THE SYNN REPORT: AN UPDATE (No. 2)

 THE SYNN REPORT  No Responses »
Jun 082012
 

(Here’s a bit of news from Andy Synn about two bands we’ve praised at NCS in the past.)

While I am beavering away on another full edition of The Synn Report (and also endeavouring to tweak the format a bit to find a balance between the original form and what it has become since it was started) I thought I’d drop you all another update on 2 bands, one a former Synn Report alumnus, the other a proto-Synn Report band whose write-up on NCS not only inspired me to start the column, but is also partially responsible for getting me the gig in the first place.

BENEA REACH

Norway’s Benea Reach, a band of whom I expect huge things in the upcoming years, have a new album (Possession) all but ready to be released and have put together a track sampler over on their Soundcloud page. Consecrated disciples of the Cult of Luna, their new album promises to be a collection of proggy atmospherics, oceanic post-Meshuggah dynamics, and raging, hardcore-derived belligerence. Just what the doctor ordered.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/48099557″ iframe=”true” /]
Continue reading »

PURIFIED IN BLOOD: “MOT GRAV”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jun 082012
 

Norway’s Purified In Blood have a new album via Indie Recordings called Flight Of A Dying Sun due for release on June 11 in Norway, June 15 in the rest of Europe, and some other day in North America. The album’s eye-catching cover art (above) was created by Jondix Mahashakti. Here are a few more intriguing details about the album:

It features guest appearances by Glenn Reaper (the band’s second singer who otherwise wasn’t involved in the recording of this album) on a power anthem called “Iron Hands” and Erlend Hjelvik (Kvelertak) on a song called “Mot Grav”. It also includes performances by a guest saxophonist, a guest organist, a guest on double bass, and a guest Siberian throat singer.

Today the band released an official video for that “Mot Grav” song, and Erlend Hjelvik is in it, along with worms, skulls, chains, falling water, and some sketchy looking activities. Along with all that, the video further includes chunky, viral riffs — the kind that will get your headbang on. There’s one thing missing from the video — clean singing. There’s just the kind of vocals that you could use in lieu of a sandblaster if you had a big paint-stripping job ahead of you.

Neck-snapping follows the jump, along with artwork for the “Mot Grav” single.
Continue reading »

WHITECHAPEL: “WHITECHAPEL”

 Album Reviews  19 Responses »
Jun 082012
 

(In this post, UK-based Andy Synn reviews the new self-titled album by Whitechapel.)

Ah Whitechapel, a name to inspire an instantaneous reaction from pretty much anyone who hears/reads it. In fact, I’d imagine many of you have already formed your opinions based on seeing the name of the review alone, and that they’re either going to be “Whitechapel are the sickest band ever dude!” or “deathcore posers aren’t real metal”… and seriously guys, I thought we were past a) the ignorant fanboyisms of declaring band x, y, or z “the sickest band ever”, and b) pre-judging by association with (often outdated) stereotypes. They’re two ends of the same scale, and both are pretty played out by now.

Now, personally I didn’t really “get” Whitechapel at first. Though their debut was a cut above the rest of the cookie-cutter, faux-aggro deathcore out at the time, and their second record saw some vast improvements in their sound and overall direction, I still wasn’t sold. The reason the group finally “clicked” for me was not just the release of their third album (though it is a very good album), but down to the WAY I was listening to the band – something facilitated by their third release, but which has also allowed me to appreciate their second album more than I ever did.

You see, the HOW and the WHY of listening to an album are just as important as the WHAT (genre, etc). And what finally clicked for me was when I queued up a Whitechapel album right after listening to one of my favourite death metal acts, the genre-defining Vader. The similarities were astounding, and this comparison finally got me to look at Whitechapel in a fresh light.

Phil Bozeman’s vocals are the modernised, spitting-image of Piotr’s, while the band’s overall blueprint bears the genetic fingerprints of the Polish masters all over it – the blinkered brutality, the sheer speed, the singular focus on aggression, the minor melodic teases, the twisting solos… they all scream VADER to me. That may be blasphemous to some of you, but it’s how my mind finally managed to categorise Whitechapel, and I think the comparison is only a positive one for them. Continue reading »

EPHEL DUATH: “ON DEATH AND COSMOS”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jun 082012
 

With six albums to their credit between 2000 and 2009, Ephel Duath is a band with whom I should have become familiar by now, but alas, no. It took their new EP, On Death and Cosmos, to finally pull me in. Given my state of ignorance about the band’s past, this review won’t provide a comparison of the new music to what preceded it. I am the proverbial blank slate, on which the EP’s three songs will write what they will.

