Let’s kick off with a useless quiz fact: they’re named after a Venom song, not after the same-named Bruce Willis franchise.

We’re dealing with an old-school inspired outfit Die Hard. On most of their band promo pictures they look like bunch of black metal fetishists, but actually Die Hard play a raw and balls to the wall blend of death and thrash. They’re inspired by bands such as the above mentioned Venom, Sodom, Bathory and Celtic Frost, but classic – both in terms of their death and thrash metal elements – as the band may sound, they’ve only been around since 2005. Moreover, with their jagged and unsanded classic sound and hate and Satan-inspired lyrics, they really couldn’t have come from any other country than Sweden. Indeed, this is a clear-cut case of Swedeath!

Having recently come off a US tour with fellow Muskegonites The Omega Experiment, Technical Deathcore quintet Bury The Silence have released their sophomore EP via Rogue Records America. The Architecture Of Struggle EP retains similarities to their début Phobiotic EP, although a new vocalist has meant a shift in another direction. Taking orders from The Faceless, All Shall Perish and The Black Dahlia Murder, they cook up a 19-minute morsel filled with the mandatory noodling guitar work and breakdowns. However, never fear that this is a Beneath The Massacre castoff, there is strong songwriting to be had as well.

At first glance, the most striking element of this EP is the number of influences thrown into the pot, most prominent of which being The Black Dahlia Murder. The intro is akin to a horror-orchestral version of “Unhallowed”, sans spoken word, which sadly undersells the band as a first impression. Better to skip to the main meal, where “The Jealous Heart Of A Weak Man” provides ample twin-riffs and harmonized solos, with a strong rhythm section to back it up. New frontman Garvey has several Strnad-like moments, although his lows recall more Oceano or All Shall Perish. The song improves as it continues, particularly in Barrett’s bludgeoning drumming, and the production ties everything off well, if not quite as refined as I’d prefer it.

Since the rise of Deathcore in the ‘00s, I’ve been following the various strains of it with mild interest, seeing it develop towards melodic, djenty or brutal tendencies. Firmly in this latter camp, US quintet Labyrinthe have unleashed The Depths of Hell this year, their début for Tribunal.

Taking notes from acts such as Suicide Silence and Carnifex, the band go one stage further and incorporate some of modern Brutal Death Metal’s characteristics, taking Ingested’s Surpassing the Boundaries of Human Suffering as a navigation point. As you can imagine, this record is just a little bit heavy.

Apparently named after a fictional castle from a series of fantasy books by English author Mervyn L. Peake, the Gormenghast under our scrutiny is a no-nonsense Death Metal outfit from the Russian city of Ekaterinburg. The now five-headed, but four-headed at the time of recording – band has been active since 2008 and has released its debut record through Stygian Crypt Records earlier this year.

Resist or Serve is an album offering dark, hellish Death Metal, much in the vein of the old school. That means blast beats, crunchy and chunky guitars and completely incomprehensible vocals.

Shambless. That sounds terrible, like Tinky Winky’s gay friend, or a Pokémon character perhaps. But actually it’s just ‘shambles’ with an additional ‘S’.

‘Cause that’s what the band started out as, as Shambles, back in 1997. The Bulgarians do a piece of Symphonic Death Metal with a medieval / fantasy atmosphere. In their own words, they were influenced by ”early Amorphis, Haggard and even Summoning” and gained a ”cult status” in their home country. With Menra Eneidalen, first released in 2011 and now rereleased globally through Stygian Crypt, their third studio album, they deepen their lyrical and musical concepts of Elfish mythology.

It seems we got caught in a slurry of Folk and Viking Metal album reviews. Today’s is by Russian band NordverG.

Formed in 2006 as Dragon’s Tears, Crimson Dawn is the band’s first album as NordverG. The record came out in December 2011 and spans nearly three quarters of an hour worth of Folk Metal with Slavonic and Viking-inspired lyrics. A bonus is that the whole thing is in Russian, which turns out to be a lovely smooth language for the purpose. Clearly this is a good one for those of you that dig a piece of Folk Metal with a Northern atmosphere, but also a thick classic Metal sauce.

A little lesson in Northern Mythology: Fenrir was a son of god of fire Loki and Hrimthur (a giant tribe) Angrboda. Incest was a common good in those days, because the dude looked nothing like a human or giant, but like a humongous wolf instead. He was bad-tempered and ill-willed and so the gods thought up a plan to tie him up. After wolfman broke a couple of conventional chains they tried it with a dwarf chain. The chain was called Gleipnir and was made of six ingredients of varying questionable existence: the breath of a fish, the beard of a woman, saliva of a bird, roots of a mountain, the sound of a cat’s paws and tendons of a bear. Týr, the god of war, lost his right hand during the event as Fenrir bit it off.

There are more details to this story, but you’ll have to dig through Wikipedia for those yourself. They key message here is that Fenrir got pissed. And apparently he still is, because he’s still in chains. Must be looking for revenge. Long story short: cool title for a Death Metal song, an EP and a band: Wrath of Fenrir, all released last month.

After a bunch of shorter / smaller releases and a debut full-length called Breed Deadness Blood in 2008, Necrovation apparently finally developed an album worthy of their own name.

The band, from Kristianstad, Sweden, is active since 2003 and produces some very traditional sweaty armpits, beer and smoke Death Metal, a.k.a. Old-School! In a time in which Metal is heavily commercializing it’s a good thing some bands remain close to the roots of Extreme Metal. Necrovation (the album) offers a selection of nine songs of ear punishment in the traditional Death Metal way. Proper Swedeath!

A good deal of time ago – we were writing October 2010 – I featured a band called Atrum Aequora in a little potpourri post. Atrum Aequora is a female fronted Melodeath outfit from Melbourne, Australia, and it hit the spot because of its contrast between female cleans and grinding, technical Metal.

Since that time the band has gone through a few line-up changes – guitarist-vocalist Adam Donnellan left the band for example – and worked on a new demo, simply titled 2012 Demo, on which Grinding the Remains, the song we included in our earlier post, is a recurring guest. Happy to give it a quick spin!

We have an album by a band called Folkodia. That, of course, spells but one thing: Folk Metal! And loads of it dear kids! And the fact that the record is called Battles and Myths gives plenty of hints as to what direction this Folk Metal tends to: the heroic and epic type!

Folkodia is apparently a spin off from this massive international Folk Metal project called Folkearth. That means not all of the countless musicians from Folkearth are involved. In fact, only a fraction is: I count only 13 members on Encyclopaedia Metallum, though only 10 are listed on the album insert. In any case, small band, NOT!