THE LATEST MESSAGES FROM HELL: AN ANAAL NATHRAKH “VANITAS” TEASER AND “WIDOWMAKER” IS ABOUT TO BE DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Sep 052012
 

The two items in this post both appeared this morning. I thought their near-simultaneous appearance was ominous, as if constituting a kind of queasiness-inducing evidence that there really are Great Old Ones in the Earth, and they are beginning to rouse themselves from their slumbers.

Both Anaal Nathrakh and Dragged Into Sunlight are from the UK, they are both favorites of this site, and they both create brilliant, hellish, obliterating music — though not of the same kind. As I wrote the last time we paired news from these bands together, “Anaal Nathrakh give you a nightmarish rocket-ride into the abyss, and Dragged Into Sunlight trap you there in a vat of acid sludge that slowly liquifies your flesh.” Here’s the latest news from both bands:

ANAAL NATHRAKH

As we reported four days ago (here), Candlelight Records will be releasing Anaal Nathrakh’s new album on October 15. Its name is Vanitas, and for that earlier post we even managed to find a small image of the album cover (which has now “officially” surfaced on the band’s Facebook page).

As of this morning we now have a teaser clip of music from the album. It’s harrowing stuff (and we would expect nothing less) — a catastrophic blast of infernal grind that sounds terrifically pissed off; the vocals are intense, even by Dave Hunt’s previous standards. Check it out next: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HIVESMASHER, SUN DRIED INTESTINES, WINTERFYLLETH, BOBÓK, AND MORE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Sep 052012
 

This is a collection of nuggets that I sifted from the ever-flowing stream of the internet yesterday. I’m going to start with some head-smashing new music and end with some head-warping music. With any luck, by the time we’re finished, you’ll have lost your head altogether.

HIVESMASHER

I like this band’s name. Any band with “smasher” in their name is already past second base and headed for third. “Hivesmasher” also reminds me of the time when my brother and I thought it would be a good idea to smash a hive of wasps after we thought they were all dead, because we had burned their nest first. We were young and stupid, and very soon we were also in agony.

Hivesmasher, the band, is also about as pissed off and poisonous as that nest of undead wasps. They’re from Massachusetts and they have a debut album named Gutter Choir that’s due on October 23 on the Black Market Activities label. Yesterday I heard two tracks from the album. Lambgoat premiered one of them — “En Route To Meat Land” — which I think is what those wasps were singing when they delivered some hellfire retribution to my brother and me.

It reminds me of Pig Destroyer. It’s berserk, but really skillfully played. You should definitely go HERE to check it out. Continue reading »

PIG DESTROYER LIVE IN TOKYO (WITH NEW SONGS)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 042012
 

Pig Destroyer’s new album Book Burner will be out in the U.S. on October 22. A bit earlier today I watched a fan-filmed video of most of their set on August 23 in Tokyo. Here’s an index to what’s on the video that I found in the YouTube comments — including some new songs:

1:10 Rotten Yellow
2:23 Deathtripper
3:52 ?????
7:00 Pretty in Casts
8:14 Dark Satellites
9:08 Trojan Whore
10:50 Sheet Metal Girl
12:43 Alexandria
16:56 New Songs!
21:12 Piss Angel
25:11 Cheerleader Corpses
25:45 Terrifyer

The video and audio quality are pretty good. Explosively violent music. Video is after the jump. Continue reading »

HAMMERS OF MISFORTUNE, THE GATES OF SLUMBER, FLOOD THE DESERT @ The Pyramid Scheme, Grand Rapids 7/19/12

 Concert Reviews  3 Responses »
Sep 042012
 

(photo credit: Craig McGillvray)

(BadWolf provides this review of the July 19, 2012, live performances by Hammers of Misfortune, The Gates of Slumber, and Flood the Desert in Grand Rapids, MI. All photos in this post, except the one above, were taken at the show by by Robert Shooks.)

In a summer stuffed to the gills with excellent tour packages, none coaxed more ropes of saliva from my lips than Hammers of Misfortune and The Gates of Slumber. The Gates may be Indiana’s finest sons in doom, but they’ve largely foregone midwestern tour dates. As for Hammers of Misfortune, what justification do you need? The band roared back to life last year after an extended hiatus (during which several Hammers members made some of the finest black metal I’ve ever heard in Ludicra) with a revamped lineup. To sweeten the pot, they toured behind last year’s 17th Street, their most focused album since 2003’s The August Engine.

