OUR LIST OF 2017’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 10): SATYRICON, WOLFHEART, HAVUKRUUNU

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2017  6 Responses »
Jan 232018
 

Oslo 05072017. Photo: Marius Viken

 

I guess it’s not a bad time to take stock of where we are in the rollout of this 2017 edition of our Most Infectious Song list, since this is the 10th Part. With the three songs I’m adding today, we’re up to a total of 32 tracks. I had planned to finish the list by the end of this month, so we can finally close the book on last year (or mostly close it) and focus our time more exclusively on the flood of new metal that’s been coming our way in 2018. If I follow through on that plan, it really just means I’ll be calling an arbitrary halt… because I’m still just figuring this out as I go along.

I suppose if I really feel that calling a dead halt on January 31 would leave too many gems behind, I might edge into February, but on the other hand, that could become a very slippery slope. I do have 8 days left in the month, and if I knock out an average of three tracks per day, I can make it to 56 songs… which would be about 20 fewer than usual for this series. We’ll see. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD BY DGR (PART 3): NECROPHOBIC, THE ATLAS MOTH, THE ABSENCE, SAMAEL, LONG DISTANCE CALLING

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jan 222018
 


Necrophobic

 

(DGR has stepped into the round-up void left by our editor this past week and has produced a three-part collection of recent songs and videos. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here.)

 

Three weeks into January, and judging by the handful of massive Seen and Heard and Overflowing Streams posts we’ve had to put up, you could say that we’ve managed to the get ourselves into gear as our beloved musical genre has already offloaded numerous news bits upon us in the new year.

I, your ever-faithful servant, have also been doing my best to go along with my ragged fish net and catch everything that might’ve slipped by us — which in the case of this post dates back to last week and then some. Continue reading »

A DGR SEEN AND HEARD: DISTASTE, LENG TCH’E, ABORTED, THE HAUNTED, SAMAEL, THE RITUAL AURA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jun 272017
 

 

(DGR once again takes over round-up duties at our metallic fortress, presenting news and new music from six bands.)

This weekend was glorious if you were in a death grind sort of mood, as it felt like Friday was the first crack in a dam about to burst from a small handful of bands. Austria’s Distaste put out a new EP entitled Todt (which is curently name-your-own-price), and Belgium-based grinders Leng Tch’e and their fellow countrymen in the restless Aborted both began streaming new songs from their upcoming releases.

In fact, in compling this roundup I felt I had to temper the blade a little bit by tacking on something that wasn’t just raw fury from front to back, so Samael find themselves paired up alongside an EP announcement for Australian tech-death wonders The Ritual Aura and an ambient teaser that, were we not aware of just how heavy those guys can get, would be fairly calming. So, if you were looking to start your day without a massive pile of non-stop guitar batterings, relentless drumming, and vocals fired at the speed of a machine-gun, my friend…you’ve come to the wrong place. Continue reading »

A SLOW START: DARKEST HOUR, KING OF ASGARD, SAMAEL, ACCIDENTAL SUICIDE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Jul 182014
 

I’m getting a slow blog start today. Yesterday I traveled with a friend to Oshkosh, Wisconsin (my friend actually grew up in Oshkosh), in order to attend the Gilead Fest, which starts tonight and runs through the weekend. We got in late and stayed up later, eating dinner and drinking Wisconsin brews, and I slept in.

When people asked what we were doing in town (as many did), we told them we were here for a metal festival, and they all said, “Oh,  Rock USA”. Turns out that festival began Wednesday and runs through Saturday and it’s here is Oshkosh, too. With Slayer and Rob Zombie and Korn and Five Finger Death Punch and… no, we’re not here for that thing. But it is a weird fuckin’ coincidence and explains why we had some trouble finding a hotel or motel with vacancies.

Anyway, I’m getting a slow start on the blog day. So I’m just going to throw some things at you that I came across as I was waking up. Starting with this highly unexpected piece of music from Darkest Hour: “By the Starlight”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: DESULTOR, SAMAEL, CORONAL MASS EJECTION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jun 012014
 

I’ve been attending a two-day picnic with friends and co-workers, this Sunday being the second day.  On the one hand, it’s been a shitload of fun. On the other hand, it has diverted from me from catching up on new metal, and I was really far behind even before the weekend began. But I hate to let a day go by without posting something, so I grabbed a few things to throw your way. This is a truly random assortment, but perhaps it will prove entertaining anyway.

