ROUND-UP: INQUISITION, SKINFATHER, BLIND TO FAITH, GODLESS ANGEL, AND BANDCAMP GOODIES

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  26 Responses »
Oct 162013
 

Herein, a collection of recommended music I discovered over the last 24 hours.

INQUISITION

Last night brought the premiere on three European sites of the title track from Inquisition’s forthcoming album, Obscure Verses for the Multiverse, which Season of Mist plans to release on October 29. Lambgoat then premiered it this morning for the North American market. Yet none of these sites chose to say anything about the actual song. It was just sort of “here’s a song, listen to it”. Maybe they know something I don’t know, i.e., that most people skip over words and go right to the music? Man, if that’s right I’ve sure been wasting a lot of time. But I can give it a shot:

Go HERE if you want to listen to “Obscure Verses for the Multiverse”. Continue reading »

YOUR BEHEMOTH ROUND-UP FOR TODAY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Oct 162013
 

I came across the three things in this post and they just seemed to go together. I really don’t know what else to say by way of introduction, so I’m not even going to try. Let’s just get on with it . . .

“THE BEHEMOTH PROJECT”

Are you like me? When you listen to Behemoth’s “Alas, Lord Is Upon Me”, do you feel like thrusting your pelvis, twerking, and trying to strangle yourself with your hair? Yeah, I thought so. It’s a common reaction. But not all of us are willing to get in front of a camera while we’re doing that. Thank goodness that Aneta, Katarzyna, and Izabela felt no such inhibitions.

Here they are, performing their dance routine to Behemoth’s classic at the Modelarnia fitness center in Bielsko-Biała, Poland. I feel sure that in no time “Alas, Lord Is Upon Me” will rapidly become a part of fitness routines worldwide, right up there with Deicide’s “Fuck Your God”. Continue reading »

YIN AND YANG: KUOLEMANLAAKSO AND HEAVY HOEMPA

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Oct 152013
 


Musta aurinko nousee — cover art by Markus Räisänen

Yesterday I discovered some new music, quite a lot of it actually. I picked two of those new discoveries as a pair for this post, but not because they are anything alike. In fact, they could hardly be more different — and that’s why I’ve paired them together.

KUOLEMANLAAKSO

This band’s Finnish name means “Death’s Valley” or “Valley of Death”. It began as a one-man project of guitarist Markus Laakso (Chaosweaver). After recording a handful of demo tracks, he recruited a group of talented comrades to flesh out the band:  vocalist Mikko Kotamäki (Swallow the Sun, Barren Earth), guitarist Savon Surma (“Kouta”) (Chaosweaver, ex-Verjnuarmu), bassist Tuomo Räisänen (“Usva”) (Elenium, The Nibiruan), and drummer Toni Ronkainen (“Tiera”) (Discard, Cult of Endtime).

Together they recorded an album at Woodshed Studio in Germany with V. Santura of Triptykon and Dark Fortress fame, who also mixed and mastered the music. The album is named Uljas uusi maailma (“Brave New World”) and it was released by Svart Records in November 2012. It was very good.

In August of this year the band recorded a second album with V. Santura, this time convening in a cabin in the Finnish woods near the shores of a lake. This morning I spent time I didn’t have reading Markus Laakso’s day-by-day studio diary, because it was both interesting and entertaining (and mouth-watering — this group ate well while together in the woods). If you have the time, and even if you don’t, I recommend it. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SOUL REMNANTS, SPECTRAL LORE, SCARECROW, AND MALTHUSIAN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Oct 142013
 

We all have our own recipes for dealing with the grimness of Mondays, even if those recipes simply involve falling into a state of clinical depression or foul surliness. My own recipe today was to go in search of fearsome new metal, the kind that would put a shot of adrenaline into the old brainstem or open a door into the pitiless void. The search proved to be highly successful, as you shall see. Here are four new songs from forthcoming releases that brightened up my Monday (and by “brightened” I mean “darkened”).

SOUL REMNANTS

Soul Remnants make their home in the Boston area, and their second album Black and Blood is slated for release on October 31 by a Philadelphia label named Horror Pain Gore Death Productions (by coincidence, this band is the first of two in this post whose new releases are being handled by that label). This morning I listened to two recently unveiled advance tracks from the album that are worth your time — “Incinerator” and “No Afterlife”.

The music is a hot shot of adrenaline straight into the bloodstream, a burst of ripping riffage and furious drumming, segmented by powerful pneumatic grooves and fleet-fingered soloing and flavored with seductive melodies. The caustic harsh vocals are aces too, and the production gives the music the sharp edge of scalpels at work. It’s a bracing brew of melodic death metal, tech-death, and even black metal stylings. Very nice. Continue reading »

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 »

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