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Vic Vaughn likes it dirty! His picks of the week are new albums by Assaulter, Rotten Sound and Trap Them in a week that also includes new releases by Across the Sun, As Blood Runs Black and Mastodon’s live DVD. His take on all of those and more after the jump.
On Monday, I headed over to Metal Hammer’s Germany-based site where Deadlock’s new album is streaming in full. After clicking play, I had my computer translate its accompanying text into English as follows [all sic]:
Deadlock have been her fifth album finished: BIZARRO WORLD. Then they combine more subtle than before Death Metal, melodic, hardcore and pop moments. Convince yourself
Stood there were never deadlock, further development is the law with them. This is also true for the eleven new songs on Bizarro World – will be released on 2/25/2011, but are now already tested exclusively with us
I swear that is the cutest thing I’ve ever read. It’s like a band bio as penned by Charlie from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Just like how Deadlock’s music is Lacuna Coil as interpreted by slightly heavier metalists. That’s a good thing for the higher-impact guitar work and similarly epic female vox. But it seems like bands with male-female singer duos defeat themselves; in all but the most exceptional cases, from The Sugarcubes to Lacuna Coil, it ends up that I mostly tolerate the stud’s mic-time and, worse, I flinch whenever the breathtaking female harmonies are about to make way for dude’s bulging-vein growls. It’s too wide a chasm between the two, like an art museum’s placement of a darkly beautiful piece of Byzantine erotica adjacent to 3D images of a rectal prolapse. Hard to be in the mood for both. For Deadlock, t’s not ineptitude, just a nearly no-win configuration; shit, so far only Devin Townsend has pulled off dual gender duets without dips in momentum. But hey, don’t listen to me! Just click here and “convince yourself”!
-ADF
Click here to order Deadlock’s Bizarro World, out today on Lifeforce Records.
Remember when I referred to Destrage as “Post-Swede“? Check out Deadlock; they offer a little more of what I was talking about. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before… it’s definitely in the Gothenburg vein, but it’s done with a bit more gusto, a bit more speed, and a bit more creativity than most “Re-Swede” metalcore that bands these days (ergo all modern metalcore bands) are pumping out. It’s the next generation of Swedish-inspired metal, if you will.
Of course, Deadlock are actually German, not Swedish, which might explain why “Falling Skywards,” Virus Jones” (in the video Axl ripped apart) and every other song I’ve ever heard by this band have incredibly cheesy choruses with clean singing [by an angelic-sounding female vocalist, no less]. This is the textbook definition of good cop / bad cop… heavy [and decent] riffs like hey this is metal!, then BAM, cheesy alt-metal central. But at least “Falling Skywards” has a good, catchy chorus as far as these things go; really there’s nothing you can hate on too much. I guess you could view Deadlock as an easy stepping stone for those just getting into metal, which I suppose is a good thing.
Check out “Falling Skywards” at Noisecreep.
-VN
Well, we haven’t done one of these in awhile. Let’s see if any of this shit isn’t shit.
First up is Rotten Sound’s video for “Hollow,” which had its premiere on The Deciblog. Now THIS is a great fucking video. Not only is the song br00tal, but the clip is just… well, I don’t give anything away because I was kinda blindsided by it myself, and I’d like to duplicate that experience for you. So just watch it.
If I needed music to represent the act of breaking a glass bottle and using its jagged edges to repeatedly stab someone in the throat, I might very well point towards Heaven Shall Burn as that aural example. Oh, sure, guitarist/co-producer Maik Weichert says the band isn’t advocating violence in their music, but how can you listen to HSB and not wanna kill every other living entity in the room? It’s almost impossible!
And the music band’s latest, Invictus, will do little to quell your bloodlust.(And while we’re on the topic, we’re still giving away an mp3 of the song “Buried in Forgotten Grounds” off of that album.) It was released by Century last week in Europe, and comes out June 8 in North America – so this seemed like an ideal time to shoot Weichert a few questions via e-mail. After the jump, get his thoughts on the thematic connections between Invictus and the other entries in HSB’s Iconoclast series, why he prefers not to work with an outside producer, his thoughts on being a vegan, violent political uprising, Asterix & Obelix vs. The Simpsons, and more.
There’s so much streamin’ going on right now you’d think a bunch of dudes were peeing on you. So without any further bullshit, here are three complete albums you can listen to right now if you wanna get your metal on:
It’s not hypocritical that the sternest hater of metalcore can guiltlessly enjoy its European cousin, melodic death metal, where prime metal thump veers into catchy hooks and harmony. Sonically, there’s not a lot of real estate separating the two genres, though metalcore is riddled with vague machoisms and boring-ass riffs. Not that melodic death metal is especially adventurous; represented here by one of the several European bands called Deadlock – this one a metal quintet distinguished by their straight-edge vegan politics – MDM is actually conservative to the point of being as intrinsically pop as it is metal.
