Jun 112015
 


The Dark Descent label has recently released a 10-track sampler of music from the label’s artists that’s available on Bandcamp now (“name your price”). It includes music from recent releases plus previews of unreleased material from Adversarial, Blood Incantation, and Thevetat.

Those three previously unreleased tracks are all great, and for me proved to be welcome introductions to the fascinating, brain-scrambling death metal exuberance of Blood Incantation (their track will appear on an EP named Interdimensional Extinction) and the blood-thirsty death metal explosiveness of Thevetat (their track will appear on a forthcoming 7″ named Desecration of Divine Presence).

I was especially hot to hear the new Adversarial track, “Eonik Spiritual Warfare”, which will appear on their forthcoming second full-length, Death, Endless Nothing and the Black Knife of Nihilism, scheduled for release in August with album artwork that has again been created by the awesome Danille Gauvin.  The band’s set at Maryland Deathfest this year was one of the event’s high points for me, and I’ve been a big fan of everything they’e recorded to date. Continue reading »

Feb 172015
 

 

I pride myself on having a breadth of knowledge that is very wide and very shallow. Sure, I could burrow deeply into particular subjects, and then be able to talk about 2 or 3 things in depth. You know people like that, don’t you? They bore the shit out of you, am I right? Broad and shallow, that’s the way to go (except when it comes to metal, about which I of course have near-encyclopedic knowledge).

For example, I know that statisticians have ways of reaching conclusions about large populations of items or people based on a small sampling of data. They have mathematical formulas for gauging the reliability of the conclusions based on their sample size. And that’s all I know about that. If I knew more, I’d probably bore the shit out of you.

I applied a sampling technique to the two compilations that are the subject of this post, because I didn’t have time to listen to all the songs. I’ve concluded that both comps are hot shit. I have no idea whether the conclusions I reached are valid. Fortunately, you can listen to all the songs before deciding whether to spend your hard-drive space on them — and that’s all you’ll have to spend, because they don’t cost money (unless you want to throw some cash at them out of the goodness of your coal-black hearts). Continue reading »