At the beginning of the month the UK death metal band Beyond Grace celebrated the first anniversary of the release of their second album, Our Kingdom Undone.
To commemorate the occasion, various members of the band have recorded a series of playthrough videos for some of their favorite tracks from the record, and we’re premiering the first of those today – a one take, no cuts, vocal rendition of the album’s 12 minute title-track as performed by our very own Andy Synn. Continue reading »
Some of us have some fun playing the game of “What Will This Sound Like?” after seeing the cover art and logo for a band we’ve never heard before. Statisticians haven’t calculated the numbers, but it sure seems like a significant percentage of the time the art and logo telegraph the music, at least for people who’ve been paying attention to metal for a fair number of years.
But if you’re like us, you’ll be perplexed when you see the cover of Convergence, the debut album from the Italian group Miscreance. It’s wildly colorful, and the images packed into it create a crazy collage. Stars, lightning, sea creatures, heads, limbs, wombs, cemetery scenes as if glimpsed through inter-dimensional windows in a wall, lots of other things too difficult to identify… it’s a head-spinning vision, and it’s not a clear message about the style of music. The band’s logo doesn’t really telegraph a clear message about the music either.
Maybe you already know, because Miscreance did put out a demo in 2018 (From Awareness to Creation) and three tracks on a split with Australia’s Vile Creation last fall, and a couple of preview songs from the new album have surfaced, but if you missed all of that you might be befuddled right now. But then you see a photo of the band, and you’ll think, okay I got it now: This is a thrash band — a real old-school thrash band. Continue reading »
Ciemra
I had visitors from Atlanta yesterday (not Atlantis – those friends have a longer swim), and that visit included a trip to the ballpark to watch the Mariners beat the Braves. I didn’t gloat too much, and my friends were pretty stoic in accepting their home team’s loss, since their team won the first game of the series the night before.
However, by the time I made it back to my island home and got to bed, the clock had struck midnight. And by the time I woke up this morning to view another sunrise dismally cloaked in wildfire smoke, a big chunk of the early day was already gone. And then I remembered an imminent outing my spouse had planned. So there’s really not much time to give this column.
I thought about not writing anything, but didn’t want to foment anxiety among the throngs who might worry that my house had been struck by a meteor or ruined by a long-awaited reappearance of the Great Old Ones. Continue reading »
Thundering Hooves
This was a hell of a week for new metal. All of the following bands released new songs and/or videos (or in Darkthrone’s case just a little Fenriz teaser) and you can check them out by clicking on the names, if you haven’t seen and heard them yet:
I thought all the items linked above ranged from decent to excellent, but I’m not writing about any of them today. I decided instead to focus on music from less well-known names. It was a hell of a week for promising new releases by more obscure groups too. Here’s just a small handful. Continue reading »
Today the Norwegian band Féleth are releasing the second single from their new album Divine Blight, which will be released by Rob Mules Records on November 11th, and we’re presenting a first listen here to help spread the word.
Today’s new song is named “Avarice“, and it’s the track that closes the album. It was preceded by the debut of the album opener, “Majesty“, and thematically the two are connected. As the band explain, “‘Majesty‘ describes the rise of a diabolical king-like entity who corrupts, oppresses and kills everyone. The ‘king’-persona is basically humankind fucking itself up”.
When the album reaches its end after many musical twists and turns, “Avarice” returns to that king-like figure from “Majesty“, “declaring war on everything and itself”. As the band explain, “The hook is written in the first person from the view of the general greed and hate that lies in the hearts of men. But grimmer.” Continue reading »
(The Finnish doom legends Spiritus Mortis will release a new album named The Great Seal through Svart Records on September 16th, and at last Comrade Aleks reached out to them for the following wide-ranging interview.)
Spiritus Mortis wasn’t the most active band of the Finnish underground, but objectively it’s the first Finnish traditional doom metal band, that’s the real fact. Starting as Rigor Mortis in 1987, the band got its longer-lasting name in 1988, but the guys released only demos until 2004 when the self-titled debut seaw the light of day. Years passed, but brothers Jussi and Teemu Maijala have remained Spirtius Mortis’ priests since the beginning, carrying the torch of damn true doom metal.
