SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: THE TROOPS OF DOOM, SOL DE SANGRE, WEREWOLVES, COLDCELL, NIHILO, LACABRA, KYBALION, BALWEZO WESTIJIZ, KŌYA, WHARFLURCH, AMORPHIS

Troops of Doom – photo by Cissa Flores

I wasn’t able to serve up a Saturday roundup last weekend due to working on Seattle’s Northwest Terror Fest, and it’s highly unlikely I’ll get one done next Saturday since I’ll be at Maryland Deathfest (if you’re there and spot someone who looks like a heavily tatted escapee from a nursing home, come say hi). So that makes this one kind of important, if only for me.

There’s gobs of new music to choose from, many more gobs than usual since I missed a week. And by the way, I’m using “gob” here as a word meaning “a large amount” and not its other meaning, i.e., “a lump or clot of a slimy or viscous substance”, though I have included a song off an album named Shittier/Slimier.

Ready, set, go!

 

 

THE TROOPS OF DOOM (Brazil)

These Brazilian musical veterans know how to write a fucking evil metal song with highly addictive qualities. They’ve already proven that with their Antichrist Reborn debut album in 2022, and they’re proving it again with the first singles off their forthcoming second album, A Mass To The Grotesque.

The more recent of those singles, “Dawn Of Mephisto“, arrived this week with a music video that lets us see these men in action. The song’s introductory phase, which lasts for about 1:39, is a hell of a sinister and ominous experience, although even then the drumming and bursts of rapidly throbbing riffage give it voltage — and then it turns into mosh pit mayhem.

The drums surge into a gallop; the bass cavorts; the guitars boil, wail, jolt, and pulsate; the words come out like the fury of a demonic hybrid of bear and panther. But there’s also dark, magical, melodic guitar soloing that adds mystery and magnificence to the marauding. And did I mention that the song is also catchy as hell?

The Troops of Doom‘s hellraising new album A Mass To The Grotesque will be released by Alma Mater Records on May 31st. It’s already drawn acclaim from some impressive sources:

From Mille Petrozza of Kreator: “The record sounds amazing! Old school as f*ck! Taking me back to the glory days of Brazilian metal. This album will crush!”

From Øystein G. Brun of Borknagar: “Wow, this one hits me hard and drags me straight back to the early ’90s, to my youth, when death metal still was fresh, wild and fierce! Listen and learn kids, this is how music in the name of the horns are done!”

Also check out the album’s first single below — “Chapels Of The Unholy“.

https://bit.ly/49LaD1x
https://bfan.link/a-mass-to-the-grotesque
https://www.thetroopsofdoom.com
https://www.facebook.com/thetroopsofdoom

 

 

SOL DE SANGRE (Colombia)

The Troops of Doom put me in an old school death metal time warp and I decided to stay there with the next selection.

It’s been three years since we last heard from this superior Colombian death metal band. That’s when they released their Despair Distiller EP (reviewed here), which followed their 2018 self-titled debut album (premiered and reviewed here). But now we’ve got a new single, “Entre Mares de Vomito” (which translates to “Between Seas of Vomit”).

The new song doesn’t waste time kicking up the listener’s pulse-rate, generating a dense swarm of circle-saw riffage, blurting and screaming guitar leads, rumbling bass lines, maniacally clobbering drum beats, and ugly-as-sin gutturals and roars. The band segue into a grisly lurch too, a brief break before raising savage hell again, introducing serpentine guitar-lines and capping it all with a delirious guitar solo.

https://soldesangre.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/soldesangre/
https://www.instagram.com/soldesangre/

 

 

WEREWOLVES (Australia)

This next song channels a whole lot of the fury and disgust I feel on a daily basis when I gaze around the modern world through the lens of news reports (and why I keep reading the miserable news is a fucking mystery to me). Here’s how Werewolves frontman Sam Bean puts it:

“You can all get fucked. This song is about how tired we are with shitheads who think they know shit about shit. OK this track is about how people willing submit themselves to slavery, their desire for demagogues, how our history is brief starry moments of freedom before people throw it all away for some magic beans offered by fat voracious sociopaths busily munching on the carcass of the last idiot to do business with them. Eat our shit”.

As for the music, it’s just what you’d expect from those words — a vicious rager packed with super-heated ant-swarm riffing, obliterating drumwork, and furious vocal expulsions — and following a brazen bridge the band really punch the gas pedal and accelerate into an even redder zone of madness and mutilation.

