SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): DEICIDE, IN PURULENCE, CREATE A KILL, INVOCATION, HESPERIAN DEATH HORSE, SECOND TO SUN

 

Completing the round-up for today that began here, I’ve made some selections of new music and videos that cross a range of genres, and therefore should appeal to a range of preferences. Four of these bands are making their first appearances at our site; one is an old favorite.

But before we get to that, I’ll begin with a late-breaking news item.

DEICIDE

On June 5th I received an e-mail from someone I don’t know pointing me to a page at Metal Kingdom listing a new Deicide album named “The Devils of Saint-Médard-en-Jalles”, and identifying the line-up as Glen Benton (Vocals, Bass), Steve Asheim (Drums), Kevin Quirion (Guitars), and Mark English (Guitars). I couldn’t find anything to corroborate what was on that page, so I didn’t write about it. But today…

 

 

Today, it was officially announced that Deicide will release a new album on September 14th via Century Media. The name isn’t the one mentioned above but is instead Overtures Of Blasphemy, but the line-up reported on that page turns out to be correct.

The album was produced by Jason Suecof (THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, TRIVIUM) at AudioHammer Studios in Sanford, Florida. The cover artwork was created by the great Zbigniew M. Bielak (GHOST, PARADISE LOST, MAYHEM).

Glen Benton calls this “perhaps the group’s strongest release to date.” We shall see.

 

 

 

 

IN PURULENCE

Moving from one venerable and still-venerated band to a quintet of newcomers, the next item in today’s collection is the debut album by a French group named In Purulence. Entitled Putrid Valley, it was released on June 20th by Great Dane Records.

On the album’s Bandcamp page there are prominent, all-caps references to BOLT THROWER and MEMORIAM, and it took no more than that to induce me to begin listening… and although I haven’t finished listening, I wanted to write something now for fear of failing to write anything later.

Let’s take the opening track, “No retreat“, as an introduction. It strikes like a “shock and awe” military assault, heavily distorted riffs grinding and hammering in ferocious fashion, the low end sounding like mortar explosions, the vocals an imperious growled roar, the threads of melody a morbid moan and whine. It’s an explosive and brutally decimating track — and much of what I’ve heard from the rest of the album is too, although the tracks aren’t all clones of each other. Well worth exploring further.

Bandcamp:
https://greatdanerecords.bandcamp.com/album/putrid-valley

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/InPurulence/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CREATE A KILL

I nearly didn’t pay attention to the debut album of this band because of their name, which (and I mean no offense to the band) I thought was… not good… and suggestive of a kind of music I wouldn’t like. And then my comrade DGR helpfully pointed out who was in the band, and of course I raced over to the Bandcamp page and started listening.

Create A Kill was formed by two ex-Malevolent Creation drummers, Gus Rios (now on guitar) and Alex Marquez (now on vocals), with Daniel Gonzalez (Possessed) on second guitar. And the album features two guest drummers — Dirk Verbueren (Soilwork and a thousand other bands) and Tobias Gustafsson (Vomitory). Matt Harvey from Exhumed also contributed vocals.

The album is set for release on July 13th but is already streaming in full on Bandcamp. Once again, I’m afraid I haven’t yet made my way through the entire album but have heard enough that I wanted to recommend it, since you can hear it for yourselves this very instant.

In a nutshell, the name of Create A Kill’s vicious game is thrash, and it’s a high-voltage rush — packed with immediately catchy riffing (sometimes jet-fast, sometimes geared toward triggering compulsive headbanging), squalling and shrieking solos, maniacal vocals, and spine-jarring drum and bass work. Your neck will get a good workout from this one.

Bandcamp:
https://createakill.bandcamp.com/releases

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/createakill/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

INVOCATION

Moving far to the South, the next entry in this collection is a track from a new 7″ EP by a Chilean black/death band named Invocation. The Mastery of the Unseen is its name, and it will be released on September 17th by Iron Bonehead Productions. Of the EP’s two tracks, “Ouija (Mystifying Oracle)” is the one that’s been made available for listening; the other is “The Spirit Trumpet”.

The guitar tone and eerie, warped contours of the song’s main riff (which sticks in the head), coupled with the menacing tremolo vibrations that surface later, gives the song a dimension of occult mystery and unearthly terror. The vocals are ugly as sin, and effectively enhance the song’s atmosphere of demonic menace.

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/invocationtemple

Iron Bonehead:
https://www.facebook.com/IronBoneheadProductions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HESPERIAN DEATH HORSE

There’s a lot of undulating flesh in this next video, sometimes coated in a sheen or sweat or dotted with a drop of blood, though it’s hard to tell which parts of the body we’re seeing or why it’s undulating. We also see flashing lights, the shadow of what might be someone working with an implement (which might be what’s causing the body to move?), and… something else. I thought about freezing the strobing frames to get a better look, and then thought I might be better off not knowing.

Something about the video makes it a bit uncomfortable to see, but the music has something to do with that. In the main, the song is just one long repeating sequence of sludgy bass notes, a rambunctious drum pattern, a tension-torquing riff, and an ominous, chanted vocal refrain, around which the lead guitarist spins twisted, hallucinatory arpeggios that threaten inner ear disturbances.

The song in the video is “Horde“, and it comes from Živ, the forthcoming second album by the Croatian avant-garde/post-metal/sludge band Hesperian Death Horse (which is a very cool name). Credit to Klara Rihtar (camera) and Ivor Šonje (editing) for the creepy yet mesmerizing video.

Bandcamp:
https://hesperiandeathhorse.bandcamp.com/

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/HesperianDeathHorse

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SECOND TO SUN

And finally we come to the band whose music we’ve featured repeatedly at this site, the Russian group Second To Sun. One of the Second To Sun albums I’ve written about previously, the instrumental-only work Blackbound, has been given a make-over. Vocals (by Gleb Sysoev) have been added; the drums and bass were re-recorded (and changed in the process); and some new guitar parts were added. The result, as the band’s mastermind Vladimir Lehtinen has said, “is the true face of the band – a well-fused combination of melodic black metal and groove metal the way we see it”. And with those changes, the album also has a new name: The Black.

Each song on the album (which was released in May) tells a different story. In recent days the band has released an animated video for one of those tales, “The Wall“. There’s a much fuller description of the story that accompanies the lyrics on the Bandcamp page, but in a nutshell it’s based on the belief (which allegedly played a role in the construction of the Kremlin in Nizhny Novgorod), propagated by elder wisdom, that to make a structure (in the case of this song, a wall) strong and durable, it must be built on the blood of the first living being to approach the construction site.

As in the original version of the track, the song is a rich blending of metallic styles that produces sensations of both jolting physicality and ethereal mysticism, with a bit of folk influence in the melodies, but the black metal component is definitely more pronounced than before, thanks significantly to Gleb‘s flesh-rending vocals.

The video was created by Vladimir Prokofiev.

Order:
http://smarturl.it/STSblack

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/secondtosun/