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Last year (and the year before) I got way too busy with this thing called life and missed out on a lot of quality music. I am here to rectify the error of my ways, month by month.
Here are the March 2011 releases that got under my skin, burrowed their way into my brain, made my ears bleed, or simply tickled my unmentionables:
Scale the Summit, Trap Them, Weedeater and Omnium Gatherum top the New Releases class of March 1st, 2011. New ones from American Heritage, Bill Steer’s Firebird, Grayceon and others also come out this week, making it one of the healthiest new release weeks for metal thus far in 2011. MS New Release Czar Vic Vaughn takes a look after the jump.
I’ve been cranking Omnium Gatherum’s new album New World Shadows ever since the folks at Lifeforce Records granted us press access in early January, and now’s your chance to do so too: the entire album is streaming at RecordShopX.com for a limited time. Warning: be prepared for extremely good, colossal, epic, aching, melo-death/doom.
If you somehow still haven’t listened to Omnium Gatherum, you’re likely to think they’re the shit if you enjoy the following bands: Insomnium, Daylight Dies, Swallow the Sun, etc. I might even go so far as to say I’m enjoying New World Shadows more than I did Insomnium’s last album… woah! There, I said it.
New World Shadows is out now everywhere except the U.S., where it’ll arrive on March 1st. It’s really too bad that Lifeforce couldn’t coordinate a mutual international release date; money is being left on the table by forcing Americans caught up in the worldwide release hype to pirate.
-VN
Before Mar De Grises were the new Insomnium, Omnium Gatherium were the new Insomnium. “The new Insomnium,” of course, being short-hand for “new band that plays monolithically epic, eternally sad, woefully aching, Scandinavian melodic death metal.” Not that anything’s happened to Insomnium that would necessitate a replacement, but, ya know, it never hurts to have more than one and Insomnium (along with America’s Daylight Dies) are pretty much the masters of this genre.
Needless to say, “Soul Journeys” — the new song and videio by Omnium Gatherum — is great in exactly all the ways you’d want it to be. It uses the standard VI –> I chord progression in the chorus (pretty much one of the most epicly sad chord combos there is) that marks so many songs by these types of bands, but fuck it, who cares… if it ain’t broke don’t fix it! The excellent metal blog No Clean Singing was the first to pick this song up. Says NCS scribe Islander: “This is melodic death metal done right. It hits hard, it makes you wanna headbang, but it’s catchy, and it has a surprising — and surprisingly dreamy — interlude in the middle with clean singing, of all things.”
The track comes from the new Dan Swanö-produced album New World Shadow, out February 9th on Lifeforce and available for pre-order now.
-VN
When you’re a melodic death metal band from Finland what you really need are the multi-faceted talents of a producer such as Dan Swanö to bring out all the best elements of your music. Sure, an ability to write and play well are necessities but the proper direction and production can elevate your music from the ranks of the fledgling many to the proven few. Omnium Gatherum are an act with which you may not yet be familiar but, given the strength of The Redshift, you should be made aware. The reason? This release deftly surpasses the mediocrity of their past couple and even trumps their impressive 2003 debut, Spirits And August Light. The band have finally brought all the pieces together in a synergistic manner creating a cohesive and impressive work that should make their name more accessible to the larger community of metal brethren the world over. And their music will even appeal to our Sisters in Metal as well, so let’s not pretend this is all part of a special, masculine group. We can’t even get the handshake down.
Finland’s Omnium Gatherum, a gloomy, dark doom/death band of whom Axl and I are big fans, have posted two new full tracks from their new album The Redshift, out September 22 in Europe and October 14 in the U.S. (Candlelight). I’m tired and unable to come up with anything funny/interesting, but trust us, it’s good and you’ll like it if you like stuff like Daylight Dies and Agalloch.
-VN
