Feb 062017
 

 

I decided to give the “Seen and Heard” caption a brief rest, but that’s basically what this post is — a round-up of new songs and videos. It just happens that everything in this round-up is the sound of slaughtering, though translated through difference metallic prisms. In essence, we’ll do a death metal/black metal back-and-forth, though you’ll hear differences even within those broad genre umbrellas, and the boundaries blur as well.

SINISTER

Over the weekend Sinister released an official video (created and directed by Sebastiaan Spijker) for a song called “Neurophobic” off their new album Syncretism, which will be released on February 24 by Massacre Records. This is the 13th studio album by these Dutch death metal veterans, and judging from the new song, it’s going to be lethal. Continue reading »

Aug 082013
 

(Late last month we brought you Part 1 of KevinP’s interview with Mike van Mastrigt of Houwitser (ex- Sinister), and we promised you that Part 2 would include an announcement you wouldn’t want to miss. KevinP gets to it without delay as we present Part 2 below.)

K:  Okay, now onto the announcement you wanted to make. The floor is yours……

M:   I’m proud to announce that I’m working again with Bart van Wallenberg (Sinister guitarist/bass on Diabolical Summoning —> Creative Killings). We have a new band called NEOCAESAR.  When we started we had an idea of the music we wanted to write,  only this did not work out (it was not the quality we were used to).  So I told Bart just to come up with anything he feels fine with.  We started working with that new material and found ourselves back in our Hate time period.  We initially tried to work with international drummers, but we needed to spend time practicing.  So we decided we needed someone from Holland, which left us with only one option (and there are a lot of good Dutch drummers), Eric de Windt.  I worked with him before (and he was also the vocalist on Sinister’s Aggressive Measures album). When Eric said yes, I called Michel [Alderliefsten] (Houwitser guitarist) with the good news.  Michel will be our bass player.

 

K:  So Bart has been quiet since his departure with Sinister many years ago (and I simply loved his work on Diabolical Summoning & Hate).  How long has this been in the planning?

M:  A few years ago we talked about it, even had a Sinister reunion night. With Bart, Aad, Michel and myself. We came up with the idea to reform Sinister, only Aad could no longer play drums anymore. We talked about getting a different drummer, but at the time Bart had other things to worry about (and it wouldn’t be nice for Aad, as an original member of the band). Little did we know the “rat” would use Sinister for his own benefit.  So this has been in the planning for a while, but finalized just a few months ago. Continue reading »

Feb 012011
 


The first month of the year has come and gone. January brought those of us in Seattle some typically ass-sucking winter weather, though it wasn’t nearly as bad as the brutality dished out by the weather gods on our metal brothers and sisters in the Midwest and Northeast of the U.S. And of course, our readers ins places like Russia, and Finland, and Sweden are probably laughing their asses off reading our complaints about our winter weather. So, we’ll just shut up about that.

Besides, January brought all sorts of great new metal to our tender ears, so who gives a shit about the weather anyway? And you know what else January brought? It brought news of still more metal goodness on the way — great bursts of audio sunshine in our collective futures that will part these winter clouds and leave them whimpering in cloudy tatters.

Okay, maybe we should leave poetry to the poets and just get on with this next monthly installment of METAL IN THE FORGE, where we collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last 30 days about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like, or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know them yet. And in this post, we’ve cut and pasted the announcements and compiled them in alphabetical order. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones:

AJATARRA: “AJATTARA — the Finnish band featuring former AMORPHIS frontman Pasi Koskinen (a.k.a. Itse Ruoja Suruntuoj) — will release its seventh album, Murhat (“Murders”) on February 2 via Osasto-A Records. Murhat is available for streaming in its entirety on the AJATTARA Facebook page.”  (much more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »