Category Archives: Free Downloads

Win FREE Tickets for OF FEATHER AND BONE in Pittsburgh!!

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Steel Bridge Promotions Presents:

Of Feather and Bone (Denver, CO)

featuring Steel City Firm (Pittsburgh, PA), Separated (Long Island, NY), Vein (Boston, MA), and High Water (York, PA)

Sunday 03 July 2016

at The Mr. Roboto Project, 5106 Penn Ave, Pittsburgh 15224

ALL AGES, 7:00 pm, $8

http://www.facebook.com/events/1735783396703078/
 

Well, Steel Bridge has done it again — assembled quite a conglomeration of a line-up, a hodgepodge of hardcore and metal, made up of regional and national bands, and presented to you for one low price (only $1.60 per band!). Pre-sale tickets are available right now at their Big Cartel page… but for the next two weeks, you can WIN a pair of tickets for FREE, courtesy of Steel Bridge Promotions and Valley of Steel! Keep on reading to learn more…

 
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Giant of the Mountain – Moon Worship (2014), The Empty Quarter (2016)

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Giant of the Mountain – Moon Worship (self-released, 25 February 2014)

 

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Giant of the Mountain – The Empty Quarter (Burning Dogma Records, 27 May 2016)

 

Emerging from the Plano/Dallas region of northern Texas way back in 2008, the beast known as Giant of the Mountain was formed by guitarist/vocalist Cody Daniels along with Randi Matejowsky, who soon switched from guitar to drums. The pair worked with a series of different bassists as they unleashed a couple EPs and a full-length album over the next several years. By the band’s fifth anniversary in 2013, they had joined up with Alexander Salazar on bass and doubling as a second vocalist — and this is the line-up that remains intact to this day. This threesome recorded and released the album Moon Worship, a masterpiece of progressive-death insanity, a little over two years ago, and now they’re back with the brand-new EP The Empty Quarter which comes out at the end of this week. If you aren’t already on the GOTM bandwagon, keep on reading to find out what you’ve been missing!

 

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Anopheli – The Ache of Want (2015), Akem Manah – Demons of the Sabbat (2016)

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Anopheli – The Ache of Want (Halo of Flies, 15 December 2015)

 

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Akem Manah – Demons of the Sabbat (Possession Productions, 11 January 2016)

 

Well folks, it seemed like it would never get here, but finally it’s Friday and nearly the end of the week! I don’t know about you, but I am fully ready to just go and hibernate for two entire days. (Of course, I won’t, because it seems like every spare minute I get outside of work is always filled by repairing something in our house or car, sometimes both at the same time — but just let me have this moment to daydream, ok?) Before I do that, I’ll leave you with one more article about some music you just might want to check out.

I’ve got two different albums to share with you, actually — one is kind of an atmospheric blackened crust style, and the other is more of an old-school death-doom. Both of these were released within the past several months, and both are free to download, so keep on reading and hopefully you’ll find at least one of these to your liking!

 

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Nekrogoblikon – Power (2013), Dethlehem – Destroyers of the Realm (2015)

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Nekrogoblikon – Power (self-released, 27 August 2013)

 

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Dethlehem – Destroyers of the Realm (self-released, 06 January 2015)

 

Hey, folks. Today’s theme is going to be fantasy-RPG-inspired metal. I know that sounds oddly specific, but there are a couple bands in that realm I’d like to discuss, and they both just happen to be playing a show together later this week. First, Californian horde Nekrogoblikon, as you may have guessed, write songs that are based on goblins — those devilish inhabitants of folklore, who in this instance resemble the nasty green creatures of Warhammer and later fantasy games, more so than the bumbling little muppets from Labyrinth, for example. The band has been around for a few years — the EP I’ll soon talk about was released nearly three years ago, in fact — but since they’re currently on a raid across the country, it seemed like as good of a time as any to share their music with you today. Nekrogoblikon‘s tour will be storming through Pittsburgh in just a few days (accompanied by Urizen from Fort Worth), and when it does, rest assured that a ragtag band of local heroes will be ready for them.

Regular readers of this website are already familiar with Pittsburgh’s own Dethlehem, perhaps from the time we did an interview with them, or from any number of other times the band has been mentioned here. For those who somehow managed to miss out on these guys previously, imagine a group of musicians who have gathered together in precisely the way a typical Dungeons & Dragons adventuring party would: someone who has good fighting skills, someone who knows magic, people who can specialize in lead guitar or rhythm guitar or bass guitar, someone who is good at sneaking around quietly and gathering information or stealing things, folks with vocal skills and drumming know-how, and so on. Basically, a group of people whose strengths and weaknesses can complement each other, and who can work together harmoniously.

 

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Laster – De Verste Verte is Hier, Sordide – La France a Peur (2014); Cantique Lépreux – Cendres Célestes (2016)

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Laster – De Verste Verte is Hier (Dunkelheit Produktionen, 01 November 2014)

 

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Sordide – La France a Peur (Avantgarde Music, 21 December 2014)

 

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Cantique Lépreux – Cendres Célestes (Eisenwald, 18 March 2016)

 

My calendar is lying to me, I am sure of this. How could it possibly be only Tuesday, when it already feels like this week has lasted about sixteen years?? I have no reasonable or logical explanation. Anyway, as I sit here watching the seconds creep by, I might as well get something written to share with you folks. How does some atmospheric black metal sound? What about albums by three different bands, who approach “atmosphere” in three different ways? And — rather peculiarly — what about a unifying theme between all three albums that just might make you want to get up out of your chair and dance? What if all these questions were rhetorical, because no matter what your answer, that’s what you’re getting anyway?

 

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Venus Sleeps – Dead Sun Worship (2016), Brigantia – Midnight (2015)

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Venus Sleeps – Dead Sun Worship (on cassette via Tartarus Records, 22 March 2016; originally released 13 March 2015)

 

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Brigantia – “Midnight” (self-released, 28 May 2015)

 

Hello out there, and good afternoon! Hope your week is going well — as for myself, I’m just relieved that it’s halfway over. Anyway, I’ve been planning on telling you about the debut album by Irish psychedelic doom band Venus Sleeps, which has been out for a while now but I just discovered it when it was re-released by Tartarus Records last week.

Well today that’s just what I’m going to do, except that I also decided to throw in an extra treat for you all: a song that was put out last spring by another Irish doom band, Brigantia, which you can download for free. Think of it as kind of a bonus track at the end of the article. I’ve got a feeling you’ll enjoy both of these …

 

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Kavyk – Hymns and Hollow Words (2015), Crawl – Old Wood & Broken Dreams (2014)

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Kavyk – Hymns and Hollow Words (self-released, 22 April 2015)

 

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Crawl – Old Wood & Broken Dreams (Stone Groove Records, 18 October 2014)

 

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen! Today I’m going to discuss a pair of releases — each of these was submitted to me by one of the members of each band a little while ago for me to check out, which I’ve done, and to share with all of you, which I’m doing now.

The first of these, released nearly a year ago, is the debut EP from a blackened doom band from Louisiana; although this band is relatively new, its members have been around for a while in various other projects (including one that was written about here on Valley of Steel, not long after the time this EP was released). The second one is a little older, almost a year and a half old by now, and it comes to us from a sludgier doom band out of Atlanta, Georgia — a band which also has been written about previously on this very website. And so, let’s just jump right in …

 

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Writhe – The Shrouded Grove (2014)

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Writhe – The Shrouded Grove (self-released, 22 September 2014)

 

“One-man black metal band” — or perhaps to be more accurate, “one-man black metal project.” What do you think of when you hear (read) those words? It sort of makes my skin crawl just to type them. In my line of work (expert music-opinion-haver), the phrase almost always means bad news: some kid who lives in his parents basement downloaded some pirated sound editing software onto his Macbook, cut-and-pasted the same generic drumbeat for twelve minutes, plugged his crappy guitar directly into the line-in input, screamed some stuff about the Impending Conquest of the Dark Lord Urkel Grue into the built-in laptop mic, and then ran the whole thing through some cheesy preset distortion plug-in. Then found some old black-and-white picture of some old buildings using Google image search, photoshopped some nonsense like “Desolation of Solitude” (using Parchment font) onto it, and then emailed it all to me. The message probably started out by saying “Infernal Hailz.” Never a good sign.

But today — surprise!! — I’m going to introduce you to something that goes against all of those stereotypes…

 

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Cormorant – Earth Diver (2014)

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Cormorant – Earth Diver (self-released, 08 April 2014)

 

Well, sleep-walking my way to the bus this morning really felt like a reality check. Tuesday mornings are generally pretty tough anyway, but following a week and a half of vacation, it just makes it that much harder. To be clear, I’ve been back to work and back to “the real world” for several days now, but today I’m really feeling like “Oh yeah, I forgot how much going to work sucks, I could really use a vacation.”

Speaking of which, how was my vacation? It was nice, thanks for asking. I’ve learned that they don’t call Florida “The Sunshine State” for nothing, everything is way too bright there, and it was some god-awful temperature (well above 80° every single day — in the middle of March!!) and the humidity was nearly unbearable. But on the plus side, I did see all sorts of fascinating nature and wildlife — especially birds. There were birds everywhere, fancy exotic kinds I’d never seen outside of a zoo or even some I’d never seen anywhere. For example, the little guy pictured below, who I encountered in a mangrove swamp while hiking through a place called Bailey Tract on Sanibel Island.

 

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Endlichkeit – Endlichkeit IX (2015)

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Endlichkeit – Endlichkeit IX (self released, 18 May 2015)

 

Good morning! Gonna make this a short and sweet one, because it’s going to be a busy day for me. Headed out to a show tonight — something I’d almost never do on a weeknight, but there’s just no way I could miss a show like this one. But of course that means tomorrow I will be absolutely dead to the world and so I’ll probably be extremely unproductive (you probably shouldn’t expect any new posts here, either), which means I’ll need to be extra busy today to make up for it. But I’ll take the time to share something with you real quick, a track that you can download for free, that was released on Bandcamp by the band Endlichkeit last spring. Think of this as sort of a bonus track to yesterday’s review, since this one fits together nicely with that album — not only alphabetically, but stylistically as well.

 

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