black harvest - shrine of hours

melodic / progressive / avant-garde / black metal

from pyromusic.net:

Mixing standard raspy-yet-distinguishable death vocals with much cleaner vocals that sound similar to those of Andreas Hedlund a.k.a. Vintersorg, (current lead singer of Borknagar) and your usual brutal Death music, Black Harvest’s Shrine of Hours isn’t quite what one would come to expect from most ordinary Death Metal.

Despite their young age as a band, Black Harvest have put together a very nice piece of work with Shrine of Hours. The musical highlights for me are the softer and acoustic moments (borrowing heavily from Opeth) on tracks in which both music and vocals slow and soften, helping to separate the tracks from many other Death Metal bands whose music is a relentless, full-on aural assault the entire duration of their records. Fans of Katatonia and My Dying Bride may also hear a few similarities as there are even some doomy segments to please the ear.

Many Death Metal fans are likely to quite enjoy Shrine of Hours and I recommend it to anyone interested in younger and up-and-coming metal acts. While it’s certainly not a masterpiece, Shrine of Hours has its merits. Tracks are structured, varied and well-produced.

riyl: katatonia, akercocke, enslaved, cannibal corpse, opeth, my dying bride

shrine of hours

solace of requiem

A new concept is born with Virginia's premier Death Metal band. The jazz vibe and the flowing textures bring the seemingly ancient atmospheres to life. Every song is like a gateway to another world, the lyrics telling the same brutal tale as the music.

Nine original tracks from Virginia's Masters of Traditional Death Metal. Including one cover track from Grave's "Souless" album. Technical and crushing guitar work with a jazz like quality have been incorporated with wicked dynamics and grueling vocals to create a unique and unmistakable sound.

solace of requiem

dvorhead

Brutal Death Metal from France, not a scene which instantly springs to mind like the mention of USDM, or Swedish Death Metal. So it comes as a pleasant surprise when I begin to listen to the debut album (I think) from French maniacs, Dvorhead. Apologies for a lack of general information here, but the website is in French, and I didn’t really pay much attention in that class, but one thing remains crystal clear here – Dvorhead are a brutal death metal machine not to be fucked with!

House of Pain is 12 tracks of violent and technical death metal, with psychotic vocal attack, and the terminator on drums. Think Cryptopsy and Cannibal Corpse in a pub brawl, and your kind of there. Each song is crafted to a professional level on par with their established peers, and there doesn’t seem to be a filler in sight. There is nothing groundbreaking or inventive here, but a thoroughly enjoyable feast of blood guts and battery which would make a perfect addition to any death metal enthusiasts catalogue.

Having not heard of Dvorhead before, I am assuming that they are fairly new players in the scene, but I can’t see it being before long that a respectable label picks up this obviously talented and creative outfit, and hopefully manage to see some tour action in the near future.

Once again, a skeletal review, but by no means a skeletal album – there is plenty of meat on these bones to be chewed. I can’t emphasize enough – buy the album so you can say in years to come, “I heard of them years ago, I’m kvlt!” - Phil Wilson

riyl: aborted, cannibal corpse, cryptopsy, deicide, severe torture, suffocation

dvorhead

hot n' steamy monkey love

The sound that these guys bring forth is a vicious combination of sludge/crust that is equal parts Iron Monkey, Black Sabbath, Motorhead and Genocide Superstars. This is topped off with a throat-ripping vocalist who sounds very much like Tomas Lindberg at his most vile.

Each song strikes you like a clawhammer to the temple. The band is tight with the drumming being spot on, the bass bringing in a dirty crawl and the guitar churning out an endless supply of slaughtering riffs.

The bottom line is that if you're a fan of sludge, crust, anything brutal or that rocks like hell, you need to check this disc out.

ps- this album has been called "self-titled" & "get the LP you f*cks"

hot n steamy

eloe omoe - marauders

The cross-pollination of genres is so abundant, it’s hard to keep up with the new terms coined on a seemingly daily basis to describe what the current breed of American garage dwellers might be pushing through their vintage SUNN® amps while customizing the settings on their Line 6's. ‘Free-sludge’ seems to be the term du jour bestowed upon Boston duo Eloe Omoe. For me, ‘free-sludge’ sounds too much like something you’d get as a souvenir from the Labrea Tar Pits, so I’ll go with my own made-up term: freeform fire-doom.

