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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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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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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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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By now, all MetalSucks readers should know who Ben Robson is. But in case you don’t, he’s this very talented kid who won our Nevermore “Create Your Own Conspiracy” contest last year, and has since proven, time and time again, that he deserved the victory.

Now Ben’s one-man band, Robot Zombie Army, has unveiled its debut(ish) album, called the 42 EP, and it’s available for free download – at least, according to Ben, “until my 200 free download credits run out.” So you should hurry up and check that shit out. I know the above album art suggests it’s gonna be some schizo-ree-ree shit like Iwrestledabearonce — which I’d be fine with, although I know many of you would not — but rest assured, it’s really not like that at all. It’s more like Nevermore, except with a greater amount of humor and a lesser amount of drinking problems. I’m especially digging the title track myself.

-AR

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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There’s gonna be a presumably-excellent new Cormorant album called Dwellings later this year, and if that news doesn’t make you happy, you must not know Cormorant. And you should remedy that lack of knowledge right quick.

In fact, Cormorant are only too happy to help you remedy that: “for a very limited time,” the band are giving away their last album, Metazoa, for free. And in a variety of high-quality formats, too, including 320kbps mp3s and FLAC files. So, basically, if you don’t already own this album and you don’t take advantage of this offer, you are a numbskull. You literally have nothing to lose, and lots and lots of awesome metal to gain.

So go download that shit right now. Listen to it. Love it. And hopefully we’ll get a release date for Dwellings real soon.

-AR

Thanks to John for the tip!

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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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 After Oblivion’s Vultures EP.

It is part of Music Criticism 101 to hold up originality as a virtue. Even if a band doesn’t possess any of it, a positive review of said band will often acknowledge why the band’s other qualities make up for their lack of originality. That’s all fine and good, but we can all think of plenty of bands that embrace a well-established sound so fully and energetically that it makes tired clichés relevant again.

My new favorite rehash metal band is Bosnian-Herzegovinaian quartet After Oblivion. These guys sound like Death. A whole lot. They acknowledge it in their press materials; they even played Death tribute shows to gear up for the writing/recording of Vultures. And in many ways, Vultures feels like a tribute EP. The band’s Chuck Schuldiner is singer/guitarist Adnan Hatić, who screams in that same parched upper register of late-era Schuldiner, and solos with a similar mix of elegance and shred. Rhythm guitars work in the Arabian modes and harmonies of Symbolic-era Death. Listen closely and you’ll hear bass slides that recall Steve DiGiorgio’s fretwork on Individual Thought Patterns. The similarities are uncanny.

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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 albums made by (mostly) solitary dudes.

Influential American art critic Clement Greenberg coined the term “post-painterly abstraction” to describe a movement of painters in the ‘40s and ‘50s that were abandoning traditional elements like subject matter and visible brush strokes, and instead exploring the flatness and two-dimensionality of the painter’s canvas – the things that make painting unique from other art forms. Greenberg would analyze the degree to which a painting laid these qualities bare, thus revealing a certain painterly purity and truthfulness.

The one-man metal project has been a thing at least since Bathory’s glory days. In this edition of Freeloader, I’m subjecting albums by a few recent lonely metalsmiths to a Greenbergian analysis – as in, how well does each album expose the qualities unique to the one-man metal band?

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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 Shadows by Embers.

Immediacy is probably my favorite part about being a music consumer in the digital age. One moment I don’t know that the Oakland black metal band Embers exists. The next, the band’s seven years of woodshedding and recording efforts have turned into 250 megabytes on my hard drive. That’s a great thing for a listener (and especially a critic), because it loosens the need to hear albums as discrete elements, rather than parts of a continuum.

The continuum is key for a band like Embers. Since their 2007 debut Memoria In Aeterna (available for free download on their Bandcamp page), Embers have written unabashedly romantic black metal epics that breathe and grow and gleam black over shifting landscapes. Their first record was perhaps over-ambitious; those persistent viola lines added little, and while there were plenty of hair-raising moments, the songs seemed alternately labored and rudderless. But like Opeth’s Orchid, Embers’ early material was admirable for its free-flowing approach to songwriting, if not for the songs themselves.

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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 Empty Crawlspace by Godstopper.

Go ahead and scoff at the suffocated production on Empty Crawlspace by Toronto band Godstopper. You’re losing out if you can’t get past the EP’s strangulated sonics. They’re partly the point, I’m guessing – those absent highs and lows smoosh everything into a compressed center, like we’re peering through a fisheye lens at the terrible things happening in the interior of this music.

