VALLENFYRE: “SPLINTERS”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 052014
 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli delivers a review of the new, second album by the UK’s Vallenfyre.)

I’ll admit to it.  I haven’t been writing ’cause of a video game.  Dark Souls 2 in particular.  Now that I’ve had my complete fucking burnout on the game, I felt motivated to get back to metal and metal things.  The new Vallenfyre album was a surprise waiting for me in our Dropbox and it pretty much called me like a siren to listen.  I loved their debut (I bought it after reviewing it) and looked forward to another helping from these death-doom denizens of pestilence.  As things turned out, having played Dark Souls 2 worked completely in my favor because it allowed me to encapsulate Splinters perfectly.

There is a monster in the game called The Rotten, a golem composed entirely of corpses held together only by a consciousness that seeks to give shelter to the thrown-away and unwanted, whether they like it or not.  The helpless victims are butchered and added to The Rotten’s mass, forever prisoners to his sadistic sense of being the shepherd to a flock of sheep.  One of the key aspects of the Dark Souls universe is that humans cannot die; they are merely resurrected in a zombified state while retaining all of their mental faculties, making The Rotten essentially a prison built from living yet decaying, rotting corpses.

Vallenfyre on Splinters pretty much embody that.  They forcefully absorb you into the mass of corrupted defilement they have created, and use your very life force to feed their ability to function.  This results in a sound that is overwhelmingly putrid, filled with Swedish buzz-saw guitar tones, dragging doom, carpet bombs of blast beats, titan-sized riffing, and utter despair. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ORUGA — “HERETICS”

 Premieres  6 Responses »
May 052014
 

Following a 2010 demo (Blitzkrieg Lady) and a self-titled 2011 EP, the French band Oruga are on the verge of seeing release of their debut album, Blackened Souls, via Apathia Records. A video clip for one track (“Ghosts of Anneliese”) premiered last month, and today we bring you a second offering with our premiere of the album’s opening onslaught, “Heretics”.

Blackened Souls was recorded “live in the studio”, and that was the right move. The music itself is like a raw and ravaged abrasion, and the immediacy of the performance comes through vibrantly in the recording.

“Heretics” begins with spoken words over the vibration of massive, groaning chords that lumber like a great beast dragging its way to a final resting place. The voice howls with wounded conviction, the staggering riffs hit with bone-shattering force, the drum beats slam like a sledge, and a dense of atmosphere of despondency settles like the mantle of night. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: JØRGEN MUNKEBY OF SHINING (NOR)

 Interviews  3 Responses »
May 052014
 

(Our man BadWolf sat down with Jørgen Munkeby of Norway’s Shining during the band’s recent US tour and files this entertaining interview.)

 

Jørgen Munkeby likes to check his watch.

Or at least that was my impression of him after I saw him tear up the Pontiac Ballroom on April 10 with his band, Shining. The man needs to be punctual—his unique blend of industrial, jazz, black metal, and progressive rock requires crackerjack timing. But Munkeby is far from being a heartless calculator-headed shredder. Whether picking on his black Gibson SG or playing his saxophone, Munkeby is an electric frontman with a piercing voice.

On the tour bus, he’s a different man entirely. Slender and contemplative, Munkeby comes across as a scholar, albeit a scholar that penned my favorite album of 2010, Blackjazz, and its pile-driving successor, last year’s One One One. I brought my friend Josh, a fellow Shining enthusiast, to sit with Munkeby and me after his performance and unpack the inner workings of this young master’s mind. Continue reading »

SHOW REVIEW: BEHEMOTH, GOATWHORE, 1349, INQUISITION, BLACK CROWN INITIATE, DRAWN AND QUARTERED — LIVE IN SEATTLE

 Concert Reviews  34 Responses »
May 052014
 

Behemoth, Goatwhore, 1349, Inquisition, Black Crown Initiate, and Drawn and Quartered performed at Studio Seven in Seattle on Saturday night (May 3, 2014). It was one of my most eagerly anticipated shows of the year. But I had a sinking feeling about it before the concert began.

I paid extra to get advance VIP tickets for myself and some friends (for what turned out to be a sold-out show) because they promised a meet-and-greet and early admission. An e-mail from the ticket-seller notified us that we needed to be at the venue no later than 3:45 for the meet-and-greet, and even earlier than that to pick up the tickets at will-call. This provoked groans, given that the show wasn’t scheduled to begin until 6:00. Of course, this was a metal show, and the odds were high that nothing would actually happen at 3:45, but we didn’t want to risk missing what we’d paid extra for. So we were there at 3:30. And of course nothing happened until 4:15.

In the meantime, we got soaked when the drizzling rain outside the venue became a downpour. And while shaking ourselves like wet dogs in a doorway we speculated that since this was the last stop of the tour, the promoters might have been having trouble waking up any of the musicians for the meet-and-greet. This suspicion was strengthened when we were finally ushered inside, to find obviously fatigued representatives from all the touring bands sitting along a long row of shadow-shrouded tables in the dark venue, waiting one-by-one to sign tour posters we were given at the door. Continue reading »

STREAM AGALLOCH’S NEW ALBUM NOW

 Metal News  14 Responses »
May 042014
 

“The wait is over. You can now listen to the new Agalloch album “The Serpent & The Sphere in its entirety over at NPR.”

