SEEN AND HEARD: ABORTED, OMNIUM GATHERUM, SKELETONWITCH, CAST THE STONE, DAKHMA

 

The last 24 hours brought a big slug of new music from a bunch of well-known bands, and the first four items in this end-of-the-week round-up are among those. I found quite a lot of good new music from lesser-known bands as well, and put one of those at the end of this collection.

ABORTED

To begin I present for your enjoyment the official video for “Squalor Opera“, a new song taken from the next album by perennial NCS favorites, Aborted. Entitled TerrorVision, it will be released through Century Media on September 21st, 2018.

 

 

There’s no mistaking Sven de Caluwé’s ferocious mix of roaring, shrieking, and squealing, of course, but the song might come as a bit of a surprise. It delivers the kind of blast-furnace explosiveness that Aborted are known for, but as my pal DGR noted, they’ve managed to worm some atmospherics into the assault: The bridge that leads into the slithering, melodic solo is apocalyptic; and they bring it back to close out the song, along with a compulsive chugging groove. There’s some merciless pile-driving in this track, too, along with eruptions of grind mania.

Hot shit!

Pre-order:
https://www.indiemerch.com/aborted/pre-orders

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

OMNIUM GATHERUM

When DGR pointed me to this new Omnium Gatherum single, “Gods Go First” (presented through a colorful music video), he enthusiastically proclaimed that it was, “Shockingly good on first pass, surprisingly death metal in its opening before it drops into the more traditional keyboard and guitar cheese that the last one was kind of lacking in. Lot of melodies in this one.”

And those words sum up the song pretty effectively; I would add that it might cause fist-pumping and the raising of clawed hands to the skies. Very catchy too.

“Gods Go First” comes from this Finnish band’s upcoming album The Burning Cold, which will be released on August 31st. The single is available for purchase now.

Order:
https://omnium-gatherum.lnk.to/TheBurningCold

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SKELETONWITCH

It’s high time we paid attention to the new Skeletonwitch album, Devouring Radiant Light (and I suspect we’ll be paying a lot more attention to it before it’s released on July 20th by Prosthetic Records).

The album track that premiered yesterday, “Temple of the Sun“, is the latest of three that have been revealed so far. If you’ve heard any of them, you already know that the album represents a shift in style for this band, with a much more pronounced black metal influence. I happen to love what they’ve done, based on what I’ve heard so far… and this new song only strengthens my admiration.

It’s the kind of wild, incendiary conflagration that gets the adrenaline flowing, but there are other facets on display as well — hinted at in the beautiful, mournful melody that occupies the opening minute, and revealed more completely at the five-and-a-half minute mark.

Credit to Stefan Thanneur for the fantastic cover art, and to Kurt Ballou for recording it.

Pre-order:
http://smarturl.it/SkeletonwitchDRL
https://skeletonwitch.bandcamp.com/album/devouring-radiant-light

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CAST THE STONE

What a fun video this is! Credit to David Hall for making it. The song is damned fun, too. Entitled “Jesusatan“, it’s a cover of an Infestdead track as rendered by Cast the Stone, whose all-star line-up consists of Mark Kloeppel (Misery Index, Scour), Derek Engemann (ex-Cattle Decapitation, Scour), Jesse Schobel (Legend, ex-Scour), and vocalist Andrew Huskey. The song appears on the band’s six-track EP, Empyrean Atrophy, which was produced by Dan Swanö and is due for release on August 31st via Agonia Records.

This thundering, ripping, neck-battering marauder of a song will get your engine revving hot and fast. It plainly pays homage to Swedish death metal, but the band toss other ingredients into the mix as well, and the result is a HUGE rush. You better loosen your damn neck muscles too.

Pre-order:
http://agoniarecords.com/castthestone

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

DAKHMA

To finish this round-up, and to close out our week (at least until we present more posts this weekend), I have 11 minutes of pure ritualistic primitivism, boiling madness, obliterating chaos, and otherworldly, hallucinatory eeriness, all in one.

This hellish track, “Nanghait (Born of Fire)“, is the first disclosure of music from the new album, Hamkar Atonement, by the horrifying Swiss black/death band Dakhma. It will be released by Iron Bonehead Productions on some future date that I can’t yet find.

This is foul, filth-ridden, fiery, and ferocious music that channels the feeling of ancient, implacable evil… and utter devotion to its ends. As they say in the trade, not for the faint of heart.

Dakhma:
https://www.facebook.com/dakhmacavern/

Iron Bonehead:
https://shop.ironbonehead.de/en/