Leere is the third full-length from German black metal horde Thorngoth, and while there were some things I didn’t like about it, overall it’s got enough of the modern German black metal sound I’ve come to love to make for a pretty enjoyable listen. It’s not quite up to the level of Germany’s more well-known bands like Nagelfar, The Ruins of Beverast, Lunar Aurora, etc., but these guys are quite talented. If you’re a fan of the German style, there should be at least a few tracks on Leere that will appeal to you.

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Another day, another awesome band returning from the dead!! There have been rumors about new Gorguts material for some time now, and it looks like we finally get a taste of what this new version of Gorguts will sound like. Check out the sample on Gorguts’s official MySpace.

Sounds like they’ll be picking up right where they left off.

If there are any other Candiria fans out there, this should be extremely welcome news. From Candiria’s facebook page:

“Candiria will be in the studio December 19th and 20th Working on brand new material for a Spring 2011 Release.”

The band confirmed that Ken Schalk will be playing drums as usual, and also Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle/Fantomas will be contributing bass to some tracks.

All of this comes as a huge surprise considering that it sounded like the band had pretty much broken up, with Schalk moving to California and Carley Coma starting a new project. Regardless of how the new material turns out, I’m pretty excited that these guys are together and writing new material. My hope to see another Candiria show and watch Schalk play live is not dead yet!

For the uninitiated:

Since I already posted about Cynthia’s Hell survey I should probably give some attention to her actual artwork. Cynthia is the creative force behind ThornyThoughts Artwork, and lately she’s contributed artwork to bands like Urfaust, Self Inflicted Violence, Der Weg Einer Freiheit, Aosoth, and a few others. She’s designed some pretty sweet band logos as well.

Cynthia’s style is easily recognizable - her works are often in simple black & white and seem to be either etched or sometimes drawn with ink. As with Saint John’s work with Inkshadows, this style works perfectly in the context of black metal, so its no surprise that ThornyThoughts has become one of the main providers of artwork for Urfaust’s releases and merchandise. It also helps that Cynthia’s imagination yields some particularly disturbing imagery, both beutiful and morbid at the same time.

Cynthia was nice enough to provide a little insight into what inspires her and her artwork (and name-drop some excellent bands, a few of which I’d never heard of):

A great source of inspiration is probably failure and the chaos in my head. It’s a mistake to give everyone else the fault for things going wrong. In reality you should work on your own mistakes as well. So what I’m doing is (as long as it’s a personal work) a kind of self reflection or a trial to ‘ban’ the horrors and endless questions of every day life onto a medium, maybe kind of a self-therapy. It’s processing negativity by turning it into productivity through ‘art’.

Of course I find inspiration in music, art, graphic novels, books, films, conversation and dreams. As long as it moves and touches me, gives birth to feelings and visuals inside me, I’m happy with any genre.

If you need ‘proper’ examples: the islandic/swedish BM Band Skendöd inspired me with the album Vanskapt as it meant a real musical ‘illustration’ of a dark time in my life. Listening to it and feeling understood was largely satisfying to me and inspired me to do something similar - processing and banning my personal abyss onto a medium like I explained above. I admire people who have the gift to illustrate a whole train of thoughts and feelings with its ups and downs. Other examples in music I admire are Ikuinen Kaamos: The Forlorn, Self Inflicted Violence: A Perception Of Matter And Energy, Slumber: Fallout, Skogen: Vittra, Totalselfhatred s/t …and many more in other genres.

In art I admire since I was a little kid Hieronymos Bosch, Käthe Kollwitz and Zdzislaw Beksinski and Enki Bilal.

ThornyThoughts currently doesn’t have an online store, but you can buy original etching prints of her work by contacting Cynthia. She also mentioned that Viva Hate Records will be releasing poster prints of her work for Der Weg Einer Freiheit, with each personally signed by Cynthia.

If you’re interested in her work, check out the ThornyThoughts page on MySpace for several galleries of her prints, shirt, album and logo designs!

Here’s another act I found recently while looking up this year’s releases. Benighted in Sodom, a US black metal band from Florida has been around for several years and had somehow escaped my attention up until now. What makes them special? Well, this duo has somehow managed to release SIX FULL LENGTH ALBUMS THIS YEAR. And that’s not even everything, they’ve also cranked out five EPs, and already have another full-length and a best-of album queued up for 2011.

It wouldn’t be quite so surprising if Benighted in Sodom flat out sucked or if their music didn’t display much in the way of talent, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The few samples I’ve heard so far actually sound pretty good - kind of a dreamy, melodic and depressive style that reminds me a little bit of Forgotten Tomb’s older stuff, although certainly quite a bit different. And hey, if he’s releasing that many albums someone’s gotta be digging it, right?

