We have all sorts of odd ways for picking bands to hear and feature. We pick them based on the appeal of their album art, or the sound of their names, or where they’re from. Sometimes we just mentally throw a dart at a list we keep for our MISCELLANY explorations (the people who watch over us won’t allowed us to have real darts — some bullshit about being a danger to self and others).

Now we’ve come up with a new method of sifting through the great unwashed hordes of metal bands for listening purposes: We decided to pick a handful of bands who, as of the writing of this post, had less than 100 Facebook “likes”. Of course, this tells you absolutely nothing reliable about the quality of the music; many godawful bands have five- and even six-figure Facebook “likes”, and some really good ones just haven’t been widely discovered yet. The low numbers do imply that the band is new, or at least new to Facebook. The bands we picked for this post have got some promising things going on with their music, despite the so-far meager “like” totals. Maybe a little attention will push their totals above the century mark.

In terms of musical styles and genres, today’s line-up is quite varied in their extremity: Melodic black metal from Oak Pantheon (Minnesota), deathcore from Above This (Virginia), death ‘n’ roll from Rudiment of Abhorrence (Washington), and old-school, face-melting death metal from Panic Disorder (Indonesia). Some of this music is also available for free download. Dive in after the jump. Continue reading »