SEEN AND HEARD: TUMBLEWEED DEALER, UNDERGANG, ARCADE MESSIAH, TRISTE TERRE, SUFFER YOURSELF, CADAVERIC INCUBATOR

 

We’re entering the time of year when year-end lists will quickly start popping up, and that means our own annual LISTMANIA frenzy will soon begin. As usual, the earliest of the forthcoming lists (those that will soon appear in print zines), will necessarily neglect albums that are set for release between now and January 1, and even some that were released in the first half of November. We will continue trying to spotlight those, despite succumbing to listmania.

The impending LISTMANIA orgy also means that our own output of reviews and new-music features will likely diminish. In what’s left of our period of normalcy, I have plans to throw as much new quality music your way as I can, including two features today, beginning here. The organizing principle of this collection is simply this: Diversity.

TUMBLEWEED DEALER

To begin today’s round-up I’m stepping off our typical beaten paths of blood-lusting savagery with music from a band I’ve only discovered recently — Tumbleweed Dealer from Montréal. Their third album, Tokes, Hatred & Caffeine, the cover of which is visible above, will be released on November 21, 2016.

 

Photo by Black Room Visuals

 

Tumbleweed Dealer is largely the work of one very talented man — guitarist/bassist Seb Painchaud — though drummer Jean-Francois Richard is no slouch himself. There are no vocals, and if you’re like me you won’t miss them.

There are so many weed references in Tumbleweed Dealer’s world that those of you who’ve never heard their music may presume it’s the usual hazy, fuzz-bombed desert/stoner rock. If you’ve got a low tolerance for that, you may veer away, thinking you’ve heard it all before. Don’t do that. Tumbleweed Dealer may drink bongwater for breakfast, but this is anything but generic music.

Speaking of bongwater, the first song from the new album is called “Bongwater Creek”. But before I get to the new song from that album which debuted yesterday, I want to share with you a stream of the opening track of their last album, 2014’s Western Horror. I listened to it just a couple of weeks ago as my first exposure to Tumbleweed Dealer’s music, and found myself rooted in place all the way through that remarkable album:

And now, on to “Bongwater Creek”. It’s funky, heavy, bluesy, jazzy, and psychedelic. It’s a head-bobbing, day-brightening swirl of colors, and it tastes much better than bongwater.

Tokes, Hatred & Caffeine can be pre-ordered now The price will go up by $1 on the album’s November 21 release date.

P.S. We’ll be bringing you the premiere of another track from the album real soon.

https://tumbleweeddealer420.bandcamp.com
http://www.facebook.com/TumbleweedDealer

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

UNDERGANG

The next song isn’t brand new. In fact, it’s almost five years old. But it was made available for a “name your price” download at Bandcamp for the first time yesterday. It’s a track named “Kloakkens Afkom” by the Danish band Undergang that originally appeared on a 7″ split release (The Dead of Winter) with New Jersey’s Funebrarum that Doomentia released in February 2012. The split featured killer artwork by Ola Larsson.

I hadn’t heard this song before getting a Bandcamp alert about it yesterday, but Undergang’s 2015 album Døden Læger Alle Sår was so fucking good that I wasted no time checking this out. Undergang sum up their music as “regurgitating sewer death metal”, and you’d be hard-pressed to come up with a better short-hand description for this track. It’s a shrieking, gurgling, steamrolling, pile-driving monster of destruction loaded with dynamic twists and turns. Kill!

To grab the song for yourselves, use the Bandcamp link below. I’m also including a stream of Funebrarum’s track from the split, “Delusions In the Sheltered Womb”.

https://undergang.bandcamp.com/album/split-w-funebrarum
https://www.facebook.com/undergangktdm/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ARCADE MESSIAH

This next song comes from a band named Arcade Messiah, and it’s the brain-child of UK musician John Bassett. As in the case of Tumbleweed Dealer, the forthcoming Arcade Messiah album III is (obviously) the band’s third, but the first one to cross my path.

