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New releases from Animals as Leaders, As I Lay Dying, Beneath Oblivion, Leviathan, Whitechapel and My Dying Bride highlight this week’s packed slate of new releases. Let’s take a look at what’s in store for listeners after the jump.
Our pals at Invisible Oranges just posted “Contrary Pulse,” a track off the upcoming Leviathan album, and boy, is it creepy. It’s not like Wrest (Jef Whitehead) has ever been much for kittens and rainbows (after all, this is the man that brought you such delightful USBM gems as “Fucking Your Ghost in Chains of Ice” and “Requiem for a Turd World”), but with this, his hitherto unexpected new effort, he’s really upped the ante. True Traitor, True Whore (Profound Lore) is genuinely nasty. You’ll feel dirty listening to it, and not in a sexy way.
A headline like “Tori Amos Issues Challenge to Metal Bands” is hard to ignore. So I went over to Spinner.com to read this interview with Ms Amos, and this is what she had to say:
“Well, look, sometimes you don’t know how music affects people. I embrace that because I don’t think that just because I talk about emotional stuff that it’s not mother—er stuff. I’ll stand next to the hardest f—ing heavy metal band on any stage in the world and take them down, alone, by myself. Gauntlet laid down, see who steps up. See who steps up! I’ll take them down at 48. And they know I will. Because emotion has power that the metal guys know is just you can’t touch it. Insanity can’t touch the soul. It’s going to win every f—ing time.”
Before we get too riled up, it’d be smart to remember that homegirl has a new album to promote, and will spout any number of ridiculous soundbites to sell some plastic. Also, the offending paragraph showed up at the end of the interview, and feels like an offhand remark. Metal news sites went apeshit over it, though, so here we are. I sincerely doubt that Ms. Amos really intends to stand onstage next to Iron Maiden (or Manowar!) and “blow them off the stage.” Unless she’s got about sixteen Orange amps to blast her whispery, piano-driven poem-songs through and 4/5 of Vader providing backup, she ain’t gonna have much luck.
Depressive black metal is a definite hit-or-miss of a subgenre. When it’s good, it’s bone-chillingly great. When it’s bad (and a LOT of it is bad), it’s just embarrassing. Remember when Xasthur used to be cool, before Malefic started collaborating with Pitchfork-approved songstresses and ultimately threw in the towel? Yeah, me neither (what happened after Defective Epitaph, bro?). Alas, Shining have jumped the shark entirely, Make A Change… Kill Yourself haven’t put out a record in four years, Bethlehem spat all over their once-shining legacy with that rerecorded abomination (Kvarforth really just needs to disappear), I haven’t heard a peep from Nortt in ages, and it seems like Leviathan’s on ice while Wrest sorts out his legal woes. What’s a suicidal black metal fanatic to do? After all, someone’s got to chase away all this sunshine, and as depressing as the new Morbid Angel album is, those world-destroying techno beats just ain’t gonna cut it.
At least we’ll always have Krohm.
No other band rips quite so massively, and this track off of seminal Leviathan only supports such a claim with flying colors.
Our esteemed panel of industry “experts” even named said album the best metal offering of the millennium thus far.
Accept no substitutes…..this is Mastodon.
-KW
So 2011 is officially underway! I mean, we’re two full weeks in — time to stop accidentally writing “2010″ as the date on shit, y’know? We started to preview some albums we’re stoked about, and will continue to do so next week. In the meantime, here’s some other fun crap we did this week:
Next week brings more debuts, more interviews, and more general Suckitude. See ya then.
-AR
Well, this is terrible.
Jef Whitehead — perhaps better known in the metal world as “Wrest,” the moniker he’s used while working with bands such as Leviathan (his own project), Lurker of Chalice (also his own project), Sunn O))), Twilight, and Nachtmystium — has been “charged with criminal sexual assault and aggravated domestic battery… allegedly attacking his girlfriend,” according to the Chicago Tribune.
