Montclair, one of the many New Jersey cities that dot the shadow of Manhattan, lies on the map along the train lines stretching to the south of the lower state. The city’s convenient situation near the many highway hubs of New Jersey make this stop particularly accessible for both audience and and artist alike between the south and the metropolitan areas along the coast above.

In this city, under a stretch of restaurants off the main drag, is a former meat locker turned venue and recording studio known appropriately as the Meat Locker. And it it here that I got in touch with Montclair, NJ’s flagship stoner punk band, Dutchguts.
It’s these guys who set the tone of the venue as a place to come to if you are looking for loud, harsh, discomforting punk and metal. They’ve also taken pains over the years to amass the equipment and skills necessary to self-produce almost all material for themselves, which they’ve given to the punk masses over the years in the form of a flurry of relatively short but content-heavy EPs. Their latest release, Losing Sleep, has been a huge payoff to that experience. It’s a huge jump in quality from previous years, which is not to sell the band short of course – but these four tracks coming in for a total runtime of 10:28 offer the perfect addition to any tone/gear/punk/brutality fanatic’s rotation.

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The Body are about to release a new EP entitled Master, We Perish on April 30th via At A Loss Recordings. They have just put out a disturbing video for their song “The Ebb and Flow of Tides in a Sea of Ash” directed by Richard Rankin. So after the jump, walk hand and hand with The Body and peep their new visual!

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The CVLT Nation 2nd Anniversary Show is coming up soon on Friday, April 26th, at Unit B in Santa Ana, CA, and we want to offer our awesome radical readers a chance to win 2 pairs of tickets to the show! You can still pick up pre-order tickets from Unit B HERE for $8, or you can pay $10 at the show, but if you pre-order your tickets and email your receipt to contact@cvltnation.com you get a 15% off code for the CVLT Store for any one order of clothing or records! We will be drawing two lucky winners for a pair of tickets each on Friday at noon PST, so enter to win at contest@cvltnation.com with “2nd Anniversary” in the subject! Good luck and see you at the show!!!

**Congratulations to Daniel Echeverria and Jesse Barron for winning a pair of tickets each! See you at the show!***

Special thanks to Crash the Clubs and LACE Pickups!

Festering somewhere in Galway, stoner doom three-piece Weed Priest are a band with a self-explanatory name, it must be said. They say first impressions are everything and when Weed Priest introduce themselves at first, they make it rather clear what you’re getting – a haze of smoky, murky stoner doom conjured from the abyss. Having played a number of shows over the years and released demo recordings, it seemed like the band were working on a full-fledged release at pretty much the same pace that their music trudges but lo and behold, Weed Priest’s self-titled is upon us and it’s an adventurous and brave record for a debut.
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Interview via Death Metal Underground

Academic acceptance of metal accelerates through conferences dedicated to studying metal, professors teaching about heavy metal, investigations of links between heavy metal and religion, and the launch of an international journal for studying metal.

While the metal community may not have found a position on this change as of yet, the very fact of its existence is startling to those of us who experienced metal in the 1980s or 1990s, when society viewed us as outcasts of a likely deranged, intoxicated, criminal and Satanic nature. From the censorship battles of the 1980s, when the Parent’s Music Resource Center (PMRC) attempted to prevent younger people from acquiring metal in record stores and tried to legislate a requirement for lyrical content warning stickers on metal records, to the 1990s bourgeois bohemians wrinkling upper lips at the impolitic and feral nature of metal, society hasn’t liked us.

Luckily, academics don’t see it that way and have forged ahead with metal study, coinciding with a massive “hipness” of metal in the mainstream press and hipster underground. Metalheads might find this interesting because academic study can balance out what social pressures amplify.

We are fortunate to have Dr. Karl Spracklen, Professor of Leisure Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University, here to tell us more about his projects, the International Society for Metal Music Studies, its conference, and its journal.

Why study heavy metal?

