SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): SEPTICFLESH, DYING FETUS, BYZANTINE, ABORTED, JACK KETCH, THE FACELESS, KREATOR, ASYLUM

 

(DGR takes over our round-up rodeo for this Thursday, with a mix of news and new music from 8 bands.)

By the time you are reading this, I will likely be hiding like a coward underneath a fan set on incredibly high as this region of California experiences its first legit summer heatwave of one hundred plus temperatures. Considering that I am a soft wuss who has somehow survived many of these prior, you’d think that attempting to lose weight so that I may one day fit in my freezer with the door closed wouldn’t be the go-to gameplan, but alas, here we are.

You may have noticed by our recent slowdown post that a good chunk of the NCS crew plans to spend the weekend cooped up in a handful of venues in Seattle for the Northwest Terror Fest, enjoying a smattering of different groups. So in order to offset that I’ve made a hefty collection of new music and some album artwork that has slowly been cropping up on the web in recent weeks that have floated by us recently, to be caught in the patented super-porous DGR news net. At the very end I’ll even toss in an album that I came across recently for all of you to enjoy.

So let us sunder forth so that I can quickly go back to attempting to stuff myself onto the second shelf of the freezer next to the frozen lasagna boxes.

 

 

 

SepticFlesh – Dante’s Inferno

Team Rock broke the news recently that Symphonic death metal group Septicflesh have a new album on the way, entitled Codex Omega, which will be out via Season Of Mist on September 1st of this year. In doing so, the band also premiered themselves a new music video for the song “Dante’s Inferno“.

As someone who has a deep and abiding love for Septicflesh’s brand of bombastic death metal shenanigans, and as someone who enjoyed their deeper entwining with a full orchestra on the last album Titan, “Dante’s Inferno” is an incredibly exciting taste of things to come. It’s a higher energy song, more death metal than orchestra this time around, though its intro and small choral bits would have you think differently.

The group still tie themselves into the movie-soundtrack-caliber brass section horn blasts, but “Dante’s Inferno” moves quickly and has some fury to it, with every symphonic bit helping add some melody to the overall hammering that Septicflesh dish out during the song’s five and a half minutes that it spends with you. Hopefully, “Dante’s Inferno” is a sign of things to come with Codex Omega as a whole, and the band are able to keep that quick-moving energy for the whole disc, because if so then things could prove to be very interesting come September 1st.

https://www.facebook.com/septicfleshband/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dying Fetus – Die With Integrity

It makes sense that the Dying Fetus crew would link up with Bloody Disgusting for the premiere of their supremely gory, ultra-NSFW, music video for the song “Die With Integrity“. The band teamed up with the same crew that did Cattle Decapitation’s video for “Forced Gender Reassignment”, and considering all the niceties that happened within the span of that video’s timeframe, you can quickly get a sense where the video for “Die With Integrity” might share some DNA, nudity,…and general viscera. It is also one of two videos in this roundup that takes inspiration from ’80s slasher movies.

“Die With Integrity” is pretty recognizably Dying Fetus, rock stupid chug when it wants to be and then frighteningly technical and death metal out of nowhere. It’s a quicker moving track after its opening bit of knuckle-dragging, and the video itself is descriptively gory to match, alongside a ton of nudity.

Wrong One To Fuck With will be out on June 23rd. Without rolling back the curtains too much, the NCS collective seems to be pretty excited by what we’ve heard on the album, so keep an eye out for the disc in the future.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Byzantine – Trapjaw

Longtime readers of the site will know that we’ve been on the thrashier groove-monsters Byzantine beat for some time now, and so we’re following the leadup to the band’s new album The Cicada Tree like a bunch of drooling bloodhounds. The Byzantine boys released a new animated lyric video for the song “Trapjaw“, and you’d better believe we were going to take some time to post it here.

Byzantine break the new trend of the 360-degree lyric video here, instead going with some actual CG animation to back up the lyrics to the song — with the whole song being built around a hefty, chugging groove. The song itself is a little shorter than the previously released “New Ways To Bear Witness“, but still contains a catchy chorus, and the slower groove seems to worm its way into your skull.

The Cicada Tree is due out on July 28th via Metal Blade Records.

Blame the videogame dork part of me, though. Maybe it’s the environment design or the character model that was animated in this video, but now I kind of want to go back and spend some time with the Playstaion 2 game Primal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pretty Picture Time!

 

 

Aborted – Bathos

The Aborted crew seem to have reached a consensus in the Retrogore timeframe that apparently they should never, ever, ever stop moving. They’ve released an EP before the disc, then put out an album, and have now circled back around and plan to release a two-song 7″ entitled Bathos within the upcoming weeks. The band have posted a small snippet of music over on their facebook page and will likely be ekeing out more music as the Bathos release date crawls ever closer.

The Hideous Divinity crew noted that this will actually be the first Aborted recording with their bassist Stefano Franceschini handling bass duties for the Aborted crew, and that gentleman is terrifyingly good with that instrument, so given the usual lightspeed mosh heavy death metal that Aborted have made their stock and trade over the past few albums, I would certainly not be shocked for them to slip a couple “holy shit, check this fucker out” moments into the songs as a whole.

I actually feel one of the best recent Aborted songs was restricted to the EP that came out prior to Retrogore — the slightly over two minute blaster Bound In Acrimony from Termination Redux — so perhaps a tighter and more focused two song experience from them will give us some gems amidst the filth and gore.

Of course, given that The Font Of All Human Knowledge contains this amusing quote in its opening in regards to the term Bathos, who knows what the band actually have planned.

“Bathos is a literary term, coined by Alexander Pope in his 1727 essay ‘Peri Bathous’, to describe amusingly failed attempts at sublimity (i.e., pathos). In particular, bathos is associated with anticlimax, an abrupt transition from a lofty style or grand topic to a common or vulgar one.”

