MISCELLANY (NO. 11)

It’s been a few weeks since we did one of these MISCELLANY posts. In case you’ve forgotten, or you’re new to these pages, here’s how it works: I make a random list of new music or new videos from bands I’ve never heard before, but look interesting for some reason, and then I go check ’em out. I don’t know in advance whether the music will be good or bad, and occasionally I get head-faked into listening to music that turns out not to be metal at all.

But whatever happens, I create this log of what I heard and saw, without filtering out anything. Sometimes, it becomes a vehicle for discovering gems. Sometimes, we blunder right into dreck — though most of the time the music has at least been passable.

On this particular venture into the musical unknown, I checked out DyNAbyte (Italy), King Giant (U.S.), and Darkness Rites (Canada).

DYNABYTE

I saw a blurb about this Italian band on Blabbermouth earlier this week. It said that the band featured a female vocalist named Cadaveria, formerly of the band Opera IX, as well as Necrodeath bassist John (aka “Killer Bob”). Those names “Cadaveria” and “Opera IX” rang a bell in my cobwebbed brain, and eventually it came to me.  (more after the jump, including music and video . . .)

Our occasional guest contributor Steff Metal, who operates her own excellent web site (here), wrote a column for us back in March about women in metal called “No Clean Chicks Singing”. She featured that Opera IX band as well as Cadaveria’s follow-up project called, uh, Cadaveria. Those were/are black-metal bands, but DyNAbyte bills itself as industrial metal.

So, with that background, I was curious. The Blabbermouth blurb reported that DyNAbyte has a new album called 2KX scheduled for release in October (the cool album cover for that is to your right) and has made available a song from the album (called “The Mummy”) for free download (here) in exchange for your e-mail address. So I bit, and downloaded the song. That was my first stop on this MISCELLANY tour.

The music is a pretty far cry from what we usually cover on this site. It’s got a cool synth introduction and then bolts into a hammering industrial groove, with Cadaveria’s clean vocals coming over the top — but in the chorus she then shifts into a raspy growl that’s more our style. The song progresses through more shifting back and forth between vocal styles, between melody and hammering. It’s pretty fucking catchy (and it includes bass drops!). Here’s what it sounds like:

DyNAbyte has one previous album to its credit, Extreme Mental Piercing.  The band’s official web site features a video of a song from that album. I watched it — and because I did, it goes in this post. Here’s DyNAbyte’s video for “I’m My Enemy”, which includes only a snippet of Cadaveria’s raspy vocals near the end:

DyNAbyte’s MySpace page includes a link for a free download of Extreme Mental Piercing, so go get it if you like what you hear.

KING GIANT

The next item on my list was a brand new video from a Virginia band called King Giant. The song is called “13 to 1”, and it’s from an album called Southern Darkness that King Giant self-released about a year ago. I got a press release about the video that described King Giant’s music as “groove-heavy Southern doom rock” for “fans of Corrosion of Conformity, Kyuss, Clutch, and Down.”

I like me some of that Southern doom every now and then, and I’ve been a fan of Down for a while, so I thought, why not? After all, I am originally from the South and I do occasionally feel doomed.

That song “13 to 1”, like the DyNAbyte song, isn’t the kind of music we usually cover on this site, but it’s about as far from DyNAbyte as you could get and still be within the loose boundaries of metal. It’s heavy and sludgy and bluesy — slow and nasty, with whiskey-soaked vocals and big, rounded, beautiful guitar tones, not to mention the unusual tinkling of a banjo during the first 45 seconds. (We need more banjo in metal!)

I thought the shit was cool, and the video is good, too — a cautionary tale about what can go wrong if you play poker with good ol’ boys you don’t know in a West Virginia roadhouse. Here’s a hint: It don’t end well.

Here’s King Giant’s video for “13 to 1”:

For more info about King Giant, their MySpace page is here and the band’s official web site is at this location. They’re working on a new album for release in 2011. What the hell, here’s their ReverbNation widget, too:

DARKNESS RITES

Darkness Rites is a band from Ottawa, Canada. We got a MySpace friend request from them a couple weeks ago, not long after we frothed at the mouth over another Ottawa band (Immersed), and I’ve been hanging on to their name until I had time to give them a proper listen.

My first stop was at the band’s MySpace page, and what greeted my eyes was a photo of some pretty young-looking dudes. On the other hand, in that photo they’re wearing band shirts from Behemoth, The Haunted, Slipknot, Down, and Cryptopsy. Well, I thought, who knows whether they can play worth a damn, but they do have good taste in metal.

I played the first song on their MySpace music player — “Systemic Human Massacre” — and it jerked me upright, like a marionette on a string. It’s a thrash-paced offering of modern, melodic death metal. The sound is sharp as knives and the musicianship is first-rate — a nice blend of rhythmic pummeling, galloping riffage, and unusually attention-grabbing melodic solos. The mid-ranged howling vocals are also quite good.

In short, “Systemic Human Massacre” hit my sweet spot. These dudes may look young, but they sound like they know the fuck what they’re doing.

That song comes from the band’s second release, an October 2009 album called The Accuser, which was produced by Cryptopsy’s Chris Donaldson. Here it is, with a montage of band photos from various live shows and tours.

Here’s the Darkness Rites ReverbNation widget, which includes one more song from The Accuser, and more songs are streaming on the band’s MySpace page.  And here’s the link where The Accuser is available for purchase.

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That’s all for today’s MISCELLANY post. We had a good run of luck today, and hope you liked what we found, too. Whether you did or didn’t, leave a comment and let us know what you thought. Hasta la vista.