Sep 162015
 

Vehemence-Forward Without Motion

 

(In this 62nd edition of THE SYNN REPORT, Andy reviews the discography to date of Arizona-based Vehemence.)

Recommended for fans of: Abysmal Dawn, God Dethroned, At The Gates,

I currently have more candidates for The Synn Report on my docket than I really know what to do with, and although on the plus side that means I’m in no danger of running out of options within… oh… the next year or two at least… on the negative side of things it means I’m scrambling to write-up and include a number of bands who have new releases out in 2015 (either already released or still forthcoming) and slowly but surely running out of time in which to do so.

One of those bands just happens to be recently resurrected Arizona wrecking crew Vehemence, whose three stellar full-lengths — The Thoughts From Which I Hide (2000), God Was Created (2002), and Helping the World to See (2004) – are soon to be joined by the long-awaited fourth album Forward Without Motion (out Oct. 23rd), which largely reunites the band’s original line-up for nine freshly carved and crafted tracks which aim to put the “DEATH” back into “Melodic Death Metal”.

So what better time than now to get caught up with the band’s killer back-catalogue?

Let the riffing commence! Continue reading »

Sep 162015
 

Behemoth-The-Satanist-Music-Video

 

Yesterday brought a lot of new song and video premieres, from both “big names” in our blessed world of metal and not-so-big names. Since I have so many new things I want to bring to your attention, I decided to split the round-up into two parts. I’m putting the “big names” in this post.

BEHEMOTH

Poland’s Behemoth premiered a new music video yesterday, and this one is for the title track to their last full-length, The Satanist. The video was directed by Andrzej Dragan and it’s unquestionably well-made and engrossing. It also stars an actress whose wide-eyed and slightly skeletal face is perfect for the video’s very lost protagonist.

As for the interpretation of the video, we have the fairly straight-forward description of the director, who conceived of the video based on the music, and the more occult interpretation of its symbolism by Nergal. First, the words of Mr. Dragan: Continue reading »

Sep 152015
 

Contrarian-Polemic

 

Today we bring you the premiere of the title track to Polemic, the debut album by New York’s Contrarian, which is due for release on November 20 by Willowtip Records.

In a musical landscape overflowing with technical death metal bands, and a similarly large number of extreme metal bands displaying the “progressive” label based on little more than occasional ambient interludes in the midst of all the pummeling, it takes something special to stand out. Contrarian stand out.

Much as their name signifies, Contrarian’s approach to songwriting is unusual, and unusually good. To be sure, “Polemic” displays the kind of intricate, high-speed technical skill that opens eyes wide. Continue reading »

Sep 152015
 

The Wizard - Ol Rusty

 

(Comrade Aleks brings us his interview with Will Fried of the Tasmanian NWOBHM/doom band The Wizar’d.)

The Wizar’d is a most unholy and catchy doom metal outfit from Tasmania. They have mixed good old doom tunes with components of NWOBHM for about ten years and already have three full-length records (apart from half a dozen smaller releases).

When people speak about The Wizar’d… well, it’s a situation of love and hate. As for me – I like it, and I’m sure that all of you are grown enough to decide for yourselves, as you need only one click to check out The Wizar’d’s necromantic melodies. Tonight, Will Fried, or Ol’ Rusty Vintage Wizard Master, the name given on his birth, answers some of my intrusive questions. Continue reading »

Sep 152015
 

Psygnosis-AAliens

 

(DGR reviews the new EP by the French band Psygnosis.)

Psygnosis are a band whom we’ve crossed paths with before. They’re a multi-talented group of Frenchmen whose music plays heavily with the experimental while also fusing death metal, -core, and industrial elements into their overall sound. Their music ranges into the epic, with tracks easily lasting longer than eight minutes, and between the band’s two EPs and two full-length releases, they have grown impressively good at telling a story.

2014’s Human Be[ing] saw the band at their best up to that point, interweaving film clips with dramatic passages of music and heavy, thundering sections of metal. They often used ambience in their favor, leaving whole sections of their songs feeling empty but for a couple of guitar and synth notes and occasional whispered vocal lines echoing out into the ether.

Since Human Be[ing], though, the group have gone through some lineup changes. They’ve seen the full exit of their vocalist and have made a shift toward instrumental music, adding a cellist in their vocalist’s stead to pick up the melodies that were once provided by human voice, and freeing the cellist to come to the forefront with his own creations. A cello has been present in Psygnosis‘ music before, but the recently released EP AAliens is the first time the band have recorded with their new lineup, with new music, and with said cellist at the forefront. Continue reading »

Sep 142015
 

Wolfpack 44-The Scourge

 

The first time I heard the first full song on Wolfpack 44’s debut album, it was lust at first listen. There’s an industrial-styled, industrial-strength groove in “The Black March” that I thought was going to make my head come off. Turns out, there are a lot more headbanging grooves — including one in a song I asked (and was granted) permission to premiere along with this review — plus a wide-ranging assortment of other styles and moods. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For those who don’t know, Wolfpack 44 is a collaboration between multi-instrumentalist Ricktor Ravensbrück from The Electric Hellfire Club and vocalist/guitarist Julian Xes from Kult ov Azazel. Their debut album, The Scourge (which features cover art by Robert Cook, aka Norot), is due for release on January 20, 2016, by the French label Deadlight Entertainment.

The album includes a slew of guest appearances, including: vocalist/lyricist Thomas Thorn (The Electric Hellfire Club); vocalist/lyricist Jinx Dawson (Coven); guitarists Lord Ahriman and Chaq Mol (Dark Funeral); vocalist Dana “Satania” Duffey (Demonic Christ); and guitarist Dan VC Guenther (Vein Collector). Together, all these talents have contributed to one hell of a hellish ride. Continue reading »

Sep 142015
 

Attan-From Nothing

 

I’ve accumulated quite a large number of interesting news items and new songs from my excursions through the interhole and the NCS in-box this weekend. In order to present more of them than I’m usually able to do, I’m going to do something that causes me great personal pain and undoubtedly will bring tears to the eyes of our faithful readers: I’m going to hold my own beautiful prose to a minimum and allow the music to speak for itself, largely without benefit of me as its interpretive intermediary.

Presented in alphabetical order:

ATTAN

Attan are a Norwegian band whose debut EP From Nothing will be released through Shelsmusic in limited-edition vinyl and digitally on November 30. The opening track, “Nocebo (I Shall Harm)” is now available for streaming on Soundcloud.

An avalanche of unhinged destructiveness; skull-fracturing drumbeats; spleen-rupturing riffs; aorta-rupturing vocals. Discordant and demented. Continue reading »

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 »