Seattle-based artist Andrew Crawshaw (read my earlier post about him here) apparently has a cat named Rigby who has unfortunately fallen ill recently. As a result, Crawshaw has marked down a bunch of stuff in the Broken Press Webstore, so now is a great time to snag some of his unique, hand-screenprinted posters as well as help out a good cause!

Read more about Andrew’s cat situation at the Broken Press blog, and check out the Broken Press Webstore.

A few of the major online metal retailers have decided to offer expansive sales this month:

Amazon’s March Metal Music Month
Amazon.com is slashing prices on over 100 new and classic metal albums. Their selection of sale items features the latest albums by Absu, Cynic, Nachtmystium, Intronaut, Eluveitie, Enslaved, Rotten Sound and Septic Flesh, among others.

The End Records Spring Cleaning
The End Records’ Omega Mailorder is offering a 12% discount across its entire catalog for the month of March. Most of the time they offer similar deals on small selections of albums, so now is a great time to take advantage of their very expansive catalog at discounted prices!

Relapse Records’ March Madness Sale
Relapse is offering a deal where you can buy one Relapse Records release and get a second free. It doesn’t work if both albums were released in 2009, but other than that you can do whatever you want. Relapse has released amazing albums from some of metal’s best bands over the years - Amorphis, Brutal Truth, Necrophagist, The Dillinger Escape Plan, Nile, Mastodon, Burst, Dying Fetus, Incantation, Neurosis and Suffocation, to name a few. Could be a great way to fill out your collection!

Metal Price Watch claims to be able to find you the lowest prices for a given album you’re looking for, but honestly the usefulness of this service is even more fundamental: enter in a metal album you want, and it will tell you where you can buy it.

In other words, think of the most obscure, impossible-to-find album you can, enter it into their search, and Metal Price Watch will look at over 40 different online stores and distributors, eventually telling you which ones have it in stock and for how much. It should be pretty obvious how amazingly useful this is, particularly for metal fans in the U.S. where there isn’t any one obvious source to find obscure metal.

The End Records’ Omega Mailorder online store currently has several holiday promotions running:

• 25% off all The End Records titles
This of course includes artists like The Gathering, Ulver, Sigh, November’s Doom, Agalloch and Dissection.

• 20% off a selection of Nuclear Blast titles
The list of sale items includes artists like In Flames, Hammerfall, Nile, Candlemass and Dimmu Borgir.

• $6.66 discount on Gift Certificate purchases.

All three sales run until the 23rd of December.

Just in time for the holidays, Ibex Moon Records has launched a massive webstore sale, with CDs as low as $2.00, and 10% off all orders!

Ibex Moon Records was founded by Incantation frontman John McEntee, and features a huge catalog of quality death metal CDs and merchandise from around the world.

Execution Magazine is a new publication geared towards musicians of all levels in the underground extreme music scene. They plan to feature instrument lessons, METAL guitar tabs, recording and studio tips, gear and show reviews, and much more.

Execution Magazine is currently offering free one-year subscriptions to the first 10,000 people who sign up, no strings attached. Just head over to ExecutionMagazine.com and sign up!

If perhaps you can’t justify paying the full price for Meshuggah’s massive, 27-minute EP “I,” head over to Amazon MP3 to pick the track up for only a buck.

If there’s one great thing about Amazon’s MP3 store, it’s their propensity to charge track prices for one-song albums. It’s too bad they don’t carry Green Carnation’s Light of Day, Day of Darkness, Edge of Sanity’s Crimson, or any Monolithe albums..

So you may have heard the news that Amazon.com recently launched an mp3 download service, comparable to that of iTunes, though without all the annoying DRM’ing. I spent some time exploring it, and noticed that there are really some awesome deals to be had, if you poke around long enough.

Probably the coolest thing I found (and one that made me wish I hadn’t already bought this CD for full price) was the fact that you can buy Fantomas’s “Delirium Cordia” album, in its entirety, for $0.99. A dollar! 74 minutes of bizarre, highly disturbing experimental weirdness! Seriously, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t buy this. Or maybe you haven’t heard about this album yet…

Fantomas is one of many Mike Patton (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More) projects, and this particular album features one highly experimental song clocking in at over 70 minutes. Sure, the last 20 minutes are just white noise, but it’s all part of Patton’s plan. Fantomas has adopted a surgery-theme for this opus, and there’s plenty of grinding, chipping, moaning, and sloshing noises throughout, to really make you feel like some awful procedure is being performed on you. Featuring very diverse instrumentation, haunting atmopheric passages, and scattered bits of scathing metal riffing, this is one CD that will really freak out your friends. Oh, and it gets bonus points from me for containing a bit of throat singing.