A WHOLE FUCKLOAD OF ALBUM RELEASE AND TOUR NEWS (AND A NEW GRAVE TRACK)

If you made your way through today’s earlier post about the first direct observation of Dark Matter, then you know we now have an official definition of “fuckload”: It’s a number that’s equal to the number of miles in 18 megaparsecs, which is (yes, I finally did the math) 1,126,656,000,000,000,000,000. Conveniently, that’s about 1.1 sextillion of whatever you’re counting, which is why it makes so much sense to just call it a fuckload.

And today there was a fuckload of news about forthcoming albums, with album art and release dates and such, plus a press release about a hellacious new tour. I don’t have time to write about the entire fuckload of news items, so I’m just going to pick the four that got the most “fuck yeah’s!” in a random survey I did of myself.

The bands in question are: Hooded Menace, Eyeconoclast, Cryptopsy, and Obituary.  And then at the end, I’ve got a new song from Grave’s next album, because we always have to have the musics.

HOODED MENACE

We’ll start this fucker off with Finland’s Hooded Menace. Today it was announced that their first album for Relapse Records, Effigies of Evil, will be released on September 11 (it can be pre-ordered in a variety of formats and bundles here). David D’Andrea did the album cover, which is cool. Relapse describes the album as “combining the grooving riffs of Black Sabbath and early Cathedral with the fire of classic Autopsy and Asphyx”. Fuck yeah.

EYECONOCLAST

This is SO damn cool. Within the shantytown of Blogville, we were relatively early supporters of Italy’s Eyeconoclast, reviewing their 2011 EP Sharpening Our Blades On the Mainstream here. Today, Prosthetic Records announced that they have signed the band and that Eyeconoclast will be entering the studio on July 21 to record their first album for Prosthetic.

If you’re not familiar with Eyeconoclast, the band includes former Hour of Penance drummer Mauro Mercurio, former Malfeitor bassist Paolo “Urizen” Ballarotto, guitarists Alessio Cosenza and Stefano Morabito (who is also a very talented record producer with his 16th Cellar Studios — he’ll be recording the new album), and new vocalist Giuseppe Di Giorgio. Fuck yeah.

(And btw, if you still haven’t seen the jaw-dropping video of Mauro Mercurio recording one of the songs on that Eyeconoclast EP, go here without delay.)

CRYPTOPSY

We’ve been pimping the shit out of Cryptopsy since news surfaced that lead guitarist and songwriter Jon Levasseur was back in the group and that they were working on a new self-titled album. Today, it was announced that pre-sales for the album will begin this Friday, July 13, via the band’s new web site, Cryptopsy.ca (which goes live on Friday), and that the album will be released on September 11. For those who pre-order,  some extra goodies will be thrown in: Two songs from the album will be delivered digitally on August 14, and then on September 11, pre-order participants will receive the “Making Of Cryptopsy” (a 30-minute documentary) along with the completed album.

One more thing: you can check out the album cover above. Fuck yeah.

OBITUARY

Today also brought this news: For the first time in three years, Florida’s Obituary will be headlining a North American tour. The Carnival of Death Tour 2012 will run throughout the month of September, and will include support from Broken Hope, Decrepit Birth, Jungle Rot, and Encrust.

Fuck yeah. (No dates are available yet, but we’ll post about it when the schedule firms up.)

GRAVE

And now, to close out this round-up, a new song from Sweden’s Grave. As we previously reported, their tenth studio album, Endless Procession of Souls, will be released on August 28 by Century Media Records. Today, Decibel magazine premiered the first track from the album, “Passion of the Weak”.

You should hear it. It will cause you to exclaim . . . well, you know.