Pinkish Black – Pinkish Black (Handmade Birds, 15 May 2012)
Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The rest of his bandmates came back from wherever they’d been all day, and walked in to find a hellish nightmare: there lay his lifeless body, extinguished by his own hand while he’d been home alone.
It sounds like a tale from Until the Light Takes Us, I know, but this was the story of Tommy Atkins, bassist for Denton, Texas’s The Great Tyrant. Bandmates Daron Beck and Jon Teague reportedly discovered him in the bathroom. Having found their band reduced from a trio to a duo, they decided to continue on under a new name — in honor of the terrible scene they had come across, in which (they said) “the walls were pinkish black.”
With an origin such as this, it’s not at all surprising that the new musical project would seem inspired by and surrounded by death. Sometimes frightening, sometimes peaceful; sometimes horribly ugly, sometimes angelically beautiful; sometimes all of these at once. And dark. Such an intense darkness that it could almost blind anyone who gazes upon it.
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…
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.)
Apologies for the lame joke in the title of this post, but I just couldn’t pass it up! Thanks to Clawhammer PR for bringing this story to my attention.
The Reticent‘s Chris Hathcock recently denounced the May 8th passage of Amendment One, North Carolina’s constitutional amendment prohibiting the legal recognition of domestic unions, including same-sex marriages. The amendment, which has made North Carolina a national focal point for the issue, defines marriage as solely a union between a man and a woman, and expands an existing North Carolina law banning gay marriage.
Said denunciation primarily came last week in the form of re-posting an image (which I’d already seen multiple times on Facebook) depicting various types of marriage, as described throughout the bible and in the laws of biblical times. However, in this particular context, Hathcock directed his message specifically at the Reverend Billy Graham:
The Reticent is collectively disappointed in North Carolina’s passage of an exclusivist, misguided, and ill-informed piece of legislature today. The mind reels. It is all too clear what really fueled those voters that checked “For” which is terribly disheartening. Billy Graham took out an ad in 14 NC newspapers proclaiming his support and we quote him: “The Bible is clear…”. Alright, then we would like to posit the following as other examples of marriage found in that text.
Mr. Graham has already displayed — on far too many occasions to count — his sick and twisted version of Christianity which has nothing to do with loving thy neighbor or any sort of a golden rule. Therefore, his direct support of a law which serves no positive or helpful purpose whatsoever, and exists only for the sake of excluding rights and liberties from a specific group of citizens, comes as no real surprise.
The reasoning in this case, though, seems to be the source of Mr. Hathcock’s frustration: there’s plenty of outdated (and just plain wrong) information written in the bible, so it makes little sense for anyone to base their entire lives on something that was written thousands of years ago. But even disregarding that, it certainly makes less sense for any law in this country to be based solely on a religious text (without any other grounds for that law’s existence), when (according to Black’s Law Dictionary) the First Amendment to the United States Constitution includes a provision “that prohibits the federal and state governments from establishing an official religion, or from favoring or disfavoring one view of religion over another.”
Anyway, apparently if you make a public statement that is contrary to a decision made by majority vote in certain places — California, for example — it just gets dismissed as another case of Hollywood liberals and most people barely even notice. However if you do the same thing in a place like North Carolina, I guess it’s a much bigger deal. Following that post, it seems a great deal of argument erupted (both for and against the legislation), prompting a second post a day later:
The anger and vitriol on all sides of the current debate in our home state and country is troubling to us. And further we do not want to entertain any further debate on our page because all we want to do is make music. The thing that is most staggering and regretful in all of this is that it seems we as a people cannot have an earnest discussion about this. Are we only capable of venom and hostility? I’m not about to tell you what to think, there are enough people doing that in all our lives already. But regardless of your stance, if we can’t all sit down and have a reasoned, honest, and legitimate discussion of this issue – we will only tear further apart. Once more, we do not wish to use this page to play host to any debate or soapboxing. Yet since we made a statement (which we thought was mild and humorous) we have found it clearly necessary to bring closure to this can of worms. Here ends our political ranting.
Very well, we can let the discussion end here and talk about music instead.
So, back in January, when the news came out about Tony Iommi‘s health condition, kind words and well-wishes came pouring in from all directions (this blog included). Right around that same time, Gothenburg stoner/sludge/doom metal titans One Inch Giantmentioned on Facebook that they planned on recording a Black Sabbath cover song in tribute to the legendary guitarist. They sought suggestions from their fans as to which song they should attack.
Well, that tribute has taken four months for the band to arrange and record, but when you listen to it you’ll hear why! Instead of choosing one of the suggestions, it seems they decided to go with all of them — with a couple extra thrown in for good measure! I only heard it once through, streamed on my phone, so I can’t guarantee the accuracy of this list, but I believe I picked out a few lines or phrases from each of the following:
Valley of Steel 