Embers – Shadows (Self-released, 29 March 2011 / vinyl by Iconoclast Records, 25 May 2012)
Californian blackened-crust band Embers released their debut LP Shadows to much critical acclaim early last year. At that time, it was made available as a free (or pay what you choose) download, and it’s still available that way (more details later), but the band recently announced that the album is finally being made available in a vinyl format for those fans who had been requesting that…
Tomorrow (Friday, 25 May) Embers will be kicking off a two-week European tour, starting in Bologna (see the end of this post for a list of dates). At the same time, they will be releasing Shadows as a 2xLP vinyl edition via the Bolognese label Iconoclast Records.
So the other day, I saw some exciting news on Facebook, that I just had to share with you, Readers. Indonesian brutal death metal band Injury Deepen posted, “Minggu ini Kami Siap Untuk Melangsungkan Proses Rekaman Untuk Debut Album Kami!!”
For those of us who don’t speak Indonesian, fortunately we have Google Translate to assist. It isn’t always perfect, and if any readers out there have a better translation for me I’d appreciate it, but as far as I can tell, it says, “This week, we are ready to establish the process of recording our debut album!!”
Anyway, like I said, I was pretty excited to see this; probably if you’d heard the band’s demo from last year, you’d feel the same way too.
I found the four-track Demo 2011 EP at the Death Metal Invasion blog, which is a wonderful resource for discovering new music, because several times a week they post another release (sometimes demos, EPs, or singles, sometimes full albums), and they are all 100% FREE to download — and 100% LEGAL because they only post stuff that comes directly from bands or record labels. As the name implies, they primarily cater to the death metal crowd, but the content spans the huge spectrum of sub-subgenres that fall under that umbrella: traditional, brutal, slamming, technical, melodic, etc., with bits of deathgrind or grindcore thrown in the mix as well.
So I end up downloading A LOT of stuff from DMI, across all those different styles, and from literally all over the world. As you might expect, there is also a wide range of quality in these releases — some I end up liking quite a bit, while others may not resonate so well with me.
Out of all that, Injury Deepen really caught my attention and ended up being one of the more memorable bands I’d heard on that site. So when I learned they’d be working on a new album, I decided to revisit their demo, and then share it with you! (Including, of course, where you can grab a copy for yourself, because they’re still offering it for free!)
Hello there, readers! I wanted to bring this to your attention as soon as I learned about it: pre-orders are now available for the Toxic Waste Split 12″ (Municipal Waste / Toxic Holocaust)! CLICK HERE!
**UPDATE 19 June 2012** Since the first pressing of this split sold out so quickly, Tankcrimes has just announced a second pressing! PLUS you can now download both sides of the release FOR FREE! Check out this newer post for all the relevant details!
This record is coming out on 12 June 2012 via Tankcrimes Records, and I’m predicting it’s gonna go fast. If you’re a thrash fan who’s been keeping up with the explosion of retro/revival bands over the past several years, then you already know that these are two of the biggest names in that movement. If you aren’t already familiar with these bands, I’ll give you a brief introduction to them later in this post (including a list of dates for each band’s upcoming world tours!), but first I want to talk about this incredible package — which I’m sure is going to be a HUGE hit with vinyl collectors all over the world…
For the past several months, Scotty at Tankcrimes has often talked about working with various manufacturers and testing a number of different formulations to come up with just the perfect glow-in-the-dark vinyl to use for this release. That kind of dedication should give you an idea of just how important this collectors’ item is going to be…
The extremely limited “Die Hard” edition of the release is available in either the picture-disc (which, as you can see above, features the album’s cover art) or the special glow-in-the-dark vinyl. Either of those will also include a beer koozie and a poster of that cover art, too. Oh, and by the way, I don’t know if you noticed, but the “Toxic Waste” logo inside the glowing globe in the center of the artwork is made of the “T” from “Toxic Holocaust” and the “W” from “Municipal Waste” — sorry, it doesn’t take much to amuse me…
Anyway, for those fans who might not also be into collectible vinyl (or, more likely, for those who want to save the picture-disc or glow-in-the-dark edition in mint condition, but still want to listen to the record) it’s also available in regular boring black or blue vinyl. With any of these editions, you will be sent a link to download a digital copy on the release date, as well.