As for the video, I’ll quote again from the band, or someone representing them: “‘We All Deserve To Be Slaves’” was filmed during the Tech Trek 2023 Australian tour with ARCHSPIRE and INGESTED at The Corner Hotel in Melbourne, in front of an impatient and unwilling live crowd who were there to see the internationals and not some middle-aged local men screaming abuse at them. ‘We get enough of that at home’ said one disgruntled and completely fictitious punter”.

The song is from Werewolves‘ new album Die For Us. It will be released on July 12th.

https://werewolvesdeathmetal.bandcamp.com/album/die-for-us
http://www.werewolvesdeathmetal.com/
https://www.facebook.com/werewolvesinhell

 

 

COLDCELL (Switzerland)

I guess it’s time to pull myself (and you) away from death metal and turn to something in a different and more blackened sphere.

Last week AOP Records announced July 26th as the international release date for ColdCell‘s fifth album, Age of Unreason, and simultaneously exposed the fascinating song “Dead to the World” to a deadened world.

It’s a long song and a dynamic one. It’s explosive and broiling at first, but interspersed with a slower and thoroughly exotic piece of instrumentation that reminds me of the saz/baglama. Those unusual drifting tones very quickly seize attention, and continue doing so even after the scorching vocals and shrill fiery leads arrive.

That exotic melody persists, becoming more prominent when the music segues into a softer phase of ethereal synths and gnarled spoken words. Of course, hell breaks loose again, the music spinning and levitating in a display of violent exultation, accented by big tumbling drums and furious snarls and screams.

More changes ensue, the drums slowing and the bass murmuring behind the searing fevers in the riffing, and the exotic melody blooms again in the song’s frightening final crescendo and again leads the way into sounds of unearthly mystery.

https://shop.aoprecords.de
https://www.indiemerchstore.com
https://save-it.cc/aop/age-of-unreason
https://www.facebook.com/coldcellofficial

 

 

NIHILO (Switzerland)

It’s sheer coincidence that I’m following one Swiss band with another. What I was thinking about was the flow of the music, not geography. And where the music flows next is the title song from a new album by Nihilo named Made of Lies.

The album mainly includes Nihilo tracks previously available only on vinyl, but the title song, which was recorded during the sessions for their 2022 album Resolution, hasn’t been previously released.

That song is thoroughly diabolical, packed with infernally swarming and contorting tremolo’d riffage, blistering and battering snare work, rabid growls, and haughty roars. It sounds like madness, but includes grand and groaning chords that lend an air of imperiousness intertwined with agony, but that final phase also sounds fiendishly exotic, like a Sumerian touchstone.

Made of Lies will be released by Iron Blood and Death Corporation on May 31st.

https://ironbloodanddeath.bandcamp.com/album/made-of-lies
https://www.facebook.com/nihilometal/

 

 

LACABRA (U.S.)

So far I’ve been playing tourist in countries outside the U.S., so I thought I ought to come back home with a new song from Seattle-based Lacabra.

This new single, “I Am Thee“, plays to Lacabra‘s genre-hybridizing strengths. Launched by a tumbling drum solo, it begins to sound dangerous and dismal, and then rips open in a paroxysm of superheated riffing (still dangerous and dismal in its mood) and scalding vocal tirades.

The song also brings in bursts of feverish thrashy riffage, fleet-fingered reptilian arpeggios, swaths of eerie ringing melody, and lots more attention-seizing drumwork — plus an intriguing and sublime instrumental interlude that ventures outside of extreme metal, followed by grand heavy-metal chords and a gorgeous dual-guitar solo.

https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/lacabra1/i-am-thee
https://www.etsy.com/shop/LacabraShop
https://www.facebook.com/lacabrametal

 

 

KYBALION (Italy)

Back abroad we go with a new discovery from Italy, an interesting black metal band named Kybalion and the opening song from their new EP A Crippled Power.

This song mostly goes flat out, driven by high-octane and constantly varying bass-and-drum work, but the fretwork twists and turns in intriguing ways, contorting as it swarms, and the song also elevates into diabolical grandeur and descends into a phase of menace and misery. The weirdly flickering guitar solo near the end, in the midst of a heart-pounding finale, adds to the song’s electrifying effects.

