SHORT BUT SWEET (AND FREE): LIVARKAHIL – “WRATH OF GOD”

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET  12 Responses »
Jun 172012
 

Something about the isolated dual guitar harmony at the beginning of Livarkahil’s new Wrath of God EP sounds a warning, despite the fact that the tone is relatively clean and the melody mournful and memorable. Eventually, the dam bursts and the flood comes, the warning fulfilled. “The Eternal Sun” may start harmoniously, but it soon wrenches necks, and the vocals scald, sear, and melt flesh right down to the bone.

Falling somewhere in the No Man’s Land between Immortal and Behemoth, Livarkahil’s brand of blackened death metal strives for a feeling of martial might, with the sound of massive armies of the night surging across blasted landscapes, implacable and unstoppable. The songs are harsh, stern, infernally imperial, with a titanic low end and a distorted bass and guitar tone that crackles with indigo energy.

That militaristic quality is enhanced by martial drum patterns that emerge here and there in between bouts of blast-beats and thundering double-bass. The riffs hammer like industrial-strength nail-drivers, with the bleak melodies carried by chords that moan and groan and by skittering tremolo-inflicted leads that rise above the crushing barrage that thunders below. The bass delivery is also absolutely pulverizing, like the hammering of giant chains into place, from which there is no escape. Continue reading »

ANIMALS AS LEADERS VICTIMIZED AGAIN

 Metal News  3 Responses »
Jun 172012
 

Javier Reyes with Vicente Sanchis Classical guitar

When it rains, it pours.

As many of you already know, Animals As Leaders guitarist Javier Reyes was arrested by Boston police following a show on May 27 in what appears to have been a gross abuse of authority, and he’s having to deal with the legal ramifications of that. For more details, and to sign a petition urging the Governor of Massachusetts to get involved on Reyes’ behalf, GO HERE (at this writing, almost 25,000 people have signed the petition).

But now there’s even more bad news from the AAL camp. This message appeared on the AAL Facebook page last night:

“Hey guys.
We’ve got some pretty terrible news to report. Upon returning home to our house in LA we discovered that we’d been robbed while were out on tour. The thieves were able to get away with Javier’s Chevy Blazer and all of the equipment we didn’t have on tour with us. 10 guitars in total. This includes many of our one of a kind custom instruments (Stranberg, Rick Toone ) as well as amplifiers, PA equipment and personal items.

This is beyond devastating. We know so many of you have been beyond supportive with Javier’s legal troubles. We may need more of your help now to potentially find some of these one of a kind instruments that may pop up on Ebay, Craigslist, pawn shops, used music stores etc.

We’re adding an album containing photos and detailed descriptions of the stolen gear to our profile. Please take a look and keep your eyes open for anything that looks close to this stuff. I truly think that with your help we have an exponentially better chance of tracking some of this down.

Thanks,
Tosin, Javier”

To see those photos, GO HERE.  One of them is at the top of this post. Also, after the jump, I’ve added the rest of the photos for those of you not on FB, along with a few more thoughts. Continue reading »

SNOW CRASH: THE MOVIE (!?!)

 Off Topic  4 Responses »
Jun 172012
 

Okay, I’m gonna show a little bit of my age now: I read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash when it was a new book, and it turned my brain inside out. It affected a lot of other people the same way. Though not as seminal a work in the cyberpunk oeuvre as William Gibson’s Neuromancer, it was still pretty damned influential.

At long last, Snow Crash is going to be made into a movie. When I say “at long last”, that doesn’t mean I’ve been eager to see this happen. In fact, I think the odds of a book like this being turned into a good and faithful movie are slim. I mean that the movie rights to the book were first acquired by Paramount in 1992, and the project was later transferred to Disney, where it seemed to die.

The development of the movie is now back at Paramount, in the hands of Kathleen Kennedy (Kennedy/Marshall) as producer and Joe Cornish as director. Cornish is the guy who directed a highly buzzed-about alien invasion movie named Attack the Block, which I haven’t seen but which I heard good things about. He seems to be a hot property, and Paramount seems to have made this production a priority, so this is probably going to become a reality.

I hate to be a pessimist (which in fact goes against my nature), but I have some anxieties because there are so many ways this can be fucked up, starting with selection of the actor to play the book’s half-black, half-Japanese, sword-wielding hacker protagonist, Hiro Protagonist. Yeah, that’s his name, and don’t laugh until you’ve read the book. Continue reading »

SATURDAY ROUND-UP: NEW VIDZ FROM DYING FETUS, DEVIN TOWNSEND, AND WINDS OF GENOCIDE, AND NEW MUSIC FROM WIDOW SUNDAY AND HUMAN CULL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jun 162012
 

Friday’s are often slow news days in the world of metal, but yesterday brought a bunch of goodies, and now we bring them to you for your amusement and edification. Stylistically, this metal is all over the fucking place, because so are my tastes.

