Good morning, it’s time to metal. Here’s some news you might have missed from the last few days:
Another week, another dollar…er…another day, another dollar. Yea whatever, you get the idea, another week has slipped by us and here we are on the best day of the week with tons of new metal to soundtrack whatever it is you’ll be doing. Tyrannosorceress kicks us off in style with their black metal debut Shattering Light’s Creation, never mind the name just dig in…pronto. Next up is Ex Eye from the experimental, jazzy and seemingly otherworldly supergroup of sorts, Ex Eye, and if you happen to be in the market for something different this is the one to fit that bill. Moving along, everyone’s favorite industrial/noise/black metal group american return with their second full length Violate and Control and put quite simply — it’s a pulsating beast of an album. Filling out the opening slots is France’s Skelethal with their classically inspired yet crushingly heavy death metal debut Of the Depths… So there you have it with the top slots, keep diving for so much more that could have easily been at the top of this list. But, we can only fit so many you know? Anyway, until next week… Continue reading
Greetings my dear congregation. While we normally try to find pairings that offer similar characteristics on this column, today is going to be a ceremony of opposites. Dark beer and dark music is my usual modus operandi, but on a day where it is literally 100 degrees out, dark syrup-y drinks are not going to work. Instead, something more palate cleansing is going to be on the menu. Let’s get down to business. The Metal: Impetuous Ritual’s Blight Upon Martyred Sentience. The Booze: Campanology Brewing’s Harmony Foretold. Continue reading
Lately, there seems to be an ever-flowing stream of Swedish-sounding death metal — and we’re talking real death metal, not melodeath — that doesn’t actually come from Sweden. I have a particularly dark recollection of Arizona natives Gatecreeper wowing the hell out of me with last year’s Sonoran Deprivation, while Germany’s Revel in Flesh and Holland’s Bodyfarm have also done a nice job carrying listeners down a Stockholm-inspired left hand path in recent years.
The latest addition to this group is France’s Skelethal, who’ll likely send listeners tumbling into the grave with their debut full-length, Of the Depths. It’s an album plucked straight from the murky depths where no life dwells, and while it’s hardly charting any new musical courses, it’s still a solid listen and one of the more entertaining death metal releases of the year to date. Continue reading
There’s a power to naming things. Labeling, categorizing, putting things into some kind of identifiable framework helps us to make sense of our thoughts and feelings. When something defies easy categorization it can challenge us to reconfigure that framework; putting the work in yields a greater pleasure than what came before. Ex Eye, the new group put together and anchored by saxophonist Colin Stetson, seeks to challenge our perceptions of metal with their debut Ex Eye and succeeds in creating a enveloping, dense work of instrumental music that doesn’t sacrifice once facet of its sound for another. Continue reading
