Rolling 2020 Metal Thread

love the cover art!

they are quite prolific

i never even listened to the last one! (and i like them)

re: Krallice. the peak for me is Diotima but I love this new one quite a bit. the Mick album, Arctopus, the Overgrow to Overthrow comp....Colin Marston is on a roll this year. every year usually, but these are all exceptionally excellent

First Martin Birch this week, now Pete Way. Old school metal is getting hit hard. Sad these deaths are being underreported, what a pair of titans. Pete was the coolest.

RIP to both of 'em

Digging this black/death/sludge/doom/everything album from Crust

http://crustband.bandcamp.com/album/and-a-dirge-becomes-an-anthem

Track 6 oddly starts off sounding a little like Kyuss.

Caverncore 4 evah:

https://angelmorgue-us.bandcamp.com

didn't realize one of the guitar players from the stevens was in a metal band, i checked it out but i didn't think it was nearly as good as the stevens unfortunately. a lot of death metal particular tends to all sort of blur together for me.

I'd never even heard of the Stevens until this thread, but that's exactly how I feel about bands that sound like them...I mean, you could tell me this was any one of a dozen different "indie" bands and I'd believe you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iy9iZ2-Z4Qk

new undeath: https://undeath.bandcamp.com/album/lesions-of-a-different-kind

Bedsore's album is hitting the right buttons for me. Bits of death metal, thrash, atmosphere, variation. Like to see metal bands doing cool things with synths (see also Malokarpatan):

https://20buckspin.bandcamp.com/album/hypnagogic-hallucinations

Ok the name Bedsore is good enuf for me.

Spinning

How did it go?

i enjoyed it....I was a bit hung over so I didn't get a non-distracted listen so I'll need to play again

I pre-ordered Intercepting Pattern's The Encounter because I trust the label (Rising Nemesis) and it sounded interesting — a single 30-minute tech-death composition divided into 10 tracks; features the drummer from Defeated Sanity — but I just got a promo of it and it's the most blatant, unimaginative Meshuggah worship imaginable. They might as well have called it Catch 34. I mean, there's a little bit of intriguing jazziness to the drumming, but everything else is cut 'n' pasted from Meshuggah.

Catch 44 surely

Now that September is almost upon us, let's play a game.

Thus far, which 2020 metal album has been slept on the most in your estimation?

I'd nominate the anti-kvlt post-BM of Förfallet (name your price): distant shrieks of despair in surround sound, drums you can almost touch, riffs upon riffs of deathless misery, lulling song structures that never slumber, quieter instrumental passages for extra impact.

Ripped to Shreds - Ruan

a virtual tie between Salqiu and Molde Volhal

Re: Luan, I've got an instinctive and unfair bias against one-man DM bands (unless it's Esoctrilihum), but I'll check it out.

Salqiu def up there (I quite liked the Moldé Volhal but it didn't sway me as much as it did you, lj).

This is cheating but I'd throw in Ayyur's two-song EP Balkarnin as well: Tunisian atmoblack that puts me in the same frame of mind as the best of late 90s/early 00s downtempo, using none of the same tricks (save for the ambient interludes). I was also tempted to mention Turia but I don't think they count as 'slept on' per se.

I'd say Kaatayra is the one I'd like to see get more traction, I'm a pretty bad judge of what *other* people would like but it could have some crossover/casual metal listener appeal (I don't say that perjoratively) like Botanist or Oranssi Pazuzu. Or maybe the band's just come to mind because he released another album today!

I did give Salqiu a couple of listens alongside some of his previous but it didn't do anything for me unfortunately.

I liked the Kaatayra well enough but I’m afraid it has yet to elicit a revisit on my part.

At work today I've been experimenting with a song-level version of Fans Also Like, plugging in random songs I thought of as seeds and generating 100-song playlists starting from there. This one for "Strange Wings" by Savatage came out inspiringly well:

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7b85OE9odL96PEEeo9xrfP?si=Qpxw0ciyTD6_5Bbbet7Q-Q

and what a good song!

the Thou/Emma Ruth Rundle record is finally coming out. first track is, surprisingly, an actual jam

https://youtu.be/liVnl2gIdhs

Nice!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-KzL0xNnX0

I don't have a feel for what people are or aren't flipping out about but the Esoctrilihum album just delivers every time.

The new Napalm Death album is really good. Barney is doing enough interesting things with his voice that I had to look up to see if there were any guest vocalists. (There are not.)

Will report a Facebook post I just made for the amusement of some here...

I checked out the new Vio-lence video for "California Über Alles" against my better judgement when I saw how Leon del Muerte [a Facebook friend and guitarist of note] raked it over the coals and I just had to see for myself. Despite a lot of people who revere their first two albums, I never thought much of the band. The Dead Kennedys cover somehow makes a great song sound horrible and the anti-mask message of the video is dumb.

