Check your preconceptions at the door when you’re first crossing The Bridge. There’s nothing on ÆGES’s debut album as metallic as bassist Tony Baumeister’s other band 16 or attitudinal as guitarist Mark Holcomb’s old hardcore band Undertow; the songs on The Bridge are way less conventional than what vocalist/guitarist Kemble Walters plays in The Blank Faces, and the fact that there are proper songs at all separate this stuff from drummer Larry Herweg’s other band Pelican.

All those bands sound completely different, and yet The Bridge doesn’t bear the sonic stamp of any of them, or any combination of any of them. That The Bridge sounds so little like ÆGES’s pedigree, and so much like a breed of tuneful post-hardcore bands that hasn’t been popular for like 15 years (and was never even THAT popular in the mid-90s), suggests that these guys are in it for the love of the game. Add ÆGES to the ranks of Vallenfyre, Bloodbath and Dukes of the Stratosphear: bands whose members turn their back on innovation and focus on the music that moved ‘em when they were kids.

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Many argue for the creative supremacy of Seattle’s breakout grunge bands in the early to mid-1990s. For me, the most exciting part about the alt-rock boom was the license it gave bands throughout the country to deepen and darken rock’s palette in all sorts of interesting ways. Especially when it meant approximating the density of heavy metal: L.A.’s Failure, Champaign’s Hum and NYC’s Quicksand weren’t quite metal bands, but they all invested superior songs with an undeniable heaviness.

My favorite band by far to come out of rock’s mid-‘90s heavification was Kansas City’s Shiner, who over four increasingly complex albums carved out their own heavy sound-world. Shiner’s best and final album, 2001’s The Egg, still fucks me up every time I listen to it. It’s an album of cycles and textures and layers as much as instruments and voices. The Egg’s songs move forward in overlapping polyrhythms; its guitars strut, cast atmospheric spells and accumulate into massive riffing. Topping it all off is the spectacular baritone of Allen Epley, still one of rock’s most mysterious, commanding voices. No wonder he’s the guy Pelican chose to sing on their first ever tune with vocals, “Final Breath.”

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom reviews a few albums by bands that play their instruments way better than you do. 

Karkajou – Let There Be Blight (self-released)

The members of Michigan three-piece Karkajou wear tie-dye t-shirts in their fun-loving promo shots. It makes them look more like The Monkees than the progressive death metal merchants that they are. But once you read through the cheeky liner notes of Let There Be Blight, and notice how Karkajou’s songs veer between environmental policy critique and predicting the creation of a new form of pornography with the power to destroy the universe, you get the sense that this is a band that takes its lack of seriousness seriously.

It’s easy to swallow the sophomoric humor on Let There Be Blight when it’s accompanied by such oddball groove-metal tunes like “Embryonic Lethality” or “From Hive to Grinder.” Even if the Karkajou’s music isn’t as distinctive as that of Deadsea’s or Dysrhythmia’s or Stinking Lizaveta’s, the band’s still one of the most balanced power trios I’ve ever heard in metal – nobody solos, nobody dominates, and yet everyone shreds. It’s a true rarity to hear musicians use their chops to serve the composition rather than the ego. That by itself makes Karkajou worth listening to.

LASTLY: Two members of Karkajou wrote me on the same day to tell me that the band’s new album was available. One of them told me that the band had recently broken up. I hope the other one knows, otherwise there’s a bassist somewhere in Ann Arbor wondering why his bandmates haven’t shown up to practice for six months.

(3 1/2 out of 5 horns up)

Download Let There Be Blight for free here.

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The members of trans-Atlantic punk foursome Split Cranium must have had Cheshire Cat grins on their faces as they bashed the shit out of their instruments and larynxes recording this, their eponymous debut. It’s easily the most straightforward, least introverted record that vocalist Aaron Turner has recorded since Isis disbanded, if not ever. Guitarist Jussi Lehtisalo, who’s also the “ring” leader of the mercurial Finnish rock outfit Circle, its offshoot Pharaoh Overlord and about three gajillion other mind-bending projects, is more often heard playing 15-minute free improv jams than the two-minute punk ditties here. And while bassist Samae Koskinen and drummer Jukka Kröger don’t exactly revel in abstractions with their other band Steel Mammoth, that band’s music is leagues more complex than these unrepentant blasts of d-beatery.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom recognises the calibre of several bands from the United Kingdom with the honour of a review, free of pretence.