Those are the words that appeared less than an hour ago on Agalloch’s Facebook page. And they are true words — you can indeed listen to the new album (which NPR praises in its review as “another metallic masterpiece from Agalloch”) in its entirety right now.

We just got our promo of the album late last week, about 10 days before its official release on May 13. I was hoping to have a review ready to post tomorrow, and we probably still will review it. But if I were you, I’d listen to it here while you can: Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SERPENTS LAIR — “DEMO MMXIV”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  9 Responses »
May 042014
 

 

Serpents Lair are from Sjælland, Denmark.  The members have not disclosed their identities or musical pedigrees. Two shrouded figures appear in a photo on their Facebook page, so I assume there are only two people in the band, but that’s merely an educated guess. Beyond that, all I know is that on May 2 they released a two-song demo on Bandcamp, and I’m tremendously impressed by it.

I’m perfectly happy with black metal that just tears, rips, and froths the waters like a school of piranha on a fresh carcass, and Serpents Lair certainly do that — and do it with a ravenous appetite. But the music is so much more than that.

Ominous, dissonant melodies heave and swell through the music like storm tides, even when the band are racing, and that creates a potent, sinister atmosphere. But they don’t always race. The music also falls into slow, menacing processionals, with big ominous chords that reverberate like bells of doom and rhythms that methodically strike like hammer blows. There is almost as much an air of bitterness and anguish in this music as there is righteous fury. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: THE ARCANE ORDER — “PROMO 2014”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
May 042014
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the brand new two-song promo from The Arcane Order.)

You guys may remember that a ways back I did a week-long series on quality, under-the-radar melodic death metal bands via reviews of select albums.  One of the bands I wrote about was Denmark’s The Arcane Order, a group for whom I really haven’t adequately expressed my enthusiasm on this site.  These guys are melodic death metal of the most imperial strain — bombastic, titanic, with blackened ice and symphonic typhoon wind.

The Arcane Order have been MIA for some time now.  Their last album, In the Wake of Collisions, came out way back in 2008.  I’ve followed them eagerly nonetheless, especially when they started talk of writing a new album last year and have since actually begun working on a new record.  To whet peoples appetites, I suppose, the band decided to debut two new songs just to let people know how things are coming along. Continue reading »

THRASHED: DEATH ANGEL, DESTITUTION, NOCTURNAL WITCH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
May 032014
 

Here are a few new things I found this Saturday morning that I thought were worth recommending for your entertainment and edification. Can you guess what they have in common?

DEATH ANGEL

As I’ve said before (without repeating the reasons) I don’t listen to a lot of thrash and would not consider myself a seasoned, well-educated expert in the genre. But I’ve been a fan of Death Angel since seeing them perform live in Seattle 3 or 4 years ago — that was one electrifying set. This morning I saw that they’ve released a video for the title track off their latest album, 2013’s The Dream Calls For Blood (Nuclear Blast), and it reminded me of that show in a good way.

I like this particular song, too. There’s a lot of jolting kick in the music, and compared to what I suppose I’d call “thrash standard”, there’s also some beefiness in the production (which I prefer). On top of that, the song exemplifies the biggest factor that (for me) separates Death Angel from the run-of-the-mill: Rob Cavestany’s soloing, which isn’t just mindless shred. And hey, I’ll also admit that the song makes me want to stupidly yell along with Mark Osegueda: “Dream! Calls For! Blood!” Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: LOUDBLAST, PACT, ARSAFES, SPECTRAL LORE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 022014
 

This is one of those days when the old fuckin’ day job is going to wipe out my blog time.  So this will likely be our last post of this Friday.  What I’ve done — hurriedly — is to feature a handful of things I heard last night that I think you should hear, too.

LOUDBLAST

Burial Ground — the new album by the long-running French band Loudblast — is one I’ve been anxiously awaiting. In late March I featured the album’s first advance track, “Ascending Straight In Circles”, and yesterday DECIBEL premiered an official video for the same song. As I’ve written before, the music is part thrash, part death, part doom — and as catchy as it is decimating (with thoroughly ravaging vocals).

It appears the album will now be released on June 10, by Listenable Records. It can be pre-ordered here. Check out the video next. Continue reading »

SUMMER SLAUGHTER 2014: TOUR SCHEDULE ANNOUNCED

 Metal News  10 Responses »
May 022014
 

I would like to see the 2014 edition of the SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour. It includes Morbid Angel, Dying Fetus, Goatwhore, Origin, Decrepit Birth, Fallujah, and other bands. I bet it would be a good time. But as much as I would like to see SUMMER SLAUGHTER, SUMMER SLAUGHTER does not want to see me.

Last night the tour schedule surfaced (I saw it on Origin’s Facebook page), and it doesn’t include Seattle, though it has in many previous years. In fact, everything north of San Francisco is getting snubbed this year. Somehow, I will survive the snubbing.

If you would like to see if you have been blessed or snubbed, check the dates after the jump. Continue reading »

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