OVERFLOWING STREAMS ON A SATURDAY

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 072024
 

From midnight on Thursday to midnight on Friday we received 221 e-mails about recent and forthcoming heavy metal releases. That’s not counting the e-mails that were just trying to sell us clothing or physical editions of records that have been out for a while, or to announce tours and shows, or to promote music that’s utterly foreign to anything we cover here (no idea how we get on some of these distribution lists).

That’s what Bandcamp Fridays do to our in-box, and the same thing happens on social media. It’s no longer surprising. Bands and labels know that lots of metalheads wait for these days when more of the money they spend will go to bands and labels. But it sure as hell makes me feel like I’m drowning when I look for things to include in Saturday roundups following Bandcamp Fridays.

And that’s not counting all the new songs and videos that were already on my plate before Friday arrived. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: NEW SONGS FROM HOODED MENACE, THE CROWN, USURPRESS, PORTAL, MAMMOTH GRINDER, AND MORE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jan 082018
 

 

In an effort to catch up with new music that appeared last week (or in some cases that I only discovered last week), I’ve resorted to a two-part OVERFLOWING STREAMS post. And for those who haven’t noticed the format of these posts, they’re a form of personal surrender to the flood of new music. I enjoy writing thoughts about what I want to recommend, but in posts such as this one I just let the music speak for itself because there’s so much to recommend that I don’t have time to blurt out my own reactions.

In Part 1 (here), I collected some newly discovered splits. This one is devoted mainly to new advance tracks, some of which just premiered today, with a few full-album or EP streams in the mix. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS

 Eye-Catchers, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 092013
 

I’m getting a late start on the day and didn’t write a post last night that would be ready to start things off this morning. I stopped at my favorite watering hole at the end of the work day and lions got me. I shouldn’t call my friends lions, but once I used the term “watering hole”, images of prey animals being mauled in the savannah immediately came to mind. I felt well and truly mauled by the time I fell into bed late last night.

While I recover from too much drink and smoke, I thought I’d give you something to gaze upon. This is a collection of recent artwork completed by various artists for forthcoming metal albums or merch. We’ve featured the work of most of these artists before, and I follow what they’re up to, because they kick ass, figuratively speaking of course. There will be new music accompanying some of the art, too.

The first piece, above, is by Japanese master Toshihiro Egawa. It’s something he did for a Russian band I’m pretty high on, 7 H.Target. They’ve now finished a second album, Psy Slam Damage, which is coming out May 16 via Coyote Records. But Egawa’s artwork isn’t for that album. It’s an illustration for the next album . . . 0.00 Apocalypse . . . which will feature vocals by Mirus (ex-Katalepsy) and will be released by Sevared Records sometime later this year. Mark Cooper has also created artwork for the album, and this post will include something by him, too. Continue reading »

MAMMOTH GRINDER

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 062010
 

In “Leviathan,” the philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that the life of man is “nasty, brutish, and short.” And that pretty much sums up the new LP from Austin’s Mammoth Grinder. Extinction of Humanity is 21 minutes of  distorted, stripped-down, feedback-accented, in-your-face, slash-and-sludge mayhem.

If you knew nothing about the band other than its name and that awesome, smoking, skull-faced, album cover above, you’d prudently prepare yourself for some ass-kicking, and you’d be right. Mammoth Grinder has thrown an unusual grab-bag of ingredients into the blender — garage-punk drum rhythms, a mash-up of grindcore pacing and sludgy trudging, harsh vocals somewhere between a hardcore howl and a death-metal growl, and a smorgasboard of heavy, fuzzed-out guitar stylings.

The resulting concoction is massively intoxicating. If you could really drink this venomous brew, it would lead you on the kind of romping binge that leaves you wondering at daylight what the hell you’d done the night before and where all that blood on your hands came from.

To find an analogue to what Extinction of Humanity delivers, scroll back through your catalogue and listen to Wolverine Blues (1993) from Entombed or (not quite as close a fit) Dismember‘s Like An Ever Flowing Stream (1991). Extinction is not strictly old-school death metal, but more like old-school, Swedish-style death ‘n’ roll — except maybe even more visceral in its appeal.  (read more after the jump, and listen to a song . . .) Continue reading »

SARCOLYTIC

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Mar 012010
 

Austin, Texas, has always had a vibrant music scene, but so many years have passed since I grew up there that I’ve lost any personal knowledge of how underground metal has evolved, Central Texas-style. All I can do now is judge from a distance, but based on the output of bands like Averse Sefira, Iron Age, Mammoth Grinder, and The Sword, I assume the scene is alive and well.  Now I can add to the growing pile of evidence the debut full-length from Sarcolytic.

Recently released by Unique Leader Records (also home to Arkaik, the sick California tech-death band whose new album we reviewed yesterday), Thee Arcane Progeny channels a shotgun marriage (and I mean the bride and groom have both got em) of black metal and brutal death metal, with the liturgy prescribed by translated Sumerian texts that tell of humanity’s genesis at the hands of godlike extraterrestrials from a tenth planet. Ancient extraterrestrials aside (for the moment), the music Sarcolytic unleashes is elemental and unadorned in its grim fury. (read more after the jump, and listen to a cut from the album . . .) Continue reading »