And maybe that’s just as well, because the Ephel Duath that gave birth to On Death and Cosmos after a nearly three-year hiatus is nearly a new band. Songwriter and guitarist Davide Tiso is still at the helm, but he has changed, wrenched by personal tragedy, economic pressures, and disappointments with the music business. Undoubtedly, those experiences have fed the fires that flow through this EP.

Davide has also recruited an eye-catching company of new names to round out the line-up: ground-breaking vocalist Karyn Crisis (Crisis), who is also Davide’s wife, and legendary bassist Steve DiGiorgio (formerly of Death, Autopsy, and Testament, among others) have joined master drummer Marco Minnemann (Adrian Belew, ex-Necrophagist, ex-Kreator), who also collaborated on Ephel Duath’s last album. In fact, given that line-up, it’s not really a stretch to call this new Ephel Duath a “super group”.

And on top of that, from what I’ve read, it appears that no one Ephel Duath album has sounded much like any of the others anyway. So, let’s start fresh, shall we? Continue reading »

NEW TRIBUTES TO ENSLAVED AND EMPEROR

 Metal News  3 Responses »
Jun 082012
 

Enslaved at the Quart-festival, photo: Håkon Mosvold Larsen, Scanpix/NTB

“Emperor and Enslaved are two of the most well-known bands in the history of Norwegian extreme metal, and June strangely enough brings tributes to both bands. On June 25th the album A Tribute To Emperor-In Honour Of Icon E will be released, and a week before Önd-A Tribute To Enslaved will see the light of day.”

And so begins an article by Totto Mjelde that appears today on Lydverket, a Norway-based web site affiliated with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, NRK. We’ve written about Totto’s coverage of Norwegian metal in the past, and this most recent piece by him is definitely worth reading. It includes interviews of Raphael Henry (Pictonian Records), the curator of the Enslaved tribute; Ivar Peersen of Enslaved (who, interestingly, plays guitar on Taake’s contribution to the Emperor tribute);  Nocturnal, from Tryzna Productions, which is releasing the Emperor tribute along with Candlelight Records; and Ørjan Nordvik of Helheim., who perform on that tribute.

But that’s not all. Totto’s article also includes exclusive streams of two songs from the Enslaved tribute compilation: Ribozyme’s performance of “To The Coast”, and Vreid’s cover of “Lunar Force”.

GO HERE to read and listen to Totto’s feature. After the jump I’ve included the cover art and track lists for both albums. Continue reading »

EVOKEN: “AN EXTRINSIC DIVIDE”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jun 082012
 

On July 31, Profound Lore will issue the label’s 100th release, and it will be Atra Mors [“Black Death”], by Evoken. This is the band’s first album in five years, and only their fifth in a career that has spanned 20 years.

I gather from reading about the band that many regard them as forefathers of the funeral doom movement in the U.S. And you can correctly infer from that last sentence that I’m a newcomer to Evoken. As far as I can remember, the sum total of the music I’ve heard consists of a brand new song that Profound Lore began streaming yesterday: “An Extrinsic Divide”.

The song makes quite an impression, which is sort of like saying that World War II was a bit of a scrape. At more than 10 minutes in length, it exhales a suffocating fog of dank miasma, creating an all-encompassing atmosphere of catastrophe. The uber-distorted music is very heavy and generally ponderous — the sound of dinosaurs walking the earth and making the ground tremble with their might.

But that’s not the sum total of the song by a long shot. It also includes some beautiful, albeit haunting, melodies (ably assisted by reverberating guitars and keyboard overlays), as well as accelerated passages of gut-churning death metal. Continue reading »

FURTHER ADVENTURES IN ICELAND (AND A FREE DEATHWISH SAMPLER)

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jun 072012
 

To be clear, I’m not actually adventuring in the actual country of Iceland, though I wish I were, because it seems like a fascinating place, and even if the landscape turned out to be less dramatic than it looks in photos, I feel pretty sure I could get my head whomped pretty hard by some live metal.

No, the adventuring in this post is following up on some new music from a couple of bands we featured on our impromptu Iceland Metal Month series last month. One of the bands is Ophidian I, who we wrote about here. The other is Beneath, featured in this post. They’ve both started streaming additional tracks from their forthcoming albums, and the new songs are slaughtering me, in a good way — the kind of slaughtering where body parts come off and you eat them with the music ringing in your earholes and you realize that you don’t taste half bad despite what you might have thought.

