Alcest’s new album, the highly-anticipated follow-up to 2007’s Souvenirs D’un Autre Monde, will be titled Écailles De Lune, and will be released March 29th in Europe and April 20th in the US. I enjoyed the last album, but I’m curious to see whether they take a similar approach on the new one or incorporate more black metal into their sound this time around. Here’s a look at the cover art:
Prophecy is also getting set to release Septembre Et Ses Dernières Pensées, the debut album from Les Discrets. Les Discrets is the solo project of Fursy Teyssier, who is also a member of Amesoeurs. It sounds like that album will be on the softer side of things, so if you enjoyed Alcest’s last full-length then this will probably be right up your alley. Here’s the cover art, which was also done by Fursy:
Like the Alcest album, Septembre Et Ses Dernières Pensées comes out March 29th in Europe and April 20th in the US. You can find a track listings and more info about both albums’ releases at the Prophecy Productions site.
Worship or Die, the newest album from Italy’s Hiems, is one of those albums that gets frustrating after awhile. On the one hand, there are some really killer tracks: the first real metal track ‘I’ is a blistering, 7-minute onslaught of midtempo black metal, and several other tracks like ‘Scum Destroyer’ and ‘W.O.F.’ are almost equally good. But then Hiems throws in weird touches that leave you scratching your head.
Read the rest of this entry »
At first, a thrashy hardcore band from Seattle, Washington seems like a rather odd fit for Southern Lord, with its eclectic, doom-heavy roster of bands like Earth, Sunn O))), Om and Boris. But one listen to Black Breath’s debut EP Razor To Oblivion, and you’ll realize that label founder Greg Anderson’s finely-tuned nose for underground talent has struck again. This pacific northwest foursome’s music has a maturity and energy that belies their relative inexperience, and this being their debut EP, they will probably only get better from here.
Read the rest of this entry »
Romania’s innovative black metal horde Negura Bunget have announced that their latest album Maiestrit will be released in North America on April 6th of this year. Maiestrit is a re-recording/re-interpretation of the band’s classic Maiastru Sfetnic album, which came out in 2000. Negura Bunget is also putting the finishing touches on another new album titled Vîrstele pamîntului, which is expected to come out in March.
In addition to the new releases, Negura Bunget’s back catalog has been gradually getting reissued by Prophecy Productions, and these reissues will be made available in North America this summer. The reissues will feature new artwork and bonus content.
Finally, Negura Bunget is currently planning a full-scale tour of the USA and Canada to coincide with the release of Maiestrit. Tour dates should hopefully be announced soon.
» Negura Bunget on MySpace
Celeste is another amazing band I heard about mainly through various ‘best of 2009′ lists. Hailing from France, these guys combine the raw energy of sludge and hardcore with the dark atmosphere of black metal. Their music is much heavier on the hardcore, but the vocals have a blackened maliciousness to them and the album’s production has a densely suffocating quality to it that separates Celeste from most bands of that genre. Imagine a darker version of Botch or Converge and you’ll be pretty close to Celeste’s sound.
I’m guessing that Celeste’s music a little too hardcore-sounding for some black metal fans to enjoy, but if you’re not one of those people who has to stick closely to a particular genre, these guys are well worth checking out. Their latest album Misanthrope(s) and their 2008 release Nihiliste(s) are both available as free downloads from their label’s site, which to me seems kind of bizarre given how good these guys are. One minor drawback is that both albums sound extremely similar, so despite how ridiculously good the music is it’s easy to get tired of it after awhile. But for the low, low price of free, how can you really complain?
» Download Misanthrope(s) from Denovali Records
German dark metallers Bethlehem have a small free downloads page on their website containing random tracks that fans might find interesting.
Currently there are only two songs offered for download, but both are rather unusual. One is called ‘The 11th Hour…’, which features lyrics written by Nihilist from Seattle black metal band In Memorium. You can check out In Memorium on MySpace at myspace.com/inmemoriummetal.
The other song is actually a Frank Sinatra cover which was originally done as a hidden track for the Mein Weg album.
» Bethlehem downloads page
Being hidden away in the unheralded Czech black metal scene, Inferno had escaped my attention up to this point despite having put out five well-recieved full-lengths, not to mention numerous splits and several live albums. Inferno’s brand of black metal doesn’t really offer anything that numerous other bands haven’t already done, but their latest album Black Devotion is still completely worth checking out.
Read the rest of this entry »
Aosoth’s Ashes of Angels starts out sounding exactly like hordes of other raw black metal albums do: blistering, fairly simplistic, punk-influenced riffing, muddy production values, snarling vocals, etc. After the opener ‘Songs Without Lungs’ was over I was ready to resign myself to this being a rather mediocre album, but fortunately songwriter BST turns up the creativity dial on the next song, the title track ‘Ashes of Angels,’ and the album only gets better from there.
Read the rest of this entry »
I saw Fall of Efrafa’s Inlé on a few best-of-2009 lists and decided to check them out. While musically they are not really my cup of tea, the more I read about the band, the more interesting they became. Fall of Efrafa is a UK-based band who base either music on the themes and mythology of Richard Adams’s Watership Down (an awesome book by the way). Their lyrics focus on atheism and animal rights, and their music is a genre-defying, epic mixture of sludge, post-rock and crust among other things.
The band has called it quits as of this past December, but in four years of existence they managed to release a trilogy of full-length albums known as “The Warren of Snares” as well as a few other singles and splits. They have all three full-lengths posted on their website as free high-quality MP3 downloads, although they’ve also released CD versions as well as a limited-edition LP box set of all their releases.
» Download Fall of Efrafa’s music from their website
» Buy Fall of Efrafa’s albums at Halo of Flies
From its headline, I figured Ben Ratliff’s recent New York Times article “Jazz and Metal, Riffs in Arms” would be just another author happily pointing out jazz’s influence on metal music to people who don’t know any better. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but Ratliff goes further, asserting unequivocally that “Jazz is metal.”
Ratliff then goes on to explain his reasoning by pointing out that, aside from the mainstream artists in each genre, both metal and jazz are largely underground movements that contain large amounts of diversity and experimentation, not to mention superbly talented musicians. Seems pretty obvious to me, and I’m sure most metalheads with any kind of knowledge about jazz wouldn’t find anything to disagree with, but then I’m pretty sure us metal fans were not the intended audience for the article. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting read and definitely refreshing to see an article talk about jazz and metal without focusing on the music.
