SEEN AND HEARD: IMPETUOUS RITUAL, BENEATH, EYECONOCLAST

I mentioned in my last post that I didn’t spend much time with new music debuts over the last day or two. I’ve learned the hard way that if I snooze for even 24 hours, I miss a lot of worthwhile stuff. And so I’m hoping to get a couple of round-up posts written for today, because I found a metric fuck ton of worthwhile goodies while catching up this morning. Let’s start with some perty pitchers, shall we?

IMPETUOUS RITUAL

I saw that dark piece of artwork this morning, the one at the top of this post. Profound Lore Records says it’s the cover for Unholy Congregation Of Hypocritical Ambivalence, which is the name of an album due out sometime in April by Impetuous Ritual. The band’s first album, Relentless Execution Of Ceremonial Excrescence, was released back in 2009. This is clearly a band with a pronounced fondness for multisyllabic utterances. I can get behind that.

Impetuous Ritual are from Brisbane, Australia, and their ranks include members of Portal and Grave Upheaval. That makes me interested. This music from their last album also makes me interested:

 

 

 

BENEATH

Here’s another fetching piece of cover art I saw this morning. This one is for The Barren Throne, the new album by Iceland’s Beneath, which is due for release by Unique Leader on April 29. We’ve written frequently about Beneath. To quote our chum Gemma Alexander, who interviewed members of the band in Iceland a couple of years ago, they are fairly new, but the musicians behind the name are some of the heaviest hitters in Icelandic metal.

“[W]ith Unnar Sigurðsson of Ophidian I fame on guitar, and with drums provided by Atrum’s Ragnar Sverisson, Beneath came out swinging in 2009, winning Iceland’s first Wacken Metal Battle. An EP followed in 2010, with their first full-length, Enslaved by Fear, released [in] July [2012]. Needless to say, all of the usual metaphors involving blunt force trauma apply.”

Beneath have a new vocalist since their last release — Benedikt Natanael Bjanason (also with Azoic).  As a reminder about why this new album will be worth waiting for, wreck your head with this ditty from the last album:

https://www.facebook.com/beneathdeathmetal

 

I’ve been singing the praises of Italy’s Eyeconoclast ever since hearing their 2011 EP Sharpening Our Blades on the Mainstream. Last year brought us the release of their debut album Drones of the Awakening via Prosthetic Records, and we had the pleasure of premiering the lyric video for one of the album’s songs, ”Rise of the Orgamechanism”. Yesterday the band unveiled another video for the same song.

The music is just as much a raging death metal blast furnace as it ever was, and the video is so much eye candy that diabetics should be forewarned. So should people who are prone to epileptic seizures.

https://www.facebook.com/eyeconoclast