Gomorrah release new track

gomorrah

 

Nu-thrash band Gomorrah has revealed one track from their upcoming album to be released later this year. The single is called “Phantom Sun” and bears unmistakable resemblance to modern acts like Sylosis.

 

Guitarist Colton Deem says:

This song is but a sample of the new refined Gomorrah sound we’re trying to encompass with the new record. A lot of the new tracks are a bit more diverse in their flow and construct than our prior work. “Phantom Sun” is one of the first songs we finished writing for the album and it’s  a good representation of what’s to come.

 

https://soundcloud.com/metalgomorrah/phantom-sun

No Comments

Tags: , , ,

May 2015: The decent and the rescuable

P0202

 

This is a “best of the month” list for this month, but making the title “Best of May 2015” sounds like giving too much of a spotlight for such a short span of time, and devaluating the word “Best of” somewhat, in my opinion. Therefore I chose a title to reflect reality more clearly: these are the only albums we heard of on this website this month that were decent enough to not be considered utter disgraces to the metal genre (those were in the SMRs or were ignored). The “decent” are those that show consistency in style, coherence, a direction and a clear artistic voice and goals. The “rescuable” are those that are still confused in their composition — unclear, or that seemed to be impeded from development by their own approach to music-making (or that of their own genre).

 

The Decent

  • Ascended Dead – The Advent                                      review
  • Blasphemic Cruelty – Crucible of the Infernum      review
  • Exhumation – Opus Death                                           review
  • Luciferian Rites – When the Light Dies                     review
  • Necrophor – Exterminatus                                          review
  • Nekromanteion – Cosmic Horrors                             review
  • Perversor – Anticosmocrator                                      review
  • Shroud of the Heretic – Unorthodox Equilibrium  review
  • Undead – False Prophecies                                           review

 

The Rescuable

  • Blind Guardian – Beyond the Red Mirror                review
  • Bureviy – Concealed Beyond the Space                     review
  • Dew-Scented – Intermination                                     review
  • Maruta – Remain Dystopian                                       review
  • Undergang – Døden Læger Alle Sår                           review
  • Wende – Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft    review
4 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Encyrcle to release new album

encyrcleDanish Power-Speed Metal band Encyrcle will be releasing their new album on June 2. You can listen to a preview of the album on Soundcloud.

While the label and the media would have you believe the band is playing some innovative form of mixture of genres, this is a laughable marketing attempt at disguising what is just a band playing a refined and expertly played Speed Metal in the vein of Epic Power Metal full of hooks.

 

 

No Comments

Tags: , ,

Final Fright – Artificial Perfection

finalfright-artificialperfection-cover2015

Hailing from Italy, Final Fright play ripping speed metal right out of the mid 1980s. Established in 2010, the band played covers, released the demo Abusive Grindhouse in 2012 and now in 2015 present us with their first full-length album, Artificial Perfection.

Unabashedly retro in their choice of style, Final Fright feels completely at home and does not try to impose modern conventions on the language of this particular brand of speed metal. Neither is the band copy pasting from particular acts. Artificial Perfection sounds like a someone learning and dominating a foreign language. When this happens, the music does not come out sounding like a cardboard front disguising something else, but the artists are able to express themselves as native speakers in the lingo of the genre.

But speaking a language does not necessarily imply you have something worth saying. So it is that the honest and proficient handling of the musical language by Final Fright is satisfactory and even enjoyable but unexceptional all the same. People looking for bouncy, authentic speed metal in a different mouth and voice but offering nothing different will find this is a fantastic release for them.

1 Comment

Tags: , , , , , ,

UnKured – Mutated Earth

mutatedearth

A riff-salad is often deemed to be intrinsically affiliated to music with no order and random ideas.  But the best use of this song-writing approach make use of different kinds relationships between one riff and the next, and between all riffs in the song. Given the superficial independence of motifs and patterns of different riffs, stylistic consistency is, above all, indispensable.

Advertised as Thrash, UnKured make schyzophrenic music materializing the worse riff-salad nightmares.  Not only does each new riff that comes do away with whatever the previous riff was saying, but influences from the most undefined and messy prog-speed albums like The Sound of Perseverance to almost deathcore-like breakdown rhythms and back to late 1980s barking death metal make an appearance.

