EXOCRINE – LEGEND

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jan 162024
 

(DGR takes on the upcoming new album from Exocrine, out 26 January)

The idea that Exocrine are on their sixth full length release with Legend is one that is mildly eye-popping.

The French Tech Death group have done extremely well for themselves with a very specific formula – one whose sheer violence and velocity is akin to lighting a pallet of Piccolo Pete fireworks all at once and just letting it screech until the neighbors call the cops – that they’ve re-forged and refined time and time again, album after album, but which is still recognizably “them”.

Credit must be given as well to the band for the fact that even as the Tech Death arms race has gone nuclear (and beyond) they’ve always tried to be something more than just a bunch of relentless speed-merchants from the massive slab of headbanging groove which underpinned Molten Giant to their willingness to be completely insane on discs like Maelstrom and The Hybrid Suns, as and when the need arises.

Well, apparently those last two albums weren’t quite big enough to contain all of the band’s insane intensity, and so we have Legend.

Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS ON A SATURDAY (TOO MANY BANDS TO NAME)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Dec 092023
 

Happy Saturday, or whatever other day you’re in when you come across this collection of new music.

I’m taking a lazy way out here — mainly just spewing a bunch of new metal songs and videos at you without much, or any, of the usual commentary. It’s actually not because I’m feeling lazy, it’s because I’m getting crushed by my fucking day job. Sadly (very sadly for me), it’s going to get worse as we approach the end of the year, and even worser in January.

I’ve never given any details about my job, but it’s not 9-5. Some days it might be Noon-3, but other days it might be 5 (a.m.) to midnight, and I have no control over the schedule. Mostly it leaves me plenty of time for NCS. Now, and increasingly until mid-January, it’s going to choke me.

At some point soon I’ll explain what that’s likely to do to some portions of our annual LISTMANIA extravaganza and the usual schedule of daily premieres, but not now. Now I only have time enough to start the spewing of this new stuff I’ve enjoyed, presented in alphabetical order by band name. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2022’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 20): MOTHER OF GRAVES, OBSCENE, EXOCRINE

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2022  No Responses »
Jan 272023
 


Mother of Graves

For the 20th Part of this still-escalating list ,variety is the name of the game, because I’ve chosen three songs that don’t have much in common. I guess you could say they’re all in sub-genres of death metal, but there the connection mostly ends.

Well, not quite. I’ll mention a few more connections: The first two bands both make their homes in Indianapolis; Todd Manning reviewed both of them for us; and all three albums arrived with eye-catching cover art. Continue reading »

EXOCRINE: “THE HYBRID SUNS”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jun 082022
 

(On June 17th Unique Leader Records will unleash a new album by the French technical death metal band Exocrine, and in advance of that we present DGR‘s extensive review.)

French tech-death group Exocrine‘s 2020 release Maelstrom landed pretty hard with me here at the site. Up to that point the group’s albums had always been a particular highlight of the given year of their release but Maelstrom really felt like the stars aligning for them. Their combination of head-spinning songwriting and sheer musical heft mixed well with the group’s experimentation throughout the album with varying synth lines, clean backing vocals, occasional brass and trumpet section solos for scene-setting, and atmospheric works, which oftentimes was more excessive than necessary.

It all worked for Maelstrom though, and made that album into an adventure, more than just the latest headspinner from a group known for making headspinners. Once you reached “Wall Of Water” on that album, you’d essentially reached the top of the roller-coaster and were now ready to accelerate downhill into whatever Exocrine had in store for you. That’s why the announcement of the group’s newest album, The Hybrid Suns – nearly two years later – was an exciting one. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: EXOCRINE, ORIGIN, UNTO OTHERS, WORMROT, PRIMITIVE MAN, GIN LANE

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 162022
 

I hope your weekend is off to a good start. I got my good start at a baseball home opener last night, arrived home late, and spent a chunk of the morning texting with fellow Mariners fans, still reveling in the ass-whipping they administered to the much-loathed Astros. Which is to say that this roundup will be a relatively short one.

A regrettably short one, because this past week was huge for new metal. I did a fairly good job making lists of new stuff I spotted, and it sure seemed like the torrent was greater than average. I basically just took random shots at some bands who have already proven themselves, and a few that seemed intriguing. To make the quick search a bit easier, I left all the black metal options to explore for tomorrow’s usual column. Be forewarned that this includes a couple exceptions to our rule about singing.

EXOCRINE (France)

To lead off we’ll go with a new Exocrine song, which two of my NCS comrades enthusiastically pushed my way. It’s the title track from the band’s fifth album, The Hybrid Suns, which Unique Leader plans to release on June 17th. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 122): EXOCRINE

 Album Reviews, THE SYNN REPORT  2 Responses »
Jul 012020
 

 

(Andy Synn has chosen to devote his SYNN REPORT for the month of June to the discography of the French band Exocrine, whose new album Maelstrom was released by Unique Leader on June 26th.)

Recommended for fans of: The Faceless, Gorod, Beneath the Massacre

The purpose of The Synn Report is, obviously, to give our readers an overview of the background and back-catalogue of whatever band I select each month.

