The UK’s Self-Inflicted Violence had managed to fly under my radar until recently, despite having put out an excellent album in last year’s A Perception Of Matter And Energy on Eerie Art Records. They sound kind of like a better version of Svarti Loghin, without all the weird alt-country elements. If you haven’t heard them, check out the songs on their MySpace page and prepare to be blown away.

The band has also decided to make a few unreleased tracks available for free download. The sound quality isn’t the greatest, but at least it’s something. See this blog post from the band’s MySpace page, or just click the download link below.

» Download unreleased Self-Inflicted Violence tracks from Mediafire

The band is currently in the studio working on their next full-length, which will be titled The Blue Sphere Floating In Black Seas. The new album should come out later this year.

Works Of Ein is a web-based underground music “unlabel” dedicated to releasing unusual and evocative music in various genres such as death metal, black metal, doom, industrial and dark ambient. Currently they are making each release freely available to the public as an mp3 download.

Check out their site at http://worksofein.com for more information about their goals, as well as the most up-to-date list of releases. Works Of Ein recently released Contaigeon’s debut “Death at the Gates of Delirium”, a brutal death metal assault in the vein of Morbid Angel and Cannibal Corpse. With cover art like this you know it has to be awesome:

They have a couple more albums planned for release very soon, so be sure to check the Works Of Ein site frequently.

US black metal band Woe haven’t gotten much press or exposure compared to bands like Krallice, Nachtmystium or Leviathan, but judging by their debut full-length A Spell For The Death Of Man, these guys are easily one of the better USBM bands to surface in the last few years. Woe plays a fairly typical, slightly depressive and atmospheric style of black metal, with a good sense of melody and excellent musicianship, and are highly worth checking out.

Woe isn’t quite giving away their album for free, but they are offering digital copies through Communitas’s Pay What You Want service, so you can get it for next to nothing if you so choose. You’ll get a high-quality, DRM-free 320kbps MP3 version of the album that also includes all album artwork.

» Download A Spell For The Death Of Man from CommunitasMedia

You can also buy a physical copy of the album from Stronghold Records.

Woe is currently working on their second album, which will be titled Quietly, Undramatically and should come out later this year.

French blackened hardcore group Celeste have unleashed their latest assault Morte(s) Nee(s), again on Denovali Records. As with their last few albums, you can download the album for free from the Denovali website, as well as order a physical copy.

» Get Morte(s) Nee(s) from the Denovali Records site

They seem to have dialed up the intensity of the production a bit from last year’s Misanthrope(s), but other than that you can pretty much expect the same level of darkness and brutality as the band’s last few releases.

March is Metal Month at several music retailers and labels. Apparently EMI and Caroline Distribution decided to use the month of March to highlight several of the metal labels they distribute, including Century Media, Candlelight, Nuclear Blast, Willowtip, Earache, and Season of Mist. What does this mean for you? Lots of sales and free stuff!

Amazon MP3 has a bunch of stuff on sale as well as several free compilations available for download. Southern Lord, The End Records and Nuclear Blast all have free compilations available on the site containing some great stuff like recent tracks from Pelican, Wolves in the Throne Room, Orcustus, Black Breath, Sunn O))), Sigh, Borknagar, Vreid, Eluveitie, Arsis, Augury and Hypocrisy, to name a few. Even if you don’t care about most of the bands on those labels, what the hell, it’s free! And it’s a pretty decent way to check out a bunch of bands you may not have heard.

» Download The End Records’ Amazon Metal Sampler

» Download Southern Lord: Ressurection Compilation

» Download Nuclear Blast Sinister Spring Slaughter Compilation

» Download Best of Nuclear Blast: 20th Anniversary Compilation

The folks at Amazon MP3 also seem to have put together a metal sampler, and while their definition of metal is unfortunately rather broad, their Metal Month compilation does contain some interesting stuff like new tracks by Fear Factory, Defeated Sanity and Ihsahn.

» Download Amazon MP3’s March Is Metal Month 2010 Sampler

Aside from the free compilations, Amazon MP3 has a bunch of albums on sale for $6.99 or less to celebrate Metal Month. The selection of sale items is a bit spotty but there’s some good stuff in there like recent releases by Ulcerate, Severed Savior, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Wolves in the Throne Room, Pelican, Orcustus, Nadja and Hull.

» Check out the Metal Month sale selection at Amazon MP3!

Finally, if you hurry you can catch the tail end of Moribund Records’s March sale. They are offering a blanket 15% discount off of everything for new customers. If you’ve shopped there before, the discount increases to 20%. They are also throwing in free posters for all orders and free promo CDs if you spend more than $35.00. The sale runs until this Friday, March 19th.

» Check out the selection at Moribund Records Armory!

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

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

Belgian black/viking metallers Theudho are celebrating the winter solstice with a new EP showcasing the band’s new line-up. The Silence is being released as a free digital download as a gift to friends and supporters. The EP consists of re-recorded versions of four songs from Theudho’s back catalogue: ‘Silence reigned over the Bog’, ‘Fafnirs Blut,’ ‘Foreboding Dreams’ and ‘Gudrun’s Revenge.’

The free versions of the songs are 128kbps, so not great quality, but certainly listenable. You can also download 320kbps versions at the ConSouling Sounds digital store.

Theudho has also recently made all their albums available for streaming from Last.fm for free, so you really have no excuse for not checking these guys out.

» Theuhdo - The Silence free download

» Theudho’s page on Last.fm

Abridged Pause Recordings is a promising new label with an intriguing roster of artists that includes Smohalla, Dreams of the Drowned, Kailash, Parabstruse and several others. They’ve so far released three releases as digital downloads, with the first two available for free on the Abridged Pause site and the third being only $1.

The first release, titled Diluvian Temperals, is a compilation that includes unreleased tracks from all of Abridged Pause’s artists. The second, Sea of Abandoned Polaroids, is a split between Phlegma and Stagnant Waters, which are each solo projects of the two members of Smohalla. The third is release “post-grindcore” act Sveta Istina Vjestica’s debut full-length, titled Witches in the Air.

» Abridged Pause Releases Page