Heavy metal is an important part of modern culture and everyday life, so studying heavy metal enables us to understand both of those things. For me, the interesting thing about heavy metal is the tension between metal’s strong sense of being part of a non-mainstream subculture, and metal’s place in the industry of modern pop and rock music. That’s because I’m essentially a sociologist. Other heavy metal scholars might be interested in the way the music is constructed, or the meaning behind song lyrics, or the history of the scene, or the use of heavy metal as a philosophy or ideology of life. Heavy metal is just a subject field, a lens, through which we can think about problems in other academic diciplines.

If death came in the form of a slow-moving baseline that could choke the life out of me, then my demise might take place at the hands of Frances’s EIBON, who have a filthy new album entitled II that is being released via Throat Ruiner Records and Aesthetic Death on May 1st. This dissolute, doom-laden listening experience is made up of two mammoth songs that will have you in a heavy trance-like state of mind. We were already huge fans of EIBON at CVLT Nation, and this record only strengthens our admiration for them. Today we are so fucking honored to be streaming EIBON’s “Elements of Doom” below! This doomedelic record is one that you need in your collection!…Pre-Order HERE!…Pre Order CD’s HERE & Download digital album HERE.

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All photos & text by Jan Zeleny

Reportedly, this has been the darkest winter since the beginning of weather statistics in Germany – and as if that wasn’t enough, while the Japanese are already posting fucking pictures of cherry blossoms, over here we’re still in the grip of winter’s third coming. Which, thanks to a slashing east wind, has been even more brutal than before. Good for Germans that the end of March saw the third Doom over Leipzig festival take place, which offered the opportunity to huddle together in the cozy bowels of the beautiful UT Connewitz with a few hundred fellow misanthropes once again and simply embrace the gloom & frostbite while getting bludgeoned by an excellent line-up of some of the most crushing artists around!

Before the doom would truly be upon us, Thursday started off with a film screening (the UT Connewitz is not only a concert venue, but also one of Germany’s oldest cinemas still in existence): a tourist’s look at the black metal scene and its pivotal formative/destructive events, “Until The Light Takes Us”. I had already forgotten how godawful the film really is, and was glad to find out that the subsequent lecture by Sascha Poehlmann of Metal Matters was also meant to shed a bit of light upon the film’s various problems (most notably the filmmakers’ apparent infatuation with Vikernes). However, it quickly became much more than that, as Poehlmann went on to explore black metal’s aesthetic & anthropologic roots in Romanticism with lots of competence and humor – most intriguing food for thought. Afterwards, there was an open mic giving the audience the opportunity for further discussion, but I figure I wasn’t the only one in attendance that was simply overwhelmed by all the input since no one took it (although a bit of talk developed among the audience with Poehlmann later).

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Thank god I am an Instagramhoor, because if I hadn’t checked it in the spare minute I had I wouldn’t have seen what fucking awesome shit was going down in my hometown of Vancouver today and tomorrow! Nothing is Heavy and Scratch Records are putting on a couple of art and music showcases at Interurban Gallery in the downtown eastside, and not only will you be able to admire the work of infamous artists like Alison Lilly (who put me on to these events), Bonnie Dobbin, Sab Kay, Gam Strudwick and Dena Lazerenko, but you will also be enjoying to extremely dope lineups! Friday features Black Wizard with War Baby, Astrakhan and Wilt, and Saturday features the legendary YOB with Alda and Harrow. Anyone who has toured through Vancouver knows that your audience is 150% with you and would literally bring the house down if their weed smoking wasn’t keeping them in check, so these shows are going to be off the hook. If you are in the vicinity this weekend make sure to head over to Interurban and say hi from CVLT Nation!

Excuse me as I plug in my vaporizer and make my way back to my screen to watch one of my all time favorite bands. For years, a week has not gone by when I have not listened to SLEEP. Travel on the weed caravan with me and check out this amazing 1994 full set that took place in Carrboro, NC at the Cat’s Cradle. SLEEP were on point this night – Chris, Matt and Al were unified under the green flag. Climb the holy mountain and peep the thc-delic experience after the jump…much respect due to kill that cat.