Omoe (named after the bass clarinetist from Sun Ra's Arkestra) join a burgeoning group of new acts skirting the line between rock and noise, though from astonishingly divergent angles. Gary Beauvais’s Animal Disguise label, on which Marauders is released, seems to be one of the top showcases for acts of this sort. Amongst the ADR roster: Kentucky’s Cadaver In Drag blend screeching noise histrionics with old time Discordance Axis-style thrash; Sic Alps sound something like the Brainbombs covering Strawberry Alarm Clock; Gary's own Mammal project has morphed into a bass-rumbling Saint Vitus-ish one-man band, complete with detached blues singing and American loner style; and new signees Warmer Milks have yet to meet a musical trope they couldn’t bifurcate and leave splayed and dripping blood on the altar of post-rock. Eloe Omoe are fortunate to be ensconced by such a tight-knit family of like-minded deconstructionists.

When masquerading as humans, the members of Eloe Omoe go by Tim Leanse (drums) and Sam Rowell (bass). References to other power duos like M__th_s and L_g__ni_ B__t will be tempting to make, but are best left unstated, as such a crass pigeonholing would be uncouth. Other comparisons to GodheadSilo and the Amp-Rep roster of you're are not totally out of line, but one could argue that the similarities are in sonority and attitude alone. Eloe Omoe are much less structured and more in line with the wild jazz stylings of their namesake’s mother-ship.

Regardless of what genre you feel the need to place them in, the results are pummeling. Rowell’s bass playing is intense, essentially a non-stop assault on the ears, while Leanse’s drumming, though kind of familiar-sounding, is masterfully annihilative. Their group dynamic is something akin to a 72-car pile-up -- sounds of screeching metal, bursting carburetors, and the hum of stalling transmissions whirring in cacophonous disharmony until FEMA rolls out its new state-of-the-art Gargantuon 2000 industrial steamroller to pave over the whole mess.

Hail to Eloe Omoe and Animal Disguise for keeping the amps turned up and the inhibitions low. Furthermore, hail to this new golden age where lo-fi nihilism and free-form expressivity are put back into rock ‘n’ roll where they belong. It’s heartening to know that such ideals still burn in the darker recesses of this country’s dying culture.

eloe omoe - marauders

forest of witchery - invokation of the ancient one

Only 1,000 cd's pressed from this grim black metal band (the only release they've made)--FoW's "Invokation of the Ancient One." Get a copy while you can, as they are becoming scarce and in high demand. This cult band quickly severed ties after their initial release and has had followings in the Euro and U.S. underground BM circuit 5 years after its release. This CD was on CD baby's Top Editor's Choice list for three years and was voted one of the top ten black metal albums of 2004 on several review sites.

riyl: borknagar, emperor, dimmu borgir

invokation of the ancient one

humansbeing - waiting for a greater good

Screaming hardcore metal, with many diverse influences, so much more interesting and spirited than most.

waiting for a greater good

bosola - re:ep

bosola are an experimental/prog/post rock/avant garde trio from new york who pull influences from bands like don caballero, sonic youth, fugazi, jesus lizard...

besides those references, they have also been compared to king crimson, ruins, minutemen, cheval de frise, a hungover led zeppelin

this album is sometimes noisy, structured differently and in a sense jammy .... some songs on this ep utilize instruments like a trumpet, a musical saw and a tabla among others

there is a lot of drumming on this record... lots of drum beats, drum rolls, cymbals, lots of drums period

from cdbaby:

"With RE:EP, Bosola outline their iconoclastic blueprint for a new rock. Not just your standard three-piece, Bosola draws up, and sometimes denies, their varied heritage. Each member has been involved in music since childhood having grown up in the house of a music teacher. Guitarist/vocalist Tickrangler cut his teeth in Hong Kong Virus, a hardcore/experimental band that now sounds entirely contemporary. Grandpa Scorpion, the band’s drummer, is an alum of NY slow-core legends, Alger Hiss. Bassist/vocalist Eli Machine has spent time in new wave/goth bands like The Change and has most recently performed Glenn Branca’s Hallucination City. The band continues to evolve their sound drawing congruent yet divergent influences from Don Caballero, Jesus Lizard, King Crimson, Ruins, and Fugazi. The songs plough a sonic landscape of odd time signatures, distorted strains and angular, collage-like arrangements.