Black Sabbath. Iron Maiden. Venom. Napalm Death. Carcass. Cathedral. Name a heavy metal sub-genre, and chances are there’s a British band that pioneered it. So how do the heavy Englishmen of today shape up? Do let’s see, shall we then!

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Layne Staley only recorded six studio albums in five years — and yet his inimitable voice influenced an entire generation of singers. To commemorate his death ten years ago, members of the MetalSucks staff will be discussing their favorite Staley performances throughout the day.

There aren’t a lot of bands brave enough to lead off an album with a song about how we’re all gonna die and we can’t do shit about it. Even fewer can write a hit single with its central riff in 7/8. Alice in Chains did both with Dirt’s incredible opener, “Them Bones.”

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“In a world where I never existed / No friends, no family, no ANb
My cargo sold for next to nothing / To the Japanese / That years later
Was rumored to have had programmed the world’s first blast beat”
-Agoraphobic Nosebleed, “Timelord Two (Paradoxical Reaction)”

Over a third of the bands represented on last year’s list of  of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists also showed up on this Top 25 Modern Metal Drummers list. Only one musician appeared on both lists, though, and that is Scott Hull. Nobody with functioning ear canals would argue with Hull’s riff-writing for Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Shit, his guitarwork is so intensely rhythmic that it could have qualified for our Best Drummers list by itself. But I’m going to throw down the gauntlet and say that Hull’s drum programming in Agoraphobic Nosebleed is as creative as anything done by the other “proper” drummers on this list, and probably more important.

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MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Drummers, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play drums (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Ben Koller from Converge, All Pigs Must Die, United Nations, and Acid Tiger…

It’s no coincidence that Converge’s 2001 album Jane Doe, widely considered to be the band’s finest hour and one of the best albums of the 21^st century by many (including our own humble web rag), was also the first Converge record to feature Ben Koller on drums. The album featured the band’s most pointed, sinister songs and best production to date. But the addition of Koller clinched it. Converge had found a drummer flexible enough to follow their twisted narratives to whatever sordid corners they went, and combustible enough to explode once they got there.

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Godstopper’s Empty Crawlspace was one of my favorite discoveries of last year. I’ll be honest, I’m struggling with “Everybody Writes Good Songs,” the first recording they’ve released since then. It is for sure a less immediate song than the brilliant ”Clean House” – Mike Simpson’s vocal melody seems so listless, and the strange guitar figures that creep in feel so distant from the weight of that single doom riff that goes through the second half.

Godstopper write songs like few other bands. They’re developing and layering ideas instead of writing linear chains of riffs and melodies. It can be difficult to listen to, because we have so few of the normal signposts of songwriting (verse, chorus, harmonic variation) to go by. But after about five listens, the song begins to sink in on an emotional level. Methinks the melody and lyric are intentionally constricted, representative of the surface-level bullshit we tell ourselves and others to keep the darkness inside at bay. Those weird guitar figures are the cracks in the surface; the repetitive doom riff is the darkness forcing its way up through the fissures. Around 3:20, the melody comes back in slightly twisted form, and Simpson’s repetitive gasping of “she’s so much smarter than me” takes on a freaky obsessional tone.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the Indian metal compilation New Year Killing Spree.

Just because heavy metal’s founding fathers were largely white and from the west doesn’t mean that the U.S. and Europe have a total lock on good heavy music. Call it post-imperialist guilt, but I’m genuinely thrilled when I discover a great metal band from somewhere unexpected. So when Axl was rightfully “meh” about the four Indian metal bands suggested by MS reader Nikhil Pradhan a few weeks back , I considered it my patronizing duty to find an Indian metal band worthy of genuine excitement.