DESULTOR

My NCS comrade Andy Synn sent me a link to a debut album entitled Masters of Hate by a Swedish duo named Desultor that’s streaming in full on YouTube. I’ve been listening to it with half an ear while doing some other things, which is hardly a good way  to listen to an album. And this obviously isn’t a review. But the album is so striking that I thought I would at least pass it along.

The first track is a two-minute introduction that sounds a bit like something from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It makes the songs that follow all the more surprising. The music is an explosion of extravagant melodic death metal. The blazing instrumental work is almost completely overpowering, with massive jet-fueled riffs and off-the-hook percussion roaring like a silo on fire (Hour of Penance and Fleshgod Apocalypse came to mind as I listened). The songs are hugely infectious while also unleashing an obliterating sonic assault. Continue reading »

. . . AND STILL MORE VICIOUSNESS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 282011
 

I don’t think two posts’ worth of viciousness are enough to ameliorate the suckitude of this Monday. We need one more. Unless of course I come across even more slashing metal before this vicious Monday turns into a moderately less vicious Tuesday.

This next offering is a brand new song from Samael, a Swiss band whose experimental brand of black metal will be known to many of you. After almost three years of work, their new album, Lex Mundi, will be released on April 29 in Europe and May 3 in North America via Nuclear Blast Records.

The cover art is by Patrick Pidoux, who is also the drummer for a band called Sludge. It’s apparently intended to be shiny black imagery on a matte-black background. When I first saw it on other sites, it just looked like a solid black square (which may have something to do with the settings on my computer). Anyway, to bring out the imagery, I enhanced the exposure of the image on a photo program, and the result is above.

As for the song, it’s awesome. I’m not terribly well-versed in Samael’s extensive discography, but it doesn’t sound quite like anything from the band that I’ve heard before. It features tribal rhythms and scorching guitars, and it’s just massively infectious. You listen to this, and in addition to whispering “Fuck Mondays” under your breath, you may be moved to start pounding any nearby flat surfaces with both fists. Go past the jump and stream this mutha . . . Continue reading »

MORE 2010 SICKNESS (Part 10)

 Forthcoming Albums  12 Responses »
Nov 022010
 

Another month has passed. Another Halloween has come and gone. Here in Seattle, we are looking forward to what is supposed to be an especially wet, dark, cold, sucktastic winter — which is really saying something, given that all Seattle winters are wet, dark, cold, and sucktastic. If they weren’t, we would have the population of Los Angeles, so there’s a silver lining to that massively dark cloud.

Yes, the seasons come and they go, the great wheel of life rolls forward, and we are all one month closer to our end, whatever it may be. But as time inexorably passes, new things happen. In particular, we find out about new metal gestating in studios around the world, struggling and kicking and yearning to erupt into the air, screaming like a banshee.

And that brings us to another monthly installment of METAL IN THE FORGE, in which we cobble together a list of forthcoming new albums, cribbing like rag-gatherers and lint-pickers from PR releases and metal news sites like Blabbermouth in order to construct a line-up of new music that at least we’re interested in hearing, even if no one else is.

What we do in this series of posts is update the list of forthcoming new albums we first posted on January 1. (All the other updates can be found via the “Forthcoming Albums” category link on the right side of our pages.) After the jump, in alphabetical order, is a list of still more projected new releases we didn’t know about at the time of our previous updates, or new info about some of the previously noted releases. Continue reading »

NOTHNEGAL

 Album Reviews, Metal News  7 Responses »
Jul 042010
 

Fair warning: This will be one extended session of spittle-flecked frothing at the mouth, because we haven’t been this blown away since stumbling into a full-fledged Seattle windstorm last winter. So get the safety glasses on and strap on sanitary masks if you got ’em.

The subject of our enthusiasm is Nothnegal. They’re a band from The Republic of the Maldives that now includes two non-Maldivian heavyweights — drummer Kevin Talley from Dååth and keyboardist Marco Sneck from those Finnish swamplords Kalmah. They’ve got a four-song EP to their credit called Antidote of Realism and they’ve just signed with Season of Mist for the release of their debut album early next year.

Oh yeah, they’re also playing with Arch Enemy this month and touring Europe in the fall with the likes of Rotting Christ, Samael, and Finntroll.

And we’d wager that most of you have never heard of them. Until earlier this week, we hadn’t either. But this band shows all the seismic signs of an impending Vesuvius-sized eruption onto the scene — and based on the band’s output to date, it would be well-deserved.

If you like technically immaculate, headbangingly compulsive, Scandinavian-style melodic death metal played at autobahn speed, stay with us after the jump. Among other things, we’ll stream all four tracks from that EP and we’ll show you how to download a cut from Nothnegal’s forthcoming debut album. Continue reading »