EXCLUSIVE FULL-ALBUM STREAM OF GOD DETHRONED’S PASSIONDALE!
Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 3:00pm by MetalSucks
Did you catch Sammy O’Hagar’s 4 out of 5-horns review of God Dethroned’s excellent new album Passiondale? If you missed it, here’s the gist:
Passiondale is a compact, precise, and immensely rewarding listen, essentially a barbed collection of riffs that you’ll most likely find yourself humming afterward… The melodic tinges are very Heartwork, while the black metal elements are nail bombs occasionally thrown in to put a part or riff over the top (the fierce opening “Under a Darkening Sky” bobs and weaves between the two seamlessly, while the title track swells with an almost In Flames sort of bigness)… Passiondale is a precise yet affecting record that’s not afraid of beauty or sadness, but certainly isn’t preoccupied with it.
Lucky for you, you don’t have to take our word for it; listen to the entire new record below, for free, until its Metal Blade release on Tuesday, April 28th, and let us know what you think. If you like what you hear, you can pre-order the CD here or pre-order a special CD/t-shirt combo here.
- The MS Dudes
[This streaming audio promotion has ended. Sorry!]
When 
So following 
Congrats to the winners of 
Trivium’s Matt Heafy loves Twitter, and he wants you to use it to illegally spread the band’s music! Mr. Heafy (
If the world were fair, the guys in Testament would be on Regis & Kelly
The grimmest tour of the Spring gets underway in less than one month, so be sure to get on your game and get tickets for the 
God Dethroned’s decision to base their latest album, Passiondale, on a particularly bloody World War I battle – quite possibly the second most brutal war ever, behind only the one that followed it – both fits their toothsome brand of blackened melodic death metal and doesn’t: the band’s previous M.O. has been mainly anti-Christian, as is the nature of the blackened half of their sound. But God Dethroned’s militaristically precise riffing and often relentless drumming evoke the horrors of the dawn of modern warfare, and the lyrics don’t glorify war as much as provide a first person account, complete with the terror and panic of it. Passiondale’s melodic flourishes smooth out the edges (of what would, without it, most likely be a Marduk album), but doesn’t dip into sentimentality too often. Those edges are still sharp, the album’s concept is still one filled with horror, and by no means is this an uncharacteristic softening of a band like God Dethroned. Passiondale is a compact, precise, and immensely rewarding listen, essentially a barbed collection of riffs that you’ll most likely find yourself humming afterward.
I really couldn’t give a fuck what some dude in Underoath says about Avenged Sevenfold, but lots of you have been emailing us about this and besides, this is the kind of shit-kicking we specialize in around here, no? So apparently 
Here at the MS Mansion we get packages from unsigned bands from all over the world; Hungary, Australia, and Poland are just a few places from which we’ve received CDs in the past few weeks. These demos range in quality from extremely sucky to extremely good (see? we do listen to everything), and they’re all over the map (haha, see what I did there?) in terms of subgenres of metal. But one thing I’ve found about “international” bands (in quotes because really, we’re all international in the true sense of the word) as opposed to their American counterparts is that metal bands in the rest of the world are not nearly as concerned with what’s cool or what appears credible in the slightest, nor do they feel compelled to stay within one genre of metal. And they’re not nearly as concerned with image; most of them are old dorks. International bands, moreso than their American brethren, just play whatever the fuck they want to play. They just don’t give a fuck.
When we introduced you to Sikth, you thanked us. When we introduced you to Textures, you thanked us again.