Where better to begin my search than New Year Killing Spree, a free compilation of more than two hours of the “best metal tracks from the Indian scene released in 2011,” hand-selected by India’s Metal Spree blog? The comp serves up 26 bands and 26 tracks of pure South Asian headbangery, most entirely unknown to the metal world outside of India. Surely there must be a bunch of undiscovered gems, right?

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out four free records by bands that probably have several Emperor albums in their collection.

Autolatry – The Hill (self-released)

Tired of viking lore? Bored of Satanic paeans and anti-Christian odes? Had all the rehashed Lovecraft you can take? Then get thee to the Bandcamp page of Autolatry, a Connecticut black metal band that write about the stirring history of…New England. While the region may not have the mythological attraction of Scandinavia, it’s rich with wars and witches and beheadings, all of which get aired in Autolatry’s debut The Hill. The music is totally pro, a mix of early Satyricon’s ever-shifting harmonies and some sinewy, Keep of Kalessin-esque muscle, clearly recorded by guitarist/bassist Dave Kaminsky without losing any of its crackling energy. In fact, The Hill is good enough that you’ll be tempted to overlook the band’s silly spoken word segments and unfortunate name (“Did he say ‘Aaah, toiletry’?”).

(3.5 horns up outta 5)

Name your price for The Hill here.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out a bunch of stuff by bands what don’t speak ‘Merican proper.

One of the very few shitty things about English being the world’s lingua franca is that native English speakers have little incentive to learn another language. What I wouldn’t give to travel freely in France or Mexico, weaseling my way into strange underground absinthe bars and illegal cockfighting rings because I understood all the absinthe and cockfighting-related idioms flung about… but no, the best I can do after six years of high school Spanish is order mulitas with the proper accent at the taco truck down the street (the lady that takes my order usually smiles obligingly but answers me in English).

On the other hand, plenty of foreign metal bands have every incentive to write and sing in English, even if they suck at it. Here are four free releases by bands whose mother tongue is probably not the same as yours.

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Ides of Gemini
Constantinople
Label — Neurot Recordings / SIGE
Release date — May 2012

Much metal gains its extremity from lack of space: ear-bleeding guitars canvas the harmonic spectrum, drums fill every possible rhythmic nook, vocalist caulks the gaps with throaty sputum sealant. That totalness can get tiring, and it’s also pretty aesthetically limiting – maximizing speed, volume, denseness, etc. can blind a songwriter to the subtler, less traveled paths to intensity.

L.A. trio Ides of Gemini followed all aforementioned paths on their 2010 debut EP, The Disruption Writ. The EP’s four songs are all about space. Guitarist J. Bennett (who moonlights as a journalist for Decibel, Terrorizer and others) lays down imperial metal riffs swathed in so much reverb that they seem isolated from the rest of the world. Bassist/vocalist Sera Timms (frontlady of Black Math Horseman) layers her affectless voice in ghostly counterpoint, turning tales of spiritual discord into disturbing lullabies. Lethargic programmed drums rustle below like a big ol’ bag of bones. If something seems missing from Ides of Gemini’s sound, that’s exactly the point. Their accretion of small musical gestures inverts metal’s normal use of space. They imply terror without ever exposing it. Each song is an accumulation of outlines, a sort of sonic daguerreotype.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out When the Revolution Comes, Everything Will Be Beautiful by The United Sons of Toil.

I can still remember the profound impact that Propagandhi had on my teenage psyche. Despite many gentle lessons from my Marxist-leaning father about the historical roots of class warfare, I bristled at the lyric “’Publicly subsidized! Privately profitable!’ / The anthem of the upper-tier, puppeteer untouchable / Focus a moment, nod in approval / Bury our heads in the bar-codes of these neo-colonials” from the song “…And We Thought That Nation-States Were a Bad Idea,” off 1996’s Less Talk, More Rock. That lyric, overwritten as it is, conveyed an intellectual rigor and desire for confrontation that seemed completely foreign to my 14-year-old self. I loved that record, and still do. But I recognize now that I was responding to its end-of-the-rope energy more than Propagandhi’s ideas.