And there’s a lot on the interior of this music. Godstopper’s Tumblr page shows reams of images of boarded up houses and masked or obscured figures. This music seeks to obscure, too. Dissonant sludge riffs cohabitate uncomfortably with Mike Simpson’s bell-clear vocal harmonies, spewing up sparks. Chiming major key guitars grind against gurgling bass lines. Nothing is quite right. Check out this video clip for “Clean House” for evidence.

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Ridiculously cool cover art by Jorden Haley

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 Axl Rosenberg checks out From Exile’s latest release…

Any band considering making a covers album, let alone a tribute album to one particular band, should be made to listen to From Exile’s new, 100% free Nine Inch Nails cover EP, Just Like You Imagined. These aren’t just rote retreads that make you think “Oh yeah, I love this song!” before shutting it off and digging out the originals. Nor are they ill-conceived drek which utilizes the originals’ lyrics and little else. They’re bona fide reimaginings of the original material, wholly recognizable as the Nine Inch Nails classics we love, but From Exile have never failed to put their own stamp on the tunes.

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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 Live to Get Rad by Pointbreakdown.

The 1991 action flick Point Break was built on incredulousness. The government does not normally infiltrate rings of criminals that rob banks to support their international surfing habits. Trained FBI agents do not jump out of airplanes without parachutes, and when they do, they die. A sassy Lori Petty would never, EVER fall for a zero-dimensional toolbag like Keanu Reeves, and as we all know from his many public battles with drug addiction, Anthony Kiedis can’t actually be killed.

Perhaps the viewing public that made Point Break a box office smash didn’t pick up the film’s inherent ridiculousness, but the millions of people that embrace it as a cult classic must have. Certainly the creators of Point Break Live, a theatrical version of the film that features a different Keanu drawn from the audience during each performance, get it. And Owen Thomas also gets it. He’s the man behind Pointbreakdown, a deathcore project whose every song is based around a dialogue sample from Point Break.

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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 three recent releases from Throatruiner Records.

Just because you’re offering your music for free doesn’t mean that presentation is unimportant. French label Throatruiner Records understands this better than most. Their press materials are thorough and totally professional, the bands they are all quality, they offer all of their albums for free download, and insist on awesome packaging to incentivize actual purchase. Since Throatruiner give us the goods gratis, we’re dedicating an entire installment of Freeloader to them.

As We Draw – Lines Breaking Circles

I washed my hands of “post-metal” long before Isis broke up. What began as a new way of writing songs, with process at the fore instead of structure, devolved into empty stylistic signifiers and soporific build-ups. As We Draw do it different. The French three-piece has some guitar atmospherics and climactic moments in common with yer Rosettas and Cults of Luna, but they offer a far more energized, varied take on post-metal than most of their contemporaries. The band uses its three-piece lineup smartly, making guitars subservient to the rhythm section on songs like “Shield” and “Draft,” pitting textured guitars in opposition to anchoring bass in “Shield” and “Drowned in Flames,” massing their vocals into gruff gang chants on “Sin of Addiction” and “Scum of the Earth.” Parts remind me of Cave-In’s Jupiter, parts remind me of ‘90s screamo. All reminds me of stuff I will listen to again.

(4 horns up)

Get it free 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 the debut release from Derek Roddy’s Serpents Rise.

It seems like only yesterday that MetalSucks posted the he said/he said account of journeyman drummer Derek Roddy’s departure from Today Is the Day. We know from Steve Austin’s marathon bitch session with Axl back in 2008 that the TITD frontman found Roddy to be a whiny, egomaniacal toolbag that hated his fans and only cared about money.

While I don’t know enough about Roddy to confirm or deny those accusations, the distribution plan for the long-awaited debut by his instrumental Serpents Rise project paints Roddy as a lot more fan-friendly than Austin’s criticisms would suggest. Roddy’s talked to the press about his intention to release the album for free since 2006, the same year he left Hate Eternal; he released a number of free demo tracks via his website in 2008, and followed through with a free finished product in late 2010. And he’s also up-front about involving fans in the project. Quoth the Rowdy Roddy on his website forum: “Serpents Rise….is an instrumental entity…But, this does not mean that we are opposed to hearing what vocal possibilities exist….Whether in your car, in your bedroom, on stage covering one of our songs, posting clips of you singing our tunes on YouTube OR….in the event that we show up in your town…..you sing with us on stage! Have fun…create!” Does that sound like the sentiment of an egomaniacal toolbag?

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