So if you haven’t heard these guys before, definitely give them a listen. The Benighted In Sodom MySpace page contains a bunch of samples that should give you a decent idea of what they sound like. You can also check out their stuff on YouTube:
» I Believe You
» Rust

Frontman Matron Thorn aka Reuben Jordan also has a blog called The Light That Veils It Grey that’s worth a read. Apparently he doesn’t like being called DSBM.

This latest from Roman Saenko’s project Blood of Kingu combines the best elements of his previous projects into one brutal-ass record. The guttural, deathy vocals and fast-paced ferocity of Hate Forest dominates most of the songs on Sun In The House Of The Scoropion, but the tracks also demonstrate an appreciation of atmospheric songwriting more reminiscent of Drudkh at their finest. While the album was initially a little tough to get into, lately I’ve been having a difficult time not listening to it, and I’d be hard pressed to find a black metal album to come out recently that rivals its combination of dark mysticism and unadulterated aggression.

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It’s that time of year when everyone starts posting their year-end album lists, and I start frantically looking around for albums I might’ve missed out on over the course of year.

One band I’ve come across as a result is Vom Fetisch der Unbeirrtheit (The fetish of the undeterred impetus), whose first full-length Psychohygiene came out earlier this year on Chinese label Temple of Torturous. It’s already pretty clear that these guys are weird from the lengthy description of the band’s concept, and their music is suitably freakish and disturbed as well.

Psychohygiene comes as a DVD-sized digibook and includes an interesting poster as well as a lengthy booklet providing even more conceptual explanation of the band’s music, in both German and English. But by far the coolest thing about this band is that the first 100 copies of the album come with a jar of rat preparation, which is just a fancy way of saying dead rats in a jar. Fucking Awesome!

Ominous Domain, which is rapidly becoming my favorite go-to US distro for weird/obscure black metal albums, should be getting some copies of Psychogenie in stock pretty soon.

You can check out a sample track from Psychogenie at ToT’s MySpace page. Their other acts are worth checking out as well.

Krieg’s latest The Isolationist is not only one of the better USBM albums I’ve heard recently, but also probably one of the more interesting black metal albums to have come out this year. At first listen the album came across as rather bland, but after a while the various tracks start to separate themselves and The Isolationist’s excellence becomes apparent. The album’s decayed, morbid atmosphere and sinister harmonies already help to differentiate it somewhat, but Krieg manages to back it up with songs that are actually pretty varied and unpredictable.

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This is pretty cool for those of you who might be artistically-inclined…

Now that Peaceville owns the rights to Darkthrone’s Moonfog releases, the label is gearing up to reissue the newly acquired Darkthrone titles, and Fenriz and Nocturno Culto have decided to hold a competition to create new cover artwork to adorn the updated versions of Ravishing Grimness and Goatlord. I’ve never really liked the Goatloard cover art, so hopefully whatever the fans come up with will be a big improvement.

The competition will run through January 31st and submissions should be sent to Peaceville.

If interested, check out the Official Contest Rules.

Even if you’re not interested, it’s kind of funny to read the rules, which are totally Darkthronish in nature and tone, and amusingly non-committal: “Only serious contributions will reach Fenriz and me to decide upon.” “This is not a real competition. There are no prizes.” It doesn’t sound like the band is particularly optimistic that they’ll receive something awesome, but hopefully the fans will prove them wrong.

I’m always happy to pollute survey results with my fucked up opinions, but today I happened on a questionnaire that is pretty interesting in and of itself. It belongs to Cynthia from ThornyThoughts, who has done artwork and shirt designs for Urfaust and several other black metal bands. When not cranking out ridiculously awesome art, shes working on a degree at Fachhochschule Niederrhein (no idea) in Germany, and needs your help for her diploma project!

Her project is focused on Sartre’s quote “L’enfer c’est les autres” (”Hell is other people”), and shes soliciting people’s opinions on the concept of hell, the afterlife and other related topics. In her own words:

The title might be L’ENFER C’EST LES AUTRES (Hell is other people) which is a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit which is about three people finding themselves in hell in form of a windowless hotel room being each other’s personal hell. I will use this as an example in literature and am looking for more inspiration and YOUR thoughts.
The idea of hell developed since human intelligence reached the point of a belief in a life after death and invented morals or rules - once broken eternal punishment is the consequence. The fear of the unknown fed the most cruel visions of hell. Different culture and religions define different versions of right and wrong and naturally expect other, opinions’ to be punished. Nowadays, when people are not really separated geographically anymore, those different individual ideals lead to severe clashes. So hell can be here and now. If you’re not your own personal hell - it’s other people.

The survey itself doesn’t take too long and the questions are all very interesting, and I’m sure that all the readers of this site will have some pretty colorful responses:

» Take the Hell Survey!

You can check out ThornyThoughts’s profile and artwork on ThornyThought’s MySpace page and get a little more info about the project in this blog post.