Category Archives: Reviews

Out Tomorrow: Embers – Shadows (2xLP Vinyl Release)

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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.

 
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Get to Know: Injury Deepen (Review of Demo 2011 – FREE Download)

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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!)
 
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Out Last Week: Pinkish Black – Self-Titled

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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.

 
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In Case You Missed It: Cultura Tres – El Mal Del Bien

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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.
 

 

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Now Available for Pre-Order: Coffinworm – Great Bringer of Night (Vinyl Reissue Shipping Soon!)

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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.

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Two Reviews for the Price of One: Ritalin Attack – James Doesn’t Exist Split + Gutter Bombin’

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Ritalin Attack / James Doesn’t Exist – Split (13 April 2012, Torn Flesh Records)

 

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Ritalin Attack – Gutter Bombin’ (07 May 2012, Torn Flesh Records)

 

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Hey there. I thought it’d never get here, but it’s finally Friday!! And there was much rejoicing. Yay.

So, remember last week when I was talking about music journalists who somehow find the time to also be musicians?

Well, at that time I also started writing this review of the recent split release between Ritalin Attack (the brainchild of Ross Gnarly, of American Aftermath fame) and fellow one-man grind band James Doesn’t Exist, which was intended to be published that same day as kind of a companion piece. But then, as it often does, life got in the way and I didn’t get it finished on-time.

Then, ironically, on Monday I learned that Torn Flesh Records had issued another Ritalin attack release, called Gutter Bombin’. I said ironically, because here I sit, unable to complete one article written on-schedule, and meanwhile an entire album of music (well, more of a mini-EP, to be fair) had been written and recorded AND released.

It’s no wonder Ross manages to write and publish nearly 4,000 articles a week (approximately), and it’s also completely fitting that this artist’s name should refer to Ritalin. Also known as Methylphenidate, Ritalin is a drug often prescribed to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) — probably a condition with a high rate of occurrence among performers and fans alike in the grindcore scene — despite the fact that the medication itself is a stimulant, and from a chemical standpoint is basically a milder form of cocaine. Of course I’m not a doctor or a scientist or whatever, but I have absolutely no idea why that would help.

Anyway, the point of all this is, I’ve now edited and amended what I originally had begun writing, so that now it covers both releases — including how to download each of them 100% free, from the nice people at Torn Flesh.

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Out Last Month: Author & Punisher – Ursus Americanus

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Author & Punisher – Ursus Americanus (24 April 2012, Seventh Rule Recordings)

Good afternoon, readers. You might remember about two months ago, when I told you about a couple preview tracks from the new Author & Punisher album, Ursus Americanus (as well as an interview with the mechanical engineer Tristan Shone who is the architect of these technological soundscapes).

Well, in case you forgot or you haven’t been paying attention, that album has since been released by Seventh Rule, and is now available for streaming, or to purchase the album download or CD, whichever is your preferred method for experiencing post-apocalyptic harsh industrial nightmares…

 
Do you remember the basic idea behind The Matrix movies? At some point in the future, humans have built machines that developed higher and higher levels of intelligence, until eventually they became self-aware and rebelled against the people who had created them. “The Matrix,” or the reality that we all perceive, is actually just an artificial virtual environment created by those machines to occupy the minds of the human slaves who are kept as sources of energy; meanwhile, the “real world,” or the actual reality outside of the Matrix, is a war-torn, post-apocalyptic hellscape as the result of generations of battles between men and machines.

In that reality, where the machines are the dominant ‘species’ and nearly all of mankind is reduced to the role of subserviant ‘batteries,’ so to speak, one would imagine that there would be plenty of leisure time for those advanced technological creations. Perhaps they get together for parties or go out to a night club. And when they do, this is their soundtrack.
 
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Out Last Month: Dreaming Dead – Midnightmares

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Dreaming Dead – Midnightmares (Self-released, 20 April 2012)

So it’s been about three weeks since Midnightmares, the new Dreaming Dead album was made available. As you may recall, I told you they were giving it away for free on the day it was released. Did you see that post, and did you take advantage of that offer? If you did, feel free to share your opinion in the comments below — I’d love to hear from you. If you missed it, though, I’m sorry — but you should totally consider taking advantage of subscribing to the Valley News email updates or RSS feed (see the relevant links somewhere on this page), or heading over to Facebook and “liking” the Valley of Steel page, because I’m always sharing information about freebies like that when I hear about them, and maybe next time you can be better informed!

In any case, if you haven’t had a chance to check out this lovely slice of progressive death-thrash yet, don’t worry — it might not be available to download for free any more, but you can still catch a stream of the album at the band’s website, and they’re also selling it in download, CD, and LP formats!

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Out Last Month: Pigs – You Ruin Everything

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Pigs – You Ruin Everything (Solar Flare Records, 11 April 2012)

Well, good morning. Another new day, another day closer to the weekend. The real shitty part is, though, I spent about half of yesterday convinced that it was actually Wednesday, which made me real depressed when I realized it wasn’t. Things were looking up as quitting time was approaching, but then when a departing coworker announced “See you all tomorrow – hey, tomorrow’s Wednesday already!” in a way-too-cheerful voice, well that made it about a hundred times worse. I was feeling pretty pissed off, and decided I needed something to listen to that’s equally pissed off, or who knows, I might have ended up breaking something.

So how has your week been so far? If it’s anything like mine has been, maybe you need some angry music too. Here’s what worked for me, I hope this will help you as well.

I’m going to start out by assuming you’re already familiar with Unsane, that groundbreaking blend of classic NYHC and noise rock, which is still going strong after nearly a quarter-century? If you aren’t, I’d suggest you correct that oversight real quick!

If you do know the band, you’ll be glad to hear that not only did they put out a new album earlier this year, but bassist Dave Curran (who’s been with the band since 1994) has a new side-project called Pigs, who also just released a new album. And, you’ll be even gladder to know that it sounds awesome!

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In Case You Missed It: Fire in the Cave – Self-Titled

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Fire in the Cave – Fire in the Cave (28 February 2012)

 
Happy Friday!! I’m so ready for the week to be over so I can get my ass home! No more school for a few months, no more work for a few days, nothing to do but kick back and… do all the shit I need to take care of around the house, that I’m unable to do during the week. Sometimes it feels like I barely get a single minute to myself, to relax or whatever. I’ll be honest with you — I’m always amazed (and, I’ll admit, sometimes a little jealous) when I hear about one of my colleagues in the music-writing world being in a band, on top of the writing and also having a “real” job and whatever else they’ve got going on. I hardly find the time to go to shows as often as I’d like, let alone to be able to rehearse beforehand, or even to put in the effort to recruit a bunch of people to even get started in the first place! But like I said, there are some people out there that manage to do it all, and I definitely respect that.

Case in point is Jarad Oates, editor/writer for Orlandooom!, plus an occasional guest columnist for … well, as far as I can tell, pretty much every other Florida-based music-related publication in existence. In addition to all of that, he’s also a member of Orlando swamp-metal warlords Fire in the Cave, for whom he contributes caveman-esque (no pun intended) bellowed vocals. A couple of months ago, that band self-released a self-titled EP, and I’d like to share that with you now.

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