Yeah I know, the last supper wasn’t on Boxing Day and there weren’t any Jack Daniels shirts at the time either, but I still thought this vid to be appropriate for today. After all, Boxing Day, or Second Christmas Day as we call it in the Netherlands, is a day off because of a Jesus-related celebration. And the dude’s in this vid too. That’s a big enough bridge for me.

Anycock, what it’s really about of course is the band entertaining the last supper guests, a UK band called Blue Origin. I know pretty much nothing about their history, but if they played to Gesus, they must be pretty friggin’ old. What I do know is that they’ve got four EP’s out since 2007 (technically one’s a demo) and they’ve recently released a single.

Yes! Part 2 of the most important list in the whole wide world of Metal. The list of best albums I have reviewed all year. You can’t possibly get a more complete overview of what happened in the Metallic world, anywhere.

Seriously though, this is just a list. My own little list of fifteen albums that struck a special chord with me this year. But then again, I do hear a fuckload of Metal over the course of a year and the fact that these fifteen stood out as the top albums does make them a little special, don’t you think? Hence they are albums that I highly recommend you to listen to, and buy when you can get your grubby hands on them and have no more fuckin’ debts to pay off.

List season has arrived. Soon the internet will be littered with countless lists of the year’s best albums. After pondering what my own list might be I realised that I couldn’t possibly come up with a truely ‘best of’ list. I haven’t even heard every album that’s come out this year, I imagine no one has. So, to do something a little different I’ve put together a list of my favorite releases from 2011 that were offered for free, including some with a name your price option. Remember, this is a ‘favorites’ list not a ‘best of’ list, I haven’t heard all the free ones either. Of the freebies I’ve heard these are the ten that have kept me coming back and I’ll present them two at a time.

10. – Savage Messiah – A Plague of Conscience

Much of the best Progressive Metal always seems to come from the UK. Whether it’s mixed with Death, Black, Thrash, Brutal, or lemon juice doesn’t seem to matter. Today we’ve got one by suggestion of Uzi that is just Progressive, without frails. Which kinda means it’s Metal with a lot of frails.

Haken, from London, England, consists of the same six members that joined up in the band’s founding year, 2007. Though a pretty standard line up – dual guitars, drums, bass, vocals and keys – the band’s music isn’t standard at all. It reverts to the Prog Rock of the Seventies, but infuses it with a very modern touch, using a bunch of effects and cheeky playing styles. Not, by far, as loud as you’re used to hear, but music educationally very valuable!

Heard of Asking Alexandria? They are an English Metalcore act put together in 2008 that has since very rapidly made a name for itself. They’re a big name now in Metalcore Land and though that might not always mean anything, in this case they’ve actually got some talent going on. I realize it’s still your average Metalcore, but at least they do it right. Whatever that is exactly.

The band released its second album earlier this year, titling it Reckless & Relentless. On the album cover there’s this famous porn actress called Belladonna, sitting in a fucked up room with a fucked up TV. Anyfuck, there’s been a tour to support that album’s release and it touched Sacramento, California earlier this year. Guess what, the full set, nearly an hour of it, is on YouTube. And in pretty decent quality too. Couldn’t let that pass by unnoticed.

For my next trick, which is another review, I’ll listen to only one fuckin’ song and tell you exactly what the whole EP is like. No cheating involved. Honest to God. Swearing on the tip of my dick!

Know why? ‘Cause there’s only one song, though a long one, on this thing. The thing in question is called The Sunless Country, which evidently is also the name of the one song on the disc. The disc is released by UK Prog Metal outfit Bleaklow and they deliver it in a handmade leather container / envelope thingy. Cool! Except that you’ll be disappointed, because it’s already sold out. According to the band’s own Joe Clayton that happened within an hour and a half after pre-ordering started. That’s slightly misleading, because there were only 25 copies available. But, come on! You wouldn’t want to hand sew together 1,000 leather envelopes. You’d get fuckin’ bored!

So unless the band decides to put together some more physical copies, this review isn’t particularly useful as a piece of consumer advice. So scrap that. The goal of this is to make you familiar with what is an awesome three-piece band making awesome fuckin’ shit!

We’ve got three new guitar freaks in this fifth installment of the One Man Show series, a continuation of the series after some four months. As nearly always, we’re dealing with purely instrumental Metal again, focusing on beautiful and generous melodies. ‘Nuf said.

More proggy Djenty stuff, once again British and once again thanks to Rufio’s suggestion. But where yesterday’s entry was pretty much purely instrumental, today’s definitely isn’t. FellSilent’s the name of the first band in the post and it’s a late Progressive / Experimental Metal band that existed between 2003 and 2010 and they’ve got some groovy tunes on their record.

Their continued existence wasn’t to be and when the band fell apart, members spread out to other projects, including TesseracT. Two members, John Browne (guitars) and Neema Askari (vox), went on to join a band called Monuments full time. The former co-founded that band as a side-project the latter has reportedly already left the band again.

We’ll give you a bite of both.

Anyone up for some Djenty stuff? We’ve got a one-man band that creates some mighty interesting stuff of the stuff. Normally CroOZza would cover this type of shit in his One Man Show series, but today, thanks to Rufio’s suggestion, I’ll cover it myself. ‘Cause I’m just that sneaky.

Anyfuck, the one man band in question is called Returning We Hear the Larks, and it’s the project of UK student Jak Noble. Apparently he took the name of his project from a poem by Isaac Rosenberg. The guy himself is a self-proclaimed multi-instrumentalist, ”although primarily a 7-string guitarist and sitarist”. You know, a sitar. That’s that odd looking guitar thing they use in India.

He’s also very generous, as he offers some of his releases for free (and others for little) on his Bandcamp page, so that means free fuckin’ music chaps – though you really oughta give him a couple of coins for it! We’ll sort you out with the link at the end of this post.

The UK seems to be a hatchery for high quality Progressive (Death) Metal bands these days. I mean think about Sylosis, Viatrophy, Xerath and TesseracT to name just a varied few. Actually, I had a discussion with someone the other day, that so many of all the well-known Classic Rock bands are from the UK. Think Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Genesis, Def Leppard, The Kinks, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Who and you can go on and on like that. Apparently then, it’s not all that different with British Heavy Metal then – I mean, NWOBHM anyone?

Anyfuck, it leads us to yet another example of this: The HAARP Machine. After Will brought them to my attention, I searched around about these guys a bit and apparently there’s quite a lot of fuss about them. Still though, there’s very little info.