An e-mail from NCS reader Black Shuck delivered two nice pieces of news on Sunday concerning two Illinois bands we’ve featured here in the past — The Horde and Awaking Leviathan.
Some dude took us to task in a recent comment for false advertising — the name of the site is NO CLEAN SINGING, but we had reviewed an album that did that clean singing like half of the time. I can see why that would be confusing, but the music in this post won’t confuse anyone. Not only is there no clean singing, there’s nothing clean about the music in any respect.
THE HORDE
This band’s 2011 album, Thy Blackened Reign, is a hell-ripping cavalcade of Viking black thrash. Thematically, it takes its cues from Norse mythology, and musically it swings some mighty sharp-edged battle-axes. Speed metal and thrash are effectively fused together with elements of death metal and black metal. It delivers a cathartic, fist-pumping experience.
A couple of days ago, the band released a music video for the song “Odin’s Blood”. In someone else’s hands, the gang shouts of the song title and the first-pumping could have become cheesy, but these dudes have such authenticity and so much conviction for what they’re doing that they succeed. And holy shit . . . those riffs! Watch it after the jump.
AWAKING LEVIATHAN
This Illinois band, which includes some membership overlap with both The Horde and the excellent A Hill To Die Upon, was one of two featured in a guest column by Black Shuck in December (here). At that time, they had released a five-song EP for free download on Bandcamp. To quote an excerpt from Black Shuck’s article:
“[T]heir music does not fit neatly into any one genre. However, it is . . . melodic . . . (although still containing a tinge of dark atmosphere), catchy as hell, and varied in approach, ranging from the straightforward, simple assaults of “Wind Beneath Our Skin” and “We Vanish in This Breath” to the quick, upbeat riffing of “Leviathan Speaks.” Plenty of tremolo picking here, enough to make me consider classifying them as melodic black metal.”
Over the weekend, the band released a new song, which is also available for streaming on Bandcamp (here). It’s called “Children of Polaris”. From the first second, the song erupts in a fireball of blasting drums and cutting tremolo riffs. Melodic black metal is a good description of the music. It’s blistering and acidic and fast. Good stuff.
37 Responses to “ILLINOIZE: NEW GOODIES FROM THE HORDE AND AWAKING LEVIATHAN”
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I get singing about Odin or his beard….but his blood? Are they Viking vampires??
Holy shit, I just created Twilight For Beardos!
They thrive on PBR and Asgardian blood…
And their weakness is….WOMEN! Ahhhhhh! Bizarre undergarments and confusing sex talk!
(I’m just playing, beardos are great people, I would guess.)
Twilight for Beardos has possibilities. Instead of pasty-faced teen heartthrobs wandering around in PNW forests gazing longingly at each other, we could have big bearded dudes dressed in skins with battle-axes, riding demon steeds and drinking tankards of blood. Anyone who looked like Kristen Stewart would just have their throats ripped out immediately.
So Twilight for Beardos would be the exact opposite of Twilight in every way? Excellent.
Yes, but their weakness is women, so they have no babies, and thus their numbers are in decline. BAM! Instadrama!
Have you read the webcomic Oglaf? You would like it. In it, there is a race of all-male barbarians, but the men give birth, so the line is kept alive. Warning: Not Safe For Work in every single way.
http://www.oglaf.com/
I love it!!
Same here, it is funny!
All male race of barbarians whose men give birth? One seems to have missed that. Do you have any way of remembering the which story that was?
http://oglaf.com/son-of-kronar/1/
So do the skins of Viking vampires turn really, really dull when under sunlight?
I dunno, but I think The Horde could become very good friends with Alestorm, then both of ’em can go pillage and plunder coastlines and all that medieval pirating schizz.
It saddens me that now when anyone says “vampire” we immediately think of Twilight. I think the Horde and Alestorm should pillage the town that Twilight. I don’t care if it’s fictional, THEY’LL FIND A WAY.
*that Twilight is set in
With Odin on our side! We can kill a fictional town full of people who have it coming so hard it’s gonna be like a national bukakke epidemic.
Didn’t we talk about apocalypitic tidal waves of semen in another comment section? I feel like we did. This seems like a suitable fate for Twilight.
I’m pretty sure we did and will do so again. Because cum is hilarious.
Is your smartphone still trying to translate “cum” as “fun” and vice-versa? I do need to get me one of them.
Yes, but sometimes I remember to uncorrect it. Like training a dog when to lick your balls.
Whep.
Well, we can dream. I’m fantasizing about Bella and Edward in some angsty, fog-shrouded scene, and then The Horde barrel through on big fucking Harleys, stomp the shit out of them, and then eat their bleeding corpses.
Am I being to harsh about Twilight? Nah.
Not harsh at all. Nope. That’s just good clean, wholesome fun. The Horde calls that “Tuesday.”
But Robert Cullen is immortal! *cue Abbath-esque “URRRGH!*
Er, I mean Edward Pattinson.
Who’s Robert Cullen? I’m so confused!!
Metal can kill anything. Even a pansified emo vampire. ESPECIALLY a pansified emo vampire.
But it can’t kill my boner!
Why would metal kill your boner? You’re a connoisseur of metal – excellent, shitty, and weird alike.
Can they also track down Anne Rice and kill her for starting this whole debacle?
I’m not saying her books were necessarily bad, but she laid the fucking groundwork. (I read the first three in the series in like a week and then never touched them again. Fucking pretty vampires.)
I’ve never read the books, but I hated the crap out of the movie version of Interview with the Vampire. I turned it off halfway through. It was so boring.
I love Brad Pitt, but yeah, that movie sucked. The books were better, I think….
Still. BLADE.
The movie that Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise will never live down. I think my favorite vampire movie (though I’m probably forgetting some) is Near Dark.
Mine’s Underworld. Kate Beckinsale’s just too hawt. Makes all MILFs out there look like GILFs.
Rhona Mitra is pretty hot too. 😀
Anyway… One would understand “GMILF”, but what is “GILF” supposed to mean?
Let the Right One In and Thirst, mane.
Oh, and From Dusk Till Dawn
Let The Right One In and Thirst are excellent picks! But, I must give special credit to Islander as Near Dark is also awesome and I thought I was the only person who knew about it!
You are being less harsh on Twilight than you should be. Even Robert Pattinson hates it. 😀
When one thinks of vampires, one thinks of Underworld and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and sometimes Nosferatu. One has fervently avoided reading the Twilight novels, or watching any of the movies, for the very sake of not ruining one’s image of vampires as Gary Oldman and Kate Beckinsale.
The only bad thing about Let the Right One In is that, for a Swedish film, there was a distinct lack of good Swedish metal. Other than that – second only to Nosferatu in my book. The American version – Let Me In – was pretty good, too.
Hell, Marduk wrote half an album about Vlad the Impaler. They could have used that.