Hailing from Kentucky, ALL DEAD‘s new record Rise Below could get the party started in a cemetery and have all the zombies head banging! Their new 7 inch is packed with fast demented grooves that will have you spazzing out! Fuck the dumb shit, check out two ALL DEAD tunes below!

I have just plugged myself into the new RETOX‘s new album YPLL that is coming out via Epitaph on May 28th, and damn this motherfucker is an energy giver! This band has trimmed off any sound that is not made up of feral fury! Check out the full stream of RETOX’s album YPLL now and stay tuned for more rawness from them on CVLT Nation!

Your songs have an anthem quality to them, and I have found myself with Ultraviolet on repeat. Where does that anthem quality stem from?

LP – Thanks. I’m not sure where that exactly stems from — but probably just the love of a good rock song. And punk rock.

PC- For me it is the influence of punk and older hardcore, when I am writing lyrics I like to throw something out there that can stick and hopefully people will be able to relate too. Those kinds of songs were very important to me as kid growing up in the south. If you stood out, you would have to take a lot of shit and it was great to hear music that made me feel that other people felt the same as I did. So i think even as we have grown older and maybe our lyrical matter has matured, that influence is still there and I agree with Laura that I also love a great rock song.

What visual artist – be them painter, illustrator or filmmaker – has had the biggest impact on the band?

LP – I’m not sure that there is “the one” artist that wins over all others. And, I think that would also depend on who in the band you ask. It’s probably safe to say that David Argento, John Carpenter, David Lynch, and Ralph Bakshi have all impacted our band.

PC: Yeah I agree with Laura on all of those, also recently I have been a big fan of a lot of the newer independent film makers there have been some great movies coming out over the last handful of years and in particular I am a big fan of Gaspar Noe’ s work.

Photos: Wicked Ways Photography
READ MORE…

One of the big surprises of this year is certainly the self titled debut album by Lychgate, a “super group” formed by the most amazing of lineups: Greg Chandler (Esoteric), Aran (Lunar Aurora, Trist), Tom Vallely (Omega Centauri) and Vortigern (The One, Archaicus). With such amazing and skilled musicians behind Lychgate, the result could only be something marvelously arcane. Founded by Vortigern, Lychgate was a natural evolution that occurred over time from his project Archaicus, and despite having a new shape it’s still very audible the influences of the band-root’s sound in Lychgate. But this influence is not only restricted to Archaicus, throughout the album, there are delightful details that bring to my mind similarities from the music from where these mysterious alchemists come from. So what can you expect with this album? “Lychgate” blends the most esoteric side of doom metal mixed with some pieces of progressive death metal with the most melodic side of black metal, that along the album, is constantly showing its agressive facet, resulting in a very avant garde, atmospheric, mystic and almost cinematic kind of black metal.

One interesting aspect in the making of “Lychgate” was that it was created without the aid of programming. All instrumentation was performed and recorded without edits, a factor that gives even more credit to ​​the talented and skilled musicians presented here. In fact that’s the way I like it done: without artifices. Just clean, well performed, honest and brilliant music coming straight from the (dark) soul. Recorded at Eidola Studios and Priory Studios between April and August of last year, “Lychgate” was mixed and mastered by Greg Chandler at Priory Studios and features an amazing cover artwork by Manuel Tinnemans that truly captures the mystery and the whole essence of this album.

READ MORE…

Why is is this awesome? Because NEGATIVE STANDARDS are the shit!!! Check out this full set of their most recent show filmed by Kevin Hobbs. Make sure to give their last album VI-XI a good listen and you will recognize that this band is special…NEGATIVE STANDARDS RULE!

Text by Sam HaiNe

You never quite know what will cross your path late at night while aimlessly trekking through the internet. Amidst the various obscure word searches you might just find something worth your time. This is exactly the case when I somehow stumbled upon this mixtape from Purple Tape Pedigree & Steady Bloggin’.

Screwing Yourself To Live: A Chopped & Slowed Tribute To Black Sabbath, is a collection of Black Sabbath songs that have been meticulously slowed and throwed by Geng-Grizzly.

If you haven’t the slightest clue what chopped & screwed is, it is the remixing of songs by slowing the tempo down to between 60 and 70 quarter-note beats per minute and using techniques such as scratches, doubles and stop-time to chop the song into a chopped up version of its original. This technique was first developed in Houston, Texas by the late DJ Screw and has grown in popularity into its own sub-culture.

