The weekend is nearly upon us. Almost time for the revels to begin. In addition to reveling in my own preferred way after a tough week (i.e., sleeping like a dead man), I hope to catch up on my metal listening. But before diving into a big batch of album-length goodies that are high on my list, I thought I’d close out the week with one more grab-bag of song-length sounds.
Two fresh tracks caught my ears this morning, one from a French band named Wormfood and one from a Brooklyn outfit, Call of the Wild. I also have ant noise. I also have this photo from Mars, beamed back to the mother ship by the Curiosity rover. What look like hills in the distance are the rim of the Gale Crater, where Curiosity is now located.
There’s a better photo of the crater rim after the jump, though it’s in black and white.
Amazing.
Let’s see now, where was I?
Oh yeah, that French band . . .
WORMFOOD
The name of this band rings a faint bell, but I’m not sure I’ve ever heard their music. They’ve released four albums since 2003, and on September 24 Apathia Records is going to add a fifth one to the list. Entitled Décade(nt), it’s a remastered reissue of Wormfood’s first album, Eponym, which the band originally self-released, and it also includes six live recordings and two cover songs (one of them being “Christian Woman” by Type O Negative).
Today I got word that Apathia had begun streaming a track from the album by the name of “The Dead Bury the Dead”. Not having any idea what it would sound like, I decided to listen — and I’ll tell you, this isn’t easy to classify, but I sure like it. Maybe avant garde black metal? I don’t know. It rocks infectiously with cutting guitars and strange keyboard atmospherics, it pauses and drifts ethereally, it mixes cavernous harsh vocals and spoken words. Probably better heard than described:
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/55822073″ iframe=”true” /]
Pre-orders of the new album can be placed here: http://www.apathiarecords.com/shop/fr/16-wormfood-decadent.html
ANT NOISE
This isn’t a band, but it’s still metal. I found it via a FB post by one of our faithful readers, Prog Geo-Cofo. This is a recording of the inside of a large ant hill, with the recorder buried within the ants. The dude who made it (Daniel Menche) swears that, “Absolutely no effects were used and all sounds [were] captured straight to a H2 ZOOM recorder.”
I mean, I can’t say that I’d have been quite so taken with this if I hadn’t known what it was, but knowing what it is makes it sound amazing.
[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/55852860″ iframe=”true” /]
If you’d like to carry this around with you and listen to it at other odd times, you can download it here.
CALL OF THE WILD
This band consists of drummer Allison Busch (ex-Awesome Color), guitarist Johnny Coolati, and bassist Max Peebles. They’ve recorded a debut album named Leave Your Leather On, which is scheduled for release on August 21 by Kemado Records.
I know nothing else about the band at this moment, except I’ve heard one song from the new album, and I dig it mightily. It’s called “Choked Out”, and Alternative Press premiered it today.
This fucker will turn your engine on and gun it hard right from the go. It’s built around a gassed-up riff, some head-whipping clean solo’s, hard-driving percussion, and scraped-raw vocals. It’s closer to punk rock and Motorhead than the kind of extreme metal we usually cover here, but I’m finding the song irresistibly infectious.
You can pre-order the LP and CD here. Call of the Wild has a Facebook page at this place.
11 Responses to “WORMFOOD, ANT NOISE, AND THE CALL OF THE WILD”
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You ever listen to The Bronx? Reminds me of that Call of the Wild band, though with more lyrics degerating into inarticulate yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!’s
I’d never listened to the Bronx, but if it’s a a punk band from LA I just listened to a track called “History’s Stranglers”, and I liked it . . . though your description is pretty accurate. 🙂
Menche’s whole soundcloud is rad. the empty school basements have some really spooky moments, and the rain is better than any white noise machine programmed rain I’ve heard. And if you play the rain, ants, and school simultaneously it will melt your brain.
I listened to some of those other tracks on Soundcloud. I’m really glad it wasn’t possible to listen to all of them at the same time.
multiple tabs bro, each song can be opened in a separate tab.
Damn, I wish you hadn’t said that. I think subconsciously I made myself pretend I didn’t know that was an easy way to play all this shit together. I have so little brain left to melt. I guess I’m going to finish my morning coffee, kiss my wife good-bye, and then do this.
After hearing “The Dead Bury the Dead”, I started scouring YouTube for tracks from Wormfood’s Posthume. Then bought it from Amazon MP3.
It’s really demented and awesome stuff. They obviously don’t give a shit about the arbitrary borders between genres. Check out “Passage a Vide” as an example. It’s like three different bands tag-teaming for eight minutes, and I happen to dig all of them.
I listened to “Salope” and “Passage A Vide”. Neither sound much like the earlier track in the post — except they’re equally impossible to describe succinctly. And yeah, you nailed it — like 3 bands (or more) tag-teaming. The vocalists’s clean singing sounds a shitload like Peter Steele in his lower range. I think I’m going to have to do what you did and get Posthume.
It’s probably just the language making me think this, but the vocals often strike me as Peter Steele doing Serge Gainsbourg. Or vice versa.
After a couple of listens, I’d probably recommend Posthume more to my “dark rock” friends than my “extreme metal” friends, but it’s really ideal for anybody who likes the whole spectrum. The most impressive thing is how organic it feels despite the eclecticism.
I’m not a big fan of iTunes Store, but turns out they have the previous album, France. From the samples, it sounds a LOT more metal than Posthume. And even more demented. Meaning it’s another guaranteed purchase…
I just got both albums. 🙂 Thanks for writing about them. This little discussion also caused me to go listen to a medley of Type O Negative songs.
I should also mention that the Wormfood cover of Type O Negative’s “Christian Woman”, which is on the new compilation is up on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AszyS3xOLGg
It’s fascinating.
I bought France right after I posted last night, so I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, but Posthume is improving with each spin. It’s really impressive with headphones. The arrangements are rich and full of little surprises. The more I digest it, the more it’s feeling like one band with an irreverent but singular vision rather than separate bands taking turns.
I’ll definitely check out that “Christian Woman” cover. Thanks for the tip!