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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Axl has blathered quite a bit in recent months about the awesomeness of the new Die Miserable album from Canadian death-grind-punk-whozit-whatsit-galore band Fuck the Facts. It’s left me quivering in the fetal position a few times, too, so we figured it was high time we found out what the band had to say about it? Read on for all the facts you could ever want to fuck from the band’s guitarist/founder Topon Das and vocalist Mel Mongeon.

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Kenneth Thomas, in a tunnel.

If you care about heavy music and still believe that art should trump commerce every time, you owe it to yourself to check out Blood, Sweat & Vinyl: DIY in the 21st Century. I’ve written about Kenneth Thomas’s music documentary in these e-pages before. After watching the film a second time, I’m even more convinced of its importance as both a document of bands that you rarely (if ever) got to hear from outside of the concert hall, and argument for the importance of underground music makers, making music underground. Thomas chose to keep the focus tight, centering on the musicians, artists and label heads associated with three independent labels that are doing things their own way: Hydra Head, Neurot Recordings and Constellation. While there are certain characters that emerge as the spiritual ballast for the film – Aaron Turner of Isis & Hydra Head, Steve von Till of Neurosis & Neurot, and Efrim Menuck of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, in particular – the overwhelming sense is of a giant inter-connected family of passionate people, united by nothing other than a desire to pursue truth and clarity through music.

Aside from a couple off-camera giggles during an adorable scene with Justin Broadrick (Jesu/Godflesh), Thomas himself doesn’t show up in his film. So we figured we’d find out what the director had to say about his opus.

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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 Komondor’s A Giant Is Coming and the Giant Is Going to Kill You.

Ever wondered what the fuck that thing is jumping over a hurdle on the cover of Beck’s Odelay? Wonder no more: it’s a komondor, a kind of dog first bred in Hungary to guard livestock. Why a sheep or goat would respond to a barking mop with anything but mocking laughter is beyond me, but give credit where it’s due: that dreadlocked mutt has been featured on two great albums now, the aforementioned Odelay back in 1996, and now A Giant Is Coming and the Giant Is Going to Kill You by Kingston, NY-based noise-rockers Komondor.

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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 Unmothered’s self-titled debut.

For the two of you who are big fans of Austin’s incredibly bitching metal band Lions of Tsavo, Unmothered is what happened to guitarist/vocalist Matt Walker after he left Lions of Tsavo post-Swarm of the Unholy. For the rest of you, just know that Unmothered are an incredibly bitching metal band from Austin. And they’re releasing their eponymous debut EP for free. If you still aren’t convinced that you need to download this pronto, it’s probably because you’re bugged by Unmothered’s name due to some severe childhood abandonment issues. Unmothered can’t help you there. But they can help cure your case of All-Metal-Sounds-the-Same-Itis and Unable-to-Headbang Syndrome.

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The Accüsed turned thirty this year. What did they do to commemorate the milestone? Did they reissue one of their early crossover classics in a five-CD box set format with four hours of throwaway demo tracks? Nope. Did they play The Return of Martha Splatterhead in its entirety on a lifeless reunion tour? Not a chance. Did they switch up their sound in a bid for relevance? Hell no. Ever the black sheep of the Pacific Northwest extreme music scene, The Accüsed celebrated by playing the smallest, least-traveled markets they could find in the region, as part of their “Backwoods Bloodbath Tour 2011.”

You could see that approach as either a humble “thank you” to the small towns that supported The Accüsed while they cut their teeth back in the ‘80s, or a “fuck you” to the notion of a self-congratulatory victory lap. Maybe it’s both. Legacies are for dead men anyway. And if the affability of the band’s guitarist Tom Niemeyer is any indication, The Accüsed have a whole lot of life left in ‘em. Nevermind that Niemeyer is the lone remaining original member of the band. The Accüsed will keep on going as long as their murderous mascot Martha Splatterhead has more work to do. And she always has more work to do.

We talked to Niemeyer about the evolution of the band, his horror obsession, and how he stays motivated after so many years.

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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 Wizard Smoke’s The Speed of Smoke.

I have neither the proper subwoofer nor the proper, y’know, glassware to fully appreciate the bong resin-saturated heaviness of Wizard Smoke’s second album, The Speed of Smoke. To my totally non-high ass though, listening to this album is every bit as enjoyable as burning a fatty, and totally holds up without one.

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Take this with a salt factory’s worth of grains of salt, because there are probably about fifty albums I have stored on my hard drive, waiting to evaluate, and there are many dozens of worthy contenders that I may never hear until it’s too late. But here are 40 albums from the first half of 2011 that’ve knocked my moocow slippers off so far:

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One of the things that I love most about underground metal is that so many diehard fans fulfill so many roles within the metal community. A lot of the kids that you see at the grind show are also in bands. The dude rockin’ out at the front might own a distro. That girl might run the screenprinting service where all the locals get their band shirts made. Another guy might be taking photographs for his blog, or promoting the show, or running a small label on the side. Extreme music requires extreme commitment.

Filmmaker Kenneth Thomas is one of those extremely committed folks. He’s a filmmaker with 15 years of experience, mostly in documentary work but also in producing music videos and EPK footage for Isis, Neurosis, Queens of the Stone Age and tons more. Back when he was living in Los Angeles, I would see Thomas at most every show I went to. Sometimes he had a film camera with him; sometimes he was just rockin’ out with everyone else. After five years of work, he’s just about to release his latest project, Blood Sweat and Vinyl: DIY in the 21^st Century.

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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 Eschaton’s An Instrument of Darkness EP.

Two thoughts that I had while listening to An Instrument of Darkness, the boss two-song EP by Austrian black metal merchants Eschaton:

1) Maybe two songs are enough!

Think about how perfect a two-song release can be. It challenges the band to sum up its strengths in a far more compacted format than with a full-length, while still providing some element of contrast. The listener is rewarded with a release sans fat, and also some insight into what the band values about itself – I’d argue even more insight than you might get in an EP, which can often be a place to throw a bunch of stuff that a band didn’t think would fit on the new album.

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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 Bedlam of Cacophony’s Neuroleptic.

Metal is essentially a modernist musical style. Since its very beginnings, metal has expanded what we think of as music by deconstructing – or outright doing away with – the schema we use to evaluate it. Metal bands constantly rub up against the limits of volume, speed, melody (or lack thereof) and other variables that all music engages in some way or another.

Even within a genre known for its pursuit of extremity, Neuroleptic, the debut album by Orange County’s Bedlam of Cacophony, stands out by hyper-extending pretty much every convention there is. Speeds alternate between grindcore fast and doom slow without notice. Riffs change quicker than your ears can process them, when they occur at all (much of the guitar playing is of the tap-heavy Psyopus variety). Sizzling distortion abuts clean fusion guitar tones. You’d be hard pressed to find two adjacent measures in the same time signature. Drummer Nate Cotton sounds like his kit is constantly exploding; three guest vocalists, including Cattle Decapitation/Murder Construct’s Travis Ryan, saddle the album with an intense case of multiple personality disorder. Hooks? Grooves? Tonal centers? All done away with. Neuroleptic blows by like four colliding tornados and dares you to keep up.

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