CONGRATZ!

More than two months ago we stumbled across a band from Mumbai, India, called Demonic Resurrection whose music hit us upside our blunt foreheads like a stout, low-hanging limb. We can’t remember what snagged our attention, though it may have been the news that Candlelight Records had agreed to handle the worldwide release of their third album, The Return to Darkness, which the band had originally self-released in January.

Whatever the reason, we were quite taken by a song from the album called “The Unrelenting Surge of Vengeance”, which the band had featured in a music video, and we wrote about it here. Eventually, we tracked down a copy of The Return to Darkness, and it blew us away.

We acknowledged back then that we were probably late-comers in our admiration for DR, and now we’ve got proof — because over the last week they’ve won a couple of notable awards, signifying that lots of other people paid attention long before we did. And we’re pretty fucking happy for them, and for the many metalheads who’ve been devoted fans of DR for a lot longer than we’ve been. So, we’re here today saying congratz to Demonic Ressurection.

And by sheer coincidence, we also just learned that another band we’ve been hot about — Shining — have won a righteous award of their own. So this post is a congratz to them, too.

And, last but not least, we want to say congratz to some other Indian bands we’ve admired from afar — Infernal Wrath and Bhayanak Maut — who also won recognition at one of the ceremonies that handed out awards to DR.

And because all these bands are on our minds, we’re going to remind you about them by serving up a collection of songs for you to hear, just in case you weren’t hanging around this site back when we first got up off our lazy asses and took notice of them.  (all that shit is after the jump, of course . . .)

Demonic Resurrection won the first award at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods 2010 ceremony in London on June 14. The award they won was in the category of “Global Metal”. Metal Hammer has been handing out these awards from quite a while, and Demonic Resurrection was the first Indian band ever to win one.

Here’s what Metal Hammer had to say in announcing the award:

We scoured the entire globe to bring you the international act that we think that you need to hear! The Global Metal award is sponsored by Sonisphere!

And the Global Metal award goes to…

Demonic Resurrection from Mumbai in India!

Featured on Sam Dunn’s Global Metal documentary, we think the music can talk for itself. Check out the band’s MySpace and let us know what you think. We think they rule!

To which we say, Pretty Fucking Sweet! Particularly considering how many bands from around the world were in the running for that award. If you want to see the rest of the bands that were award recipients in London, go to this location to see the complete list of winners.

But it turns out that the London show was just the start of a hot streak for DR. They got back to India from London just in time for the Rolling Stone-India metal awards show on June 20, at which Demonic Resurrection performed live — and won the awards for Best Metal Song (“The Unrelenting Surge of Vengeance”) and Best Metal Album (The Return to Darkness).

But DR didn’t sweep the Rolling Stone awards. Another remarkably good band, Infernal Wrath, won the award for Best Metal Band and Best Metal Drummer. As it happens, we reviewed their most recent album (2009’s Inside of Me) here. Among other things, we said: “It’s a serious, meticulously planned and superbly played work that by turns is exotic, beautiful, headbangingly compulsive, and brutally heavy.”

And a third band we wrote about around the same time we were discovering Demonic Resurrection and Infernal Wrath — Bhayanak Maut — also made the short list of nominees for Best Metal Band, Best Metal Album, Best Metal Song (“Ungentle”), Best Metal Vocalist (Vinay Venkatest and Sunnieth Revankar), Best Metal Guitarist (Aditya Gopinath and R. Venkatraman) and Best Metal Drummer (Rahul Hariharan). Not too fucking shabby. (You can check out all the winners at this location.)

Now, to be clear, it’s not like we happened to write about these three bands because of our encyclopedic knowledge of the Indian metal scene. We checked out these bands based on the suggestions we got from NCS readers in India — and they obviously knew what the fuck they were talking about. And we still haven’t finished checking out their recommendations.

For our last word of congratulations, we turn to Norway’s Shining. We were dumbstruck by their most recent album, Blackjazz, and wrote about them here and here. Their music is blazingly inventive and completely berserk.

Thanks to the always entertaining, always informative MetalSucks, we saw today that Shining was awarded one of two grants offered by the legendary A-Ha, and the loot consists of 1 million Norwegian Kroner (approximately $150,000 or €125,000). The award was based on Internet polling, and MetalSucks (who dig this band as much as we do) helped stuff the ballot box via an earlier post.

So, congratz to Shining too! We join MetalSucks in hoping they will spend this nice haul of cash touring the U.S.  Hell, to be honest, all we really care about is that they tour Seattle. They could skip the rest of our country and just spend more of the kroner on shit in Norway. Or visit India.

As we promised, in honor of all these hard-working and richly deserving bands, here’s a montage of their music. But don’t stop with this — go get their whole albums (or in the case of DR, keep your eyes peeled for the Candlelight release).

Demonic Resurrection: The Unrelenting Surge of Vengeance

Infernal Wrath: At the Foothills of Palestine

Bhayanak Maut: Ungentle

Shining: The Madness and the Damage Done