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.

Though I don’t often post about local acts, lately I’ve come across a couple of Seattle-based bands that deserve some attention and seem to be doing quite well for themselves, so I thought I’d help spread the word.

SOMNAE

A friend turned me onto progressive death metal band Somnae, whose debut EP Forever More came out earlier this year. Somnae’s basic sound features well-crafted harmonics and melodic dual-guitar riffing accompanied by powerful guttural vocal delivery. One of the things you notice right away is how great the EP’s sound is, particularly for a debut. Probably a lot of the credit for that goes to the mastering job done by the legendary Dan Swanö, but it’s also clear that the members of Somnae know what they’re doing. The band will soon begin playing shows in the Seattle area, and we can probably look forward to some new material soon as well.

» Somnae @ MySpace
» Somnae.net

WESTERING

One-man black metal project Westering also released their first length Help A Body this year, and when your first album gets released by Paradigms Recordings you know you’re doing something right. Westering plays depressive, ambient black metal that’s vaguely reminiscent of bands like Velvet Cacoon or Germany’s Trist. There’s a bit of shoegaze influence as well, but it’s kept mostly in the background unlike a lot of the “black-gaze” bands out there these days. I kind of doubt that Westering will be touring any time soon, but it’s certainly nice to have an obscure ambient black metal band as part of the local scene.

» Westering @ MySpace

Portland’s Soriah is currently touring the West Coast, playing shows at various odd venues and also holding a few very exclusive workshops. I managed to catch Soriah this past week in Seattle as part of a Dia de los Muertos ceremony, and his performance was certainly one of the most amazing and mind-altering that I’ve experienced, so needless to say this tour is highly recommended. If you’re at all interested in throat singing and similar vocal techniques, you should definitely inquire about the workshops as well, since you’ll have the chance to learn from one of the art’s masters.

For those who aren’t familiar with him, Soriah is a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist whose music and performances draw influence from many different global musical traditions such as raga, shamanism, butoh, and especially Tuvan throat singing. Soriah has established himself as one of the world’s masters of this style of singing, having received several international awards including “Best Foreigner” in the 2008 Ustuu-Khooree World Music Festival in Tuva. Soriah combines these various influences into a musical experience that is deeply moving and spiritual, while demonstrating his unparalleled vocal abilities. Nothing else out there comes close to sounding like this.

SF Workshop Info:

An Introduction to Khoomei
The Ancient Art of Tuvan Throat Singing with Enrique Ugalde

Friday, November 5th from 2pm - 5pm
at 1543 Mission Street, 3rd Floor,
San Francisco, CA 94103

This workshop will offer:
An introduction to Tuvan Culture.
Instruction in the three main Tuvan throat singing styles Khoomei,
Sygyt and Kargyraa, their history and application to traditional folk songs.
Unconventional but effective ways to utilize and activate your instrument properly.

3 hours of group and one on one instruction

$60 sliding scale donation for 3 hours of instruction. Limit of 13 people.
To register, contact oshan anand: info@omshantea.com

Remaining Tour Dates:

Friday November 5th
San Francisco, CA
OHM SHAN TEA

Saturday November 6th
SHADOW DANCE FESTIVAL
Oakland, CA
The Metro

Tuesday November 9th
Santa Fe
TBA

Wednesday November 10th
Sedona, AZ
THE CHOCOLATREE

Thursday November 11th
Tucson, AZ
Solar Culture Gallery

Friday November 12th
San Diego
Tin Can Alehouse

Saturday November 13th
Hollywood, CA
Bar Sinister

Head over to Soriah.net for more details.

Unlike seemingly every other metal fan out there, I never really got into Neurosis. However, I am certainly familiar with many of today’s artists in the genre that Neurosis helped spawn: heavyweights like Intronaut, Mouth of the Architect, Isis, Pelican, The Ocean, and Mastodon all share some debt to Neurosis’s pioneering blend of hardcore and crushing doom. I finally got a taste of Oakland’s forefathers of post-metal with the re-release of 1993’s Enemy of the Sun, and I’ve gotta say that even today, most bands out there pale in comparison.

