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.

Lately, Season of Mist has been putting out some pretty sweet box sets for releases like Drudkh and Cynic’s latest offerings. The latest box set for Rotting Christ’s new album Aealo is no exception, coming packaged in a metal container that looks like a shield. Aside from the CD/DVD version of the album, the set includes an exclusive shirt, a belt buckle, a leather bracelet, and a bumper sticker. Not too shabby.

» Buy the Aealo box set from Season of Mist
» Buy the Aealo box set from Amazon.com

Black metal logo artist Christophe Szpajdel will have a book out early next year featuring hundreds of his logos, along with some photography that helped to inspired the artwork. The book will be 272 pages long, and will chronicle Szpajdel’s work in several different styles, from his more nature-influenced designs to some of his newer art deco creations.

You can find a bit of info about the Lord of the Logos book at Gestalten, including several sample pages. It looks like there isn’t much explanation or commentary from Szpajdel itself, which is kind of disappointing, but it also looks like the book is going to be packed with logos. Having a large chunk of Szpajdel’s output consolidated into a book seems like it should be really interesting for artist and designer types as well as black metal fans, and I’m very much looking forward to this coming out.

Legendary death metal band Cannibal Corpse is taking their cartoonish, ultra-violent imagery a step further. The band announced plans to release a limited-edition graphic novel to accompany their latest album, “Evisceration Plague.”

The 96-page graphic novel is illustrated by Vince Locke, who also created all of Cannibal Corpse’s gruesome album covers. Locke has previously done illustration work on several graphic novels including “A History of Violence,” “The Sandman,” “Batman” and “2000 AD”.

The “Evisceration Plague” graphic novel will be sold exclusively on the Rockstar Mayhem Festival tour at the Hot Topic booth, and it will also include a copy of the album. It contains a story for each song on the album, following the same order as the tracks on the album do. Check out a sample page from the comic here.

Since I’m obviously a fan of album artwork and other visual expressions that accompany extreme music, I really like this idea of creating graphic novels or visual supplements to help promote albums. It gives us art fans more to enjoy and it also gives bands another way to express their creative vision. Hopefully more bands and labels will start doing stuff like this.

Samael’s online shop offers, among other things, a Samael wine called “Alliance.” According to the site, it will “surprise connoisseurs by its mixtures of dark and deep aromas” and it contains a mixture of grapes from Gamay, Diolinoir and Sangiovese. It’s not possible to have it shipped to the US, unfortunately.

KYPCK win the prize for originality when it comes to promoting themselves. They are now offering KYPCK-branded Russian gas masks for sale, complete with nozzle, filter container and a bag. More details are available on KYPCK’s MySpace page.

KYPCK are a Finnish doom metal band who sing entirely in Russian. They released their debut album “Cherno” last year.