If you’re American, you already know it’s Memorial Day weekend, and, in fact, you’re probably either already on your way to the beach/a BBQ/a terrible summer movie/whatever, and are reading this after it was published. If you’re not American, all you really need to know is that we’re breaking out right now, and won’t be here on Monday. Usual tomfoolery will resume on Tuesday, May 31.

In the meantime, here’s how we kept busy this week:

• We debuted new music from Job for a Cowboy, Tombs, Unearth, and Vaulting.
• We spoke to Neil Fallon from Clutch.
• We continued to unveil our list of The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists.
• We checked out the latest releases from Dark Castle and Embers.
• Sergeant D. examined comedy metal.
• Leyla Ford examined Lady GaGa’s metal-ness.
• Anso wondered if Slayer pinball is better than recent Slayer albums.
• We got really excited about the new Gojira song.
• We got less excited about the new Bury Your Dead song.
• We watched you folks debated about the new Trivium song.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am going to put these tips for using the toilet to good use before I head out for the weekend. See ya Tuesday!

-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 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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Alright, so Embers was not actually suggested to me by a reader – MS staffer Bob Cock told me about them. But they’re a good band and they have at least one and possibly two female members, so I’m writin’ about ‘em.

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