It’s been quiet for a long while with Noumena. At least as far as any releases from the Finnish Melodeath outfit go. Their last official release stems from 2006 and is called Anatomy of Life. Then things turned relatively silent, though the band is still doing gigs and does the occasional post on its website. Apparently, Rufio is a guy that regularly checks into that site, because he spotted a new song there that was aired in late November. He spotted it in early January already, it’s my fault that we didn’t run this post any sooner.

At this point I have absolutely no clue what’s going to happen with this song. New EP? New album? Beats me, all I know is that the song exists and I don’t feel attracted to the thought of digging out the rest. Don’t have time for it either. But if any of you knows more, please don’t hesitate to share! Hooray for lazy bloggers!

That’s twice in two days. Not only because the band in my most holy opinion is a metaphorical hot piece of ass, but also because today’s video wasn’t released too long ago and I feel bad about having missed it before. I’m a sloppy motherfucker sometimes.

And that was nearly three months ago. Just didn’t have time to cover them any sooner. And I don’t really have any now either, so I’ll just dump you a pile of vids to keep you occupied. Go be a good boy – or girl – and entertain yourself with this great fuckin’ Indian music!

Veil of Maya are new to the palette of Deathcore outfits I know (which isn’t too big). While Eclipse is the longest piece of work I ever heard from a Deathcore act, the others being EP’s and single songs, it left me craving for more, which is bad in the case of an album.

Starting off, Veil of May were kind of thrown into my lap by James Montheit of Hold Tight! PR, so they kind of crashed into my life. What first caught my eye was the running time and the number of songs, I mean, how can you write so many songs, and have such a short album? With only 28 minutes of playing time, it hangs in between of an LP and an EP, and there is not a lot of meat to be taken on. But that didn’t keep me from jumping in, and after all, I found Eclipse to be pretty good.

Writer and colleague KevinP did an interview with our demi-god Tuomas Saukkonen, over at NCS. The man has passed by countless times on our website and is just short of having his own tag. Before the Dawn, Dawn of Solace and Black Sun Aeon are just three of the millions of projects and all of them are in high regard with us metalheads.

Kevin actually shared the link on our facebook, and I was happy to read the interview. In stead of watching with envy, I asked Kevin if we could share in his epic moment with Tuomas, and we could! So I’ll serve you a small fragment below and if you want more click the link after that. On top I’ll get you the video of their latest single Phoenix Rising and a link to a free download from Nuclear Blast.

Just a quick dump of awesome here today. As an operator of a Metal blog, I find that my name is on the mail list of a whole load of different labels and PR agencies. Consequently the amount of news messages poppin’ into my mailbox on a daily basis is quite huge, to use an understatement. Usually I open them, check for one prerequisite that’s usually missing and then disregard them. What’s the prerequisite? There has to be a link to a video! I’m not copying prefab news statements, but need something to talk about. Logical second requirement then is that the video tickles my long John and with this one that has definitely been the case! More than definitely.

The news message that was sent to me in the first place already hinted at this being good shit. It said: ”Betraeus to support Xerath and Scar Symmetry in the UK”. Hadn’t heard of Betraeus yet, but Xerath and Scar Symmetry are a couple of big names and high quality bands and I didn’t figure they would hire the first bunch of loose guns to come and play their show opener. Looked into things a bit further and it turns out these guys are definitely a rising act in the UK Metal scene and this is probably just one of their first steps.

I’ve got an interesting mix of Thrash and (Melodic) Death Metal to share today. It’s actually neither but both, hard to describe. But before we get into the details, let me introduce the subject band and its album at hand first. The band in question is called Last Transgression and it’s an American Metal unit, from a place called Prattville, Alabama, that has been active since 1994. For a band that’s geriatric! In all those years the band has released nothing but four full-length record, the last of which, titled Perpetual State of Collapse, came out in 2002. Until 2011 happened and they popped Cynic Verses onto the market of Metal.

Cynic Verses appeared somewhere at the end of October 2011 and is since available for legal download for just five measly bucks on the group’s BandCamp hide-out. As hinted at, that’s not a lot and I’m about to explain to you why that is. It all comes down to the fact that Cynic Verses is a pleasant album, flowing, natural, headbanging, pure. No bullshit, but a collection of ten good songs.

Today, which means exactly today, Italian Thrash-outfit Boarders have released their third album called R-Existence. The guys managed to impress the world with their sophomore The World Hates Me, and judging from the first notes of R-Existence, they continue to do so. With this 40 minute album, Boarders again serve us some face molding Melodic Thrash Metal.

Emerging from a Megadeth cover band, Boarders actually date back to 1988. Roughly 20 years later however, they decided to walk their own path, and started writing their own songs, with lyrics in the vain of US-Metalcore outfit As I Lay Dying; society with a Christianity-influenced outlook.

Where Equal Minds Theory went abso-fuckin’-lutely completely mental on our ass, another Russian band, called Cosmonauts Day, takes a whole different approach today. I’m not mentioning the two bands together here, or reviewing them so shortly after another, as the two bands are connected. Both hail from Moscow and they share members as well, at least guitarist Dima – the rest I’m unsure of, as I can’t read the Cyrillic on EMT’s album art.

But there are also differences, and they are larger than the similarities. Where EMT is completely fucked up Mathcore on some techno-club drug – I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, as you’ll be able to judge from that review – Cosmonauts Day, named after a Russian holiday that was instituted after Yuri Gagarin’s first flight into space in 1961, take an approach that is Sludgy, atmospheric, dreamy and melodic. And surprisingly harmonic.

From a UK band whose name is a palindrome I’ve got a short but capturing little EP to review today. The band in question we’ve written about and reviewed before. Based on that experience with the guys I was expecting some mildly melodic, atmospheric sludge, breathing darkness, a bit of despair and light tints of anger. I praised the band’s 2011 EP Mammalian as a ”a good piece of freak-fuckin’ underproduced Metal”, as well as ”an accessible step up” into the genre of Sludge. Nothing wrong with that!

Where Mammalian was, with its nearly forty minutes, an EP of considerable proportions. This year Naisian members must have had to spend more time working and / or studying though, as Monocle contains only two songs adding up to thirteen odd minutes. And as a result of its limited length nothing that’ll keep you satisfied for too long. But that’s absolutely the only reason why that’d be the case.