The result of this on Black Sabbath results in something rare and successful. Why is very simple; slowing the tempo down will either reveal sloppy production or highlight exceptional production. Black Sabbath still to this day is one of the best bands of musicians ever to play. The slower/screwed tempos here put breathing room between each instrument and give them defined textures, often turning riffs into walls of distorted doom and blues. The vocals are dropped down to their lowest level with an almost non-human effect. Throw in some film samples throughout the mixtape and you have here my friends a darkly fuzzed out head trip down to the bottom of a codeine bottle.

It’s been a while since we have done a giveaway, but today we have a great one for you! Candlelight Records has given us a red wax test pressing of the WOE Withdrawal album to give to one of our awesome CVLT Nation records! Check out some photos below, and email us at contest@cvltnation.com with “WOE” in the subject to enter the giveaway! We will accept entries until Thursday at noon PST, and then we’ll draw our winner!

CONGRATS Andrew Lusby!!

READ MORE…

Oxtongue might not be familiar to a lot of my fellow doom-heads, but from here on out they should be. Combining subtle atmospherics with the oft-imitated dirge rumble of Holy Mountain-era Sleep and a crushing, misanthropic fuzz wall is what these Canadian cats are all about. And it works damn well, with “Where The Light Is Mute” winding its way across 31 minutes of acid-dipped grooves and a hollowed, depressing stomp.

The album comes on slowly, with the first five minutes of opener “Humanity: Born In The Way Of Eternal Grief” devoted to a simmering riff backed with subtle whispers and ambient melodic touches. “Humanity…” lurches from one lynchpin groove to the next, the whole mass held together with reverb-drenched shrieks and moans that give a mournful flare to the crushing heaviness. While the riffs at times become a murky edifice of reiteration, they never lose the sense of dynamism that runs like a black vein through this whole album. The tone and timbre of the guitars changes so slowly in spots that, before you’re fully aware, you’ve gone from listening to a chugging bit of repetition to being engulfed in a bongload of atmosphere. And, just as easily, Oxtongue shift into the forceful and infinitely heavy “Anguish: Abide With Suffering,” which sets the same dragging tone as the opening track but follows a much more direct approach. It would have been easy for Oxtongue to take the path that far too many “doom metal” bands have and churn out 15 minute tracks full of bone-dry, Neurosis-aping schlock. Instead, they’ve created something that is at turns groovy, startlingly heavy, and dynamic. Oxtongue manage to strike a near-perfect balance of creativity and nihilism that stretches out into the black edges of emotion that serves as the mark of a truly talented band.

READ MORE…

Irish scourge ZOM present us two cosmological atrocities on a wicked 7” EP that lights the altar of Blasphemy, Morbid Angel, and Slayer aflame in it’s worship. While these tracks did appear on their 2012 “Hells Pleasure” demo I unfortunately did not get a hold of that so these are new to me, and also rip really hard.

ZOM’s assault is not new however. Their self-titled demo was certainly promising, making heads turn despite the perceived ordinariness outside of the locale they hail from, largely because the worship they display is flat out enjoyable with subtle additions that the newer revivals are bringing with them that seem to have naturally leeched into their classic sound. Just enough to refresh things at least because they were getting a lot of attention, and I still managed to miss their second demo last year containing these two tracks.

Though, as it was a demo, I assume they were rougher which is either a plus or a minus depending on your attitude. There are two tracks, virtually the same length but with different approaches to their thrash formula, the first “Multiversal Holocaust” dips into the slower realms near the end while “Terror of the Cosmos” really is a relentless and blistering offensive.

READ MORE…

DAY THREE
The third day was probably one of the heaviest of the fest. The place is packed, it’s Saturday, and something heavy’s cooking!

COUGH
So here I start my super sonic marathon with Cough. It was probably one of the performances that many people were most excited to see after their cancellation last year. I had the chance to see them in Copenhagen a couple of years ago, shortly after they released the brilliant Ritual Abuse. That show was rad, so my expectations were high. The set mostly included tracks from their recent split with Windhand, Reflection of the Negative, which I hadn’t time to give a spin yet so I felt a bit blindfolded, but it was cool to discover their new songs live. Kind of disappointed they didn’t leave more room for some of their bigger “hits” like “Crooked Spine” or “Killing Fields,” but the atmosphere they conveyed was definitely as obscure and suffocating as I remembered…

READ MORE…