Back in May we got all excitebike about the new band formed by Sacha Dunable (Intronaut/Graviton/MetalSucks columnist),  Charles Elliott (Abysmal Dawn), Derek Rydquist (ex-The Faceless), and Derek Donley (National Sunday Law/Graviton), called Bewilderbiest. Then in September they announced they’d changed their name to Bereft and released their first song, causing our helpless minds to swell with heated anticipation.

Now Bereft have announced a record deal with The End Records, which is great news because it also comes with an album name and release date for that album. The debut album Leichenhaus (“Mortuary” in German) is a conceptual album thematically revolving around a waiting mortuary (!), and it’s due on April 24th. You can be SURE you’ll be hearing more about it on MetalSucks as the date draws closer.

Check out the previously released track “Withered Efflorescence” here.

-VN

We got all hot n’ bothered back in May, when Derek Rydquist (ex-The Faceless), Sacha Dunable (Intronaut/Graviton/MetalSucks columnist),  Charles Elliott (Abysmal Dawn), and Derek Donley (National Sunday Law/Graviton) announced the formation of a new project, Bewilderbiest. But now we’re even MORE hot n’ bothered to learn that not only has the band changed their name to a less schticky moniker, Bereft, but have also debuted a new song, “Withered Efflorescence,” on their Facebook page (“like” required).

The song is positively crushing, and, you should be happy to learn, sounds nothing like any of the bands of which these musicians have previously been members. It’s a long, slow, heavy-as-Dino-giving-Milano-a-piggy-back-ride doom number, which makes the band’s new name seem all the more fitting. Here’s a comment on the tune from Mr. Elliott himself:

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With every bit of bad news come a little bit of good. Last week we suspected and then confirmed that Derek Rydquist had left The Faceless, who are quickly becoming the White Wizzard of progressive death metal, but that he had joined a new project called Bewilderbiest alongside Sacha Dunable of Intronaut/Graviton, Abysmal Dawn’s Charles Elliot, and National Sunday Law’s Derek Donley, who is also Dunable’s bandmate in Graviton. Since Dunable also happens to be a MetalSucks columnist, we emailed him and asked for the skinny on the band. Here’s what we got back:

Derek Donley is mixing it right now and we should be ready to post something in a week or two.  This shit is sounding heavy as fuck, but I’m sure it won’t be for everyone, especially the tech death guys.  It’s basically 45 minutes of crushing doom metal in the vein of old My Dying Bride, Anathema, etc, but maybe a little more “sludgy” sounding and probably with more of a melodic/psychadelic emphasis.  We’re all really stoked on it though.  I basically have had a few of these songs demoed out for an imaginary band for a few years now, and Derek D and I started working on them back in January.  Derek Rydquist was moving down to LA around that time and wanted to jam on something like this, and Charles has been on deck to do guitar/vocals ever since I first demoed the songs back in ’08 or so.

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I was stumbling around YouTube last night when I came across some new fan-filmed videos of The Faceless on their current European tour with Born of Osiris, Veil of Maya, and Gorod. And I’m sitting there watching some shitty cell phone footage of the band performing their new song, “The Eidelon Reality” (listen to a pre-production demo of the track here), and I have this realization –

Hey, that ain’t Derek Rydquist doin’ the vocals.

And so I scrolled down to look at the comments where, indeed, some other dude has asserted “that doesnt look like the vocalist,” and the dude who filmed the above video responded, “I think they got a new one and he´s much better than the old vocalist.”

So, trying to be a good detective, I went over to the band’s Facebook page to see if Rydquist had been removed from their listed line-up. And as of this writing, he hasn’t.

But there is this comment on their wall from some fan who saw them in Plymouth last night:

“incredible tonight, tight as fuck but wheres derek? had no idea he was no longer in the band, never the less the new guy did a stellar job”

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It’s here! Graviton, the band guitarist Sacha Dunable (also of MS faves Intronaut) named because of an MS commenter, will release their full-length debut album Massless via Translation Loss on April 26th, but this being MetalSucks (toot toot!) we’ve got the whole thing for you here two weeks early. The album is as psychy, droney and proggy as you’d expect a band featuring three members of National Sunday Law (one of whom is also in Intronaut) to be, but a whole lot more mellow… which is to say it rules.

In case you’re wondering what on earth (or elsewhere) a Graviton is and why this album has been named Massless, look no further than the first sentence of the graviton (the thing, not the band) Wikipedia entry:

In physics, the graviton is a hypothetical elementary particle that mediates the force of gravitation in the framework of quantum field theory. If it exists, the graviton must be massless (because the gravitational force has unlimited range) and must have a spin of 2.

Well, gee… that might explain song titles such as “Hadron,” “Quarks,” “Photon,” and “Tachyon,” the latter of which I’d thought only existed on Star Trek.

Listen to Massless below. Tune into WCUR on the web tomorrow at 5:30 EDT to listen to an interview with Graviton’s Darin Tambascio.

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If you stretch your pot-addled brain, you may recall that, back in June, Intronaut’s Sacha Dunable wrote about his new band, Graviton, as part of his Blogronaut series here on MetalSucks — in fact, it was a MetalSucks reader who named Graviton.

Well, now Graviton have signed with Translation Loss! Which is great news. And while there’s still no official release date for Graviton’s debut, there is now a title (Massless), cover art (above), and the promise that we’ll get to hear it before the year is through. In fact, there are already several tracks streaming on Graviton’s Facebook page. And they’re excellent — they have all the proggy goodness of Intronaut, but they are, generally speaking, a little on the mellower side… in fact, the title Massless strikes me as being really, really appropriate. Go listen here.

While we wait for Massless to get a release date, here’s what Sacha wrote about the project when he first solicited names from MS readers during April of last year:

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Yesterday I attempted to clarify the meaning of the phrase “elephants marching riff” by pointing out some reader suggestions that, even if they were cool riffs, did not meet the definition for this particular trope. Today, I am going to highlight some of the reader-suggested riffs that I actually think do meet that definition.

Now, these aren’t ALL the riffs that you guys suggested… I’ve cherry picked some in the interest of time. (For example, a lot of you suggested various riffs by Chimaira and Gojira. Since I already pointed out that both of those bands are really good at writing elephants marching riffs, I’m not going to include any additional examples from those bands here.) So don’t have a conniption if your riff didn’t make the list.

And so…

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A few weeks ago I asked you guys for help with naming a new band I started with my good pals in National Sunday Law, and the response was literally overwhelming. Thanks so much to everyone who replied! Some were good, some were hilariously bad, and some were just hilarious. We ended up debating for another month, and decided on the name Graviton (not Gravitron, as I just discovered MS had reported (smoke weed)) [We've since fixed it! Sorry.  -Ed.], which was inspired by MS reader Nate’s suggestion of Hadron. Thanks for turning us onto string theory as a band theme, Nate! Email me at sachadunable [at] gmail [dot] com with your address and I’ll be sure to send you all kinds of crap.

Honorable mention should definitely go to reader Dave B, who provided such gems as Hella Smelly Belly, GuhGuhGuts, Sweatpants Surprise, and Don’t Injure Car Keys (D.I.C.K.). I don’t know you Dave, but I know we’d get along. Send me your address for some crap as well.

Anyhow, we’ve posted two full Graviton songs for you to check out on our Myspace, Bandcamp, Twitter, and if you’re too lazy to open a new window and require colorful moving pictures along with your music, Youtube:

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Technical sludge/doom outfit National Sunday Law — who The Blogronaut name-checked last year and whose free 4-song EP we featured here just this past April — are calling it quits. Cerebral Metalhead is reporting that jack-of-all-trades Darin Tambascio is moving back to his home state of Maryland:

After playing over 50 shows with some of our favorite bands (Intronaut, Mouth of the Architect, Irepress, Behold…The Arctopus, Dysrhythmia, Exhausted Prayer, Solar Wimp, Hurt Model, Fight Amp and so many more), we are taking a break from National Sunday Law. Due to a dire financial situation and ongoing employment issues, Darin will be moving back to his home state of Maryland in late June. Therefore, the band will be on an indefinite hiatus after two more shows.

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I’ve always been a crappy band namer. I’m crappy at naming anything, really. I come from a long line of people who were bad namers as well. My parents named me Sacha for fuck’s sake. We have absolutely no Russian in our gene pool. My mom already had a cat named Sacha when I was born. She either really liked the name, or just wasn’t creative enough to think of something else to call her first-born child. Thanks to her, I was constantly asked by my peers if I knew that “Sacha is a girl’s name,” which probably led to me getting into heavy metal, which most definitely led to me eventually writing this blog entry for MetalSucks. So yeah, thanks Mom.

Back to the band name thing. Yeah, I suck at it. I’ve never named a single band I’ve ever been in. God damn it if I haven’t tried, though. And god damn it if it isn’t the most pathetic, embarrassing, and unnecessarily vulnerable experience a group of musicians will ever put themselves through. You spend all week thinking of a name you believe to be unique, and to have meaning, then present it at rehearsal the next day only to have it written off after 15 seconds of consideration with a “nah, man…” while everyone stares away at the ground and/or quickly changes the subject.

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A long, long while ago, “Blogronaut” Sacha Dunable shared his favorite unsigned bands with us and mentioned a Los Angeles band called National Sunday Law. Sacha, being the aspiring Metallica ghost-writer that he is, wouldn’t lead us astray — National Sunday Law are a fierce sludgy, doomy, proggy duo who make noise like there are twice the amount of dudes in the band than there actually are. Their mix of technicality and sludge/doom reminds me of Intronaut in certain ways — I see why Sacha took a liking to them — but by no means are they aping Sacha’s style.

National Sunday Law are giving away their 4-track EP for free on their Bandcamp page — no reason you shouldn’t at least give it a shot. Intronaut bass wizard Joe Lester lent his skilled hand to the bass tracks on the EP. If you like what you hear but have a jones for that physical disc, hard copies will soon be available here. You can also buy their full length CD and T-shirts.

If you’re digging National Sunday Law you might also dig Knut, a Switzerland-based doomy post-hardcore band cut from the same cloth.

-VN

Having an outlet through a prominent web media site like metalsucks.net is a blessing in so many ways. It took a while for me to realize, but honestly having my shitty ideas read by thousands of shitty people is a power that I should harness and use to project something positive onto the metal scene. Since Metallica haven’t called me about ghost writing their next album yet, I figure I should still try to do some good for the heavy music community and turn you people on to some bands who don’t have a label buying ad space on Metalsucks. Here is a list of bands I am angry at the public for not liking:

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