A you’ve all noticed we’ve been on a bit of a hiatus today, but now it’s Friday night and the large part of my exams are over, so I’ll just throw down some of the music I’m digging at the moment. Nothing special, just some bands to keep you busy.

First up is a song by Enslaved, which seems to be a band of contradiction to me. I’m not very familiar with them, but I was really attracted to this song called Ethica Odini, an 8-minute long hybrid of Black Metal and Progressive Rock. It’s really a fabulous piece of music, but when I look at the list of album reviews at the Metal Encyclopedia, I actually find people who are angry with Enslaved for putting out this album Axioma Ethica Odini. I really like it though, because the balance between Black Metal and edgy Prog Rock is just perfect.

So you write five songs that you name Bodhi Zephyr, Jean-Luc Picard, John Jameson, K’nuckles and Walter White and you stick ‘em all on an EP that you title Captains. I find that pretty original.

Why? I have no clue, I guess that’s why it’s original. At first I thought all of them were going to be captains, but that shit flies only for Jean-Luc Picard and K’nuckles. You can pull it wider and say all of them are TV / movie / comic characters, but even then I’m left with Bodhi Zephyr. Who / what the fuck is that? Well, the cool thing is that the music on Captains works about in the same way: it makes you think you see patterns and then proves you wrong about them.

I can’t really find anything about Into the Storm, except that they’re four dudes out of Seattle and that they released Captains as a sophomore to their 2010 album Amidst a Sea of Chaos, which I haven’t heard, by the way. I’ve heard plenty of Captains though, and it’s hot shit.

For a long time I thought Sludge / Doom was a genre who couldn’t afford decent instruments and equipment and that moreover had no clue on how to play their shit. But why then does it still sound so brilliant?

Grimpen Mire is the cause to such philosophical contemplation in my head today. It’s a three-piece, from Wolverhampton, UK and has been sludging its way in and out of venues since 2007. With Paul van Linden doing vocals and bass, James Goad on guitar and more vocals and Ian Davis on drums, the band employs nothing more than the bare minimum, but the sound springing from these dudes’ hands is rich nonetheless. As rich as can be in a minimalistic genre like Sludge.

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.

I looked at the posting queue and to my abhorrence, there was no post left for today. So I decided to make one on the spot. I’m able to because I just got my hands on the above bands EP. Well, at least it’s two songs, but together, they make for 24 minutes of absolute pleasure. One afternoon, I ended up at Threnodies, who mostly cover Metal genres coming from the North (think Folk-, Black-, Pagan-, and Viking Metal). They caught my attention however with their classification Black ‘N’ Roll, as I’m always in for some innovative Hybrid genres.

First up was a positive review of a band called FALSE, which got me interested, although I didn’t actually read it. However, the fact that their EP is a freebie kinda helped me over, of course, as I’m Dutch. The music FALSE display on their self-entitled is superb. It seems like where Death ‘N’ Roll gets it’s pounding force from rolling beats, FALSE get their drive from blast beats, although they still roll of course. Not only is this EP quite unique, but also very pleasant to listen to.

UK Doom Metallers Conan have just uploaded a video of them performing a new song of their upcoming album, at the Buffalo Bar, Cardiff. The name Hawk as Weapon, already sounds cool to me, and the live recording sounds promising. I’ve always wondered what these guys would sound like live, and all I can say is that they sound louder and heavier than in the studio. Which is a good thing.

Then who are Conan? We wrote about them little over a month ago, and we were all quite positive. I wrote about their latest record Horseback Battle Hammer

their music feels like you’ve just had a massive blow with a war hammer, and now you lie on the ground, which is wet from the rain, while you can’t feel anything.

While we’re in the doomy, sludgy type of mood that Toreignimmortal initiated with his post on British Doom Stoners Conan, we might as well throw up Ventilation Shaft’s recommendation as well. He recommends Omega Massif, a German band from Würzburg, Bavaria that has been active since 2005. As Ventilation Shaft describes it: ”very dark in atmosphere, very heavy, but also melodic”. Accurate!

After the band’s 2007 debut Geisterstadt, four years passed until the release of Karpatia, which came out last September. All their songs carry German titles, but the vocals are not. Because there are no vocals. Omega Massif plays purely instrumental.

I’ve seen fit to take you through some of the band’s past releases – there have been two splits as well – as there is some genuinely good stuff there. Just free up some time for this, as this, despite that the songs aren’t even that ridiculously long, is not suitable for quick and easy listening. Now follow us past the jump!

Style-wise, Heartless is a bit of an oddball. On the one hand they call themselves ”Hardcore warriors”, so I’m expecting some pretty sweet guys with spiky hair, fighting injustice and dressing up like 80’s punk dudes. Call me a camel cunt, but that’s my image of Hardcore, the real thing, not the blend with Metal. Anyfuck, some of that (spiky hair, dressing up in studded vests and checkered shirts) turned out fairly accurate, whereas other stuff did not.

Mainly I had to change my expectations when I saw the album cover of this band’s latest effort. It’s an effort called Hell is Other People, which is to be released on November 7^th and the cover depicts the kind of gritty and horrific imagery you’d expect on the cover of a Satan-loving Sludge band’s album. Not on a Hardcore album. So going into the music, I discovered Heartless is not an average Hardcore band!

“What is this band’s name? *Turns album on its side to read*” “I forgot the name *again needs to turn the album on its side*” Ulcerate is a three-piece Death Metal band from New Zealand, or are they?

The logo doesn’t make reading the name of the band more easy, but the front cover of this album looks awesome. Next to the picture of this renaissance sculpture on the front, the rest of the album is covered in blurry close-ups of similar sculptures. Very cool.

Let me be honest, when I got this album I was informed about its apparent inaccessibility and when I put it up I was able to agree with it. However, after several spins I found the music, just like the cover, rather interesting.