A couple of months ago we published an interview with France’s Arkan, which was taken by Kilik2049. In reality Kilik2049 is called Simon and he is one of the two guitarists / vocalists in a beginning French band based out of Le Mans – yes, that’s where they do those 24-hour races. The band’s called Blind Tears and they do a grungy piece of Doom Metal. And of course we’re happy to return the favor and give them some air time.
They’ve got a collection of twelve songs out that they’ve titled First Tears. Catchy! It’s not all up to standards yet and the recording quality is poor, but it’s clear the band has some interesting ideas they’re working on. They’re mixing a very classic Metal feel with depressing darkness and doom elements. Sabbath and Iron Maiden are the most apparent influences and these then are mixed with fifty cans of bleach and fifty more of tar.
Pour yourself some beer and another one over your head, sniff your sweaty armpits, scratch your crotch. Press play on Hatred United and bang your head like there’s no tomorrow. Windmill when you can, bang your fists on the wall, kick your army boots through the TV screen and shout foul language at your mom cooking dinner.
For Hatred United, two Finnish underground formations joined their love for raw and hatred for everything else into eight songs of noise. The first, Gasmask Violence, is new to us, but Vuohi is a group we’ve seen before when we reviewed their The Rising Era of Goat release about two months ago. Kick it in gear!
Style-wise, Heartless is a bit of an oddball. On the one hand they call themselves ”Hardcore warriors”, so I’m expecting some pretty sweet guys with spiky hair, fighting injustice and dressing up like 80’s punk dudes. Call me a camel cunt, but that’s my image of Hardcore, the real thing, not the blend with Metal. Anyfuck, some of that (spiky hair, dressing up in studded vests and checkered shirts) turned out fairly accurate, whereas other stuff did not.
Mainly I had to change my expectations when I saw the album cover of this band’s latest effort. It’s an effort called Hell is Other People, which is to be released on November 7th and the cover depicts the kind of gritty and horrific imagery you’d expect on the cover of a Satan-loving Sludge band’s album. Not on a Hardcore album. So going into the music, I discovered Heartless is not an average Hardcore band!
I just saw this over at NCS and couldn’t pass up sharing it here. On the evening of Oct. 22nd Kvelertak, Skeletonwitch, Tombs and Psychic Limbs played a show on a small cruise boat in NYC. An A/V dude going by the name (((unartig))) captured the performances on video and has put them, along with many more, at his Vimeo page. Skeletonwitch is one of my very favorite bands so only their set is ahead here along with a music video and a track from their latest, Forever Abomination.
It’s not too long ago when we discussed Unsphered, a Finnish Death Metal band with more talents than a circus elephant holding a maths degree, and taking elements from all over the realm of Metal, from Progressive to Thrash to Melodic to Power. It’s all there explicitly yet brilliantly mixed and blended into something of rare coherence and unity. And intelligence.
About a month ago the band released its new EP, Katharsis, following up on its 2009 debut self-titled full-length. Katharsis contains only three songs and just over eighteen minutes of playing time, but it is so impressive that even God loves it. I think he said that to me when I wasn’t listening.
Now the good news about this EP is that you can download it for free. We’ll hook you up with a download link at the end of this review! Also, we would like to note that apparently the band pic we’ve used is not currently up to date. This is an old line up. However, we’ll roll with it as long as there’s no substitute available.
No, this is not a Spanish band. It’s a Polish band, from a city called Mielec. Yet all of their four studio albums, released between 2004 and last month carry Spanish titles. Their latest is called Los Asesinos del Sur, which according to an online translation means ‘The Murderers of the South’.
Stillborn is an Anti-Christian, Satanic Blackened Death Metal outfit and with that in mind the titles of their earlier works, Satanas el Grande (Satan the Great), Manifiesto de Blasfemia (Manifest of Blasphemy) and Esta Rebelión es Eterna (This Rebellion is Eternal), make sense. The Murderers of the South eludes me though, no clue what it’s supposed to mean in the context of worshipping Beelzebub. Not that I care much, as this shit sounds pretty decent and that’s all I give a hairy cock about.
See that bunch of tough looking Poles down there? The bunch that looks at you like you’re a baby they’re about to have for breakfast? That’s Pandemonium, a not-so-God-fearing quartet from the city of … Łódź – I’m having some difficulty pronouncing that – active in the sub-department of what they themselves term ”Satanic Dark Metal”.
Their ”Promo 2010” recently reaches my address by effort of Greg of Godz ov War Productions, active in band management, press and promotion duties. The demo contains only two songs that will later be featured on the band’s upcoming studio album, Misanthropy, to be released in the fall of 2011, according to the accompanying press release. We haven’t got that yet and so we’ll just give you our take on Black Forest and God Delusion, the two songs in question.
It’s like Red Descending knew in advance what my favorite track off their Kingdoms album would be. Bassist annex vocalist Bernard Shaw turned my attention to a new video of theirs this morning. A video of precisely that track I adore. If it hadn’t been for a busy day at work today, this would’ve been on here already.
When I reviewed just over a week ago I mentioned Kings of Torture to be the album’s best song in my holy opinion. I even uploaded it so you could share in my delight about it. And now there’s an official video for the song online. Not a real music video, but rather the studio track supported by live footage shot at the Amplifier Bar in Perth at the band’s album launch party on August 19th. Nothing you haven’t heard before if you’ve read last week’s review, but definitely a joy to watch while hearing!
There, I could very well leave it at that. It doesn’t get more accurate. Kingdoms is epic, and I don’t mean that in the way of the word when it’s used so lightly as it often is these days. I mean epic in the way it was meant to describe legendary and heroic events, battles between good and evil, that sort of thing. Something so awe-inspiring it’s just baffling and makes you want to cry like a baby that just shat its pants.
Red Descending’s second album is a piece of carefully devised brilliance, even more so than its predecessor, Where Dreams Come to Die. We didn’t officially review that, as it came out well before I started The Baboon, but I haven’t listened to it so incredibly often I pretty much know it by heart. And I’m still enjoying it regularly. Kingdoms was released last Friday and if you haven’t ordered it already, let me tell you why you should.
I know, news of the release of Xerath’s II album has reached the outer shells of the Milky Way by now, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find them worthy to write about. Besides, one of you may just be some kind of lone cave dweller that hasn’t heard about it yet, despite the vast amounts of electromagnetic radiation spreading the news shooting straight through your brain.
II came out on April 25th on Candlelight Records. Xerath – we wrote about them before last year – outputs ten tracks, 56 minutes of Progressive Symphonic Groovy Mathematical Death Metal. Characteristics, for as far as not yet obvious: bombastic, dark, mood-swinging and, indeed, very fuckin’ groovy. And it is was very well received by global Metal press.
I’m not surprised, despite not having heard the full record, because the English band’s music is incredibly rich. Very sophisticated. And just very fuckin’ terribly pleasant to listen to!
