I’m dealing with limited intel here, as Encyclopaedia Metallum seems to have been brought down by the FBI – wouldn’t worry too much yet, it’s April 1^st – and the band’s own Facebook page contains a bulleted time line that I’m basically too lazy for to read.

I’m not completely in the dark though. I know EmpactiC is Polish and consists of five dudes. And that the band was formed in 2005 and has recently released its debut full-length. This album is titled Gods of Thousand Souls and contains eleven songs of a crusty sort of Melodeath. Has a bit of an Old-school flavor to it too. The album was released through Terrasound Records from Austria on January 20^th and is distributed through the German Twilight mail-order company.

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.

If you’ve heard some Polish Metal in your life, you might agree to my rather coarse generalization that these guys are good at stuff with small amounts of melody and large amounts of pummeling groove. Music without unnecessary add-ons. They don’t do “nice” there, just punch-in-the-face Metal.

Well, something or someone called MAS Music Art released a full record full of Polish underground Metal adhering to just that principle. No fewer than 22 tracks and nearly an hour and a half of material that will in particular keep the Death Metal purist well satisfied, including a song by Devil’s Note. That’s not to say all tracks are Death Metal in the strict sense of the word – we’ll discuss some exceptions after the jump – but the majority definitely is.

And guess what! There’s good news! ” You can download, share, burn, trash, and even use this compilation in the most peculiar and perverted ways if you so desire.” That means we’ll show you where to grab this action-packed baby after the jump!

OK, I’ll be honest. When Jakub ‘Sandman’ Nadolski sent us a message I wasn’t overly thrilled, expecting nothing but another group of average noise makers. You know, some mediocre drumming, couple of power chords, bass doing the exact same and someone violently screaming into a microphone. The basic recipe of most bands, but some just throw all the shit into a band and set the stove on burn.

Surprisingly, not Devil’s Note though. The five songs on the demo sound pretty fuckin’ grown up, especially considering this is “merely” a demo. Sure, it’s all a bit raw, could use a polish in more than a few places, lacks in depth a bit. But that are just mixing and mastering issues. The musical basis is pretty sweet ‘n’ tasty.

A quick bit of news about Poland’s legendary Decapitated. The band formed in 1996. Eleven years later they were involved in an road accident where their tour bus collided with a wood truck. It wounded vocalist Adrian “Covan” Kowanek and took the life of drummer Witold “Vitek” Kieltyka. Now, anyone who’s ever heard a Decapitated album knows the latter was a beast, tirelessly acting away on his bass pedals.

Obviously the accident had a major impact on the band’s continued existence and for a while they turned silent. Then, in late 2008 the decision to start up again was made and in 2009 the band finally reformed with three new members. One of them is Austrian drummer Kerim “Krimh” Lechner, whom we’ve already seen solo in a very short post back in 2009, when we had just started this site.

My Polish limits itself to the words “dobre”, “kurwa” and “dziękowanie”: “good”, “whore” and “thank you”. My Polish friend Wojtek taught me more, but as you know, only the useful words stick. That’s why I have absolutely no fuckin’ clue what the above title means! I’m also way too fuckin’ lazy to use a translator to figure it out, but if you want to know: go look it up. I hear dictionaries can be useful.

What I do know is that To Nie Jest Piknik Kantry, apart from a tongue twisting turd of a phrase, is the demo of a Polish band named Whore Laugh. I know this, because Whore Laugh contacted me three weeks ago, and not from their MySpace, because that’s completely in Polish – not that there is much there at all – and doesn’t feature the words “dobre”, “kurwa” or “dziękowanie”. The band asked me to air my opinion on their material and of course I am delighted to.

This morning’s post was short, so we’ll do another one. The Polish band Chain Reaction is a band we’ve already had visiting once and twice before. It balances on the edge of Heavy and Extreme Metal and we implicitly praised it for its heavy grooves.

2009’s Cutthroat Melodies is still their latest album, so nothing new there, but what they have done is record a little video clip for the album’s opening track Twinge. Features school teachers, bare-knuckle fighting and incredibly sexy chicks. Seriously, incredibly sexy! Reason enough to check it out, isn’t it?!

It has been quite a while since I posted the first issue of this series. If you haven’t read it yet, here’s the opportunity to do so after all. The reason for the long pause is an album that I’ve been waiting for and one that I wanted to include. It was supposed to be released in early November, but problems postponed the release and it wasn’t until December that it became clear that it wouldn’t make it anymore in 2010. So, we’ll do without it for now. I won’t tell you more, not even who’s album it is, but you can be sure that you’ll hear from it later!

So, on to the actual post for today. In this second part we’ve got another three solo-artists, all making purely instrumental music. Stylewise they all fall somewhere in the range of Progressive and Math Metal.

Poland’s Saratan formed up in the city of Cracow in 2003, in order to produce anti-religious anti-political Death Thrash. Their name they derived from Arabic, where Saratan means Cancer. Lovely. In June of this year they came out with their second studio album, which is under our scrutiny right now.

They gave that album the highly original – NOT – title Antireligion. But actually it’s a fitting name, matches their music: there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s not going to challenge you one bit either, let alone give you shivers down your spine. In fact, apart from some bits it’s quite boring and it took me considerable discipline to listen to the whole thing multiple times to be able to form an educated opinion about it.