SHORT BUT SWEET: ÆVANGELIST — “OMNIQUITY”

 Album Reviews, Metal News, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 222013
 

This past weekend I saw two pieces of news concerning the otherworldly black death entity known as Ævangelist, about whom we have written frequently. First, it appears the band have finished recording a new album, Omen Ex Simulacra, which will be released later this year by Debemur Morti. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Second, I saw that in the coming months an Australian label named Aurora Australis Records will be releasing an Ævangelist split with a Philadelphia black metal band named Esoterica . The artwork for it, created by Ralph Stewart, is displayed at the top of this post. Esoterica will be contributing three songs, including one on which MkM of Antaeus and Aosoth will be making a guest appearance. Ævangelist’s track is called “Omniquity”, and they posted it on YouTube yesterday.

It may only be one track, but that one track is the length of at least an EP: 22 minutes, 21 seconds. It’s a dense, harrowing, atmospheric piece, often violent and always unsettling. Yet for all its destructive power it exerts a strange hypnotic hold on the senses. Continue reading »

BISPORA: “THE PINEAL CHRONICLES PHASE I: FURTHERANCE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Jul 162013
 

(DGR reviews the new release by Sacramento-based Bispora.)

Back in 2011, local Sacramento group Bispora released an EP called The Cycle. For a group that pretty much came out of nowhere, The Cycle was a fantastic twenty minutes of music. It combined a love of prog metal, some djent elements, and a serious bit of Between The Buried and Me influence into something that you couldn’t really find elsewhere. It was a very guitar-centric disc too, with a pretty amazing melody that was intertwined throughout the first and last songs.

With a first release like that, Bispora became a band to watch. While they occasionally played with the same genre tropes as a lot of other bands, they managed to morph them into something all their own, so that they didn’t sound like just generic musician exercises. That’s why they gained the following that they did and why so many folks have been watching and waiting to see how they would follow it with the now-titled The Pineal Chronicles Phase One: Furtherance. (For the sake of my own fingers I’ll probably alternate between Phase One and Furtherance.)

Phase One was released the evening of July 4th and was free for an hour, before the band decided to start selling it for the pittance of $5. So is the first half of a promised two-part release worth the time of day? Have the band managed to pull away from the tractor beam that is the ‘difficult second release’? Continue reading »

CLOUDKICKER: “HELLO”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Jul 142013
 

(Better late than never, DGR reviews a single released by Ohio-based Cloudkicker earlier this year.)

Cloudkicker is one of those projects that people really should know more about. At this point, one-man band Ben Sharp has taken this project beyond being interesting for just guitarists and moved into a realm where people who love music generally should have a couple of his releases. Especially when he’s been kind enough to put out his material for free and then offer up some beautiful physical packages later on. He’s also got quite the varied discography at this point, writing music that was technically impressive and then moving into an area that is very ambient and ethereal.

I think he hit a major high point with 2010’s Beacons, which is one of the few instrumental discs I can do front to back without getting bored, and then reached it again with the recent Fade. Both discs represent two different eras in the Cloudkicker history, and way earlier this year he put out a single song called Hello that falls right in line with the mastery he displayed on Fade. Some folks may think it ridiculous that six months out we finally decide to discuss the song, but Hello is a powerful bit of music that travels further into the ambient realm than this project ever has before. On top of that, it contains slight elements of drone to create a warm and inviting song that, cliched as the description is, you can get absolutely lost in and just drift. Continue reading »

TORTURE DIVISION AND BENT SEA: “DOUBLE PENETRATION”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 132013
 

It was barely more than a month ago when Torture Division released their latest three-song assault on the senses (The Worship, reviewed here), and damned if they aren’t already back with another release. And damned if they don’t have company this time, because Double Penetration is a split release by Torture Division and Bent Sea, which is another super-group, and one we haven’t heard from in a while.

