SEEN AND HEARD: HANGING GARDEN, DRUG HONKEY, VALLENFYRE, VETUR

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  29 Responses »
Jan 212014
 

I’ve been in a state of Seahawks-inspired delirium since Sunday morning. Apart from my own ridiculous heights of excitement, the city I call home as been completely engulfed in a similar type of out-of-body experience. Everyone wants to talk about Sunday’s win and the impending Super Bowl trip, even the people who are still trying to figure out how many innings it takes to complete a football game. You can’t listen to radio or watch any kind of sports-related TV without being engulfed in Seahawks talk (although much of it has consisted of uninformed yammering about Richard Sherman). Some of you have probably found yourselves in a similar environment in past years, but it hasn’t happened here in Seattle in a long, long time.

One result of all this is that I’m way behind on my usual search for metal news and new metal. This morning I did tear myself away from Seahawks mania long enough to check out a few things and put this post together.

HANGING GARDEN

If you haven’t heard the 2013 EP by Finland’s Hanging Garden, stop wasting time and go find it. I don’t want to have to tell you twice. I Was A Soldier (Lifeforce records) is worth your 15 minutes, and all the other minutes you’ll spend with it after the first listen. To give you some evidence of why the EP is so worthwhile, allow me to show you a video that premiered today for its final track, “Will You Share This Ending With Me?” Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: NEW FILM FROM INCANTATION, HANGING GARDEN, AND BYZANTINE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Feb 142013
 

The last 24 hours brought three new music videos that I thought were worth throwing your way — three quite different forms of metal and three quite different uses of visual accompaniment, but all worth seeing and hearing. The bands are Incantation (U.S.), Hanging Garden (Finland), and Byzantine (U.S.).

INCANTATION

This seminal NYDM band’s new album Vanquish in Vengeance, their first in half a decade, was released last fall by Listenable Records.  It has been very well-received, and rightly so. It bears the hallmarks of Incantation’s well-defined morbid, crushing style, but with a crisper, more modernized sound, and it’s packed with varied, well-written songs. The album opener “Invoked Infinity” sets the tone for the album, summoning up atmospherics of the occult and the doomed while also ripping flesh with a storm of razor-edged guitar work.

This morning the band premiered a video for the song that captures the mortuary air of the track — because it was filmed in an actual, decaying, turn-of-the-century funeral home. Here you go: Continue reading »

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