The name of the track is “To Know Defeat“. A Crippled Power is set for release on June 27th by Void Wanderer Productions. It features Helslave drummer Francesco Hel Comerci as session drummer. The EP is described as embracing a “somewhat beastly Epicurean message”:

“Bite every single ounce of flesh you can put your fangs on, since they will eventually fall and leave you starving. To live free is to live without limits, exploring the glorious curse of Freedom.”

https://voidwandererproductions.bandcamp.com/album/a-crippled-power
https://linktr.ee/kybalion.bm
https://www.facebook.com/kybalion.bm/

 

 

BALWEZO WESTIJIZ (Sweden)

I was unfamiliar with the music of this next band and only checked out the song because it’s from an album that will be released by Profound Lore. A bit of sleuthing reveals that Balwezo Westijiz is principally the work of one Swartadauþuz, whose M-A page includes a vast number of other projects and bands, though on this new album he’s accompanied by a couple of session musicians and vocalist Likaska.

The one long song from the album that surfaced last week, “Endless Black Nightmares“, sounds almost exactly like its name — both oppressive and nightmarish — but it also proves to be entrancing. The drums move slowly, going off sharply like gunshots, while surrounded by an amalgam of piercing sounds that wretchedly wail, pierced by shrieked vocals of shattering torment.

The song’s otherworldly aspects become even more pronounced as it proceeds, near celestial at the heights of their splendor, with only the warm murmur of the bass keeping a tether to the earth. When the music comes back to earth, it’s profoundly sad in its mood, but grows more tormented and tortured again too. As the music rises up once more, brittle tones strikingly ring like broken chimes within the vast swaths of heavenly synths and gripping drum progressions — though deeper despondency is never far away.

The album’s name is Tower of Famine. Profound Lore will release it on June 14th.

https://profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/tower-of-famine

 

 

KŌYA (Denmark)

Every other song in today’s collection is a track from a record that isn’t out yet. The next item is a complete EP named Fragments that was released in March. I’ve now forgotten how I came across it, but once I got around to giving it a “taste test” yesterday, I got pulled all the way in.

What pulled me in is this Aalborg band’s immediately evident talent for melding hardcore fury and punch with gripping melodic accents and insane vocals, simultaneously incendiary and acidic. The music is humongously heavy, capable of busting up concrete with its pile-driving and bulldozing heft, and often damned bleak and distressing in the timbre of its riffing.

The band lace the songs with other features, including maniacal laughter, demented yells, sizzling riffing with the taint of pestilence, other chords that sound thick as redwoods, screeching and moaning guitar-leads, outbursts of decimating violence driven by blast-beat percussion and blast-furnace guitars, and lonely, mournful strumming and picking.

The songs do have hooks, but the main takeaway is how intense they are in different ways — so ruthlessly pulverizing and emotionally distressing that they may leave your mouth hanging open by the end.

https://koyaband.bandcamp.com/album/fragments
https://www.facebook.com/koyabandofficial/

 

 

WHARFLURCH (U.S.)

Now we finally come to that song off an album named Shittier/Slimier, from a Floridian death/doom band whose name sounds like someone sneezing or clearing their throat during a bad cold but is also kind of creepy, in keeping with the band’s desire to inspire otherworldly horror, even though the name was completely made up.

The new song is “Death Toll Horror“, and it’s more impressive than you might expect based upon the new album’s name. Sure, it’s foul and gross, with monstrous reverb-ed vocals, but also brutish and crazed, capable of triggering muscle reflexes and of spawning ghoulish visions.

When the band slow down, that’s when you really feel like you’re being dragged by your hair into a stinking cesspool, and the feverish lead-guitar sounds like it’s gleefully reveling in your agony.

Shittier/Slimier is described as “a collection of previously unreleased demos that showcase the more experimental and psychedelic side of the project”. It will be released on June 21st through Dawnbreed Records and Gurgling Gore. Preorders will begin on May 24th.

https://www.gurglinggore.com/
https://www.dawnbreed.com/
https://www.facebook.com/wharflurch/

 

 

AMORPHIS (Finland)

As usual, today’s collection of new songs and videos has focused on under-the-radar underground artists, but here at the end I couldn’t resist including something new from a “household name” in metal.

One reason I couldn’t resist is that the song being performed in the following live video is “Drowned Maid” from an album that made an enormous impression on me when I first heard it — 1994’s Tales From the Thousand Lakes, now 30 years old.

The video was recorded during Amorphis‘ live performance at Tavastia in Helsinki, Finland, and that show is captured on a new Amorphis album named Tales From The Thousand Lakes – Live At Tavastia, which will be released on July 12th, 2024, and includes a Blu-ray edition for viewing purposes.

And I think that’s all I’ll say about this before closing — other than to point out that by my lights this song hasn’t lost its appeal over 30 years of time, and to mention that Amorphis will be embarking on a big U.S. tour beginning in September, with Dark Tranquillity and Fires In The Distance.

https://amorphis.rpm.link/drownedmaidYT
https://www.facebook.com/amorphis/