The line-up shows why this is the path that they chose:

Bassist Christian Olde Wolbers Believes COVID-19 Is a Biological Weapon Created to Kill “Anti-Commie Protestors”

I personally got into it with guitarist Bobby Gustafson because he was a Tea Party idiot way back in 2014 (I can only wonder how his views have evolved since then).

Phil Demmel and Sean Killian recorded this trash back in 1993 for a demo that wound up on the Torque album which Sean didn't sing on (not sure who wrote the charming lyrics):

No welfare case of sinking bums
NO GANGSTERS WITH THEIR KILLING GUNS!
No crack babies for sucking breasts
WIPE OUT THEIR MOTHERS!

No fornication of the breeds
No more conception of you we need
No more the love of fucking cunt
Discard the ones we consider scum

One simple incision at the balls
One slice direct from the love of GOD
One rape your cock on the chopping block
One kill and you're the next to fall!

YOU BREED LIKE RATS - You fucking breed
YOU BREED LIKE RATS - Like disease
YOU BREED LIKE RATS - Like a rat you breed
YOU BREED LIKE RATS - You fuckin' breed like rats!

No more you hear your mother scream
No more crack babies on the street
No scenes of sacrifices for hate
Wipe out this fucked up race!

YOU BREED LIKE RATS - You fucking breed
YOU BREED LIKE RATS - Like disease
YOU BREED LIKE RATS - Like a rat you breed
YOU BREED LIKE RATS - You fuckin' breed like rats!

So yeah, fuck this band. I am glad I never liked them. And I am not linking to the shitty video.

Good: Carcass that was delayed due to COVID-19 has a new release date of 10/30.
Bad: Only an EP (Maybe that was common knowledge but it's news to me).

The new Unleash the Archers album is fantastic.

https://open.spotify.com/album/5AZyScekGF0otc4JAYGiDG

fuckin' yiiiiiiikes on that Vio-lence stuff

so is the new Napalm Death all in that Killing Joke-influenced style?

Just to backtrack for a second, Angel Morgue's riffs are simple, but some of them are Iommi-tier in their ability to burrow into my brain. If you've heard a better death/doom album this year, please share!

new INcantation is indeed dope, and a little less dirgey as unperson mentioned. kind of some uncharacteristic riff choices at times too.

angel morgue is a cool name.

but all I can hear in my head is

YOU'RE AN ANGEL MORGUE
YOU'RE AN ANGEL MOOOOORGUE

I don't have a feel for what people are or aren't flipping out about but the Esoctrilihum album just delivers every time.

yeah, I love this thing. big step up from telluric ashes, which was already pretty good.

this and the mystras record are both top-notch imo, good year for i voidhanger records.

agreed.
btw, new japanese goregrind band:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnNMHMyicOY

Good: Carcass that was delayed due to COVID-19 has a new release date of 10/30.
Bad: Only an EP (Maybe that was common knowledge but it's news to me).

It looks like the full-length is delayed until 2021 and this EP is meant to tide folks over until then.

New Botanist out 10/30.

http://verdant-realm-botanist.bandcamp.com/album/photosynthesis

The first song from it, "Water," is dulcimerific as usual!

Was just coming to post that! I reviewed the Hammer of Botany/Oplopanax Horridus reissue for The Wire last year. Really interesting stuff.

Plague Organ are a project by Rene Aquarius (Horrid Apparition, Imperial Cult, Sneezing Pus, Celestial Bodies, Dead Neanderthals, etc) and recording engineer Marlon W. With influences ranging from deviant free-form jazz, drone and dark ambient, to ritualistic black and death metal all the way to the most erratic strains of kraut and improvised psychedelia, Plague Organ’s abhorrent avant-garde/ambient black/death metal deformity “Orphan” is a spiraling and malformed mantra of deviated experimentalism and inverted incantations designed to bore into the listener’s mind and ravage it of its sanity. By all means a triumph in fringe sonic experimentalism and among the most accomplished and unclassifiable avant-garde extreme metal anomalies of the year.

90 seconds in and i'm yes

https://sentientruin.bandcamp.com/album/orphan

Every time I revisit this record 'Ashen Goblets' strikes me as the single most perfect metal track I've heard all year, almost Brucknerian in its stateliness. Bonus points for distantly and intermittently echoing the 'Opening' to Glassworks and the impeccable vocal work:

https://bloodreddistribution.bandcamp.com/album/black-stream

The rest is pretty damn good too, if you're into this kind of thing.

Ooohh Plague Organ & new Botanist both seem really awesome

Riley Gale of Power Trip has died

Tragic and terrible but very on point for 2020, alas.

Goddamnit. That’s awful news.

RIP

Thirty fuckin' five.

This just killed my mood

So sad.

This is Century Media's latest signing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS42JD_YTg8

I'm kinda surprised Roadrunner didn't grab her up, honestly.