D00shc00gr and I made the trek across the state to the Pyramid Scheme in Grand Rapids—a fine venue tucked behind a cafe and pinball arcade, complete with a small but top-notch selection of Michigan microbrews on tap. I suffered through a complimentary glass of Bell’s Two-Hearted IPA ( I wished it was Oberon) but Short’s Soft Parade still tastes like sweet dreams! Venues such as the Pyramid Scheme are growing like weeds in Grand Rapids.

Having spent a sizable portion of my adult life in the erstwhile metal-free state of Michigan, I can say with some authority that Grand Rapids is the place to live at the moment. Lansing may have the finest local scene, But Grand Rapids draws many larger tours with its bounty of clean, up-and-coming venues, compared to the largely bitter remnants of Detroit Rock City.

Continue reading »

A FLOOD OF NEW VIDEOS FROM OBLIVION, NEKROGOBLIKON, HEAVENWOOD, DROPBUNNY, AND ENGEL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Sep 042012
 

Holy shit!  The last 24 hours have brought a flood of brand new music videos that are (a) constructed around kickass music of considerable diversity, and (b) fun to watch. I’ve collected five of them in this post, and have kept my introductory verbiage to a minimum so you can spend your time listening and watching.  Go!

OBLIVION

Oblivion are Nick Vasallo (vocals, bass), Ted O’Neill (guitar), and Luis Martinez (drums). They are tech-death hell on wheels. TheMadIsraeli reviewed their 2012 demo here, and we’re damned excited about their forthcoming debut album, Called To Rise.

Today they debuted a video for the first song to be aired from the album, “Black Veils of Justice”. The song just blazes. And the video is cool, too, mixing a band performance together with an animated short film called “ARK” by Grzegorz Jonkajtys.

We’ll have more news about the new album in the near future. You can keep track of what Oblivion are up to by visiting their Facebook page. Here’s the video: Continue reading »

PSYCHIATRIC REGURGITATION: “STABBED IN THE EYES WITH A CRACK PIPE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 042012
 

PSYCHIATRIC REGURGITATION are an unsigned band from Dallas, Texas, who sent me the songs from their new debut album not long ago, describing the music as sort of like a cross between Death/Decrepit Birth and Exhumed/Carcass/Impaled.

The music happened to arrive in one of those rare moments when I wasn’t right in the middle of something else, and the description sounded like my kinda thing. So, I listened to a few tracks and got a big smile from what I heard — and not just from the sample that starts off the opening title track, “Stabbed In the Eyes With A Crack Pipe”.

Despite the humorous samples and song titles — including the unforgettable “Smoke Crack, Worship Satan, Kill People” — the music is seriously good death metal. It’s a rapid-fire blast of skull-hammering brutality delivered with blazing technicality, but it also includes catchy melodic riffing, head-spinning solos and progressive instrumental breaks that may take you by surprise, and even a few clobbering slam breakdowns. The barking-dog vocals are cool, too (big, rabid dogs, to be clear).

When you see names like Death, Decrepit Birth, and Exhumed tossed around in an e-mail out of the blue, you tend to take it with a grain of salt. But Psychiatric Regurgitation have the songwriting and performance chops to back it up.  Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HELLWELL, SHINING, AND VHÖL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 032012
 

Here’s another daily round-up of metal things I saw and heard this morning that I thought were worth sharing. Fair warning: there is clean singing in the first two items, but it’s counter-balanced by harsh vocals and an overlay of darkness.

HELLWELL

I came to metal relatively late in life. I’ve devoted a lot of effort catching up on what I missed in the decades preceding my initiation. One of the bands I missed was Wichita-based Manila Road, though judging from the enthusiasm that greeted our report about the band’s scheduled appearance at MARYLAND DEATHFEST 2013, it seems many of our readers are quite familiar with them.

This item, however, is not about Manila Road. It’s about a side project created by Manila Road’s Mark “The Shark” Shelton. The band is called Hellwell, the album is named Beyond the Boundaries of Sin, and it will be released this month by High Roller Records and Shadow Kingdom Records — though it’s already up on Bandcamp. Shelton describes it as “like Manilla Road’s evil twin”, with a sound that resembles “a cross between Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, early Metallica and Manilla Road.”

The band is named after Ernest “Ernie” Cunningham Hellwell, who Shelton says is a writer of horror-themed fiction and plays keyboards, synthesizers, and bass on Hellwell’s debut album. I am somewhat skeptical about whether Hellwell is a real person as opposed to the alter ego of someone else, because I can find nothing about him in my net sleuthing, either as a writer or as a musician.