The album’s first advance track, “Revolver”, debuted a couple of days ago via a music video. On Sunday I saw the Doctor Strange movie (which I highly recommend). The brilliant video looks like an out-take from one of the mind-bending scenes of wizardry from that movie.

As for the music, prepare for a vibrant amalgam of sludgy jolting grooves, spectral lead guitar apparitions, gut-punching drumwork, narcotic soloing, and gritty vocal wailing. This will get your head (and the rest of your body) moving. Damned infectious, too.

The new album will be released on November 25; the cover art is by Michael Kerbow. Pre-order it here:

https://arcademessiah.bandcamp.com/album/iii
https://www.facebook.com/arcademessiah

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TRISTE TERRE

Little more than a month ago I came across a three-song EP called La cour des voraces that at the time seemed to exist only on YouTube. It originally appeared last May and was recorded by a one-man French black metal band named Triste Terre (the creator lives in Lyon and calls himself Naâl). I wrote about the EP here, and expressed the wish that it would become available for acquisition somewhere.

I soon got my wish, when Triste Terre made a Bandcamp page. And then yesterday I received a Bandcamp alert that a new Triste Terre EP had also just been released. The new one is another three-track affair, bearing the name Et pour les siècles des siècles…. The Bandcamp player for the EP is set to begin with the last track, but I recommend you listen to the songs in order.

The tracks are segmented by brief excerpts from the orchestral piece Atmosphères composed by György Ligeti in 1961. The songs themselves are also atmospheric and seem classically influenced. They’re dramatic, multifaceted, and ambitious conceptions — ferocious at times, funereal at others, but also mesmerizing. They seem designed to cast spells that will draw the listener into another realm, one pervaded by a darkness that conceals shape-shifting terrors.

Triste Terre remains a very impressive new discovery. More please.

https://tristeterrefr.bandcamp.com/album/et-pour-les-si-cles-des-si-cles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SUFFER YOURSELF

Suffer Yourself are another band I’m just discovering. According to Metal-Archives, it began in 2011 as a one-man project in Poland, but since then has fleshed out into a group and is now based in Linköping, Sweden. The band’s debut album Inner Sanctum was released in 2014, and their second one — Ectoplasm — is scheduled for release on November 25 by Cimmerian Shade Recordings.

Below you can indulge yourself in the album’s title track, which is well-named. As explained at The Font of All Human Knowledge, the word “ectoplasm” describes a paranormal physical substance — sometimes vaporous, sometimes viscous and gelatinous, sometimes as a bundle of fine threads or a membrane — excreted by mediums in a trance state to drape over the nonphysical bodies of spirits, enabling them to interact in the physical and real universe.

The song “Ectoplasm” likewise has the feel of something not entirely of this world, something that’s ghostly at its core, like a frightening apparition — but one with the ability to shake the earth as it walks. Both crushingly heavy and unnervingly creepy, and with vocals that range from monstrous growls to solemn occult chanting, it’s a very enticing teaser for this new album.

https://sufferyourself.bandcamp.com/album/ectoplasm
http://www.facebook.com/SufferYourself

 

 

 

 

 

 

CADAVERIC INCUBATOR

I decided to exit this collection with a thermonuclear head-wrecker. It’s described on YouTube as a “raw mix preview track” from an ucoming debut album by the band Cadaveric Incubator, to be released in 2017. I learned about it through a Facebook post by Dutch Pearce (thank you sir!).

Metal-Archives reports that Cadaveric Incubator are from Helsinki and that they’ve previously released a demo and a split 11 years ago and then another demo in 2014 named Unburied Abominations. The name of the new track, like the band’s name, is “Cadaveric Incubator”.

“Vicious” doesn’t begin to describe this rampaging slice of death/grind, but it’s a start. (Jeez, that made no sense — I blame this song for being unable to think straight.)

https://www.facebook.com/Cadaveric-Incubator-1537299173162374/