I didn’t have time last weekend to make my usual weekly exploration of new music for our MISCELLANY series, and so my list of un-heard bands grew. I’m now trying to catch up a bit with a mid-week installment, and with any luck, I’ll do another one this weekend.

I’m sure our previous readers are sick of me explaining what they already know, but our audience still seems to be growing, and so just in case someone’s reading this MISCELLANY thing for the first time, I feel like it’s only fair to give them the usual warning:

MISCELLANY is an unfiltered stumbling around in search of new music (and by “new”, I mean bands I haven’t previously heard, even if the rest of the fucking world knows them like the back of their hand). I keep a running list of bands that look interesting for some reason — sometimes for no better reason than they have an interesting name or cool album art — and then I randomly choose names off the list and go listen to what they’ve got to offer on MySpace or elsewhere.

What I hear, I stick into these MISCELLANY posts, regardless of whether I thought the music was worth a shit. More often than not, we’ve had good luck with the choices, but you never know. That’s part of the cringing fun of doing this.

For today’s installment, I listened to The Burning (Denmark), Caliber 666 (Sweden), and Sacred Oath (U.S.). And here’s a hint — I unintentionally hit a trifecta: All killer, and no filler. And although the styles of music are different, all three have returned to the earthy roots of older genres in a very appealing way.   (more after the jump, including your chance to stream the same songs I heard . . .) Continue reading »