Krieg are the odd man out in the USBM spectrum. “True” almost to a fault, they lack the oppressive, claustrophobic bleakness of Xasthur, the Phil Spector-ian walls of blackened madness of Leviathan, or the psychedelic mindfuckery of Nachtmystium. The few times I’ve tried to get into Krieg, nothing jumped out at me. And yet, after hearing Krieg frontman/mastermind Imperial’s serrated vocals on Twilight’s Monument to Time End this year, it shook something in me. There’s a fundamental rawness to it that can’t be replicated in silly backyard corpsepaint GIFs. And that rawness is all over Krieg’s latest, the chilling The Isolationist. It’s got all the black metal hallmarks, sure, but they’re all tweaked to provide maximum effectiveness. Droning and repetitive to some ears, to others, it’s all about mood. And that mood is suffocating and bleak. It’s relentless hideousness is truly a thing to behold, and with it, Krieg ably prove themselves as major contributors to US black metal.
So in case you’ve been hiding under a rock lately, or this is simply your first visit to Metal=eh, we’ve been sharing our views on the 21 “best” metal albums of this millennium (according to an esteemed panel of metal industry yahoos), and lo and behold — an amazing album by an amazing band topped the list.
Commencing with arguably the “best” (or at least “most metal”) opening lyrics of any album this century (“I think that someone is trying to kill me….it’s infecting my blood and destroying my mind…”), Mastodon‘s epic yet grounded Leviathan ascends above the crop of proto-prog-thrashsters throughout every song, and the range of jamz feels both balanced and diverse, all the while sounding like the same album from start to finish — not an easy feat.
For me, it was always the first and last tunes off this album that exhibit the most, ahehhahem, heart (and of course “Iron Tusk” totally rips……..ROAR).
MASTODON — “Hearts Alive”, from ["best" 21st century album] Leviathan (2004)
-KW
I heard Assassins, the new album from Nachtmystium, over the weekend, and its even better than I thought (or hoped) it would be. I’ll get around to doing a full review before the album drops in June, but let me just say that these dudes take black metal to psychedelic new heights (Actually, I think they’ve already done that, but they really have outdone themselves this time. Again.)
So I was stoked to get this press release, which announces that 2008 will offer even more new Nachtmystium goodness than previously expected:
“First, the new Worldfall MCD will be released as a precursor to their upcoming full-length, and will only be available direct from Century Media as well as iTunes…
“The Worldfall tracks were originally intended for a split with Leviathan that has now been delayed due to legal issues with Leviathan’s record label. Nachtmystium will be recording new tracks later this year and releasing the split at a later date.”
Does that mean we might get THREE new Nachtmystium albums this year?!?! The thought makes me so happy I might have to go jerk off just so I can get my hard-on down and go out in public again.
-AR
Okay, no surprise — we fucking love Mastodon and Lamb of God ’round here…you wanna fight about it? Therefore it should be no shock when I nominate the opening lines of Leviathan and Ashes of the Wake (both released in 2004) as the two best opening lines of that year, perhaps even ever.
Mastodon, “Blood And Thunder”, from Leviathan –
“I think that someone is trying to kill me; it’s infecting my blood and destroying my mind…” — I just got chills even typing it out; what a direct vision of madness, and a seriously vivid start to a truly sensational album.
Lamb of God, “Laid To Rest”, from Ashes of the Wake –
“The blood’s on the wall, so you might as well just admit it…” — Why hide from the painfully obvious truths of the reality of war? LoG simply puts it all on the table from moment one.
These albums made 2004 a landmark year for metal, and I am happy to report that both band’s follow-ups (Mastodon/Blood Mountain and Lamb of God/Sacrament, both released in 2006) are amazing, despite any gripes that the nitpickers may have.
However, I personally think that LoG stepped up their opening line chops with “Walk With Me In Hell” a notch above what Mastodon did on “The Wolf Is Loose”.
Compare for yourself after the jjjjump…