I bet Sven goes ,”Bleeugch”, to start a measure at least once.

 

 

 

 

Jack Ketch – The Ashes Of Vesuvius

Local Sacramento death metal crew Jack Ketch updated their facebook page at the top of the month with the art you see above, for a release entitled The Ashes Of Vesuvius — of which it seems no further details have been provided. However, I can only hope that it’s a full album announcement because it has been a long time for these guys, with their previous album Bringers Of The Dawn having hit in 2010. In that span of time, the group have only released one song — Pool Of Machines — and that was three some-odd years ago at this point.

Since then, the band have squirreled themselves away and have been writing new music and playing the occasional live date, but otherwise have been relatively silent — so here’s the first sign of life and a hint at a hopefully active upcoming year for the Jack Ketch crew.

 

 

Back To The Music!

 

 

 

The Faceless – Black Star

Having had a few unforturnate show cancellations due to Mars not transiting Jupiter’s orbit or whatever more serious reason the band actually had, The Faceless have had a rough month or so. Attempting to offset some of that and likely ramping up to a release of a full album (hopefully), the group revealed that they will be taking part in this year’s already packed Summer Slaughter tour, which features the likes of Black Dahlia Murder, Dying Fetus, Lorna Shore, Origin, and a small handful of others (they’re even doing the “vote to add one more band” popularity contest thing again this year). The tour will be carving its way across the US later this year, and as a lead-up to it, The Faceless crew have actually released a new song entitled “Black Star“, the first material we have heard from the band since their single release of The Spiraling Void.

I’m curious to see what people think of the song, because in recent times The Faceless have become one of those groups for whom the inner-band workings have almost shadowed the making of any actual music and, obviously, some time has passed since the release of the group’s last album Autotheism.

It’s interesting to hear what the band are doing within the “Black Star” song, because they did a pretty good job politely bowing out of the tech-death arms race during the Autotheism album cycle. But it’s still hard to tell just where the band will land musically with each disc, especially as project mainman Michael Keene has been the only through-line tying all of their releases together. It keeps the band dynamic, but also part of the attraction has become ‘What will The Faceless be getting us this time?’. At the very least, their previous releases have stood in pretty stark contrast to each other.

“Black Star” is full-on prog-death, filled to the brim with some glorious high screams to help break up the singing segments of the track. It’s a somewhat familiar Faceless song, as each instrument is tooled across as if it were a child’s toy, but it also feels slightly…partial? “Black Star” feels like a chunk of a much larger whole, a single carved out of a bigger song. It would honestly not shock me to hear that “Black Star” is from a fuller concept album, as lyrically it seems to be tying together a couple of different themes, instead of sticking with the usual protagonist, antagonist, faux-losophy song-writing that many bands tend to stick with. It is one of those songs that will be enjoyable to dive into alongside the rest of whatever The Faceless guys have planned for a fuller release, as I suspect there might be much more to it than just face value.

I will, however, completely accept that I am full of hot air and this really is just a pretty good The Faceless song.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kreator – Pleasure To Kill music video

We now travel across time to a more recent item that deals with the past, something that caught my eye and seemed like a generally good idea to tack onto a news article containing the Dying Fetus splatterfest above.

Kreator have a handful of re-releases coming up, to go alongside this year’s Gods Of Violence album and in doing so have put out a music video for the song “Pleasure To Kill” — one which the band says took its inspiration from ’80s slasher flicks.

The video itself is an interesting idea, containing a ton of old Kreator live footage in between shots of a well-dressed chainsaw-wielding gentleman chasing a very nice young lady around. The amount of blood is fairly light overall… especially in comparison to the mess above. It’s more the idea of making a throwback music video that seems intriguing, and it’s one hell of a way to bring attention to the fact that you have some re-issues on the way.

Most of time it just feels like half of the albums coming out each week are older discs, so you just get used to nodding when you see a band name and a huge slate of releases popping up one week, knowing full well it’s the bands discography going through the usual reprint, reissue routine again. It would be a cool idea to see more groups do this in the future though, especially for songs that never got a music video otherwise.

Four of Kreator’s early discs will be re-issued, including the aforementioned Pleasure To Kill. The other three albums are Extreme Aggression, Terrible Certainty, and Endless Pain.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Asylum – Psalms Of Paralysis

We’re going to steal a page out of our esteemed editor’s round-up playbook with this one, and close out with an album recommendation gathered from the smattering ot stuff I’ve been listening to recently. Since we’ve already engaged the time machine with Kreator, why don’t we stick around in the much more recent past?

Released way back in the dinosaur ages of March 2017, Psalms Of Paralysis marks the first full album from Fort Worth, Texas-based death metal startups Asylum. I reviewed their EP Committed way back yonder, and since then have tried to keep an eye out for them.

Psalms Of Paralysis is a lot of potential fulfilled for the band, adding loads more death metal to an already stacked thrashier death metal take. Asylum are still fairly speed-guitar focused, but it is wielded more as a weapon of brutality on Psalms Of Paralysis as the band rip their way across nine different songs, including the expansive seven-minute closer “Neuroslave“. Vocalist Colby Rodgers lets nary a moment of silence run across the whole disc, jamming as much inhuman noise on top of an already stacked crew of musicians to make a pretty dense death metal experience overall.

The three years between Committed and Psalms have seen the Asylum crew mature their sound greatly from an already shreddier take on tech-death, and into a devastating blast of speedier, genre-spanning, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-plus-maybe-some-other-detritus-we-found-outside form of death metal. Give this one a shot.

https://asylumfw.bandcamp.com/album/psalms-of-paralysis-2017