Thanks to an exuberant Facebook post by The Binary Code‘s Jesper Zuretti, we learned within the last hour that French black metal band Deathspell Omega has just made available a new song from their forthcoming album Paracletus (due for release in the U.S. on November 9). Deathspell Omega is one of those bands we’ve been hearing great things about for a long time, but whose music we somehow have never actually gotten around to hearing.
Amazing, really, since they’ve been playing music since about 1998 and since they have one of the coolest band names in extreme metal. Anyway, that’s all changed now, because the Season of Mist label has made that new song available for free download, and we’ve now heard them. Should have checked out these dudes long ago.
The new song is called “Devouring Famine”. It’s a dense and immense piece of guitar-driven, progressive black metal. To string together some additional adjectives: It’s powerful, caustic, cacophonous, creative, rhythmically diverse, technical, discordant, and compelling. Unless you just can’t stand black metal, this is absolutely worth hearing. So, here it is:
By the way, the Season of Mist site has lots of other free downloads available from label artists, including that brand new song from Atheist, “Second To Sun”, that we featured in a post last week, and a song called “Tired Climb” by Kylesa from their forthcoming new album Spiral Shadow. This link will take you to the index of available downloads from Season of Mist.
And if you haven’t already seen Kylesa’s video for that “Tired Climb” song, it’s definitely worth seeing. So here — see it (after the jump).
12 Responses to “DEATHSPELL OMEGA (MISCELLANY NO. 15 1/2?)”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Man, I’m loving all the new stuff I’ve heard from Kylesa. Saw them open for Mastodon on the first night of the Crack the Skye tour w/ Intronaut. The two drummers thing is definitely appreciated live a lot more than on a recording. It’s pretty damned massive in person. Thanks for the link to the downloads too, found a couple bands I’ve wanted to check out for a while.
I was lukewarm on Kylesa based on the Static Tensions album, which I probably didn’t give a fair chance to grow on me. But I really like this new song and I want to hear the whole album now. I don’t know when they’ll get back to the Pacific NW again, but I definitely want to see them live.
That album was a slow burner for me, but once I let it run a few times in the background at work it hit me. This new material seems to build on the good on Static Tensions, and add another dimension to it. The track “Forsaken” on the Metal Swim comp sounds a lot like Drain STH, which is pretty wild.
“Amazing, really, since they’ve been playing music since about 1998 and since they have one of the coolest band names in extreme metal. Anyway, that’s all changed now, because the Season of Mist label has made that new song available for free download, and we’ve now heard them. Should have checked out these dudes long ago.”
If you like black metal, you should listen to all their albums and EP’s (except for the first one). The early stuff is good, vicious, raw black metal but theystarted to develop a new style with Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice and Kenose which is really unlike anything else. It’s really violent, terrifying music and the beautiful moments are very rare, but listening to their albums is really carthartic. They’re the best black metal band in my opinion. They also have the best album art.
The new song seems to be as good as the stuff from Fas but Deathspell Omega albums really need to be listened to as a whole. I’m really looking forward to this one.
Black metal is still the extreme genre I’m most ignorant about. I’ve been doing my best to get better educated, because the genre is so diverse and fascinating. And you said all the magic words (for me, at least) — violent, terrifying, cathartic. Where should I start among the earlier albums? Or should i work backwards from Fas?
I wouldn’t start with Fas because that’s their most “difficult” one. Si Monumentum Requires is a much better albu album to start with because it’s still “normal” black metal most of the time and it has some of their most beautiful melodies (for example, the one two minutes into Sola Fide I). Kenose might also be a good place to sart. It’s a little less traditional and a little shorter, but there are still plenty of accessible moments.
This is the kind of educated help I need to avoid flailing around — many thanks. I will track down both of those albums.
How about some love for “Mass Grave Aesthetics”? God, I love that album/Ep/track/whatever it is…
I was compiling a preliminary list of my potential albums for a top ten round up of the year recently, ad found that it’s 90% black metal this year. Good times.
Now that does look interesting — a 19-minute EP (or whatever it is) containing one long song. I am hunting for it now. Hope you’ll share your 2010 list at some point . . .
Mass Grave Aesthetics is on the split with Antaeus and Mutiilation titled From the Entrails to the Dirt. It shares a riff or two with the track Diabolus Absconditus from a different split. Both tracks are worth a listen, if you can find them. You should also try and get their split with SVEST entitled Veritas Diaboli Manet in Aeternum which contains a piece in the vein of Fas. The SVEST side of the split contains three very interesting pieces of music, but it didn’t really grab me. It’s still worth a listen, though.
You can get Mass Grave Aesthetics stand-alone though. In case you don’t want it in split form.
That’s what I did earlier today, on the strength of Andy’s strong recommendation, shelling out for it on Amazon mp3 (it’s also available as a standalone on iTunes, but more expensive). It’s a very challenging listen. I think this is the kind of music reviewers have in mind when they use the word “dense”. But I was mesmerized by it. I can tell that more will unfold the more I listen to the song.