mean, other than a stranger’s tongue or that bedbug that crawled in there while you were sleeping?  Well then, check out this selection of recommended new songs discovered over the last 24 hours.

SOLIUM FATALIS

I found out about this band (whose name means “Fated Throne”) thanks to a tip from my NCS comrade TheMadIsraeli. It’s the brainchild of New Hampshire guitarist Jim Gregory, but it also includes the superb Dirk Verbeuren (Soilwork, Scarve, Bent Sea) on drums, Scarve bassist Loic Colin, and Excrecor guitarist/frontman Jeff DeMarco on vocals. Solium Fatalis released their self-titled debut album just days ago, and it features eye-catching cover art by Septic Flesh frontman/bassist Seth Siro Anton.

Two songs from the album are streaming on Bandcamp. I listened to them last night and they’re really good – a dynamic offering of blackened melodic death metal built upon excellent instrumental performances, a voracious vocal turn, and a well-crafted production that gives the music a sharp, heavy sound. Seductive Eastern melodies flow through the stately but savage “Molecular Devices” and the jolting fury of “The 7th Gate”. I don’t know why I haven’t heard more about this album, but I’m definitely going after it now (it’s available on iTunes and Amazon) Continue reading »

SUTURE: “CARCINOMA CONTAGION”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Oct 032013
 

Most of today we were distracted by other things, and hence kind of light on the spotlighting of new music. Hell, even Andy Synn could only manage to write a three-line album review, though he did write three of them, and BadWolf was so distracted that he experienced temporary website confusion and wrote up a song premiere for someone else, though it was a really good write-up for a really hot song. I put up photos of calcified birds and bats.  Just one of those fuckin’ days.

We’ll try to do better tomorrow. But I thought before I completely checked out for the day I’d throw one piece of audio-visual sweetness your way.

Take a pit-bull guard-dog that hasn’t been fed in a week and then taunt him until he’s barking and ready to tear your throat out. Add a full-throttle headless drummer wearing a Blotted Science shirt (high fives for that!). Throw in a couple of mutant guitarists and a bassist with super-animated fingers. Set all of them on fire and tell them you won’t put it out until they finish their song, and then stand way back and let them GO! Continue reading »

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