SEEN AND HEARD: THE CROWN, DIRE OMEN, BLOODBEAST, CIRCA SURVIVE

Here’s part two of a round-up post I began earlier today. Collected here are the best of the new songs and videos that I saw and heard over the last 24 hours.

THE CROWN

We reported last month that after the passage of four years since Sweden’s The Crown released their comeback album Doomsday King, which Andy Synn praised in one of his earliest posts for our site as “a masterpiece of wild fury and calculated aggression, blurring the lines between razor-sharp thrash and full-speed death metal”, they will be returning in January with their eighth album, Death Is Not Dead.

Century Media has also just released a 7″ vinyl single from the band that includes one of the new songs — “Headhunter” — plus the band’s cover of “Unfit Earth” by Napalm Death. And yesterday the band unveiled a music video for “Headhunter”.

The song is a complete ass-kicker, a venomous blast of death/thrash that punches like a price-fighter, with a delicious guitar solo and convincingly flesh-eating vocals. Cool video, too.

The “Headhunter” single can be ordered here.

https://www.facebook.com/thecrownofficial

 

 

 

 

 

 

DIRE OMEN

I first discovered Dire Omen from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, more than three and a half years ago in a MISCELLANY excursion. At that time I had only heard a 2011 promo and thought that it showed a lot of promise. Now, the band have recorded a debut album — Wresting the Revelation of Futility — which will be released by Dark Descent on November 12. Today BraveWords began streaming one of the new tracks, a song named “Onward With Wounds of Disillusion”, and goddamn is this a big step up from what I remember of that early demo.

It’s also a change in style from what I remember. “Onward” is titanically heavy and saturated with an ichor of doom. It’s an unmitigated blackened death metal assault of whirring riff ferocity, pavement-splitting bass dominance, and snare-heavy percussion. The eerie lead guitar melody gives it an otherworldly ambience, and the reverberating vocal excretions are thoroughly heartless.

The new song is streaming exclusively at BraveWords, so you’ll have to go here to listen (find Dire Omen on Facebook via this link and pre-order the album here):

http://bravewords.com/exclusives/audios/player

 

 

 

 

 

BLOODBEAST

Yesterday South Africa’s Bloodbeast released a new single named “Truth By Torture” from the forthcoming album Out For Blood.  Its available on Bandcamp, and Bloodbeast have also released a lyric video for the track.

If you’re in the mood for ravenous, high-speed death metal with a strong old-school flavor and enough groove to crack ribs (plus a couple of electrifying  guitar solos), you’ll dig this mightily. It’s a megawatt charge delivered straight to the brain stem.

http://bloodbeastband.bandcamp.com/releases

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Maggot-Entertainment/264004393619644

 

 

 

 

 

 

CIRCA SURVIVE

I should have begun this post with a question: What’s the one thing in this post different from everything else? And the answer is this next song and video.

The last and only time we’ve mentioned Pennsylvania’s Circa Survive at this site was in late 2010, when BadWolf named their album Blue Sky Noise to his list of The 10 Most Metal Non-Metal Albums of 2010. He called them one of the few “bands that carry the flame of everything good about metalcore now that the genre’s become a commercialized cesspool of terrible bands”.

They have a new album named Descensus coming out on November 24 (it can be ordered here), and yesterday they released a music video for a track named “Schema”. Against my expectations, I’m enjoying the song, but the video (directed by Frankie Nasso) is the main attraction, because there is so much truth in the metaphor it vividly depicts.

https://www.facebook.com/CircaSurvive