I’ve had a busy weekend, with two late nights in a row catching Deafheaven and Autopsy/Black Breath in Seattle (yes, they all killed), on top of more activity than usual during the daylight hours. But I did manage to do some web surfing and e-mail reading and found quite a lot of new things to like. I’ve collected a few of them in this post and will try to round-up the others for another post tomorrow.

NORTHLESS

I heard a lot of good things about this Milwaukee band’s last album Clandestine Abuse (2011), but somehow it got lost in the mountainous piles of music I intended to check out. I’m not going to miss the next one. Its title is World Keeps Sinking and it’s due for release on August 23 by Gilead Media. And why am I not going to miss it? Because this morning I heard the album’s first advance track, “Kuru”, and it kills.

The mid-paced song is freighted with earth-splitting sludge riffs and laced with caustic hardcore-style howls, heavy as fuck and doomed as a village in the path of a lava flow. But there’s more to the song than the weight of sledgehammers coming down on fragile skulls and the dissonance of squalling guitars. The band incorporate some surprising instrumental segments that hint at post-rock and even jazz, without diminishing the music’s suffocating atmosphere of hopelessness. Good stuff — which you can hear next (the album can be pre-ordered here). Continue reading »