DYING FETUS

The new Dying Fetus album, Reign Supreme, is so damned fine — one of the finest brutal death metal albums of 2012 in your humble editor’s opinion. It’s due for release on June 19. A few tracks have already premiered, including “From Womb To Waste”, which we featured here last month. It’s one of those songs that’s likely to remembered as much for the highly quotable audio sample at the beginning as for the rest of the song.

Yesterday Relapse released an official video for the song. It’s a splicing of live performance clips. It seems there is headbanging and moshing at Dying Fetus shows. Watch it after the jump. Continue reading »

DEATHTRACK

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jun 162012
 

I’m writing this on Friday afternoon. I don’t know for sure what I’ll feel like on Saturday morning when this post goes up on the site, but the odds are I’ll have an eye-watering hangover and my blood will be moving through the veins at the speed of sludge. I figure I’ll need something to get the blood pumping, something that will make me feel happy to be alive instead of contemplating the least painful way of killing myself. And as a trained medical professional, I have just the prescription for myself, and for any other Friday-night miscreants in the audience: Deathtrack. Or deathtrack, as the band seem to prefer.

deathtrack are from Norway. I discovered their existence two days ago via a report on the Facebook page of Svölk, with whom deathtrack share a band member (Halstein), that deathtrack were releasing a new EP with a free song download as enticement. So, impulsive creature that I am, I listened to that song (“Demon Cowboy”) plus one other that I found from the new EP (“True Blood”) — and I was SOLD. So sold, in fact, that I went and bought the band’s self-titled debut album on iTunes, in part because it includes a song called “Friday Night’s (All Right For Fighting)”, which seemed like good timing.

This music comes with a CLEAN SINGING! warning, but I’ll tell you what, Harry Hellriffer can sing, with a good, strong, clear voice, which he degrades with a little abrasion at the right moments. I’ll tell you another thing: These fuckers can lay down some heavy riffs and rhythms that make it impossible to sit still. Continue reading »

TODAY IS THE 25th ANNIVERSARY OF “ABIGAIL” BY KING DIAMOND

 Metal News  59 Responses »
Jun 152012
 

How do I know this is the 25th anniversary of King Diamond’s Abigail album? Because our brother in blog Full Metal Attorney has devoted a post to the anniversary on his site today (here). I would add that today is also the first birthday of his twin children, who someday will realize that their old man is way cooler than the daddies of most of their friends.

FMA’s post about this album makes me feel even more ignorant than I normally feel, which is saying something since NormallyIgnorant is one of my middle names. I feel more than normally ignorant because, despite the fact that FMA calls Abigail “one of the most beloved metal albums of all time”, I’ve never heard it. In fact, I’ve never heard any King Diamond album, though I’ve heard scattered songs here and there. Maybe I listened to the wrong scattered songs, because they never sent me into a rush to discover more of the band’s music, and that’s been true despite the iconic status of Mercyful Fate.

According to FMA, Abigail “has some of the best songwriting and performances of any metal record, ever, by everyone involved. And a creepy horror story to go along with it.” With praise like that, I felt compelled to check out two of the songs from Abigail to which FMA devoted particular praise — “The 7th Day of July 1777” and the title track.

I must say, the acoustic + synth intro to “1777” was very cool, as was the riffing that followed it . . . and then I remembered why I never dived deeper into the music: THAT VOICE!! Continue reading »

CARACH ANGREN: “WHERE THE CORPSES SINK FOREVER”

 Album Reviews  13 Responses »
Jun 152012
 

(Four days, four reviews in a row by DemiGodRaven, who is in catch-up mode. Today, we have his take on the new album by Carach Angren.)

Imagine if you and your friends were out on a camping trip and decided to sit around telling ghost stories. As the night goes on, the stories get worse and worse as each of you tries to one-up the others in the horror factor contained within each. Stories of war, suicide, cannibalism, almost everything is fair game. Carach Angren’s latest release, Where The Corpses Sink Forever, is like an audio version of that. Each song contains its own little story, of a person or a group of people and the absolutely awful things that happen to them, with a thin thread connecting all of them.

Carach Angren have a love for drama and the theatrical, and so it seems like a natural fit that they play symphonic black metal, a style that allows them to be as grand as they want and that permits them to indulge the spectacle of getting all decked out. Some of you may remember these gentlemen from the group’s previous release, another story-driven disc by the name of Death Came Through A Phantom Ship. It’s where I jumped aboard (thanks folks! I’ll be here all week! Tip your waitresses and try the veal!) with the band.

Death Came Through A Phantom Ship told the story of a captain of a Dutch East India Company ship who became increasingly corrupted over time by the deeds and atrocities he committed. It culminated in a final act in which he flung the Bible overboard, killed one of his crewmen, and sailed into a maelstrom, where a bolt of lightning eventually struck the ship, impaling him to the wheel of his now-sinking vessel.