Also, since I’m back on the subject of Iceland, I thought I might as well throw in some music from another band we haven’t covered yet. It’s not an Icelandic band. They’re actually from New York, but they recorded a new two-song 7″ at “Sundlaugin”, a studio in Mosfellsbær, Iceland, owned by the band Sigur Ros. (The session was engineered by Birgir Jón “Biggi” Birgisson.) The band is called Self Defense Family, and the music is a big, sweeping left turn away from our well-traveled path around here — but it has managed to sink its hooks in me. Maybe it will hook you, too. Continue reading »

MISERATION: “ON WINGS OF BRIMSTONE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jun 072012
 

We’ve already posted twice about the forthcoming album by Sweden’s Miseration, so this makes three. Late yesterday, the band released a second track from the album for YouTube streaming. This one’s called “On Wings of Brimstone”

The album is Tragedy Has Spoken and it will be released by Lifeforce Records on July 2 in Europe and a day later in North America. As previously noted, the artwork is by the ubiquitous and dependably awesome Pär Olofsson. I thoroughly enjoyed this band’s ass-blasting last album, The Mirroring Shadow (2009), and had high hopes for the new one. I’ve only found time for one spin through it so far, and it’s certainly not a clone of The Mirroring Shadow, but it’s quite cool.

Among other things, it incorporates the use of 8-string guitars and folk instruments such as the Indian Esraj harp, the Persian hammered dulcimer called a Santur, sawblade, organ, mandolin, and piano, as well as Mongolian throatsinging. I wouldn’t have been able to tell you much of that just from listening. Although I’m familiar with a vast array of instruments, most of them are the kind you buy online and have them shipped to a one-use only P.O. box, though possibly a Santur was included as a bonus in my last shipment. I know there was something in there that involved strings and a hammer.

Anyway, there’s a lot going on in “On Wings of Brimstone”. There is definitely some up-tempo ass-blasting brutality, a la The Mirroring Shadow, but the song also includes dark stomping chords with an old-school Swedeath tone, a white-hot guitar solo, and a dramatic melody. And Christian Älvestam provides an impressive array of vocals style, from flesh-flaying howls to abyss-deep growls to soaring cleans. There might be an Esraj in the mix, too, though since I’ve never heard an Esraj it’s difficult to be sure. Very nice song — listen after the jump. Continue reading »

I’M NOT GOING TO CALL THIS “THINGS I SAW AND HEARD YESTERDAY” BECAUSE I’VE OVERUSED THAT LINE SO I’LL COME UP WITH SOMETHING ELSE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  18 Responses »
Jun 072012
 

Really, I swear, this isn’t going to become a regular feature, despite the fact that this is the fourth time I’ve done one of these posts in the last week. And the proof is that I’m not using the same name for this post as I did for the last ones. I’m calling it something different. You can see that.

Anyway, here are some things I saw and heard yesterday and last night, and at the end of the post I’ll have an update on our experiment in paying to promote our Facebook posts. Here’s a disgusting hint: It works.

I saw an announcement by Century Media that Swedish death metal icons Grave (in their leather finery up above) will release their 10th studio album, Endless Procession Of Souls, on August 27th in Europe and on August 28th in North America.  I’m already beginning to get the stench of rotting corpsemeat up inside my nose. I’ll probably stop bathing soon, just to get myself fully attuned to the reek by August. We previously reported that Grave will be touring NorthAm with Dark Funeral (and some band named Morbid Angel) this September and October.

And speaking of grisly old-school Swedish death metal, I received through the ether an electronic copy of a new EP from Mexico’s Zombiefication called Reaper’s Consecration. I’ve only listened to two of the five tracks so far, but it is a fucking brain assassin, and the EP includes this sweet cover art designd by the band’s vocalist Mr. Hitch: Continue reading »

CHEMICAL TOMB: S/T

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, Phro's Posts  6 Responses »
Jun 062012
 


(Phro reviews the 2012 free EP by “2 Polish and two English scumbags stuck in the shit hole known as Plymouth”, a/k/a Chemical Tomb.)

Grindcore.

Can you think of any genre label more accurate to the genre it describes? Not even “death metal” carries the visceral weight of “holy-fuck-who-just-shoved-a-chainsaw-in-my-ear” that is imparted by the two syllables of “grindcore.” And when you make like a bath salt abuser (salter? bather?) and start chopping wildly at random appendages and slice off the “core,” you just get “grind”: simple and glorious like unrepentant morning wood, standing ready to fuck everything with violent dissonance.

Which brings us to my early morning discovery today: Chemical Tomb.

They seem to have a thing for pot, based on their movie samples. I forgive them because they made my ears cum and bleed at the same time. (Cleed? Blum?)

This EP, if it’s long enough to be anything more than a single, is all of 5 minutes. Perfect for a quickie before work or, if you put it on a loop, to help you get through a few rounds in a cage match. I think. I’m not actually sure how cage matches work…do they involve whiskey? They should. Everything is better with whiskey.

Anyway. The music. Well, obviously, I’m gonna just put that handy little bandcamp player after this. But maybe you’re at work and you can’t listen to music. So you need words—my words, sweaty with exertion and flush with eagerness to please—to give you an idea of what you’re missing out on. Continue reading »

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