Upcoming Metal Albums to Get Excited About

picture from this awesomely stark Polish gallery

(Consider this a more proactive extension of my last post.) After the first few nearly release-less weeks of the new year pass, bands will start releasing new albums again. I can only hope to feel the same overwhelming optimism this year that I felt as I began to dig into 2007's releases late last year (umm... a few weeks ago). To help this process along I started a tradition a couple of years ago where I create a list at the beginning of the year for all the announced and upcoming releases that I am anticipating. But somewhere along the way I always abandon the list. Usually my taste will change or I'll hear negative reactions from friends or the release will be delayed indefinitely or whatever. So a few months in, I just start delving in all unorganized. Inevitably I end up missing a lot of albums that eventually do come out or that I duped myself into avoiding because I thought I wouldn't like them. Even now I'm still catching up with a ton of last year's albums that I missed for whatever reason. I could probably do a whole new top ten of 2007 from that stuff alone. But I'm setting my sights forward, trying to keep organized and hopefully shining some light on a few upcoming metal albums that have caught my attention.



Plague Bringer - Life Songs in a Land of Death
(January 29, 2008)
Back in 2006, Plague Bringer released their amazing debut EP As The Ghosts Collect, The Corpses Rest. It's a cool amalgam of very mechanical tones (they use a drum machine and the guitar sounds digitally processed/distorted to me though I could be wrong) and a really reserved and tactful vocalist. He knows when to pause and let the guitarist just shatter you with a riff (always reinforced by a powerful drum machine riff). But the guy's voice is strong and he's always violently erupting through thick layers of distortion. He's often mixed kinda low, which adds to the tension. It's beautiful. There's one point in the track "No Such Nothing" that my friend said sounds like he's screaming with the timbre of a wind tunnel.

If you had asked me back in '06 who they sounded like, I would've told you Pig Destroyer. I might shy away from that comparison now but it's not false, and on a superficial level, the connections are ever-present. Scott Hull (Pig Destroyer's guitarist) mastered their EP (though that doesn't really have a whole lot to do with their music, no offense to the mastering process), Plague Bringer list Pig Destroyer as one of the bands in their "Sounds Like" section on Myspace, and just check out their original logo here... it's like a computerized version of the PxDx logo. All that said, there are worse bands to be connected to.

These guys have had a really big influence on my own writing style (which isn't saying much, except that I really dig this band). All the preview tracks on their Myspace are great and I highly recommend checking them out.

MP3: Plague Bringer - "Impaled Faith" As The Ghosts Collect, The Corpses Rest (2006)



Cursed - III: Architects of Troubled Sleep
(TBA 2008)
One of the few releases from 2008 that I have all ready heard. And damn, this album rips. The production is singular, cohesive and really raw. Every riff floors it.

I don't have much of a story for this band, they are just fuckin' heavy and primal. Definitely the best hardcore band going right now, but there's a whole lotta metal to be heard here too. Consistent but stylistically and dynamically diverse, Cursed have a real winner with III. And they have a song called "Hegel's Bastards," which wins points over here (though apparently the term is from a Jacques Lacan seminar of which I know nothing about). Their other albums I and II are just as awesome and consistent, so check those out too.

MP3: Cursed - "Friends in the Music Business" III: Architects of Troubled Sleep (2008)
MP3: Cursed - "Night Terrors" III: Architects of Troubled Sleep (2008)



Mgła - Groza
(TBA 2008)
I discovered this band earlier this week after I saw Groza on a RYM users' metal-heavy list. For whatever reason the band's name attracted me and I dug a little further. Turns out the group have some awesome late-period Francisco Goya-ish artwork on the cover for their 2006 EP Presence, so I downloaded that one here. Everything about that EP floored me. Memorable riffs, really hard and straight (no homo) but still very natural/human drumming, very powerful midrange-y vocals, I guess everything that's de rigueur for a good traditional black metal band. But it's all about their execution, which is unrelenting and ultimately very memorable. After the second or third time through Presence, a handful of the main riffs felt so familiar that I almost had to double-check that I had put on this album and not something else.

Mgła ("fog" in Polish) have released two more EPs since Presence (Mdłosci and Further Down the Nest) that I still have to check out. Nevertheless, I'm really excited to see what they put together for a full-length.

MP3: Mgła - "Presence III" Presence (2006)



Ocrilim - Annwn
(February 5, 2008)
Here's a small justification for my last post. I first checked out Orthrelm (one of the projects of Ocrilim's sole member, guitarist Mick Barr) because their album OV was #50 on Pitchfork's 2005 list. The description of the album was intriguing and the cover art was cool and you know the drill. I downloaded it still not really knowing what to expect, only that it was extremely repetitive.

My first listen was trying (mostly because it was on iPod headphones while I was in the cafeteria at school), but I was somewhat into it. I kept putting it on for the hell of it and eventually what do you know, I started to require it. It became this mental fuel or something. One cliché with "minimalist" songs like this is that time becomes a little more fluid, and that probably had something to do with my obsession. I don't think it's brilliant or anything, but that doesn't really matter 'cause it's awesome and captivating.

So I downloaded the rest of the Orthrelm albums which were basically like, take one 5 second chunk of OV and do a bunch of really fast variations of it. Cool stuff, but I wasn't as taken as I was with OV.

I was pleased to find out that the Orthrelm guitarist (Mick Barr) had some more solo stuff out under the guises of "Octis" and "Ocrilim" (and some other lesser known ones). I listened to previews wherever I could find them but never bought the albums. I constantly looked for them at the store but could never find them, and for some reason I never bought them online. But I recently found Ocrilim's Anoint and Mick Barr's Octis: Iohargh Wended on Soulseex. Anoint really struck me as it was the one I had coveted the most back in '06. Definitely didn't disappoint either. It's all made up of guitar (I guess usually one or two tracks at a time, maybe more) and it's very chromatic and piercing. But the guitar tones are really cool and there's something I can't identify that makes it very comfortable to listen to. To use a stupid analogy, it's much more Interstellar Space than For Alto. (I even read an Amazon.com review where someone compared the Mick Barr and Zach Hill collaboration to Coltrane and Rashied Ali, so I'm not stretching too far here.)

From the preview track on Ocrilim's Myspace, Annwn sounds even thicker with beautiful counterpoint from the two guitar tracks and just generally more up my alley than his past work. I'm really amped to hear this when it comes out.

MP3: Ocrilim - "Anoint 6" Anoint (2006)



Earth - The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull
(February 2008)
I used to listen to Earth's album 2 a lot during my sophomore year of college ('05-'06). People would wander in and out of my dorm room wondering why I was listening to this droning guitar and bass music (and I sometimes asked myself the same thing). I didn't have a good answer as to why I enjoyed Earth, but being at a music school where some people are more "open" to and respectful of different kinds of music, I often didn't need one (and fuck 'em anyway). Looking back, now I would probably just say "it's heavy, and good music to drink to," which is something that most can relate to in addition to being absolutely true.

Until this year, 2 was the only Earth album I had heard. I'd recently read pretty favorable reviews of Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method, but I think there was something like a 9 or 10 year hiatus between that and their previous full-length. I'm always hesitant to check out bands who are on a comeback or semi-comeback (even ones I really like), probably because of ageism and how often that sort of stuff disappoints. But the blog Befriend the Riffs put a good amount of Earth albums up in November, and I decided I should check them out (and I eventually found the new album leak sometime in December). But I didn't really give any of those albums a listen until early this month due to busyness/laziness.

This band is great. Particularly the new album The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull. It's similar to Hex... but more rich in its sense of song and texture. The melodies that take prominence in a few of the tracks are straight up beautiful. An important thing to note about those melodies is that they are completely reserved and never overstay their welcome (which is unbelievable in spite of the 8 minute--on average--song lengths). Earth show a distinct taste for craft. There are even some really cool piano/keyboard lines doubling the guitar lines in certain songs. So it's varied and tasteful and all that but also logically rooted in their Northwestern sludge. They don't skimp on the heaviness or density of their previous releases.

Something stupid that the album made me think of: this album sounds like Chet Atkins playing traditional heavy metal (on account of Earth's instrumentalness and the gorgeous melodies)

MP3: Earth - "Miami Morning Coming Down II (Shine)" The Bees Made Honey... (2008)
MP3: Chet Atkins - "Travelin'" The Essential Chet Atkins (1996)

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As for the metal thing I am most excited about right now: this awesome, fucking 40 minute long podcast interview with J.R. Hayes of Pig Destroyer from the Headbanger's Ball blog (apparently J.R. doesn't love the word "blog"). About a third of the way through, the interviewer gets all Dr. Katz Professional Therapist, but J.R. rides with it, so it's bearable. Listen to it here (that's a direct link to the MP3 file of the interview)

In other Pig Destroyer news, Blake Harrison (who does samples, noises, assorted stuff, maybe some bass) has a metal show on satellite radio with a guy from Misery Index. I can't listen to it, but I've been enjoying going through their playlists from the last few weeks. Lots of cool thrash/death/all sorts of metal ideas to check out. Here's a link to their Myspace blog where they post their weekly playlist: The Ultraviolence.