Nov 012013
 

Halloween Day turned out to be quite a day for discovering new songs and video debuts. In our first post of this post-Halloween Friday, I collected five new videos that came out yesterday, and in this post I’ve got some other recommended new songs that I discovered on Halloween (or first thing this morning), presented in the order of discovery.

CRYPTICUS

Crypticus is a collaboration between American vocalist/guitarist/bassist Patrick Bruss and Norwegian drummer Brynjar Helgetun that I came across (and wrote about) through their 2012 EP, Insieme Verso Terrore. That was enough to land them a place on our recent list of the best Swedish-style death metal released in the last five years by newer bands. Their third album, The Barrens, is due for release on December 1 and can be pre-ordered on Bandcamp now.

To celebrate Halloween, Crypticus released a free Horror Grind Mixtape on Bandcamp, which they describe as “an original Death Metal mini-anthology”. It’s one nearly 11-minute adrenaline rush called “The Belasco Bequest”, the kind of expertly executed, blast-force chainsaw death metal (with surprises) that Crypticus do so well. Tasty riffs, tasty drumming, tasty lead guitar melodies, varying rhythms, carnivorous vocals — and it’s free! Continue reading »

Apr 172013
 

(Below, TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Detroit’s Scorned Deity, which was released yesterday)

Scorned Deity are an American blackened melodic death metal band I’ve been following for some time now.  I was a fan of their debut The Monarchy Memoirs for its commitment to blistering brutality combined with cheese levels of epically delightful proportions.  Sometimes you just need the theatrics.  Since then Scorned Deity have been working on a second album, Adventum, and it’s finally arrived.  The album as a whole is quite a bit darker and savage than The Monarchy Memoirs, but the signature combination of melodic death metal, black metal, and symphonic incorporations (including things like opera on this album) are still present and stronger than ever.  The result is an engrossing album, and an evolutionary step that I think warrants this band getting some notoriety.

The things that make Adventum a great album are its savage delivery, fantastic melodic texturing, and its tasteful use of symphonic elements, which are incorporated not as half-assed attempts to make a song sound epic, but to bring the songs into expansiveness.  It’s not often that a band succeed in using such elements to actually serve the song, distinguish it, and set it apart.  The electronic elements, the operatic vocals, the choirs and harpsichords — they all really lend a sense of majesty to the music despite the unrelenting beating that the album delivers.  There is nothing entirely new here, these guys just do what they do undeniably well and are skyscraper heights above a lot of their contemporaries. Continue reading »