Their 2016 album The Year Is One was recorded with Sami Hynninen (Reverend Bizarre, Opium Warlords, and a dozen more bands you maybe heard about) on vocals… this album was a killer! Honestly, I was wondering what else could they bring here after that masterpiece of glorious doom? Then Sami left the band according to their agreement, the new vocalist Kimmo Perämäki took his place in 2018, and then Markus Kuula replaced Jarkko Seppälä on drums.
All these changes didn’t distract the brothers Maijala from their holy task and Spiritus Mortis’ new album The Great Seal is to be released through Svart Records on September 16th. And that means that now is our turn to support the band. Continue reading »
The Turkish band Diabolical Raw has had a long history, and not an easy one. Starting life under the name Diabolical, they honed their talents during stage performances in the late ’90s and early 2000s but didn’t make their first release until the Daimonion EP in 2005, and soon after the group disbanded due to difficulties in finding a stable line-up.
After a dozen years of silence drummer Ozan Tunç and vocalist Ozan Erkmen decided to resurrect the band, but changed the name to what it is today. By 2019 they released their debut concept album Estrangement, revealing a more symphonic take on black metal, with Ozan Tunç handling all the instrumentation and orchestration, as well as the mixing and mastering.
A year later Diabolical Raw began work on a second album, but of course pandemic hell intervened and slowed down the process. Yet in the fall of 2021, the band completed the recording of that sophomore album, Elegy Of Fire Dusk, again with Ozan Tunc responsible for the music, the mixing, and the mastering, and Ozan Erkmen crafting the lyrics and delivering the vocals.
Like the first album, the new one is based on a unifying theme derived from a short story by Ozan Erkmen that uses ancient Central Asian Turkish mythology. One song from the album (“Face the Judgment”) debuted last spring, and today we present an official video for the second one — “Wise Old Woman“. Continue reading »
(DGR has some thoughts to share about the new 12th album from Poland’s Behemoth, which will be released on September 16th by Nuclear Blast.)
It has been a long-standing tradition of Joe Baressi that whenever he works on a metal album, he is credited as ‘Evil Joe Baressi’. That’s pretty funny, considering that often Joe’s name is brought up more in line with groups like Alice in Chains, Soundgarden, Tool, Queens Of The Stone Age, Volbeat, and a bunch of other humongous rock acts over the years. Thus, you get ‘Evil Joe Baressi’ whenever he and his team work on a metal album.
It is certainly an unusual name to see attached to one of the bigger purveyors of Satan-as-spectacle out there — Behemoth. There’s been a little hay made in the press over the name drop, although it’s not like the band strayed well outside their comfort zone, since they’ve involved longtime collaborator Daniel Bergstrand as well. However, this may also be one of the more interesting new things happening with Behemoth‘s latest release Opvs Contra Natvram, because otherwise this is “as expected” a Behemoth album as you could possibly expect. Continue reading »
“Internal Organs External” — what a grisly and ghastly vision that name conjures! And speaking of visions, take in that cover art up there for this Arizona project’s new album, whose title reinforces the expectations: The Brutality of Tomorrow. And wait ’til you get a look at Vince Otero, the band’s sole member.
But some of you already have an idea of what’s coming without all those clues. That is, if you caught up with the first album of Internal Organs External, Into the Depths. It certainly caught the attention of Vicious Instinct Records, which quickly signed the project to a multi-record deal, one that began with the 2021 EP Apocalyptic Domination.
And now we’ve got The Brutality of Tomorrow fast approaching its September 30th release date. Traumatizing brutality is to be expected, but there’s more here than that. Let’s let Vince explain: Continue reading »
Last spring we premiered a pulse-pounding track from a multi-faceted new album named Transactinides by the Massachusetts-based “metaltronica” project Planepacked. We summed it up then as “a head-spinning trip of changing moods and soundscapes”, bringing music which “includes ingredients that should appeal to fans of extreme metal, but adventurously mixes those with both boisterous and mesmerizing electronica and dramatically varying vocal styles”.
Planepacked (named after a glitch in the game Dwarf Fortress) identified a smorgasbord of influences for that album, including the likes of Autechre, Igorrr, Devin Townsend, and Susumu Hirasawa (among others), as well as the urban fantasy fiction series Endian Project created by the woman behind Planepacked, Jessica Kagan.
Planepacked‘s creative fires have continued to burn since then, and one result is a new single that we’re premiering today — a song named “Harrowhark” in which Planepacked has doubled-down on the project’s more extreme influences — providing a death/thrash flavored take on the more usual Planepacked sound. Continue reading »