**UPDATE – 23 MAY** I told you that glow-in-the-dark vinyl was going to be a hot seller and that it would sell out… but I never predicted that they’d all be gone by the afternoon of the first pre-sale day! But, that’s what happened — as of yesterday, there are no more glowing Toxic Waste records left. If you missed out, sorry, it sucks to be you. Next time you need to listen to me when I tell you to jump on something quickly! I just wish I had some extra cash lying around this week, or else I might have grabbed up a dozen copies!
But anyway, all is not lost because that picture-disc edition is still available (although that one surely won’t be around too much longer, either!), as well as the black or blue versions. **
Once again, the link to pre-order the split is here.
Hey there, loyal and devoted Valley of Steel Readers! For the past four months I’ve been doing these little profiles every Monday about bands that I’ve discovered on the “Sign Me to Roadrunner Records” website. Mostly they’ve been bands that have sent me messages seeking reviews of their music, but occasionally I’ll just randomly stumble across something good and then I end up writing about that. Either way, I’ve found some really cool stuff that I might not have known about otherwise! I hope the same has been true for you, readers — have you seen any bands profiled here that really resonated with you? Let me know in the comments section below; hearing that I’ve introduced a reader to some awesome new music (and also that I’ve given a band some much-deserved exposure to new fans) validates my existence and gives me a reason to get out of bed each morning.
Over the course of the past several weeks, I’ve tried to keep up with some of these exciting new discoveries — either by following their Facebook pages, or signing up for an email list, or possibly by watching for smoke signals. In any case, I’ve been hearing some things lately about some of these bands — in terms of new songs, new videos, or upcoming new releases — and so I decided to use this week’s post to reflect back on some of those previous posts and see what the bands have been up to since I wrote about them…
Drone from the Underside of the Earth is a FREE digital compilation featuring Australia’s best stoner, sludge, doom and drone bands.
It’s supposed to be released 21 May 2012 through Art As Catharsis, and I know that’s tomorrow, but it turns out that in addition to having winter when we have summer, and water going backwards down their drains, Australian people also live inside some crazy time warp thing where there it’s already tomorrow while here it’s still today. I’ll never understand all this complicated science stuff, but the good thing means, the compilation is available right now!
It features 26 songs by Adrift for Days, Arrowhead, Atolah, Battle Pope, Clagg, DEAD, Drowning Horse, Futility, Houdini, Hydromedusa, In Trenches, Law of the Tongue, Lint, Log, Looking Glass, Moth, Mother Eel, Mother Mars, No Anchor, Noûs, Shellfin, Sore, Space Bong, Summonus, Sons of the Ionian Sea, and The Slow Death. The compilation also includes that incredible artwork shown above, which was done by promoter/label head Lachlan R. Dale.
Lachlan also had the following message to share:
I’ve spent a lot of hours on this project this year. I really wanted to draw attention to some our country’s awesome fuzzy, droney, drug-addled groups, that perhaps don’t get the attention they deserve – especially outside of Australia – because the reality is we can boast some of the most unique and varied slow music of any country.
So I set off with intent to pull together some of my favourite artists in Australia’s stoner, sludge, doom and drone scenes in order to get more people to discover great Australian underground music. But I was a little naive of quite how long it would take me!
The hard work paid off in the end. Drone form the Underside of the Earth features a selection of 26 tracks. This is a rare, eye-opening peek into Australia’s rich underground music scene. At 3-and-a-half hours in length it’s quite a ride, but I sincerely hope that you at least discover a few new bands as a result of this work.
Listen to or download the compilation through Bandcamp…
Cultura Tres – El Mal Del Bien (self-released, 29 March 2011)
So yesterday morning, as I was putting together the post about the newly released track by Vesperia, it occurred to me that I’ve done an awful lot of writing about bands from our upstairs neighbors over the past couple months. At the same time, it occurred to me that I’ve probably been unfairly neglecting music that originates from south of the border…
Well, actually, I haven’t entirely neglected bands from south of here — about a month and a half ago, I posted about the Grip of Delusion Radio compilation (which you can still download for free, if you haven’t yet!), and in that post I briefly mentioned a couple of South American bands that had songs included. One of those was Cultura Tres from Maracay, Venezuela.
These guys had first come across my radar just prior to the release of that Book of Riff-Elations compilation, when I read about them playing some shows over in Europe with our British friends Undersmile. So the band name (which literally means “Culture Three” but idiomatically refers to life in the so-called ‘Third World’) jumped out at me when I saw it in the tracklisting. Naturally, I had to give their song “No es mi Verdad” (“It is Not My Truth”) a quick listen, and it was so deliciously sludgey and doomy that I just had to grab both of the band’s full-length releases, 2008’s La Cura (“The Cure”), and last year’s El Mal del Bien (literally, “Bad from Good” or “Wrong from Right”). Both of these are available to download (for free or whatever price you choose), but the newer one was also recently released on vinyl, so I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about that now, Dear Reader.