And now they’ve written another disc, and what subjects do the band decide to take on for a large part of it? World War I and World War II. Continue reading »

NACHTMYSTIUM DEBUT “BORROWED HOPE AND BROKEN DREAMS” ON SOME NON-METAL GERMAN SITE WHOSE PLAYER WON’T WORK FOR ME

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Jun 152012
 

Nachtmystium’s new album Silencing Machine is due for release on July 31 via Century Media. I’ve been really interested in this album because of Blake Judd’s interview comments about it (promising that it’s a move away from the Meddle albums and more of a follow-up to Instinct: Decay, i.e., “It’s a fuckin’ black metal record”.) and because of what I heard on the first song to be released from the album for streaming (the title track).

Today, Nachtmystium premiered a second song titled “Borrowed Hope and Broken Dreams” exclusively through some German site called Visions.de (here).

I’ve been trying off and on to get the goddamned music player on that site to stream the song for the last half hour, without success. I press play, and it just sits there like a lump of inert code. On the computer I’m using, I’ve only got Firefox and Safari, so maybe it’s a browser issue, or maybe it’s a slow net connection, which sometimes plagues me where I’m currently located. Or maybe Visions.de is just lame.

But really, why did Chicago-based Nachtmystium (or Century) pick some apparently non-metal site in Germany which features a bunch of annoying flashing ads as the locus for this song debut instead of an ad-free site whose music player works and whose verbiage can be read by stupid monolingual Americans, i.e., our site? There is no justice.

Anyway, if you can hear this song, let me know what you think. Meanwhile, I’m going over to Pitchfork to listen to the title track again, because it rips and rolls.

ENSIFERUM: “UNSUNG HEROES” ON THE WAY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jun 152012
 

I must have been one of the 84% of Ensiferum’s Facebook fans who didn’t see the announcement about their new album in late May. However, I was one of the 16% of Spinefarm’s Facebook fans who did see the status update today about their uploading of a new cover photo, which you can see above, and which depicts Ensiferum in all their half-dressed, kilt-clad, face-painted, badass finery, and which led me to explore why Spinefarm was featuring an Ensiferum photo at the top of their FB page. And here’s why:

Spinefarm will be releasing a new hour-long album of Ensiferum music titled Unsung Heroes on August 24. It will be released as both a CD and a vinyl LP, plus there will also be a two-disc digipak set, with the second one being a bonus DVD consisting of almost 3 hours of material. It will include album art by the godlike Kristian Wahlin (Necrolord), and will feature special guests including members of Apokalyptischen Reiter (which is very weird) plus “legendary Finnish singer & actor, Vesa-Matti Loiri” (about whom I am clueless because Vesa-Matti Loiri is not yet legendary where I live).

Knowing the ways of Spinefarm, August 24 will be a European release date, and the album will be released in North America sometime in 2014, and I will not receive a promo for review purposes until sometime in 2015, if ever. HOWEVER, all the available versions are now available for pre-order at Finland’s Record Shop X (here), which ships worldwide. I have just pre-ordered the two-disc digipak for myself in lieu of waiting for the promo copy in 2015, if ever, at a price of 25.85 Euro, including shipping, which I think is about $5,000 U.S.

I did this because I love Ensiferum. I love you, too, which is why I’m telling you about this news, in addition to the fact that I haven’t posted a feature about Finnish metal all week, and that’s a wrong that must be righted.

Also, I have another Ensiferum promo shot after the jump, plus an older song, because I’m in the Ensiferum mood now. Continue reading »

HALT! HERE BE THINGS OF YORE THAT PENETRATED MY EAR HOLES AND TO WHICH MY EYES PAID HEED

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  17 Responses »
Jun 152012
 

I’m still trying out reader suggestions for the title of these posts in which I collect recently discovered music and news items, but I’m thinking it still needs work. Anyway, here are things I saw and heard over the last 24 hours that I thought were worth passing along. Most of the music is brand new, and it’s all good.

There are six very diverse songs in here, with accompanying art, from Tyrant of Death, Destroyer 666, Early Graves, Death I Am, and Polarization. That’s a lot of music for a single post, but just think of this like a packaging together of three or four posts you’d read on any other metal blog. If you like, you could read and listen a little at a time over the rest of the day. I just don’t feel like chopping it up.

TYRANT OF DEATH: “FROM EARTH TO HELL”

I saw that Tyrant of Death have released a new song. This one is especially easy to pass along, because DGR wrote the following introduction.  Copy and paste . . .

“While not as ridiculous on the release scale so far this year, Tyrant Of Death is still putting out a mighty chunk of music for people to listen to. I reviewed (and introduced some of you to) his work earlier this year with the release of Re-Connect, and in between the time I started and finished that review he released two songs.

He’s released another one now, this time inspired by the new Ridley Scott ‘Not Alien but totally Alien’ movie Prometheus that just came out. Man, is it a doozy, clocking it at almost nine minutes of crushing industrial death. It’s a solo guitar work this time, with the only vocals being samples from the movie and distorted screams (although a couple do sound like T.o.D contributor Lucem Fero). It is, however, totally free and available on The Tyrant Of Death Bandcamp. Plus it does have an awesome song title in, “From Earth To Hell”.

With that intro, enjoy the song right after the jump, and feel free to share thoughts about Prometheus while we’re on that subject. Continue reading »

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