Great. I just vomited on my keyboard. Big fuckin’ chunks of breakfast soggy under my fingers as I type this. The reason? Blotted Science! Or well, the pieces of movie they used to score their music to, specifically the bit taken from the 2006 horror flick Slither.

Blotted Science is a San Antonio Texas based instrumental Progressive Metal outfit active since 2004. If you’ve been about on Metal blogs here and there, the name should ring a bell. The band is not only well known for its freakier than fuck tunes, but also consists of three musically experienced and appraised musicians: guitarist Ron Jarzombek (Watchtower, Terrestrial Exiled, Spastic Ink), bassis Alex Webster (Cannibal Corpse, Hate Eternal) and drummer Hannes Grossmann (Obscura, Terrestrial Exiled).

Visitor Simon was out in Montréal a while ago, where he discovered some new material that was to his liking. Bookakee is one of them, and they do Technical Brutal Death Cumsplatter Metal. Other than that the band consists of five guys and that they love to kill Super Mario on stage, my intel on these guys is pretty limited.

So, I’ll just proceed with giving you the tunes. First one is a song called Bookakee Blast, the first song from their first EP, released last June.

Despite – or perhaps because – I had a 20 hour working day yesterday / this morning, I had plenty of time to listen to music. Just didn’t have any fuckin’ time to write about it, as I was wrestling 1.4 million line Excel docs and PowerPoint files with way too much fuckin’ bullcrap. That wasn’t particularly fun, but one of the main things that kept me going until 4:30 a.m. was fellow Dutch national Christian Olde Wolbers, with his both chugging and catchy jamming which I’d like to share today.

If his name strikes you as familiar, that’s perhaps because he’s been a long but no longer standing member of American Industrial Metal formation Fear Factory, on both bass and guitar duties. On top of that he has worked with Mnemic, Threat Signal, Devin Townsend, God Forbid and many more. Currently he’s involved in Arkaea and Beowülf and he’s the CEO of his own company in goalkeeper’s gloves, Aviata Sports. Summarizing, you could say he’s a busy man.

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.

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.

After being reviewed twice already by the Baboon (referring to his albums X and Arcologies), the multi-talented music machine from Maryland (so many M’s!) that is Dan Dankmeyer is back for more with his second release of the year, Origin. A unique brand of Progressive Metal mixed with Djent and Melodic Death (think Cloudkicker meets Periphery) coming from an enigmatic individual slowly gaining fame in the instrumental Metal circles.

Welcome to the fourth installment of this series. A series focusing on single musicians that prefer to do their thing alone instead of with annoying band members. Three such artists are Sami Anttila and Liquorworks from Finland and Nimbatus from Germany. For a change, the three gents are not found operating in the Djent area. Instead, they play various other forms of Metal. What exactly those are you’ll experience in the following.

We featured a French band named Eyeless here over a year ago, but today we present you with one from Canada. This Eyeless formed in 2008 and self-released their first EP about this time last year. It’s an EP of five tracks, four progressive Death Metal songs and one laid back instrumental. This is quality music, excellent musicianship and song writing skills coupled with good production value. Let’s just say that for a band called Eyeless they certainly have a vision.

It’s only been a few days since we last came with something Progressive, but we like the stuff and so we’ve got one more today, thanks to motig, who sent us the suggestion. And a real fuckin’ gem too, but we’ll get to that later. First about the band: I’m talking about a group called Long Distance Calling here, and they make some super sweet Metal – though their name could’ve easily meant a white-men hoodie-wearing hip hop posse with thick black glasses and rapping about bad-ass themes such as social class-bridging love and fuckin’ text messaging.

Thankfully they’re not that, but a five-headed German Instrumental band operating on the Progressive side of the spectrum. But, and we quote, “rather than baffling the masses with a wall of odd time signatures and syncopated rhythm – the proclaimed formula so many bands use and abuse when claiming to be progressive – Long Distance Calling’s new outing serves up seven tracks written from a traditional song-oriented perspective in spite of the extended arrangements.” That’s right, they’ve got something new coming up too, and we’ve got its first serving lined up for you today.