Your humble editor has been under the weather since last weekend, causing him to fall even further behind in planned NCS projects (and also causing him occasionally to refer to himself in the third person). Concentrating for very long has proven difficult, and given that your editor’s normal attention span is comparable to that of a hummingbird, this is a serious deficit. I haven’t been able to listen to more than a song or two at a stretch, and even typing hurts.

However, the show must go on, and it occurred to me that writing another installment of MISCELLANY would be feasible despite my current disabilities.  Why?  Because in the MISCELLANY series, the general rule is that I only listen to one song per band from bands whose music I’ve never heard before, and then I dutifully record the results, not knowing in advance whether the music will or won’t be worthwhile.

Almost two months have passed since the last installment of this series, and the list of listening candidates has grown to gargantuan proportions. Confronted with so many choices, I decided to take the easy way out and simply pick the last three bands who contacted us (either directly or through a PR representative): Funeral Whore (The Netherlands), Falling Leaves (Jordan), and Parius (U.S. – Pennsylvania).

FUNERAL WHORE

What first caught my attention about this Dutch band was the news that their debut album, Step Into Damnation, would be released by the Mexican label Chaos Records (on February 27). I’ve had good luck with Chaos releases, and of course it didn’t hurt one tiny bit that the music was described with references to Grave, Unleashed, and Entombed. Continue reading »