Oct 012025
 

Recommended for fans of: Full of Hell, Wake, Of Feather and Bone

I must admit that Grindcore is not a genre I tend to spend a lot of time with… although I do dip my toe into the filth every now and then (mostly when a band comes along who mixes in some of the ol’ Grind with other, equally metallic, elements).

Case in point, Portland, Oregon trio Tithe – aka Matt Eiseman (guitar/vocals), Alex Huddleston (bass/vocals), and Kevin Swartz (drums) – first caught my attention with the release of 2023’s Inverse Rapture, whose hideous Death/Black/Sludge/Grind hybrid ultimately earned them a place on my list of the year’s “Great” albums (which you can check out here, if you’re curious).

And with the group having just released their third album, Communion In Anguish, a few weeks ago now seemed like the perfect time to introduce you to (or remind you of) the group’s grindy greatness.

Continue reading »

Aug 012025
 

(written by Islander)

Today is another Bandcamp Friday, a good time to buy or pre-order music because a greater percentage of the proceeds will reach bands and labels. I had a few hours to myself yesterday afternoon and this morning that I spent surveying new music that’s come out over the last week or so. From that, I picked music from six bands to recommend today.

With one exception, all these songs are advance tracks from albums that will be released either later this month or in September or October. The one exception is the first single from an album that’s being released in full today. There’s a hell of a lot of great cover art in today’s collection too.

If things go as planned, I’ll have more recommendations in the usual space for these roundups tomorrow. Continue reading »

Dec 122022
 

As I explained in yesterday’s round-up, we’re now beginning a week when (by design) we don’t have the normal volume of premieres on the calendar. This gives me more time to stare at the wall (I swear there’s a face in that wood plank), pick lint from my navel, twiddle my thumbs, and try to pull together more round-ups of new songs and videos.

The timing is fortuitous, because despite the fact that only a couple of weeks remain in the year, new songs keep pumping out of the heavy metal firehose, and my list of them continues to metastasize. In trying to figure out which ones to recommend here, I decided to leave out some of the bigger names, such as the new songs from Memoriam and Ne Obliviscaris, and to end with a compilation that I’m making no effort to “review”. Continue reading »

May 032020
 


Ascendency

 

We’ve now entered the second full month of a government-ordered shutdown here in Washington State, with only minimal re-openings permitted before June, and maybe not even then. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the country communities are being encouraged to become human petri dishes by venturing out to movie theaters, gyms, restaurants, beaches, etc. Good luck to them. I’ll be interested to see what grows within their cells, or doesn’t.

Meanwhile I’ll try to suppress my own depression and anxiety over the prospect of another month within these walls, and continue to sift through the great mass of new metal in an effort to make my life, and perhaps yours, a little more harrowing and wretched. To that end, below you will find six individual tracks and one album to stream. I also have a collection of other complete releases I would like to recommend. Maybe tomorrow…. Continue reading »