NEW MUSIC (Part 2): A HILL TO DIE UPON, THORNGOTH, AND OBLIVIONIZED

Here’s our second installment, with one more coming, of a Sunday smorgasbord of new metal for your entertainment and edification. Once again, we’re graced with brand new music from three old favorites around these parts. Let’s cut right to the chase:

A HILL TO DIE UPON

This Illinois band is a big favorite of ours; all of our previous ravings about them can be found here. Their last album, 2011’s Omens, garnered these words of praise from Andy Synn: “One of this year’s great discoveries, A Hill To Die Upon ply their trade in the bloodstained arena of blackened death metal, taking their cues from the crushing power of Satanica-era Behemoth and the decaying grooves of Sheol-era Naglfar all wrapped up in a monumental package of fire-brand riffage and pulsing drums that recalls Immortal in their prime.”

Yesterday, A Hill To Die Upon released a new single named “manden med leen”, which can be acquired for the dirt-cheap price of $1 on Bandcamp. The mid-paced song is majestic and magnetic (in part due to the effective addition of keyboards to the band’s repertoire), and includes an unexpected and quite interesting acoustic-sounding interlude. But at its core it still rips and crushes. Killer stuff.

http://ahilltodieupon.bandcamp.com/album/manden-med-leen
http://www.facebook.com/ahilltodieuponband

THORNGOTH

Germany’s Thorngoth are another favorite of mine. I was blown away by their third album, Leere, which I reviewed here in August 2010. It has been a long wait for Leere’s successor, but it’s finally upon us. Entitled SCHWARZ-KARG-KALT, the album is now scheduled for release by the band in March.

Yesterday I listened to the album for the first time, and it’s as good as I hoped it would be. It reflects a few changes in style from Leere, which are more in the nature of enhancements than radical changes in direction. The music includes strokes of doom and death metal across the hard palette of melodic black metal. The songs create atmospheres of moonless night, deep, heavy, and full of foreboding power.

On Friday, the band started streaming the album’s second track, “Im toten Feld der Wirklichkeit”. It’s a good taste of what the album has to offer. Hope you dig this indigo monster as much as I do — and if you do, you can download the song for free at this location.

http://www.facebook.com/thorngoth
http://thorngoth.de/

OBLIVIONIZED

This London-based collective have released two EPs that I’ve reviewed here at NCS, most recently Nullify the Cycle, which issued in 2012. They now have two splits on the way that I’ve been highly anticipating, in part because Oblivionized are so fucking good and in part because their partners on the two splits are also super-strong: Plague Widow and Human Cull. The split with Human Cull was mastered by the godly Scott Hull (Pig Destroyer, Agoraphobic Nosebleed) and the Plague Widow split by the awesome Colin Marston (Dysrhythmia, Gorguts).

Yesterday, Oblivionized began streaming “Hope Is the First Sign of Defeat” from the split with Plague Widow. Following an appropriate sample from Network, the song proceeds to decimate brain cells with an unstable blast of grind. It stomps hard, spins your head all the way around for good measure, and then pisses acid on the remains.

The Oblivionized-Plague Widow split is entitled This Black Earth and can be pre-orderd on 7″ vinyl here. We’ll have more to say about both splits in the future. For now, check out “Hope Is the First Sign of Defeat”:

http://www.facebook.com/Oblivionized