I had to crawl all the way back to November 2011 to find the post I wrote about Bent Sea’s debut album, Nostalgia. At that point the band consisted of guitarist/drummer Dirk Verbeuren (Soilwork, Scarve), vocalist Sven de Caluwe (Aborted), and bassist Devin Townsend (you read that right). Devin Townsend didn’t participate in Bent Sea’s contribution to Double Penetration, his shoes having been filled by none other than Napalm Death’s Shane Embury.

The Bent Sea track is a ditty called “Partners In Grind”. It’s a bone-shaker and a neck-snapper, a death-grind marauder with a beastly off-tempo mid-section. I’ve taken the liberty of uploading it to our Soundcloud account so you can hear it. And then of course you should go download it from Torture Division’s web site (more on that later). Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: DEIPHAGO AND RITUAL COMBAT — “ACCEPT THE MARK”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 122013
 

Last fall a U.S. label named Red Stream Inc. made a limited CD release of a split entitled Accept the Mark by two sonically destructive bands — Deiphago and Ritual Combat. Now, the German label Iron Bonehead Productions is on the verge of giving the split the vinyl treatment, and that gave me the opportunity to hear the split for the first time. Here are some thoughts about it, plus the chance for you to hear one track from each band’s two contributions (we thank Iron Bonehead for giving us permission to do this).

DEIPHAGO

Deiphago, who we’ve written about repeatedly in the past, were initially what caught my interest in this release. Originally from The Philippines and now based in Costa Rica, they’ve mastered the art of inflicting black/death musical assaults that are both incinerating and transfixing. Their 2012 full-length Satan Alpha Omega was one of the best in this genre that I heard last year, and their two songs on Accept the Mark are just as compelling.

“Beast of Annihilation” is an original song that will eat you alive from the head down. It’s a mass of uber-distorted, vicious riffing, snare-heavy beats, and reverberating bestial barks and howls. Massive bass vibrations segment the maelstrom in brief slowdowns, and a shrieking solo tunnels into your skull like an overheated drill. It’s an eviscerating, brain-slamming experience. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SUNBURSTER — “SOLARBIPOLAR”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 122013
 

One thing leads to another. In late May I came across a compilation by the name of Anthrosphere IV assembled by Philadelphia label Anthropic Records. It includes some stellar tunes, and so I wrote about it here. One song that I singled out for specific praise was from a stoner/sludge/doom band I hadn’t heard of before named Sunburster. And that led to the discovery that they’ve got a new EP coming this August named SolarBipolar, and a chance to hear it in advance.

The EP includes three songs of increasing length. All three remind me that you don’t need brain-scrambling complexity or high-wire instrumental acrobatics to make a great song. Sometimes the simplest tunes can be the ones you remember the longest and enjoy the most, though it takes a special kind of songwriting ingenuity to pull off that trick, and it helps a lot for the band  to have the power of the music in their blood. Sunburster bring all that to the table on SolarBipolar.

“War Torn” is the shortest and simplest of the EP’s songs. From start to finish, it’s essentially one repeating riff, in sync with the drumbeats. It’s immense, spine-smashing music that exerts its magnetic pull almost immediately, and most definitely will bind itself to your head by the end. Mike Murro’s raw, high-pitched, bleeding-wound vocals contrast effectively with the music’s staggering low end. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: LORD IMPALER – “BABYLON WHORE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jul 012013
 

Man, it’s hard to believe that an entire year has passed since I first heard (and reviewed) Lord Impaler’s debut album, Admire the Cosmos Black. A full year has indeed come and gone, but not without a small anniversary present. Last week Lord Impaler released a digital EP available on Bandcamp by the name of Babylon Whore. It consists of two songs, it comes with a 6-page digital booklet, and it once again delivers some damned potent black metal from this under-recognized group of Greek marauders.

The title track “Babylon Whore” cuts right to the bone, right from the beginning. The music roars, moans, and vibrates with arcane energy, and the tremolo-picked melodies carry an atmosphere of sickness, while Tragon’s vocals are caustic enough to raise welts on your skin.

“The White Dream of Ziz” begins in a similarly blasting and ripping manner, but the assault is divided by a slow, morbid interlude with spoken-word vocals, and there is a kind of melancholy beauty in the song’s rippling guitar melodies.  Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ANTEDILUVIAN – “SEPTENTRIONAL THEOPHANY”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Jun 292013
 

I like to think I do a decent job of keeping my eyes open for new releases by bands I like, including bands and labels who don’t send out lots of press releases or advance promo copies to NCS. But I completely fell down on the job in the case of Canada’s Antediluvian, despite the fact that I was powerfully impressed by both their 2011 debut album Through the Cervix of Hawaah (reviewed here) and their 2012 split with Adversarial (reviewed here). Just how badly did I fall down? Well, for starters, until yesterday I completely missed the fact that Nuclear War Now! released Antediluvian’s second full-length album — Logos — in April.

And to top that off I also failed to notice that two previously unreleased tracks recorded at the same time were released in May as a 7″ vinyl EP (entitled Septentrional Theophany) accompanying the premiere issue of a zine called Haruspex. The zine, written by Jason Campbell with artwork by  Tim Grieco (Haasiophis of Antediluvian) was originally intended for release in support of NWN! Fest III, but apparently will be an ongoing thing. It’s being sold, along with the Antediluvian release, by Nuclear War Now! at this location.

Obviously, having just discovered these two oversights yesterday, I don’t have either release in my grubby claws yet. But I did listen to the two songs from Septentrional Theophany on Bandcamp. If it’s possible for music to be both primitive and avant garde, that’s what these two songs are. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: PYRE / ENTRAPMENT SPLIT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jun 232013
 

Last month the Dutch label/distro Soulseller Records released a 45 rpm black vinyl split featuring two songs each from Pyre (Russia) and Entrapment (The Netherlands). I don’t have the vinyl — yet — but I did discover all four of the songs on Bandcamp, and what a discovery that proved to be. I admit that I have a real weak spot for the style of metal both bands play; more accurately, it’s a G-spot (or at least the male equivalent thereof). But even making allowances for my predisposition toward this kind of music, what both bands have done here is impressive.

The genre to which I’m referring is old school, Swedish-style, metal of fucking death. I hasten to add that Pyre and Entrapment do not sound like clones of each other. Although both bands have obviously plunged their hands up to the elbows in the river of gore that spread out from late-80’s/early 90’s Stockholm, they have very distinctive takes on the tradition, and there are some nods to Autopsy and NYDM in the music, too.

PYRE

Pyre are based in St. Petersburg, and this is only their second release (the first was a 2012 EP, Ravenous Decease), but man, they already sound like they’ve been at this for a long time. “Destined To Die” is a hard-rocking, punk-fueled rampage that gets the neck snapping immediately. The guitars and bass are stuffed full of HM-2 distortion, the gut-punch drumming is pitch-perfect for this kind of music, and the vocalist sounds a helluva lot like LG Petrov. Very nice screaming guitar solo in this one, too. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: CRYPT SERMON — “DEMO MMXIII”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jun 202013
 

Crypt Sermon are the second doom-oriented band with a new debut release named Demo MMXIII that I’m reviewing today (the first was by Temple of Void). This is a new project, and I know only a small amount of information about them: By snooping around I’ve learned that they are from Philadelphia, the membership apparently includes Steve Jansson (Infiltrator, Grass, Trench Rot), Brooks Wilson (Grass), and James L. (Labyrinthine), among others, and the demo was mastered by Chris Grigg (Woe).

I’ll say up-front that the demo is an Exception To the Rule around here — no howls, growls, guttural vomiting, or hair-raising shrieks on this release. But  the clean vocals — whoever is doing them — are definitely one of this demo’s strengths. The music is strong in many other respects as well.

The three songs are an offering of traditional doom — the kind of music that put me in mind of Candlemass, Saint Vitus, and The Gates of Slumber — but less theatrical than some of the music from the bands I just name-dropped. I will also say up front that I have never been a die-hard fan of any of those bands, yet Crypt Sermon struck a chord, and twanged it really hard. Continue reading »

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