This morning I got two e-mails that reminded me about bands — Thy Catafalque (originally Hungary) and Mitochondrion (Canada) — that I’ve been meaning to say something about for a long time. So rather than procrastinate further, or worry about how many other bands I’ve been unjustly ignoring, I thought, wtf, might as well just do it now.

The first band is Thy Catafalque, who (as of last month) are now signed to the excellent Season of Mist label. I’ve seen this band’s name in various places, but most often at The Number of the Blog, where groverXIII is a big admirer of them (see this, for example). Although I’d forgotten about it, I finally remembered listening at one point long ago to a clip of one of their songs that he featured at TNOTB from their latest album, Róka Hasa Rádió, which was released in 2009. I didn’t fall in love with the song immediately, and therefore moved on to something else important, like picking lint out of my navel.

And then this morning, I got an e-mail from Tamás Kátai, who is the principle alter ego of Thy Catafalque (along with János Juhász) and now resides in Edinburgh, Scotland. He had seen my review of the excellent new album by another Hungarian band, Slytract, which included my confession of ignorance and curiosity about Hungarian metal. So he gave me links to two of Thy Catafalque’s albums — not only Róka Hasa Rádió, which is the fourth album, but also the third one, Tűnő Idő Tárlat (2004), which Tamás thought I might want because, unlike Róka Hasa Rádió, it contains no clean male vocals at all. I wonder why he thought that would matter to me?

Turns out that one of those download files also contained a video for a song called “Paths Untrodden”, which isn’t on either of the two most recent albums. Instead, it’s on the second release, Microcosmos (2001). Because I like moving pictures, and because I do most things ass-backwards, I watched that video before listening to anything else. It may very well not be representative of the band’s current musical direction, since it’s roughly 10 years old, but damn, it’s a fine, scathing black-metal song that has become firmly stuck in my head, and the video is beautiful — definitely worth sharing.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »