CATCHING UP, WITH HEAVEN SHALL BURN, CHILDREN OF BODOM, AND ALTAR OF PLAGUES

I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to go home to Seattle tonight after more than 3 weeks of grueling bullshit for my day job. I even had a couple of hours yesterday to start catching up on all the metal I missed while buried in work. Of course, I found a lot of new things. In this post are a few of the more recent discoveries.

HEAVEN SHALL BURN

Yesterday, Germany’s Heaven Shall Burn released  a second song from their forthcoming album Veto. Its name is “Die Stürme Rufen Dich”, which means “the storms call you” (according to Google Translate). It’s venomous, heavy-booted music with catchy melodic hooks and Marcus Bischoff’s distinctive vox spraying acid all over everything. In other words, it’s recognizably Heaven Shall Burn.

If you’re a fan of this band, I think you’ll like the song.  It’s up next.

 

CHILDREN OF BODOM

Yesterday brought a lot of news about the next COB album. Just as I was about to summarize what I saw for this post, I found an e-mail from my NCS comrade DGR with his own summing up, and here it is:

“Hot on the heels of the announcement that Children Of Bodom would be playing the Rockstar Mayhem festival – which won’t be coming to Sacramento (for the third time!) so it might as well be the Rockstar Failhem Festifail – came an announcement posted on their official site about what the hell to expect from their new album.

“If you saw it, you got the artwork, name, and tracklisting — and those juicy tidbits can be found here as well as spread throughout this post. Before we begin though, let me just commend whoever is handling their PR for releasing the info in one huge batch like this. Yes, you could’ve spread each post around in order to keep the name at the top of each news cycle, one day revealing the artwork, the next the tracklisting, then the date, but you have clearly taken the high road and god bless you for it. Everything fans need to know, short of the release date, is in one centralized posting, and that is awesome.

“On to the album (whose artwork you see above): The disc will be called Halo Of Blood and the tracklisting appears as follows:

01 Waste of Skin
02 Halo of Blood
03 Scream for Silence
04 Transference
05 Bodom Blue Moon (The Second Coming)
06 The Days are Numbered
07 Dead Man’s Hand on You
08 Damage Beyond Repair
09 All Twisted
10 One Bottle and a Knee Deep

“Now here’s the thing. It seems like since Hatecrew Deathroll the band have been pretty happy to continually kick out the same song over and over again. However, even though the album name is difficult to remember, Relentless Reckless Forever actually wasn’t half bad. It has difficulties standing out for sure, but I actually thought it was a little bit of an improvement over Blooddrunk – in that I enjoyed more than four songs and actually found the Eddie Murphy cover be pretty funny.

“Do they have it in them though? I’m staying positive mostly because the prospect of another disc that sounds so samey to the previous three is just depressing. COB make a huge deal over on their site about the fact that they recorded this disc with the same recording engineer who worked on Hatebreeder through Hatecrew Deathroll, and the fact that Peter Tagtren (who has worked on Marduk/Amon Amarth releases as well) is involved, so maybe they’re aiming for the album to have a little more bite to it than what the album art suggests?

“It’s a fun idea to play with, and honestly, I’m doing so because Soilwork absolutely killed it on The Living Infinite and I loved those guys the same way I loved Children Of Bodom – for a long time they dominated my radio, and yet they both had albums that were just consistently good without really reaching the highs that they used to achieve. Worst thing that happens is we get another Bodom disc to dissect, but fingers crossed on the DGR side of things. I’m hoping to be surprised.”

 

ALTAR OF PLAGUES

This Irish black metal band’s next album Teethed Glory and Injury is due for release on April 30 by Profound Lore. It’s been on my own “most anticipated” list for this year for a while. Yesterday we got the first taste of the new music via an official video for “God Alone”.

The video was directed by the band’s James Kelly and by Patrick O’ Mahony, and it makes for a fine pairing with the music. Dancers move in slow motion, twisting, turning, and writhing in black and white as the music unfolds, enhancing the song’s hypnotic qualities (and its intensity).

The song throws genre categories up in the air like a game of pick-up-sticks, which is one reason I’ve been looking forward to the album: Altar of Plagues are pleasingly difficult to classify. Check this out:

http://www.facebook.com/altarofplagues