For this first outing, Bosola selected Wharton Tiers’ FunCity (Helmet, Sonic Youth) studio to record. Finding an immediate rapport with Wharton, Bosola pounded out five complex and fully produced songs in three hot days in July 2005.

The selection of songs also show the various sides of the band and moves from the abrupt odd-times of Leaky Aura to the more wistful State of Illfitting. The band is intensely interested in jamming and the music community and brought in Tim Byrnes of The Friendly Bears who lends his trumpet playing, William Bredbeck on musical saw, and the widely denounced Sri Usted Taco Leg who donates his tabla talents. Each addition was purposely done in two takes or less to keep the feel spontaneous. Similarly, the band has a tradition of creating “perishable” songs which are quickly assembled jams meant to be played only once or in this case memorialized on RE:EP. The band explores a larger sonic palette on this recording – evident in Fred’s expanded drum kit as well as Ali’s use of an electric version of the traditional Turkish saz."

re:ep

rellik - deceive the deceiving

USA Thrash Metal Band from Philadelphia featuring Craig Smilowski former Immolation/Goreaphobia drummer.

imagine if you will a sick blend of ripping old style Death / Thrash à la Ripping Corpse with hints of early Morbid Angel, James Murphy-era Death and pre-"Dawn Of Possession" Immolation.

"Rellik has many original ideas and they make this band one of the best Death/Thrash Metal projects from East Coast. " - Metal Side

"I like the bands enthusiastic, dry produced sound, the straightness of the songs and above all the awesome singer. So if you are interested in a rousing, rocking Metal / Thrash / Core-mixture, check out this album" - from "Voices from the Darkside Webzine"

deceive the deceiving

yes, collapse - climate

from crucial blast:

"These guys were pretty much the house band for the noise/core/drone label Epicene Sound System, releasing a host of ridiculously limited-edition cassettes and CD-Rs, oftentimes doing splits with likeminded heavy noise bands. I've been grooving on Yes, Collapse's blasted electronics and factory deathcrush since their Smeared White Sickness disc from a couple years ago, and ended up talking back and forth with Matt from YC for awhile about releasing something with them.

Yes, Collapse has that distinctly midwestern brand of improvised noise-rock that you'll recognize immediately, but then they go and drop in caustic crawls through rust-coated computer doom, brutal factory scrape, tribal junk-metal percussion trances, guitars with the distortion pushed all the way into the red and beyond, deranged verbal rantings, and pure free-noise fuckery, all combined into a crushingly heavy noise-dirge epic that will strip the paint from your walls."

yes, collapse - climate

anomanes - pronunciation

reminds me a little of old sepultura (pre-chaos ad)

from mutant renegade zine:

"This starts off with some cool tribal drumming which I know Mite and Dawn would love them it breaks into grindcore. I like grindcore when I'm at a show, but it really doesn't do much for me when I'm listening to it at home. Actually I guess you could call this death metal but it really does remind me a bit of the beloved Blatherskite from Indy. A pretty cool CD if you're into grindcore or thrashy stuff." {Grog}

anomanes - pronunciation

seized - live at kfjc

four songs recorded at a live radio session live in the kfjc studio (pit) in los altos hills, ca, on january 2nd, 1999

these are the last recordings of this great band

"During their brief existence in the mid-1990's, these guys delivered some killer misanthropic sludgecore, part psychedelic human-hate a la Dystopia, part Man is the Bastard bass-heavy craziness, and part Disassociate/Brutal Truth-styled hemp-fueled grind, with mosntrous, gutteral roars.

The lyrics are pure negativity, but there are some surprisingly catchy hooks and uptempo chuggers on here beneath a triple bassist assault. Thats right, these guys had THREE BASS PLAYERS, no guitar, with the basses downtuned as fuck and eerily dissonant, crushing, winding bass lines driving these dirges along, a bulldozing heavy avalanche of catchy tarpit blast.

There are also violins on some of these songs, making them even creepier than usual. Featured former members of the even more obscure Human Greed." -- crucial blast

seized - live at kfjc