SEEN AND HEARD: GLOWSUN, TOMBS, P.O.O.R., AND TOTAL VOMIT EXPERIENCE

For someone of my tastes, this has been an action-packed 24 hours in the world of metal, and hence the flood of posts on our site today. But the new videos from Enslaved and Kvelertak, the new song from Daylight Dies, the new free download from Impureza, and . . . uh . . . the new video from Baby Metal . . . have just been the tip of the iceberg. I’ve seen and heard a lot more things that have got me really pumped up at the moment — so much so that I’ve written two of these “seen and heard” posts. This is the first one.

GLOWSUN

First things first: that colorful album art caught my eye in a big way. It wasn’t the name “Glowsun”, because I hadn’t heard of that band (or their music) before seeing the artwork. It turns out that Glowsun are from northern France, and their second album Eternal Season is scheduled for release by Napalm Records on September 28. It also turns out that the cover art was created by Glowsun’s own singer and guitarist Johan Jaccob.

So, having been hooked by the cover art, I listened to a track from the album that Napalm debuted today, not knowing what to expect. What I got was . . . completely bowled over by the song. Stylistically, I suppose you’d classify “Reverse” as psychedelic stoner metal, with a real retro feel, but for those of you (like me) who don’t immediately start salivating when you see that genre label, just bear with me a moment longer:

Glowsun have ultra-mad guitar chops. Their guitar chops have guitar chops. The song’s opening riff got my head nodding quickly . . . but that proved to be just a small appetizer for the soloing explosion to come on the back half of the song. Fuckin’ caused my hair to start smoking. Listen:

 

Eternal Season is available for pre-order in a variety of formats at this location. Glowsun’s Facebook page is here.

TOMBS

As I’ve said repeatedly in these pages, I think this Brooklyn collective is hot shit, and I tend to pay attention to whatever they do. What they’ve done most recently is to record two covers of “Heroes” by David Bowie.

Yep, you read that correctly. And if you’re having trouble imagining what “Heroes” would sound like as performed by Tombs, join the club, because I was certainly puzzled. But then I listened to the two covers and loved them, especially when the music intensifies in the latter half of the songs.

Why two covers? Well, there was a version of “Heroes” by Bowie called “Heroes/Helden” in which the second half of the lyrics were sung in German (which I never knew), and so Tombs recorded a version of their cover that also includes some German vocals (provided by Ralph Schmidt of Hëllström and Planks). Otherwise, the two covers are the same. Listen to one or the other or both (as I did), and let us know what you think.

 

 

To read more about how these covers came about, visit Ghettoblaster’s online site here; they premiered the two tracks today.

 

P.O.O.R.

I hope you haven’t already forgotten about P.O.O.R. (Point Of Our Resistance). I only last posted about them a week ago. They have a debut album entitled Extinction of Trust that will be released on September 22 by Get Pissed Stay Pissed Records. The album is billed as 24 songs of grind in 33 minutes.

At the time of my first post, I didn’t have any music from the new album — but I did have the awesome Mike Fisher album art and a bunch of rough mixes of demo tracks that the band had put up on Bandcamp, which I thought were absolutely ass-kicking — and all of that was enough to get me stoked about the album.

Well, now I have one of the new songs for you. It’s called “American Idolatry” and it punches damned hard, which is just the way I liked to be punched. By music. I like to be punched hard by music. I mean, I’m not really a masochist, and anyone who says different is a damned liar.

 

P.O.O.R.’s Facebook page is here.

TOTAL VOMIT EXPERIENCE

Yes, almost eight months have passed since I last wrote about this Finnish band, but seriously, with a name like Total Vomit Experience, they’re pretty hard to forget. Their music is hard to forget, too. Here’s what I wrote about three tracks I heard last December that were slated to appear on a forthcoming 7″ vinyl split with a band named Kashmar:

“It’s like standing in the blast radius of a napalm detonation. Take massively distorted and disgustingly down-tuned guitars riffing at full-tilt; add a brutal slug of d-beats, blast-beats, and crashing cymbals; throw in combo vocals that sound like bears fighting banshees, and then turbocharge the whole thing, and you get Total Vomit Experience.”

Today’s news is that the 7″ is finally available for order on vinyl, AND the music can also be downloaded via Bandcamp. To do either one of those things, go here. And in case you missed these tracks when I streamed them on our own player last December, here they are again, this time via Bandcamp: