Knowing that you will have picked up this news already some time ago, I still deemed it just for me to serve you this. You know, there may always be people that missed it and shit.

7 Horns 7 Eyes, from Seattle, is an absolute novelty to me, but I guess that’s because their first record is yet to be released. Still, the band are leaving a major buzz across the web already. Quite an achievement, and I’m not quite sure what’s fueling it. Other than that the upcoming shit sounds hot, of course.

The end of humanity. On the cover is an old hitman holding a silenced pistol. God who’s about to put a bullet in Humanity?

The album is Divultion’s first. The Ukrainian band out of Simferopol has been a musical unit since June 2005, but only saw its efforts come to full fruition with the early 2011 release of The End of Humanity. Titles like Worms Under Skin, Eat My Guts and Rotting give a strong suggestion of Brutal Death Metal and reality proves this right at least partly. Divultion does focus on delivering a product that is as loud and harsh as it could possibly be. On the contrary, there is a strong technical focus in the eight songs – there’s also an outro with Boondock Saints outtakes – that The End of Humanity is rich.

For some reason, Canada is Technical Death Metal-land in my head, easily taking the crown with Ascariasis and April 20, they will solidify their position with Derelict’s third full-length Perpetuation. We already covered the fact that two of the twelve songs were up for free download before, but vocalist and owner of Ricburn Media Eric Burnet offered us to take care of his baby. A duty I will fulfil with the greatest pleasure.

The fact that I mentioned Ascariasis is a bit problematic, because they are just fucking epic, and in such I have a hard time in objectively judging Perpetuation. It will most probably be the case that in my effort to not underestimate this album, I’d grossly overrate it, which is good for the band image, but bad for mine. So I’ll dive in while trying to forget Ocean of Colour, which we didn’t even cover on here. Where have we been with our meat-covered asses over the past few weeks?

Just got a message about this band called Shturm. I cannot begin to compare this to anything I’ve ever heard, but it’s good. Boy is it GOOD!

Shturm is a group of four guys from Krasnodar, Russia, a city located in the South-Western corner of the country. Taking a quick look through the band’s profile page on Encyclopaedia Metallum, my guess is the band started out in 2003, doing a brutal sort of Black Metal. Their first record came out in 2004 and carries the title unambiguous title Fresh Christian Meat.

Stepping forward in time to the current year, the band released its third album, called Karmaruna. I don’t proclaim to have heard anything more of that than the one song for which they released a video, but that does seem to suggest the band have drastically developed their style since 2004. I’ve lined up the video past the jump.

As a reviewer, you often need to do some extensive research before you write down anything, and Derelict was a band which I discovered while doing research about Dischordia. It is as such, that Dischordia are promoted by RicBurn Media, lead by our friend Eric Burnett, who in turn is the lead singer of Tech Death-outfit Derelict. At first I wasn’t bothered much by the busy kind of Death Metal, but with this little novelty, they completely fixed that for me.

On the 20th day of April, we will witness the birth of this Canadian Death Metal monster, and a monster this will be! As I can judge from the two songs presented this album will have all the guts needed in order to get Derelict to the next level, the “big” level.

Metalcore is a genre often despised by metalheads, but personally I’ve never seen the problem with it. The origins of Metalcore, Metal and Hardcore Punk, are both great genres and the resulting combination of melodic lines and brutal rhythms certainly appeals to me. So why the hate? We don’t hate on Melodeath either which, although taking a slightly different approach stylistically and structure-wise, does the same thing; combining melody and rhythm.

Well, enough ranting for today, let’s move on to take a look at Ruled By Reason. Again they come in via my Tumblr page, where I posted a text-post on my favourite Metalcore band Still Remains. Assuming I posted similar stuff all the time they followed me, but sadly (for them), I mostly do pictures and sometimes a Black Metal post (sorry guys). Anyways, listening to their stuff, I found that their music is really interesting.

Despite that I’m late, in case Santacock has been a bit of a cheapo with his gifts this year, maybe I can make up for it with two little tips that’ll get you value without having to empty your purse. Nerve End and Mirrors of Obsidian have and EP and full album respectively up for free, at least if a digital version of the releases will satisfy you. However, like always, we would like to stress that you can in fact support these bands by donating a little something. It isn’t ‘name your price’ for nothing.

As I was checking out some of Death’s work, I made a jump to Toxic Holocaust’s latest work. The two minute-long Judgement Awaits You didn’t really attract my attention, but as I clicked through to Revocation’s latest single No Funeral, my day got better. It was fresh, catchy, yet extreme and fast. This was something I needed more of.

Revocation was formed in 2006 and they have released three albums and one EP to date. In order to stay with today, I decided to dive into their latest album Chaos of Forms, released just about 4 months ago. Looking at lyrics, song length or anything, this is nothing special, but boy, this album just gets me banging from the first note.

Sidestepping their Brutal Death Metal roots, Dutch quintet Toxocara have embraced a slightly different angle on their third album AtmosFear. Understandable, given the significant line-up change they underwent, but at least there are some remnants of the older style, now mixed in with some industrial and Tech-Death touches. Their main aims seem to be intensity and speed, both of which they achieve with much aplomb, and display a maturity that can only be gained from each of the members having his own respective bands on the side.

Ignoring the frankly strange title-track intro of children singing, the first proper track Black Widow kicks off nicely with a blazing fury of Technical Death Metal, powered by human drum-machine William Vlierman, who dominates much of the album. An echo of The Monolith Deathcult is present (logically given they share Martijn Moes as guitarist), but they also incorporate elements of Obscura in the solos from Moes and Vince Zwarts, and some tasteful melodic lines.

A couple of months ago we covered a song by a German band named Vaulting. I characterized the song as having ”plenty of fast-paced leads, hooks and sharp edges”. A few weeks later the band released its debut record Nucleus, containing thirteen brand new songs of pretty much the same general inclination. If it wasn’t for a bunch of them being rather different.

So Nucleus is a debut according to drummer Sebastian Gathof, so it’s kinda strange how Encyclopaedia Metallum lists 2008’s Epilog as a full-length too. Because taking a closer look at it, it seems more like an EP, with only 18 odd minutes of playing time. Yet there are eight songs which is more than you’d expect on a normal EP. The key is in the Grindcorian length of songs: one of them is only four seconds.