STOP! You should totally check out THIS POST instead. Vesperia‘s entire The Swordsman demo is now available to download for free; the full details are included there.
Good afternoon! How are you on this lovely Wednesday? Personally, I’m pretty sure I’m about to choke somebody. I don’t know who yet, but it’ll be the next person who says something about how gorgeous the weather is outside. It isn’t raining, and it’s actually been pretty sunny for most of the day, and if you’ve never been to Pittsburgh then you probably don’t realize how rare that is — especially in the springtime. In general, though, we have one of the lowest average numbers of sunny days in the whole United States. Even fewer than Seattle — although we don’t get as much rain, if you factor in cloudy or partly cloudy days and overcast days, we average fewer sunny days per year. True story; you can Google it if you don’t believe me.
So anyway, on the rare occasions that the sun is actually shining and there’s no precipitation around, all these idiots walk around prattling on about what a beautiful day it is, until you feel like you’re going to vomit. Being shut inside a windowless office all day is kind of a double-edged sword, too. On one hand, you don’t have to be subjected to the stupid sun, but on the other hand, all the people around you feel some sense of obligation to give you the goddamn weather report at least once an hour.
Unfortunately, I don’t have an office door. I think there’s an official policy somewhere that dictates who exactly can qualify for an office with a door, and I’m definitely not there yet. In fact, the people one or two levels above me on the organization chart also don’t have doors, and I have no idea how much time and hard work it will take to rise three whole levels on that chart. I suspect it doesn’t involve spending half of one’s day writing a metal blog, though. So for now, I have to make do with the invisible, virtual door provided by loud music through a pair of headphones. It makes the days pass by more quickly, and sends a clear signal that I don’t want to be disturbed by any passers-by.
On a day like today, though, it takes a little bit extra to be able to block out the outside world — some music that’s especially miserable and filthy and nasty. If you’ve been paying attention to Facebook today, you might have noticed that I spent part of the day with Vulture. That helped for a while, and then since I was already in a dirty, sludgey, agonizing kind of mood, I’ve moved on to Coffinworm.
Although it might feel like this band has been around forever, based on the amount of underground cred they seem to have accumulated, they’ve really only been around for a couple of years — their debut full-length When All Became None was just released by Profound Lore about two years ago, while the three-track demo Great Bringer of Night had been self-released about one year earlier. While that demo had been made available for an extremely limited run of physical copies, those have been pretty hard to come by for a long time now.
Well, all that’s about to change, because The Flenser has been kind enough to repackage the songs, along with the demo versions of two additional tracks from around the same time, got all five remastered by James Plotkin, and stuck them on some vinyl inside the warm and inviting cover whose artwork (by Bryan Proteau) you can see at the top of this page.
Würzburg, Germany black metal band Der Weg Einer Freiheit is slated to release their next album, Unstille, through Berlin-based Viva Hate Records on the 29th of June, 2012.
Pre-orders will be available soon (31 May), but first, the band just announced earlier today that one of the songs on that forthcoming album will be available for you to listen — OR DOWNLOAD — for free, but only through THIS SUNDAY (20 May)! Twelve-and-a-half minutes of excellent atmospheric black metal is up for grabs here. Click here to download it directly, or you can listen to it via Soundcloud first…
That intro is pretty awesome, you’d swear it was recorded in some huge cathedral or monastery — and the sound remains just as immense throughout the next ten or eleven minutes. If you’re a long-time fan of this band, or just someone that enjoys quality black metal, you owe it to yourself to check this out.
The French label/promoter Klonosphere recently announced an 18-track sampler of their associated bands that you can download for free!
The bands include: Trepalium, Hypno5e, Memories of a Dead Man, Jenx, Pictured, Hyperdump, The Mistaken Sons of Alabama, Jumping Jack, Wild, Weaksaw, Nojia, Step in Fluid, Nephalokia, Dwail, Klone, Nami, Noein, and The Brutal Deceiver.
The comp is available right here (a direct link to the RAR file), but before you jump right in, click here for a much better write-up that the good folks at No Clean Singing have put together — including sound samples, links to reviews or profiles of some of the bands, as well as links to websites or Facebook pages of ALL the bands! (Because they apparently have more free time than I do, or something.)
Valley of Steel 