In plenty of forms of extreme music, where confrontation is de rigueur and soapboxing is a national pastime, the music’s sonic force can overwhelm the message. In fact, musical extremity often is the message. For a band with an agenda more nuanced than “fuck the universe,” that’s just not good enough. It’s got to strike a balance between pedagogy and catharsis.

That’s one of many reasons why I appreciate what Wisconsin’s The United Sons of Toil have done on their third album, When the Revolution Comes, Everything Will Be Beautiful.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out a bunch of stuff from Australia.

It’s been fucking FREEZING in Los Angeles this past week. And as usually happens when it gets lower than sixty degrees, I put on me long johns, drink some cocoa and turn my ears towards warmer climes. Like Australia, for whom it’s the dead of summer right now. Except it’s been raining dingos and wallabies there recently. Oh well. Here’s some free shit from Australia.

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This was an incredible year for metal, with major players and up-and-comers alike releasing stellar material in almost every subgenre. There were some clear winners for me, but a number of spots on Top 15 could easily have gone to any of the albums on my “honorable mention” list, so I partially picked this based on which of my favorite albums I invested more time into. Please check out any of the bands you haven’t heard here – they need and deserve your support.

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For those of us that still get a little queasy inside when we think of the tragic bus accident that killed Cliff Burton, this has been a really tough past year and change to stomach. Bonded by Blood and The Chariot both experienced van accidents; earlier this month, Decapitated survived an emergency plane landing in Warsaw, four years almost to the day after the horrible crash that killed drummer Vitek and left vocalist Covan in a coma. The tail end of 2010 found All Shall Perish and Pathology enduring accidents unscathed, and Makh Daniels of Early Graves losing his life in a crash.

It’s an unfortunate fact of being a touring musician that driving conditions aren’t ideal, and the vehicles that scrappy metal bands can afford usually aren’t in the best of shape. All the more reason to thank whatever god you disbelieve in that the members of Philadelphia noise-rock band Gods and Queens (frequent gig-mates of our own Justin Foley’s band Austerity Program) are all still alive after their van skidded and rolled off a highway in the Czech Republic, en route to Dresden, Germany. Here’s the full story, from the band’s frontman Jamie Getz:

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Locrian’s André Foisy pitched his band’s new album The Clearing to me as “probably the most accessible thing we’ve done yet.” I can hear what he means, in that this album contains some of the most obviously human moments in the Chicago drone trio’s canon. The mere existence of the somnolent piano arpeggios in “Chalk Point” get Foisy and his bandmates Terence Hannum and Steven Hess as close to “pretty” as they’ve gone thus far; the fact that you may identify shards of the feeling that that “song” evokes while listening to Grails, or Bohren & der Club of Gore, or Godspeed You! Black Emperor, suggests that this combo is expanding its range of intended effects beyond queasiness.

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“Remote control collapse / Respirators, leather, lead / Fate commanded on the rooftop,” grunts Vaulting vocalist Felix Kisseler in their new song “Biorobot.” “60 seconds to be dead.” That’s all the time this German tech-grind band needs to make its point about the deadly risks we take by continuing to operate nuclear power plants. Metal bands have been writing songs about the horrors of nuclear power for 30 years, and there’s still room for more: the album on which “Biorobot” appears, Nucleus, was recorded just one month before the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant meltdown this past March.

The music that Vaulting writes these days is tight but splintered, with short outbursts of reckless grind colliding into chewy death metal. It’s Vaulting’s spasmodic songwriting, not their full-tilt force, that hits the hardest. It’s the musical equivalent of getting caught in five crossfires at once.

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Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader,” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from grind bands Nemesis Complex and Honduran.

Almost without exception, grindcore is best appreciated live, where the everything-all-at-once extremity of the style can most directly wage war on the senses. But if I’m going to sit down at home and let a grindcore record punish my ears with drums, bass and guitars all playing too fast to be doing anything all that interesting, I ask just one thing: it should sound as devastating as if I were watching it live.

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