Unleashing their 5^th album Blinded by Rage (inspired by a Gandhi quote), Austrian Metallers Lost Dreams showcase their brand of Soilwork-inspired Melodic Death Metal with aspects of Metalcore and a strong variety of vocal approaches to keep things interesting. Their style has changed over the years, dropping the Symphonic and Blackened elements of earlier works and focusing more on groove and Gothenburg.

Hide And Seek kicks off as a fairly standard number, with a wall of distortion under pounding drums giving way to a melodic riff. There are some low growls from vocalist Stefan Traunig, much in the vein of Christian Älvestam, before he employs a Norther-like scream. Some eerie moments of spoken word also occur, particularly in quieter sections, which at first stick out but become a part of the sound after a couple of spins.

So I got a friendship request on YT by a bunch of German guys making up a band named Tenside. I checked out some of their stuff and fuckin’ liked what I heard. From there I kinda went on a directionless surf, clicking suggestions randomly. I do this on occasion, but seldomly have I gone through one so fruitful as this one. Let me present you with my best findings, including a song by the band with which it all started.

Regular visitor and contributor of great suggestions Jonas came up with yet another great band the other day. In this case it’s a band from Vienna, Austria, called Artas, that delivers a raw edged piece of Melodic Death Metal with lyrics partly in German.

The five-headed band formed in 2006 and is up to its second full-length release now, with Riotology having been released at the end of last January. We’ve not heard it in full, but we have heard one song, and if all songs on the album are that wicked, Riotology delivers some extreme value for money! Why? Because it has 16 songs on it, and nearly 70 minutes of playing time. By all modern means, that is a lengthy album!

After the break we’ll feed you a music video for a song called Rassenhass and tell you what we think of it.

We did some mild Black Metal yesterday, we’ll do some more today. But where yesterday’s band crawled out of the Finnish soil, today’s band came rolling down off the Austrian mountains. Eschaton is from the city of Linz, in upper Austria, which is also the city in which Adolf Hitler went to school. Sorry ‘bout that chaps! I just searched Wikipedia for an interesting fact about Linz, and this was pretty much the most interesting one that popped up.

But where listening to Hitler is like listening to a fart-festering asshole, listening to Eschaton is good for the soul. The band released a new EP in early October 2010, which was its second release since forming in 2002 and after releasing a full-length in 2004. The songs on it provide a violent sort of Black Metal, raw, cathartic and deeply evil, all two of them.

That’s right, there are only two songs on this EP, and to be honest they aren’t all that long either; just over five and eight minutes respectively. I guess short-ass releases will just have to make do with short-ass reviews like this. If anything, it’s not going to be quantity to count here, but quality.

Tristwood hails from Austria and has been active since 2001. Encyclopaedia Metallum labels them Industrial Death/Black Metal which I suppose is pretty acurate. Think Deicide smothered in Industrial Metal. Got your attention? How about if I told you their latest album Dystopia et Disturbia is available for free and legal download?

Oooooh! Fuck yeah! Orgasmic music up ahead! Sole Method is an Austrian producer of thick rolling Groove with a pinch of Thrash. In the four-member band’s nearly five years of existence it came up with four releases already, of which two demos and two full lengths (2008 and 2010). The one from 2008 carries the title Collateral Suicide. Go Sick is that album’s opening track, for which they made a video.

It’s a pretty meager vid though. Just a dude in a straight jacket worming around in front of a camera, alternated with the band grooving themselves a headache. But then! Then there’s the music. Which, in line with the song’s title, is totally SICK!