(Andy Synn delivers another installment of his irregular series of album reviews in haiku. Two more reviews come after the jump. With music.)
DEVILDRIVER – WINTER KILLS
More brawn than Beast. More
vigour than Villains. Hamstrung
By some weaker tracks.
https://www.facebook.com/DevilDriverOfficial1 Continue reading »
This is breaking news, and therefore the details are sketchy and, as is often true with early reports of just about anything scandalous, there may be inaccuracies. However, news reports have appeared in Europe that Burzum’s Varg Vikernes has been arrested at his farm in France by the Central Directorate of Interior Intelligence (DCRI) on suspicion of plotting a terrorist attack. Reports indicate that Varg’s wife Marie Cachet has also been arrested. I’m just going to quote THIS REPORT at Euronews for now (with a few comments after that), and update the post as more info becomes available (additional info has appeared at French publications, such as this one):
“Black metal musician and neo-nazi sympathiser Kristian “Varg” Vikernes was arrested in southwestern France on Tuesday after his wife bought four rifles, raising suspicions he could turn to violence, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.
The police suspect the Norwegian national of planning a “massacre” and searched his house for weapons and explosives. His wife, a French national and a member of a shooting club, had recently legally purchased four rifles.
The anti-terrorist prosecutor has been put in charge of the investigation. In a statement, the French Ministry of the Interior deemed him “likely to prepare a large-scale act of terrorism.” Continue reading »
The day will come when crowdfunding campaigns reach the saturation point, but we’re not there yet, and we may not ever get there if more bands become as creative as Arsis.
You may remember that earlier this year Arsis was to be part of the End of Disclosure North American Tour along with Hypocrisy, Aborted, and Krisiun. And then, as we sadly reported here, Hypocrisy was forced to drop off the tour due to delays in obtaining visas, and that led to Aborted’s cancellation as well. But instead of just writing off the whole enterprise, Arsis and Krisiun soldiered on, despite the negative impact of those last-minute cancellations. That bought them a lot of respect from a lot of people, including me; I saw the Seattle show on that tour, and those bands killed it, despite playing to an embarrassingly small audience.
But what goes around comes around, and we gleefully reported that Arsis had become part of another North American tour beginning in August with Wintersun, Fleshgod Apocalypse, and Starkill. But this is going to cost Arsis a pretty penny, as it turns out, and they’re making an appeal to fans to help them underwrite the expense. Before you blow this off, check out some of the perks they’re offering. Continue reading »
(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Sweden’s Darkane, their first in five years and out now on Prosthetic Records.)
There are certain bands who, I will admit, I am incapable of being objective about. Bands whose music has an effect on me that, let’s be honest, is just plain fucking unfair. Darkane is that band to me. Not only have Darkane been consistently excellent, they are to me THE flagship band for how modern metal should should be, creating a succinct core sound with so much hybridization at work that it’s full of nooks and crannies to get lost in.
With a compelling combination of Bay Area thrash, melodic death metal, death metal, progressive tendencies, jazz fusion detours, and classical foundations, they should be bigger than they are. It’s a real shame. The Sinister Supremacy marks album number six, and yet I fear that it may not expose their music to many more people than normal. The Darkane fanbase, even the most rabid, seems to be rather insular in nature.
I think the discography is flawless, the sound always far ahead of its time, and the musicianship unrivaled in many respects. The core of guitarists Christofer Malmstrom and Klas Idleberg, bassist Jorgen Lofberg, and drummer Peter Wildoer is quite possibly one of the tightest, most in-tune-with-each-other musical units you will ever hear. While keeping vocalists around has always been a problem, I was also immensely stoked to learn that Lawrence Mackory, the band’s original vocalist on their debut, Rusted Angel, had returned for The Sinister Supremacy. Continue reading »
I love our European brethren and sistren so much that I’m belatedly sharing this news even though it makes me slightly bitter. Okay, more than slightly bitter. More accurately, it makes me want to bite you in my bitterness.
This fall Amon Amarth and Carcass are linking horns in a tour called DEFENDERS OF THE FAITH IV, and they’ll be joined by UK’s Hell. The flyer you see up above just spotlights the UK dates on the tour, where Bleed From Within will also join the tour. But many other countries will be visited as well.
