Hello fellow readers. Well, with our dear leader and his brethren (or, according to some conspiracy theorists, just Islander and his multiple online personas) otherwise occupied indulging in copious liquid refreshments (or, worried about butt chastity, it’s not clear which…), I thought I’d make myself at home and spam you all about one of my favourite surprise finds this year – The Devil.

Sometimes the greatest finds are ones you know nothing of, where you just hit play and randomly stumble across some aural goodness, which is just the case for my experience of this little gem: officially a November 2012 release, I found this album through Candlelight Records’ Bandcamp page sometime early this year, and after the initial shock of realizing there was no band previously claiming the all-metal moniker of ‘The Devil’ (“hey, who’s that you’re listening to?”….. “I’m listening to the devil!! Muah-ha-haa”  \m/), I hit play and found myself strangely intrigued at what this band had to offer….

This is The Devil’s first album, in which they offer up a kind of instrumental doomish slab of riff. I say ‘kind of instrumental’ as there’s no vocals as such, but the vocal elements are instead replaced by audio samples to provide the thematic, lyrical, and conceptual content; and boy does the album cover some conceptual ground: from that favourite of metal topics – the prospect of nuclear war (see ‘Extinction Level Event’ video below) — to the military-industrial complex, alien invasion (“Universe”; video below), life after death, long-gone civilizations, 9/11, and more. Continue reading »