NEWNESS: DYING FETUS, BLACKLODGE, AND PANOPTICON

Come on now, you didn’t really think I was going to let a new Dying Fetus song pass by, did you? I’ve been a little slow on the draw lately, but I can still clear the holster. And yes, there’s a new Dying Fetus song that’s been released for public streaming. It’s called “From Womb To Waste”, and of course it appears on the Reign Supreme album that will be released on June 19. It’s really good.

In fact, I’ll just go ahead and be a douchebag and say that the whole damned album is really fuckin’ good. In fact, it’s definitely in the running for the best death metal album of the year. Speaking of which, because I have such a hard time comparing albums and ranking them, I’ve decided that I’m going to use a loris race to rank the best death metal albums of 2012. I’ll round up a bunch of them from the NCS loris compound, tie band names around their necks, and let them race for the finish line.

Of course, they’re really fuckin’ slow, so I’ll have to start the race in, like, August.  That will be hard on the bands who release albums in the last four months of the year, but I don’t feel too bad about that because it’s not like bands are waiting around holding their breaths to see if they make the NCS year-end list, especially since we’ve never had an NCS year-end list.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the new Dying Fetus song. It debuted at AltPress. I borrowed their little player to stream the song after the jump. There’s more new music after the jump, too — from Blacklodge and Panopticon.

“From Womb To Waste”

BLACKLODGE

I wrote about this French band once before, when I discovered that Season of Mist plans to release their new album MachinatioN on June 21 (July 17 in NorthAm). Back then, I didn’t have any music from the album to give you, just that badass album cover above and a couple of tracks from earlier Blacklodge  albums that I liked. But now Season of Mist has released a song from the new album called “NeutroN ShivA [Sun, Walk With Me!]”.

Those purists among you who will have no truck with industrial music may be inclined to skip this one, but I dig it. It’s a big, nasty, blackened, groove-hammering machine of death worship that would make Shiva proud if there were a Shiva.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/47183684″ iframe=”true” /]
 

PANOPTICON

Panopticon is one man — Austin Lunn — from Louisville, Kentucky. He has created a new Panopticon album named Kentucky that will jointly be released in June by Handmade Birds and Pagan Flames. Yesterday, Decibel began streaming a long track from the album called “Bodies Under the Falls”. I was curious enough to listen, based on a description of the music as a marriage of “traditional coal mining songs with harsh, expansive black metal”.

I wasn’t immediately taken with “Bodies Under the Falls”, but I hung in there, and the more the song progressed, the more it sucked me in. The frantic drumming, somewhat rhythmically out of step with the guitars, takes some getting used to. So do the strange penny-whistle and clean guitar melodies that pierce through the blasting blackness. But there’s a payoff, and all of the song’s oddities contribute to it.

For me, the turning point was the banjo instrumental in the middle of the song. I confess that after that, I was willingly carried along to the end, wanting more, and I’ve now concluded that it’s a hell of a song.

Panopticon’s Facebook page is here. And “Bodies Under the Falls” is here: