Category Archives: Uncategorized

New Cathedral Release! || Bandcamp Friday Merch

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Inbox overflowing with messages from every band and label you’ve ever heard of (and tons you don’t even remember subscribing to)? Must be Bandcamp Friday!

If you need help wading through the oceans of stuff being marketed at you all day, I’m here to help with a few selections to highlight.

 

First: our good friends over at Philip K. Discs have dropped some sweet exclusive merch today.

  • They’ve got super-limited mystery bundles, packed in custom-designed cereal boxes and filled with tons of label-related goodness, but there are only TWO sets available!
  • “This Vending Machine is a Compilation” full-color poster-sized prints as companion pieces to last year’s compilation of the same name.
  • From Chaos to Ambiguity: A Theology of Noise Rock – the guidebook to noise rock written by the label’s owner (spoiler alert: not Philip), now available signed by the author.
  • And there’s lots more where these came from, from printed ‘zines to sculpted mini-figurines to hot sauce bottles to a special edition Touching Grass CD bundled with an actual packet of grass seed — check it all out right here!

 

Next, get yourself ready for winter weather with a brand new pair of socks! But not just any socks, these ones come emblazoned with the logo of Italian dark-occult/doomsters Messa. Wear them in good health!

 

And finally…

 

Cathedral – Society’s Pact With Satan (Rise Above Records, 03 October 2025)

 

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See You On The Other Side.

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See You On The Other Side.

 

End of an era: John “Ozzy” Osbourne (3 December 1948 – 22 July 2025), Rest in Peace.

From Dreams to Living Things III (2025 Compilation)

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And just like that — we’ve reached the halfway point of 2025. When did that happen?
Where did the time go?

For me, I know I’ve been completely draining all of my mental energy with work crap every day, and at the end of it I can barely manage to drag myself downstairs to just zone out to some mindless nonsense on the tv until it’s time to go to bed, rinse and repeat the next day and every day ad nauseam.

 

But never mind all that, here’s a new (well, it came out earlier this month) compilation absolutely jam-packed with music you can insert into your ear-holes and fight off the encroaching ennui…

 

Various Artists – From Dreams to Living Things III: From the Plough to the Stars (Fiadh Productions, 01 June 2025)

 

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Riffs for Palestine (2024 Compilation)

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Good morning and HAPPY MONDAY, everyone!

I did promise recently that my Top 24 of 2024 list was nearing its completion, and I’m pleased to announce that it has finally been published.

We’re going to dive head-first into writing about some of those top releases from last year and from years past, as well as trying to catch up on some of the hits of today, as I am determined to put an end to the lengthy semi-hiatus I’ve been stuck in for roughly the past two years (and intermittently over the past dozen or so years?)…

The world is such a fucked-up place these days, and it seems it’s only getting worse, and like most of you I have no idea what the hell to do about it. But at the very least we can try to cope, and if listening to music helps in any way, then I will try to do my small part in getting the word out there.

One quick housekeeping note, and while we’re on the subject of how fucked-up the world is: as I was finally putting 2024 to rest I came across one more charity benefit compilation from last year that I had forgotten to share here at the time…

 

Various Artists – Riffs for Palestine (Beaver Mosh x Fiadh Productions, 29 July 2024)

 

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Syrup Moose Records: V (2024 Compilation)

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ICYMI: at some point in the latter half of 2024, Syrup Moose Records officially announced that they were taking a well-deserved break during 2025. After averaging at least one release (digital and/or cassette, sometimes CD and/or vinyl too) for their first 2-1/4 years in existence, they have hit the pause button on anything new over the course of this whole year.

Honestly, I think this is a brilliant idea and more people should follow suit. It might give me a slight fighting chance to eventually one day dig myself out of the pile of stuff on my to-do list I have been compiling over the past dozen or so years, stuff I’ve heard and enjoyed enough to write something about to share with the folks who come here to read these words, but which I’ve failed to find the time and energy to do so (yet).

Anyway, because they’ve never half-assed anything, Syrup Moose closed out last year with one hell of a bang: their latest and greatest compilation V — the fifth in a series (not including their first anniversary Year of the Moose) — which tips the scales at a whopping 108 tracks (yes, you read that right, one hundred eight), totaling roughly EIGHT HOURS of material as varied as the label’s first two years of releases have been.

 

Various Artists – V (Syrup Moose Records, 27 December 2024)

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Welcome to the Spectrum (2024 Compilation)

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Dear gentlepersons of the internet: once more I bid you hello and good day. Things have been pretty quiet around here for a bit, which has been (as per usual) the result of extensive craziness happening BTS IRL. So much, in fact, that I’ve missed the year-end deadline for compiling my year-end list by a couple of weeks now. I’ve got it narrowed down to a manageable collection of contenders, just need to revisit them to cut that number in half and then put them in order — which I’ll hopefully accomplish in the near future, now that I’ve finally emptied my inbox of everything from 2024.

Speaking of which, over the past two months we’ve been dormant here, Food Desert Recordings put out another of their esteemed fundraising compilations, which I’ll take a rare minute of downtime to bring to your attention. Welcome to the Spectrum benefits The Autistic Self Advocacy Network, a very worthy cause, since unlike some other well-known organizations, it does not view Autism as a disease to be cured or eradicated…

 

Various Artists – Welcome to the Spectrum: A Compilation to Support the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (Food Desert Recordings, 27 September 2024)

 

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Love Songs (2024 Compilation)

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Good afternoon // happy Friday, everyone!

It’s been an eventful month here at Valley of Steel HQ. After a full year of inactivity on the bird site, earlier this week I finally pulled the plug and deactivated my dozen-year-old Twitter account, which was pretty much the last remnant of my “social media” presence outside of lurking around a handful of Discords.

And on the subject of housekeeping-type news, the renewal for this website’s domain (valleyofsteel.net) is coming up later this month — and with the limited amount of activity I’ve had here in the past few years, I’ve been seriously considering discontinuing that registration. The website would remain, but it would revert back to its original address of https://valleyofsteel.wordpress.com. So you might want to update those bookmarks, just in case. I guess if anyone felt very strongly about the dot-net address sticking around, you could always go buy some shit through this Amazon affiliate link. I just don’t know if my heart is still in it enough, to keep dumping money just to keep a personalized domain name anymore.

But two things I can say for sure my heart IS still in — sharing good music with you folks who come here to read these words, and especially sharing things that are supposed to help other people. In a two birds / one stone situation, here’s a benefit compilation that came out last month, but which I just discovered yesterday (and which I just had to buy before I had even gotten halfway through listening)…

 

Mother Anxiety / Various Artists – Love Songs (26 July 2024)

 

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Syrup Moose Summer Sale

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Syrup Moose Records Summer Sale

 

Hey folks. We’ve talked about our “woke, broke” Canadian friends at Syrup Moose Records a few times over the past couple of years, and if real-life bullshit wasn’t such overwhelmingly real-life bullshit every day, and if I had more time to spend writing about music and sharing it with all you nice people, I can guarantee we’d be talking about our favorite sticky cervids far more often.

But I wanted to let you all know that this week only, they’re running a special summer sale on nearly all the physical releases currently available in their store, also including pre-orders. Better hurry, though – the sale only lasts through this weekend!

 

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Celebrating 10 Years!

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This week, Valley of Steel officially celebrates the milestone of TEN YEARS since first emerging from the ether of cyberspace.

It has been a bumpy ride and the publishing schedule has certainly been irregular and unpredictable much of the time, but inconceivably the site is still puttering along.

A huge THANK YOU to every person reading these words on this page, or who has ever read any of the words that have been published here; I sincerely hope you have found at least one thing you’ve enjoyed, and hope that you continue to do so. To anyone who has ever submitted anything that has been written about (even time has not allowed said writing to take place yet). And most of all to the musicians, thank you — please keep doing what you do, and I’ll keep doing what I do.

The Limit – Caveman Logic (2021)

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The Limit – Caveman Logic (Svart Records, 09 April 2021)

 

Here’s a Friday afternoon riddle for you: what do you get when you mix a couple musicians from highly influential proto-punk/punk-rock bands of the 70s, a couple musicians from a 21st-century doom band, and then round out the line-up with with a vocalist widely regarded as one of the main influencers and forefathers of doom metal from the 70s to present?

More specifically, bassist Jimmy Recca (best known for a brief stint with The Stooges in 1971 before the band broke up for the first time, although he later went on to play with guitarist Ron Asheton‘s band The New Order after The Stooges broke up again) and guitarist Sonny Vincent (of the short-lived, late-70s NYC punk band Testors, as well as an extensive solo and collaborative career ever since then), plus Hugo Conim and Joao Pedro (guitar and drums, respectively, from Portuguese doom band Dawnrider), probably the best-known member of this musical collective, especially to readers of this website, would be vocalist Bobby Liebling (the only constant member of Pentagram throughout their long and tumultuous history)…

 

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