Sometimes bands that are signed to tiny labels approach us about coverage on MS. While it might be an insult to these bands and their labels to include them in our “Unsigned & Unholy” column, it’d also seem odd to include them in Readers’ Choice since most of the time it’s band members themselves, or occasionally publicists, that have reached out to us. So without further ado, here are a couple of excellent mostly unknown metal bands on even more unknown labels that recently sent word to the MS Mansion of their crushing wares:

• Cease of Breeding: Deliciously tasty deathgrind that’s incredibly fast and brutal in all the right ways and executed with seeming ease. This is the sound of women and children being mercilessly mutilated en masse; it’s ugly as fuck. Cease of Breeding are signed to Amputated Vein Records, a label that wants you to get into their website so badly that they insist on blocking immediate entrance with not one, not two, but FOUR splash pages you have to click through. Annoying, yes, but fortunately you can listen to Cease of Breeding at their own MySpace page.
• Rorcal: Blackened, epicly slow doom metal from Geneva, Switzerland, signed to the French label Calofror. Stream the 70-minute (!) title track and only track of their new album Heliogabalus on the band’s official website for a taste of the sloooowww, crushing doom. Rorcal so badly want you to know they play their metal slow that the track starts out with what feels like nearly a minute of glacially-paced closed hi-hat hits. But it’s worth the wait because the dissonant doom madness that unfolds afterwards will take you to another plane.

-VN

• Exist: Forward-thinking, forward-pushing progressive experimental metal with plenty of guts and grit, ala Intronaut or an intensified Cynic. These Marylanders actually remind me a lot of Carnal Rapture, an amazing Italian experimental metal band who sent me their demo last year; they’re jazzy in just the right measures, brutally heavy in others, and sometimes both at once. They know when to turn the brutality on and when to turn it off, and nothing sounds forced or cliche. I’m reasonably sure some of this guitar and bass work is off the cuff, too. This band makes me horny! Listen to their In Mirrors EP at Bandcamp, and download it entirely for free at their official website.

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