That’s really all I have to say about this. The complete tour dates can be seen after the jump. Bastards. Continue reading »
Times passes, things change, bands break up, musicians move on. And now it’s happening to Ireland’s wonderful Altar of Plagues. It’s sad news, as it always is when a band whose music you dig calls it quits. In this case, as you’ll see, the creativity of AoP will likely continue in some other form. Here’s a statement from guitarist James Kelly that just appeared on AoP’s Facebook page:
“Altar of Plagues will conclude this year.
I decided before writing “Teethed Glory and Injury” that it would be our final album. It was executed with this fact in mind. I can state it no more simply than this; it is time to move on.
We considered whether or not we would say anything at all regarding this. But at the very least, we would like to give people an opportunity to see us perform again should they care to. And so, these upcoming shows will be our final.
Our very final performance will be on October 19th, at Unsound Festival Poland. As a festival that celebrates the eclectic and the eccentric, I can think of no other place that would be more appropriate for this occasion. It is exactly the type of environment in which I have always aspired to share our work, and it will be a celebratory occasion to conclude at what I believe will be the peak of our existence as a group. Continue reading »
This isn’t a full-blown edition of THAT’S METAL!, because I didn’t get my butt in a high enough gear to do one this week. It’s just one item that I found via a link from our buddy Phro, and it’s so fuckin’ cool that I decided to go with it now instead of adding it to the pile of other items from which the next full edition will be assembled. (And for any newcomers, this series is about photos, videos, and news items that I think are metal even if they’re not music.)
This is a story about Justin Vigile, the drummer for a Philadelphia metal band named Extractus, and about the doctor (Hartzell Schaff) who gave him back his life. There are other messages in this story, too, but you can draw your own conclusions about those. I just want to tell you what happened.
The facts are based on a May 14 story in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune by Jon Tevlin. It begins with these sentences:
“When a Mayo Clinic surgeon showed a short film featuring the drummer of the heavy metal band Extractus at the Minneapolis Convention Center last week, he probably wasn’t hitting the band’s target audience. They were suit-clad doctors, in town for the annual convention of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery. They seemed pretty button-down for the drummer’s exuberant style, but they were impressed nonetheless. That’s because the drummer, 22-year-old Justin Vigile, had been bedridden and dying with end-stage heart disease, hypertrophic cardiomyopathy [HCM], or thickening of the heart muscle, just months before the video was shot.“ Continue reading »
On July 6, 2013, Britain’s Anaal Nathrakh played the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. The entire set was streamed live over the internet and it was filmed for posterity as well. The band received a DVD of the show and they’ve been “tweaking” the footage to improve the audio and alter the visual appearance a bit. Tonight they uploaded the first clip to YouTube, and more will be coming.
The first clip is the very beginning of the set and includes “Drug-Fucking Abomination” from their 2011 album Passion. The visuals have been given a kind of grainy, sepia-toned quality, which looks very cool. The sound is just absolutely obliterating.
For those of you unfamiliar with AN, this is a good example of the band’s cross-genre conflagration, and an introduction to the four different vocalists who live in Dave Hunt’s body. For those who are already fans, you’re gonna love this.
There is only one way to listen to the clip — VERY FUCKING LOUD. Boost that volume ’til the goo comes out your ears and you feel your internal organs beginning to liquify. Watch and listen/liquify after the jump. Continue reading »
I’ve had a busy weekend, with two late nights in a row catching Deafheaven and Autopsy/Black Breath in Seattle (yes, they all killed), on top of more activity than usual during the daylight hours. But I did manage to do some web surfing and e-mail reading and found quite a lot of new things to like. I’ve collected a few of them in this post and will try to round-up the others for another post tomorrow.
NORTHLESS
I heard a lot of good things about this Milwaukee band’s last album Clandestine Abuse (2011), but somehow it got lost in the mountainous piles of music I intended to check out. I’m not going to miss the next one. Its title is World Keeps Sinking and it’s due for release on August 23 by Gilead Media. And why am I not going to miss it? Because this morning I heard the album’s first advance track, “Kuru”, and it kills.
The mid-paced song is freighted with earth-splitting sludge riffs and laced with caustic hardcore-style howls, heavy as fuck and doomed as a village in the path of a lava flow. But there’s more to the song than the weight of sledgehammers coming down on fragile skulls and the dissonance of squalling guitars. The band incorporate some surprising instrumental segments that hint at post-rock and even jazz, without diminishing the music’s suffocating atmosphere of hopelessness. Good stuff — which you can hear next (the album can be pre-ordered here). Continue reading »
(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 »