In any event, I was attracted to the music by the awesome cover art (above) by Alexander von Wieding, and this morning I listened to about half of the album on Bandcamp. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 62): THE LABOR DAY EDITION

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  18 Responses »
Sep 032012
 

It’s time for another edition of “THAT’S METAL!”, in which we collect images, videos, and news items that we think are metal, even though they’re not music (though sometimes we include music that’s not metal, but it’s “metal”, if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn’t, but we only make sense about half the time around here on a good day anyway).

We have a slug of items for you today, but it’s Labor Day, in which we Americans commemorate the labor movement and the value of hard work by fucking off, drinking copious amounts of beer, and grilling dead animals, so I figure you’ll have time to wade through everything — and it’s all worth the wading.

ITEM ONE

As usual, Item One relates to that pic you see at the top of the post. That lovely young lady with the flowing tresses is Sue Austin. She’s a British multimedia performance and installation artist who has been wheelchair-bound since 1996 and has devoted much of her art to challenging notions of disabled people as “the other”. She developed an underwater wheelchair with help of diving experts, who installed two dive propulsion units on the chair as well as a clear fin that helps with steering. More details about the development of the chair can be found here.

Undoubtedly, there are more efficient ways for a disabled person to scuba dive than being strapped to a self-propelled wheelchair — in fact, Ms. Austin learned how to dive in 2005, long before this chair became a reality. But there’s a point being made here, and the chair is part of a performance designed to drive the point home — because, as you’re about to see, Ms. Austin also assembled a film crew to create a beautiful documentary of her dreamlike journey through an ocean world. Continue reading »

MIDNIGHT: “COMPLETE AND TOTAL HELL”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Sep 032012
 

(In this post, BadWolf reviews the forthcoming Hells Headbangers compilation of Midnight’s entire pre-Satanic Royalty back catalogue.)

Midnight came seemingly out of nowhere last year with their debut Satanic Royalty. Clocking in at just over thirty minutes, the album roared out of the gates, dazzled with its compelling mix of old-school black metal, D-beat, and classic cock rock, then ended too quickly. I loved it—as did many others, judging by Midnight’s announced slot at Maryland Deathfest—and if I’d heard it before the holiday season, it would most certainly have wormed into my end-of-year lists. I await tis sequel with bated breath.

But Satanic Royalty was hardly Midnight’s first release. The Cleveland three-peice has been releasing music in splits, demos, singles, and EP’s since 2003, and now all of that early material (minus a Quiet Riot cover) is available in one convenient package: Complete and Total Hell. And while it hardly feels like the rock-solid sequel to Satanic Royalty, it serves as a convenient appetizer—the prequel to the sequel, if you’ll pardon my reference.

Complete and Total Hell flows well as an album, even though it is a compilation. “Funeral Bell” opens with some Bathory-style atmosphere, and then the record pumps out track after track of chunky and distorted riffs. The early tracks sound like they were recorded straight to cassette in a basement over a boombox—which they may have been. The raw recording works in their favor since the songs emerge from simple building blocks. As the record progresses you can actually hear more and more money flow into Midnight’s recording—the guitar solos clear up, the bass rumbles deeper, until the music breaks into jangly boogie rock on “Berlin is Burning,” over an hour later. Yes, an hour; where Satanic Royalty was brief, Complete and Total Hell is overlong. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BROOD OF HATRED, PLANKS, A TRIBE CALLED RED, AND ALLEGAEON

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Sep 022012
 

It may be Labor Day Weekend here in the U.S., and although it’s fair to say that I’m fucking off even more than usual with a 3-day weekend to enjoy, I’m also still prowling the interhole in search of new metal experiences worth sharing with our beloved readers, without whom I would just be talking to myself like the average homeless person. And man oh man, did I find some intriguing items yesterday.

I knew only one of these bands before seeing and hearing what I saw — Allegaeon. But we’ve slobbered over them a lot at NCS already, and they’re getting buckets of slobber from fans and critics already, so despite the fact that their new video is indeed awesome, I’m putting them last today. In front of them come three more obscure collectives that deserve the front end of the spotlight.

BROOD OF HATRED

I’m pretty sure that the first and last time I wrote about a metal band from Tunisia was in July 2010, when the subject was a band named Barzakh, in a series on Metal From North Africa. Yesterday I found another Tunisian band named Brood of Hatred, thanks to the wonderful Middle Eastern-based metal blog, Metality. This past March, Brood of Hatred released their debut EP, New Order of Intelligence, which is available for free download on Bandcamp (here). But though I’m now interested in hearing that, what I heard (and saw) yesterday that grabbed my attention was something even more recent.

It’s a brand new video for a new single called “Cacophony In Creation” that will appear on the band’s debut album, Skinless Agony. The song is excellent, both very well written and very well performed.  Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries