The debut LP by Ireland’s Putrefaction is a heavy dose of dark metallic crusty riffs skewered together by visions of concentration camps, putrefied bodies, cities consumed by filth, corruption and disease. The opening track ‘Scourge’ leads us in, with distorted feedback slowly fading and declining into a heavy bass tone atmospheric riff. This as all fans of heavy music know is the revving up and things after this are going to go pretty fucking awry. Much like being handcuffed to a car that’s about to explode. There’s the riff change, a low-pitched roar and yes, balls to the fucking wall, things have gone very awry!

Putrefaction – ‘Drown Them In Their Wine’ track off their debut LP ‘Blood Cult’ out May 2012
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Painted is an intimidating record, to say the least. Being only remotely familiarized with their previous works, I listened to Narrows’ most recent offering with great interest. Painted is there second full-length, following 2009′s New Distances and it should be no surprise that Narrows is signed to Deathwish, arguably one of the best labels in the genre. Considering the esoteric nature of most of Deathwish’s roster, Narrows fits well here. Painted displays its hardcore roots proudly, while not being shy to demonstrate its more metallic plumage. Considering the cross continent origins of Narrows (Seattle, San Diego, London), Painted is an impressive work in both sound and effort.
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One label from the chocolate city, Washington, D.C., called Cricket Cemetry has done it again. They are about to release a killer split with LTW // Beasts of No Nation on May 21st. The LTW song is actually two songs in one, entitled “Lake Drug/Joy of Lying and Cheating,” and clocks in at around four minutes of pure blazing hot distorted awesome fury. The band are in the pocket from the get go – the screeching sound of feedback gets their part started. Then LTW began to bruise you all over with their punishing onslaught of speed and chaos. What really makes these songs work is how the band allow them to breathe in so much oxygen of originality, hence all of the wicked tempo changes! Hot damn, next up is the Beasts of No Nation song “Impunity,” which yanks your body and says, listen to this now motherfucker!!! There is nothing weak about this tune, and it reeks of demented melody that will stick in your thought pattern. The singer of Beasts of No Nation delivers the goods and the lyrics are on point. While listening to this record, I realized there must be something in the history of this town that gives so many of their bands that special unknown factor that makes their music so killer. Cricket Cemetry is doing the world justice by releasing some kick-ass records, so do your part and support them. Don’t just take my word for it, check out the songs below and tell me if they aren’t the shit!

Review Source:Profane Existence

Label:Inimical

Of course, MISERY needs no introduction, having been prophesizing the end times while blasting our ears for the last 25 years now. 25 years and only three full-lengths. For many bands, after such a huge gap between releases (it’s been 9 years since their somewhat lacklustre splits with TOXIC NARCOTIC and PATH OF DESTRUCTION; 16 years since the now-legendary “Who’s the Fool… The Fool is Silence” LP), the original spark isn’t there anymore, or the band merely splits up. Thankfully, neither of these are the case with MISERY. In fact, it is safe to say that this is the best thing the band has recorded in their entire history, and this seems to be the start of a whole new exciting chapter for the band.

Recorded in their own studio on their own time, this record has been slowly taking shape over the last five years or so. I still remember the day when I was in Minneapolis hanging out and went over to the House of Misery to drink beers and watch the band practice. Before anyone else showed up, Jon played me a couple of tracks they had just recorded a couple days prior – the two earliest tracks recorded for this album. At that point, I knew that this was destined to become a classic record… if it ever came out.

Read the rest of the review after the jump!
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Portland’s Aldebaran have had quite the prolific career thus far, in what has been a fairly short amount of time. Having formed in 2004 Aldebaran have consistently produced some of the most intoxicating and downtrodden funeral death doom this side of diSEMBOWELMENT and Asunder, yet they have only released one full length in their time together. Besides the many splits the band have to their name and a lauded EP from last year (Buried Beneath Aeons), Aldebaran now stand on the precipice of a new release. Embracing The Lightless Depths is wondrously majestic and the two twenty five minute plus tracks committed to this record are surrounded by three graceful passages which envelope the album in a sheen of mystical splendour.

Sweet and gently struck notes usher the melancholic dawn of Embracing The Lightless Depths, slowly giving way to distorted and electricity-laden strikes of guitar. “Occultation of Hali’s Gates” hits deeply with an embedded gloom, lacing the record with a knowledge of the deep-seated despair to come. Pouring into “Forever In The Dream Of Death” seamlessly, Aldebaran waste no time in pulling the atmosphere through shades of dusk and misery. Measured and processional beats cut the air, thick with dense and deliberate funereal tones. The almost fathomless vocal hits with crashing precision, striking in the hollows of the soul and each instrumental element is given space to coil and surround with a monolithic power. Moments of calm permeate the twilight offsetting the moving and commanding builds to exaltation. Rolling drum beats pound with an almost militaristic essence before sliding back to make room for husky breaths of doom.

Aldebaran take flashes of peaceful magnificence and counter them with depth and a sensation of hypnotic beauty. Horror lies veiled in echoing caverns of bass and subterranean roars and shadowy whispers. Embracing The Lightless Depths is a journey into the abyssal yawning pits of a vast universe. Aldebaran’s affecting and altogether destructive force is consistently compelling; the extended running time of each track holds natural progression and sublimely concealed chaos bleeds through the snarls of sludge and dirt during “Sentinel Of A Sunless Abyss.” Segueing into the final instrumental piece, “Occultation Of Dim Carcosa,” Embracing The Lightless Depths closes on a droning and soft pulse. Reminiscent of the opening work, the tender breeze of grief works through the tranquility opposing the depressive strength of the two colossal tracks.

In a cosmic sense, Aldebaran is one of the brightest stars in the known sky. Here the aptly named band burns through celestial clouds of devastation and ruin, seizing each lamentable instant and crushing with a potent authority.

Embrace the lightless depths.

Pre-order from Profound Lore Records.

Volume I: Subradiant Architecture is one of those rare records that was able to gain my attention directly with the first note I heard, makes my heart beat faster and gives me this certain powerful feeling only the best records are able to. Brendan Hayter, founder and song-writer of OBSIDIAN TONGUE, played in Woods of Ypres as well, and so it’s not very surprising that this record creates a similar, epic atmosphere. At a lot of moments Subradiant Architecture also reminds me of Agalloch, due to the same way as the tension throughout the record is built up and kept until the end and how the hymnic melodies are woven into the harsh, metallic soundscape. READ MORE…

With dissemination of anxiety, confusion, humiliation, darkness, conflict, cruelty, nihilism, inferno and all kinds of other evil, Lautréamonts fictional character Maldoror attempts to demonstrate the hated mankind its own badness. With the second album of their experimental project NERNES/SKAGEN, Kjetil Nernes and Stian Skagen, both members of the noise/math/chaos formation ÅRABROT, want to tell the story of a contemporary Maldoror.

However, the Norwegian duo aims not to set the literary text to music, but to generate appropriate moods. Instead of coarse words, as with Lautréamont, “Confession” is told with massive guitar drones and abstract electronic noise. The inhospitable and distant sounds create a quite dark atmosphere. In the vein of EARTH and KHANATE, NERNES/SKAGEN create narrative soundscapes that are tentatively searching through an eerily desolate dark. Challenging and exciting!

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Corpus Christi, Texas is perhaps best known for producing the honey-toned latin pop vocal stylings of Selena Quintanilla (1971-95) for many years now. Taking that into account, the aptly named small label/distro known as Murder/Suicide Incidents are doing what they can to put Corpus on the map for underground punk and metal. With just very few releases so far they’ve offered up a small variety of delicacies which include some death metal, sludge, hardcore, shoegaze and grindcore/power violence. Murder/Sucide Incidents hosts many young and memorable bands like Esclavo (sludgy doom chaos for the cult of Noothgrush), Chuch Of Disgust (brutal shredding death doom for anyone undergoing an Autopsy) and also Skinfather (d-beaten death blast for Swedish streets circa ’91). Nestled among those sit Botfly and Sigil who are perhaps the most unlikely pair out of the bunch, which is why I’ve singled them out for the spotlight. Some of what Murder/Suicide‘s got is on vinyl but most is only available on cassette tape, which I enjoy just as much as wax, if not more sometimes. Let’s face it, you just can’t fix broken a record with a pencil.

BOTFLY
ENEMIES OF THE WORLD
New York style hardcore by way of San Antonio. All the heavy breakdowns and thrashing, in the “no bullshit” east coast tradition was refreshing to hear from a southern band like Botfly. This is a quick cassette EP with an intro, three proper tracks and they even managed to squeeze in their own version of “Birthright” by Samhain. That cover really sold me on this too. Definitely recommended for anyone who’s ever been taken in under Citizen’s Arrest.

SIGIL Review after the jump!
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Rote Hexe’s newest release is like the feeling of being slowly bludgeoned to death with a lead pipe, directly across the face. The LA duo has found the prefect concoction of sludgey doom, blood splatters of 90′s post-punk, and a healthy dose of raw hatred. There is no shoegazey downtempo guitar, and no passages of misanthropic pondering here, just the better parts of every Buzzov*en, and Acid Bath album mixed with tincture droplets of Hot Snakes, here and there, to make one ferocious record, fit for the not-so-chill beard set. Elizabeth Gordon’s drumming keeps the stereotypical doom plod, but always to drive the pace forward, and never to fall back against it. Meanwhile, Aaron D.C. Edge’s guitar falls somewhere beneath the dungeons of drop D, and has all the fury of a buzzsaw gnashing bones. All of which is sewn together by Aaron’s glass hammered, fury ignited vokills.

The four tracks on,”Red Witch,” ease deceptively in with a phonograph laden sample from Alfred Hitchcock’s,”Music to Be Murdered By,” before punching you straight in the face with the full force of, “The Brightest Decaying Star.” More samples lead the way for the sophomorial, “Journey of the Forsaken Monk,” which creeps in, but keeps the unrelenting brutality prevalent throughout the album, especially when it comes the meat cleaving vocals. The record’s, “Red Witch,” namesake has a definite metal-cum-90′s-post-hxc feel to it, but that only adds to the dynamic and variation of Rote Hexe, who are clearly making excellent music based on their own wants and needs. Even when the track breaks down, it never gives way, with the drums and guitar still beating a bloody pulse under Aaron’s feral voice. We leave the witches to burn with a sludge-merchants southern-riffed wet dream, in the twisted body of, “Through Bramble, Thorn, and Thistle,” which happens to be the very hole I dwell in. All in all, it’s an eclectic, organic, and unified sound that the duo of Rote Hexe has thrown down on the, “Red Witch,” album. It is most definitely worth taking your time to wrap your fingers around this bleak treasure, which is soon to be released on Cricket Cemetery out of DC.

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Gliding into conscious minds with 2010’s four track demo The Disruption Writ, Ides of Gemini have added to the core of the band – Sera Timms (bass/vocals) and J.Bennett (guitar/backing vocals) – by introducing drummer Kelly Johnston to provide a somewhat martial tone to proceedings. Reworking the tracks found on the aforementioned cassette, the band has turned the processed beats of old into a fully rounded and slyly dangerous entity with debut full length Constantinople.

Using moments of peace to imbue Constantinople with an undercurrent of doom, Ides of Gemini use shades of light and dark to construct a full length of blissful and dreamy folk-tinged occult rock. Sera Timms breathes life into Constantinople, a record that is reminiscent of The Devil’s Blood and Worm Ouroborus in its vocal style, her voice carrying waves of destruction in the depths and judgment in the highs. “Slain in Spirit” and the military beat that sits within slithers with a mystical essence, the band utilsing the space in the track to conjure a terrific trance-like state whilst burning with a seductive power.

Sonically minimal, Constantinople is dynamic in its use of gentle progression and the occasionally massive crunching guitar tone adds a hidden weight to the funeralistic shades evoked by this three-piece. Soft rolling beats permeate “One to Oneness” whilst Timms voice is laced with a power to invoke from beyond this reality, menacing in a sweetly delicate manner. Dirty bass lines spill on “Reaping Golden,” sauntering through the initial stages of the track before giving way to the martial kicks of the drum and flashes of fragmented guitar lines. The simple mix of instruments and voice gives Ides of Gemini a strangely apocalyptic tone. The end of the known world will not come in crashes of sound and fury but with whispers of unnerving strength. Constantinople is an album of sighs and esoteric nightmares, lulling with enigmatic subtleties and supernatural wonder.

Ides of Gemini are deadly; allow yourself to be swept along in the swells of euphoric disaster that flow from this haunting trio.

Constantinople is released May 29th on Neurot Recordings.