One of the great things about this approach, of course, is that it allows all of us (myself included) to see just how the band in question has evolved over the course of their career.

In the case of French four-piece Exocrine the band’s evolution has led them to grow from some relatively humble beginnings into something far more titanic, and if 2018’s blazing Molten Giant didn’t convince you of the group’s tech-tastic lethality then perhaps their recently released fourth record, Maelstrom, will?

Before then, of course, there’s three other albums to sink your teeth into… Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 1): ALKYMIST, APOSENTO, ASHTAR, BEYOND CREATION, BLAZE OF SORROW, CALLIGRAM, CATTLE DECAPITATION, COSMIC BURIAL, DEFACING GOD, DYING FETUS, EXOCRINE, FORGOTTEN TOMB

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 032020
 

 

We begin another mega-roundup today to assist you in enduring your shut-in time, with a second installment planned for Saturday. Long on music and short on words, it’s arranged alphabetically by band name. We have A-F today, and F through W tomorrow, unless an X, Y, or Z band surfaces between now and then.

Lots of old friends in this Part I, and some new names, a scattering of both big names and obscure ones, as well as a mix of genres. Almost everything here surfaced in the last few days. This time I added some artwork thumbnails, but don’t get used to that. It takes time I usually don’t have when I compile these monster collections.

ALKYMIST (Denmark)

Ugly, sludgy riffing that moans and groans… methodical drum pounding… grotesque, gritty growls and terrifying howls… a meaty bass line combined with eerie ringing notes… flares of evil braying chords rising up like a death anthem and descending like a plague gouging its way into the body… and then the guitar begins to pulse and the drums begin to hammer and rock… and things get fairly demented and frightening near the end before a final bout of gouging, groaning, and pounding. Really, the whole song is evil…. Continue reading »

DGR’S QUEST TO TURN 2018 INTO A COFFEE TABLE BOOK – ISSUE THREE: 30-21

 LISTMANIA 2018  1 Response »
Jan 022019
 

 

(Here’s the third installment of DGR’s 5-part year-end effort to sink our site beneath an avalanche of words and a deluge of music.)

Now that I’ve broken it out from the tremendous bulk of the rest of my year-end collective, I’m amused by how much world traveling this specific subset of the list does. It spends a surprising amount of time in France (which has done very well for itself these past few years), some time in the States, some time in Australia, and even manages to touch base with both Canada and Sweden for a few. It is also probably the most varied intsallment so far — the tech-death crews make a strong play here, but you’ll also start seeing some of the prefix-core resurgence that happened recently, as well as some ugly-as-fuck grind (on two fronts). And then there’s however in the hell Author & Punisher might be described.

Oh, did I spoil that Author & Punisher is making an appearance here? Whoops. Well too bad, Beastland is fucking killer but if you want to know why you’ll have to read on and see just where the San Diego noise-engineer found himself. There’s still a lot of list left to go, and knowing me, at least two-thousand more words of intro paragraph left to be written somewhere so let’s get the third chunk of this motherfucker going. Continue reading »

EXOCRINE: “MOLTEN GIANT”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Aug 122018
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new third album by the French death metal band Exocrine, which will be released by Unique Leader Records on August 17.)

There’s a sort of hyper-manic, throw-in-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink school of death metal that, while adopted by few bands, has always been really appealing to me. The main two bands I think of when this approach comes to mind are the legendary hydro-grinders Cephalic Carnage and Cattle Decapitation since their reinvention, starting at Monolith Of Inhumanity. Cephalic Carnage have been out of the album-release game a long time especially, and I feel like they’re a definitely missed icon in extreme metal right now.

Exocrine, however, appear to be a band who’ve been working on usurping the throne of the legendary progressive technical death/grind behemoths by not only doing a convincing spin on the band’s sound, but taking the template Cephalic established and propelling it to an over-the-top extreme. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: HIDEOUS DIVINITY, FIRESPAWN, WOLFHEART, FUOCO FATUO, ZEAL AND ARDOR, EXOCRINE, SEPULCHRAL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Feb 042017
 

 

It’s been a crazy week for this half-witted editor. Interferences by my fucking day job coupled with interferences by my non-blogging personal life prevented me from posting any news and new-music round-ups all week. That means I’ve accumulated an enormous list of things since last weekend. Unfortunately, I still won’t have time to catch up this weekend.

I’ve got work I need to do today for an annual event I’m attending tonight with my spouse, and based on past experience, I’ll be in no condition to write anything on Sunday morning. I’ve agreed to post one premiere tomorrow, which I’ll get ready today, but there probably won’t be anything else on the site tomorrow. Maybe the coming week will be less crazy and I can do a delayed Shades of Black thing and/or a “That’s Metal!” post after the new week begins.

Okay, enough with the excuses. On to a regrettably small but diverse collection of new things I noticed last week.

HIDEOUS DIVINITY

When I first started using the title “Seen and Heard“, it was because I intended to include both news about, and artwork from, new albums, even when there was nothing yet to hear, as well as streams of new songs. And I have items in both categories to recommend today in this large collection, beginning with the artwork at the top of this post. Continue reading »