MONDAY MASSACRE: WOCCON, BURIAL HORDES, MORBO, BENIGHTED

Happy putrid Monday to one and all. I have a nice little slaughtering playlist for you. All the songs are new, all of them are from forthcoming albums, all of them are very good.

WOCCON

This first item is such a pleasant surprise. It comes from an Athens, Georgia, melodic death metal band named Woccon, whose 2013 release The Wither Fields I enjoyed immensely. Those of you who have dutifully waded through my ongoing list of 2013’s “Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs” will remember their name, because I included a song from that album (“Our Ashes”) on the list near the end of January (here). Over the weekend I discovered, thanks to a post at DECIBEL’s site, that Woccon will have a debut album named Solace In Decay coming our way this spring.

DECIBEL premiered one of the new songs, a track entitled “Giving Up the Ghost”. It’s something of a departure from the sounds I remember from The Wither Fields — less overtly doom-oriented and more progressively inclined — yet still quite impressive. It begins with a cosmic introduction and ends with a piano melody, and in between you’ll find a contrasting blend of spiraling, reverberant guitar melodies and heavy, blasting thunder. The dark, melodic doom of the band’s previous work is not gone altogether, but the song is a spreading of wings by a group whose talents should take them far.

https://www.facebook.com/woccon

 

 

BURIAL HORDES

Right after the start of the year, we had the pleasure of premiering the title track to Incendium, the new album by a Greek band named Burial Hordes which is slated for release today by Hellthrasher Productions. Yesterday the band uploaded another new song from the album, and if you haven’t already been convinced to pick up this album, it should push you over the edge.

“Black Shrouds of Depravity” is a riveting mix of death metal might and blistering black metal reaping. It’s intense and unsettling, heavy and harrowing, and yet for all the song’s ominous indigo atmosphere, its serpentine melody is quite entrancing. Listen below.

https://www.facebook.com/BurialHordesOfficial
http://burialhordes.bandcamp.com/
http://www.hellthrasher.com/

 

 

MORBO

Unlike the first two bands in this round-up, Italy’s Morbo are a new discovery for me. Their debut album (on the Norwegian Demonhood Productions label) will be coming later this year. Its name is Addiction To Musickal Dissection and it’s adorned by a delicious piece of cover art by Adam Geyer. Earlier today the band uploaded a new song from the album, and it turns out that the album title adheres to the principle of truth in advertising: Yes indeed, Morbo are addicted to musical dissection.

“Dawn of the Dying Living” channels both old-school Autopsy and the Nihilist-Entombed brand of Swedish death, with a hefty helping of crushing death/doom in the song’s back half.  The music races and lumbers, cracks the bullwhip and brings down the heavy mallet blows. It features gruesome, harsh, mid-range howls and wailing ghostly cleans, and it’s suffused with the stench of a moldering crypt.

Two more songs from the album are now streaming on Bandcamp, and I’ve embedded them below, along with the newest premiere.

https://soundcloud.com/demonhood-1/morbo-dawn-of-the-dying-living
http://demonhood.bandcamp.com/album/addiction-to-musickal-dissection
https://www.facebook.com/morbodeathmetal
http://demonhoodprod.com/morbo.htm

 

 

 

BENIGHTED

In our private NCS Facebook group, two of our writers — DGR and BadWolf — have been gleefully singing the praises of Carnivore Sublime, the forthcoming album by those brutal French death-grinders in Benighted. We may need to schedule a cage match to decide which of them reviews the album. Actually, I’d enjoy a cage match even if they work it out amicably.

They’ve also been cracking me up with their verbal descriptions of a cover song that will apparently be included in some editions of the album. The song is Rammstein’s “Du Riechst So Gut”, and it is indeed a shitload of fun to hear. It’s a heavy jackhammering assault filled with slimy, slithery guitar leads; a mix of guttural vomiting, raw howls, and pig-squealing highs; and Rammsteinian rhythms. You can’t not headbang.

(The whole album is now streaming here, and it will be released by Season of Mist on February 18.)

https://www.facebook.com/Benighted.Official/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrspEwiHIbo