Category Archives: Free Streams

Slaves BC / Cousin Sleaze – Split 7″

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Slaves BC / Cousin Sleaze – Split 7″ (self-released, 11 April 2013)

 
 
Several months ago, I wrote about a new EP from the Pittsburgh-based dark, caustic hardcore/metal band Slaves BC, which was titled we mean nothing. If you’re feeling especially adventurous, you could look it up if you searched for it, but I’m not linking to it here. Because honestly, it was among the worst articles I’ve written, and I wouldn’t advise taking the time to read it. Instead, just listen to the songs and download the EP, which you can do it you follow the Bandcamp link at the end of this page.

About that review — I’ve noticed sometimes when I really like something or really connect with a piece of music on some level, I feel inadequate to convey that in words, and so I end up rambling about some other nonsense that isn’t related to the actual music. In this case, we mean nothing. centers around the concept of someone struggling and perhaps questioning the validity or value of religion — and I sort of ran with that idea, focusing more on people who place too much value on religious principles, at the expense of common sense and moral decency.

Sort of lost in all of that was my opinion of the actual music — dark and caustic, as I just said; abrasive, ultra-heavy. Some music is described as “doom metal” which usually seems to foretell a bleak, dire outcome; some music is “post-apocalyptic,” representing that tragic new reality. What Slaves BC bring is more like DURING the apocalypse: there isn’t doom coming, it’s happening RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

Anyway, one thing I did point out in that review was that the sound had improved dramatically over their first release, the demo album This World Shall Pass Away. With that in mind, the appearance of any new Slaves material should be really exciting. And GUESS WHAT — today we have exactly that! Two new songs, to be exact, coupled with a pair from the band’s comrades from New York, Cousin Sleaze.

The four-song split is available as of today on CD (if you come to the bands’ joint release show TONIGHT at The Smiling Moose in Pittsburgh — see below for details), and the 7″ vinyl version (in three different colors) can be ordered now, and will be out in the very near future!

 
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Borracho – Mob Gathering 7″

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Borracho - Mob Gathering 7- - cover

 
It’s been nearly two years since Borracho, the heavy stoner-fuzz-rock band from Washington DC, graced the world with their debut album Splitting Sky. Since that LP was released (and subsequently landed on my Top 11 of 2011 list), there has also been a 7″ single (and video) for “Concentric Circles”, a video for “All in Play”, and a 10″ single for “Plunge/Return” (which was included in the digital and CD versions, but didn’t fit on the vinyl pressing of Splitting Sky).

Now, all that has been really cool, but we haven’t heard any NEW songs in a while! Well as it turns out, that’ll be changing soon, because in a few months the band will have a follow-up album out…

 

[In mid-February], we entered the studio to lay down brand new music for a proper follow-up release. We’ve reunited with Splitting Sky producer Frank Marchand at his brand new Hudson Street Sound studio in Annapolis MD. The as-yet untitled record will be co-released on limited edition 12″ vinyl by No Balls Records (Germany) and Ghost Highway Recordings (Spain) in June.

 
So that’s pretty exciting, huh? But that’s not even all of the good news I have for you! Although it’ll still be a few more months ’til we get some new material, right now you can get treated to some OLD stuff — plus select east-coast cities are due to be visited by the band this weekend!

 
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Dendritic Arbor – Sylvan Matriarch

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Dendritic Arbor – Sylvan Matriarch (self-released, 26 March 2013)

 
Good morning, folks! What’s new with you?? I have to tell you a story about what happened to me recently, but it’s a little bit embarassing…

So I’m sure you all remember Quercus, guitarist/vocalist for that band of black metal eco-terrorists Dendritic Arbor — he and I had a conversation about his band last month when they were performing at the Winter’s Wake pre-fest show (which you can read here). As you’ll recall, there was some discussion at that time about their forthcoming release Sylvan Matriarch…

Anyway, fast-forward to a couple days ago, and I got a message from Mr. Quercus, where he asked me whether I do album reviews on this website. Well. That was sort of a reality check for me — I know that I’ve been very preoccupied lately and have been writing very, very little. And what I have been posting recently has largely consisted of interviews, either conducted by myself or by someone else. But at that moment I realized, geez, you really couldn’t tell just by looking — unless you were to dig pretty deep — that reviewing music is sort of supposed to be the primary purpose of this website!

So I got my hands on a copy of Sylvan Matriarch, which is officially available today — it actually went up on Bandcamp yesterday, but tonight Dendritic Arbor will be playing a show to celebrate the release. I’ve got all the information you need about the album, the show, AND a special super-limited bundle were you can get a whole bunch of goodies for a really low price, IF you’re one of the first few people to jump on this deal!

 
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Winter’s Wake Winterview: Vit

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Good morning readers, here’s another Winter’s Wake band interview I’d like to share with you!

Once again, with so many people to talk to, I tried to keep these short and sweet. Just long enough for you (the reader) to get a bit of a lesson about each band’s history, to learn a little about where they came from and what they’re doing now, so that you can be as excited about seeing all of them as I am!

This one comes from Vit percussionist JK.

 
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Toxic Holocaust / Municipal Waste “Toxic Waste” Split Now Expanded To Fourth Pressing!

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So, this just happened.

Despite being available for free download since last June (see the Bandcamp player below), this 12″ split has burned through nearly four thousand copies since it first went on sale back in May. I guess that’s some positive news amidst all the doom-and-gloom we keep hearing about the record industry in general, and particularly about physical media.

So if you haven’t gotten your hands on one of these yet, or if you’re such a die-hard collector that you’re making sure you have at least one of each color variant, looks like there’ll be another five hundred up for grabs soon!

 
Tankcrimes Records says:

TOXIC WASTE UPDATE!!!

The 4th pressing of this beast has been ordered! (It’s only been out 8 months, you guys are insane!) There are less than a dozen copies remain of each color variant from the 3rd press, if that’s important to you it’s time to act.

http://www.bluecollardistro.com/tankcrimes/product_info.php?products_id=7913&cPath=1597_1624&store=0

4th press is 500 on orange vinyl. Available in March.

 
Listen to/download Toxic Waste here:

 
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Municipal Waste: website, Facebook, Myspace, Reverbnation
Toxic Holocaust: Facebook, Myspace, Reverbnation, Bandcamp
Tankcrimes: website, Facebook, Myspace, Bandcamp

GUEST REVIEW: Grisly Amputation – Cannibalistic Tendencies

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Dear readers, as you should already know (because I just told you a couple weeks ago!), two Innervenus artists have CDs coming out tomorrow (Tuesday, 12 February 2013)! One of those is the death metal + grind unit called Grisly Amputation, with their debut full-length Cannibalistic Tendencies.

 
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Considering my professional relationship with the band, as the record label’s PR representative, it didn’t seem appropriate for me to write a review of their album, because it wouldn’t seem objective or unbiased. So I found a neutral outside reviewer who was willing to write about the album and then let me publish it for him. He was a frequent contributor to the “Sign Me To Roadrunner Records” website when I used to spend a lot of time there, and his reviews were always very thoughtful and detailed. Plus, as a musician in a death metal band himself, I’d be inclined to say he’s even more qualified to discuss this album than I am…

 
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GUEST REVIEW: Lycosa – Self-Titled EP

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Dear readers, as you should already know (because I just told you a couple weeks ago!), two Innervenus artists have CDs coming out tomorrow (Tuesday, 12 February 2013)! One of those is the brutal death/thrash/groove/sludge conglomeration known as Lycosa, who will be putting out their debut, self-titled EP.

 
Lycosa_CDcover

 
Considering my professional relationship with the band, as the record label’s PR representative, it didn’t seem appropriate for me to write a review of their album, because it wouldn’t seem objective or unbiased. So I found a neutral outside reviewer who was willing to write about the album and then let me publish it for him. He was a frequent contributor to the “Sign Me To Roadrunner Records” website when I used to spend a lot of time there, and his reviews were always very thoughtful and detailed. So I asked if he’d be willing to discuss this EP, and he graciously agreed…

 
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Innervenus Music: Two New CDs Coming Next Month!

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Hello, friends. Regular visitors to this website have surely noticed that recently the volume of writing I am putting out there has significantly decreased. I apologize for that. But it hasn’t been the result of laziness, I assure you. I’ve been getting myself involved with a few other things — as I keep alluding to in several new posts over the past few weeks — and finally I want to let you know about one of those.

So, I have been asked to join the Pittsburgh-based record label The Innervenus Music Collective to help out with their PR and publicity. It’s a pretty exciting opportunty for me — first of all, as a writer I’ve been working with a variety of PR people and representatives from other labels, so I understand what’s involved, and it’s cool to be getting some experience from the other direction now. But even more than that, now I get to work directly with a group of people who do so much to support our local music scene — between planning shows and giving away the Iron Atrocity compilations, not to mention releasing albums from some really talented bands (Vulture, Invader, Fist Fight in the Parking Lot — just to name a few examples that I had written about last year)!

And so this new position has been using up a lot of my free time recently, mostly because we’re gearing up to put out two CDs in February: the debut full-length by grindcore/death dealers Grisly Amputation, and a self-titled EP by death-thrash-groove-sludge-core band Lycosa. I’ve been sending out promo materials to a whole slew of websites and magazines, so we should start seeing some reviews trickle in shortly, but I figure I wouldn’t really be doing my job (EITHER job – as a writer OR a publicist!) if I didn’t also inform you about the releases here on Valley of Steel!

 
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Solarburn – 13

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Solarburn – 13 (self-released, 14 September 2012)

 
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you — in my opinion — the #1 CD from all of 2012. Not only one of the best bands I’ve ever heard in Pittsburgh, but one of the best bands I’ve ever heard. And I stumbled into being a huge fan of theirs, almost by accident. Or some might call it fate.

See, these guys had included one of their songs (“C-Section”) on the Innervenus Music Collective‘s free Pittsburgh metal sampler, Iron Atrocity V.2 — a collection which I heard and wrote about when it was released last summer.

At the time, I was impressed by the Solarburn track, given that I’ve always been fond of instrumental metal music anyway, and (as I said in that article about the compilation), this song sounded “way heavier, more ballsy, and well, just plain more interesting than a bunch of the aimless noodly shit that’s out there.”

I also recall somebody involved with Innervenus talking about this particular song when the compilation was made public — I can’t find the exact quote, now, so I will paraphrase — playing the song for another person, that other person reportedly said something about how the song was absolutely perfect, and he kept hoping that nobody would start singing and fuck things up.

I was also intrigued to learn that the band had been working on a full-length album (which was to be unveiled at a show in mid-September), and thought that I might want to check that out — the new CD at least, even if I ended up not being able to make it to that show.

Anyway, within the next few weeks I heard about what was called the R.A.N.T. (Rock All Night Tour) in the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I wrote an announcement that this all-day free music festival was happening, and what really caught my eye was the fact that the renowned local pirate rock band, The Bloody Seamen, were playing a show that evening. I’d been wanting to get a chance to check them out ever since I’d seen a few of their videos, so that’s just what the wife and I had planned on doing.

Well once we got to the Thunderbird Cafe, where the “punk” show was taking place, it was already extremely crowded for such a small area — and people just kept coming and coming, to the point where we felt pretty claustrophobic, and couldn’t find anywhere to stand where we weren’t constantly getting stepped on. Frankly, it was kind of miserable, so we were talking about just heading back home — when I pulled up the Valley of Steel post about R.A.N.T. on my phone. I saw that the “metal” show was taking place at a bar called Cattivo, just a few blocks away, and it had a slightly later start time — so we decided to see what that was like, before just giving up on the evening.

It happened to be much more spacious there, and there weren’t nearly as many people (at least at first). So we grabbed a couple drinks, found an empty table, and waited for opening act Solarburn to take the stage.

 
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Gay Kiss – Fault (Free Download / In Pittsburgh Tonight!)

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Gay Kiss – Fault (Anxiety Machine Records, 21 December 2012)

 
HELLO OUT THERE! HAPPY 2013!! How’s life been treating you, dear readers?

I wish I could say that flipping the calendar over to a new year has also turned the page on all the problems and stresses and worries and other crap that infringes on my time I’d rather be spending with fun stuff like listening to music and writing about music and all that.

So far, that has not been the case. And at this moment I almost literally feel like I am bursting at the seams with stuff I want to share with you, because you’ve all been such wonderful, loyal readers for so long, I feel like you really deserve to be rewarded with some good music you can listen to.

For my first post as we enter into the thirteenth year of this millennium, I want to tell you about an up-and-coming group of young men who come from the city of Tempe, which is just outside Phoenix and is also the home of the ASU Sun Devils.

That band is called Gay Kiss.

 
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