Neurosis’s own label Neurot Recordings is celebrating the band’s 25th anniversary with another reissue of their classic Enemy of the Sun, which was also reissued in 1999. Enemy of the Sun is really where Neurosis’s potent post-hardcore sound came into its own, and even among today’s slew of heavy post-metal and sludge acts, this album remains one of the most brutal and uncompromising slabs of music ever released. In a genre where new bands seem to be intent on one-upping each other in heaviness and extremity of sound, it’s a testament to Neurosis’s talent and vision that their early albums such as Enemy of the Sun still stick out as some of the most pummeling and difficult to listen to in the genre. Many of today’s bands have mastered the soft-loud-soft pattern of mixing sludgy downtuned riffing with moody acoustics, but back in ‘93 there was none of that. Enemy of the Sun doesn’t let the listener go for a second of its cataclysmic length, and Neurosis’s use of dense, tribal percussion patterns only added to the primal onslaught.

The tracklist of Enemy of the Sun 2010 is the same as the previous reissue, with the only perceivable difference being that this edition bears a completely redesigned booklet courtesy of Neurosis’s visual mastermind (and ex-Red Sparowes guitarist) Josh Graham. So if you already have the album, I’m not sure this new edition has much to offer, but if you’re like me and haven’t checked out Neurosis yet, you probably won’t find a much better place to start.

» Buy the Enemy of the Sun reissue and t-shirt from Neurot Recordings

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.

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.

Finland’s In Silentio Noctis’s debut album Through Fragments of Christianity is an interesting take on the usual female-fronted metal sound. The typical symphonic metal elements and operatic, melodic female vocals are of course present, but here they are combined with aggressive black metal musicianship to create something much heavier and more complex than fans of this genre are used to. Whether it works or not probably depends on your affinity for female singers, but In Silentio Noctis definitely deserves credit for trying to carve their own path.

[ Read article… ]

Of all the main metal instruments - guitar, bass, drums, vocals - the vocal aspect is easily the one I’m the worst at and the most mystified by. I can’t get myself to make anywhere near a menacing metal growl without fucking my throat up, which means I’m clearly doing it wrong.

So I was happy to run across this post by Seattle’s 7 Horns 7 Eyes vocalist Kyle Wood, describing some of the mistakes novice vocalists make, as well as describing the basics of metal vocals. He doesn’t go into too much detail, but he does make it clear what the right approach is. Wood also gives lots of credit to Melissa Cross’s The Zen of Screaming DVDs. Having just seen his band perform, I can definitely vouch for him being at least a pretty competent and fairly versatile vocalist.

Also, if you’re into sludge and/or Meshuggah-type polyrhythmic bands, you should definitely give these guys a listen. They clearly borrow a lot from Meshuggah, doing a lot of ultra-heavy off-time rhythmic stuff coupled with doomy, sludgey riffing. Their rhythm section pulled it off surprisingly well, so their upcoming debut full-length should be an interesting one. Supposedly it will be coming out later this year.

» 7 Horns 7 Eyes on MySpace

Black Hate has finally released some news regarding Dark Tribe’s long-awaited follow-up to 2004’s In Jeraspunta - Die Rückkehr der Tollwütigen Bestie:

We have some really great news! Just in this moment we are mixing the new Dark Tribe album “Archaic Visons” in our shelter!!! We have the pleasure to have again Angel of Doom in the duty for this task. We have planned to finnish the mixing in the next 3 days. And Angel of Doom will of course also do the the final mastering. So its not that far away anymore.

So it sounds as though Archaic Visions will be released this year, hopefully sooner rather than later.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who occasionally gets confused by all the random, bizarre metal band names out there. So to help make things easier for all you metal fans, here’s a first attempt to disambiguate a few similar-sounding band names. The bands in question are Orcustus, Orcivus and Obitus.

Orcivus is a Swedish black metal band playing dissonant, orthodox black metal very similar to bands like Borgia, Watain, Ofermod or Ondskapt. They just released their sophomore album Est Deus in Nobis earlier this month. They also have the coolest logo out of the three. Definitely a band to check out if you’re a fan of the recent group of orthodox black metal bands.

Obitus are also Swedish, and they also play black metal, but in a much more sterile, frenzied style. Founding member Anders Ahlbäck is also in Waning, and the two projects definitely sound similar, though Obitus’s style is a bit faster and more chaotic. They released their debut full-length March of the Drones last year. Obitus is apparently also a role-playing game from the early 90s.

Finally, Orcustus is a black metal band from Norway with the distinction of having Gorgoroth guitarists Infernus and Tormentor as former members. Founding members Taipan and Dirge Rep resurrected the band in 2008, and their self-titled debut came out last year. The name Orcustus apparently means “the inner circle of Hell where Lucifer resides on his throne.” Multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Taipan also presumably gets his alias from the Australian snake of the same name, which has the most potent venom of any snake on earth.