Fans looking for the fun provided by Chuck Schuldiner’s naivete will enjoy this release even though this is less organized and more confusing for anyone trying to get an integral view of the music.

4 Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Xendra – Xendra

Xendra

Xendra was a heavy metal project from the Central American country, Honduras. Rumor has it that their only album was recorded within one week around the turn of the century. The simplicity of the production would never put this into doubt as it is just barely satisfies the requirements of the music to be listenable.

 

As Brett Stevens said in a previous article, one could make the experiment of imagining music played through a primitive or simple device or format like a midi output and then see how interesting the music becomes then as a measure of the actual resulting power of the composition. It is in this respect that the barely satisfactory production in this album becomes a test for the music. Despite the production, the compositions’ musical qualities shine through, modest as they admittedly are in the very-large scale of music appreciation.

 

Xendra’s brand of late heavy metal also takes on speed metal characteristics with melodic tendencies. This is a typical 1990s mid-paced, simple melodic heavy/speed amalgam that is exemplified today by Cruxiter. Most of the most iconic and prominent Central American metal bands played in this style. Its raw yet singable character being particularly apt to work as a channel for a kind of urban folk style. I often use a word callejero(“of the street”) to describe the particular brand of heavy metal that developed in Central and northern South America. It is a folk heavy metal not because it makes use of old aboriginal melodies for motifs, but rather because it is the language of the young people in touch with the crudest reality of their modern countries. As such it tends to be be full of socio-political protest, prone to melancholic bouts and occult visionary prophecies. We should stress that the latter is appropriate and perhaps even mandatory for any respectable underground metal genre. As a kind of folk music, a few simpler songs in verse chorus manner are sparkled throughout the sixteen tracks of the album. These do not sound pandering as indulging themselves or the singer but are veritable laments voiced impersonally.

 

Claiming to be influenced from the more mainstream rock and hard rock progressive outfits like Rush and Dream Theater, someone listening in a slightly distracted manner would miss where and how Xendra makes these influences manifest. While we hear Dream Theater making technical acrobatics and the contrasts from one section of the music to the next the main point of the music, a more sensible and humble band like Xendra uses them in key points as tools towards smooth expansion or creative and beautiful articulation between sections. The rendition of the heavy metal callejero as presented in 2000’s Xendra is one of the best of its kind. Displaying elegant songwriting, subtlety and the restraint of talented instrumentalists using their technical abilities where the music needs them, rather than when their ego fancies it.

 

The full album can be downloaded here.

 

 

1 Comment

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Celebrating Jeff Hanneman

jeff_hanneman_slayer

Today, May 2, in 2013 founding Slayer guitarist and composer Jeff Hanneman died.

During his brief tour of planet Earth, Hanneman fused the boundaryless songwriting of hardcore punk with the riff-based narrative ideas of heavy metal, producing what became an important template for all metal to follow. Punk, by reducing music to modal strips which fit within a percussive framework instead of accentuating it, and metal, with its phrasal tendencies that required internal dialogue between the riffs, gave rise to a new language with the first four Slayer albums which were mostly composed by Hanneman.

His music also took on a different form because of its perspective on the modern world as exhibited in both sound and lyrics. In his eyes, modern life became not a struggle for technology and politics to dominate the beast within, but a mythological conflict between what humans desire is true and project upon the world and a hidden layer of realistic truth in denial of which humans — and human civilization — self-destruct.

For these innovations, and the spirit that caused them, many of us feel indebted to Hanneman and honored to celebrate his art:

Having someone like you to lay down a realistic but transcendentally imaginative view of the universe really helped. I will never forget, and I am certain I am not alone. You spent your days reprogramming the cosmos with fiendish guitar riffs and that has made all the difference. Even though we never knew each other, in a way, we were best of friends.

This second of May, celebrate Jeff Hanneman not only with his music, but by carrying forth his legacy of clear-sighted realism matched to transcendental mythology, in all that you do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=es5nlvCuQPA

9 Comments

Tags: , , , ,

Classic reviews:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z