Caligula’s Horse started in early 2010 as a solo project for Quandray guitarist Sam Vallen to express the heavier and more guitar centric side of his musical personality. The music began to take a more modern form, incorporating influences as diverse as Frost*, Steely Dan, Meshugga, Devin Townsend and Porcupine Tree. At the begining the project was a primarily instrumental blank canvas, things changed by introducing vocalist Jim Grey from progressive metal band Arcane. Jim’s vocal created a musical invention much greater than it’s constituent components; highly melodic music of intense mood and depth, with strong, memorable hooks and intense, technical instrumental performance.
“Moments From Ephemeral City”, consist of 7 elaborated songs was release in April 2011 and it’s available for free-download (Download this entire album [in whatever format you like] for whatever price you think it’s worth, and please feel free to put in $0 if you see fit. All I ask is that you share it with a friend or two if you do!) at the band’s official site. Read more Caligula’s Horse – Moments From Ephemeral City (2011)
post metal
June DeVille – Swan Songs Of The Coyote (2011)
If the Google do not make a sucker out of me ( 😀 ), Lausanne is a city in Romandy, the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and from there are this three piece band called June DeVille, founded in December 2007 and as they say: “not split up yet.” 😀 And actually I didn’t stumbled into them, they found me. (Thanks Max!)
Their music is what we call post-metal and they flavor it with some grunge left-over spices, that kind of noisy and heavy grunge what once was the driving force behind Soundgarden. And well, June DeVille was a quite nice surprise. First at all, they have nerve. Sometimes it sounds like Zakk Wylde does it in his better days with Ozzy and Black Label Society. Secondly, but not at least, they wrote and recorded a couple of great songs. Read more June DeVille – Swan Songs Of The Coyote (2011)
Samael – Lux Mundi (2011)
Samael was a hell of a guy! 😆 😆 😆 Actually an important archangel in Talmudic and post-Talmudic lore, a figure who is accuser, seducer and destroyer, and has been regarded as both good and evil. Also called Sammael and Samil, he is considered in legend both a member of the heavenly host with often grim and destructive duties and a fallen angel, equatable with Satan and the chief of the evil spirits. One of Samael’s greatest roles in Jewish lore is that of the angel of death. In this capacity he is a fallen angel but nevertheless remains one of the Lord’s servants. As a good angel, Samael supposedly resides in the seventh heaven, although he is declared to be the chief angel of the fifth heaven. It is said that he was the guardian angel of Esau and a patron of the Roman empire. Read more Samael – Lux Mundi (2011)
The Phantom Carriage – New Thing (2011)
Throatruiner Records have a nice, fan-friendly approach by making most of their products accessible for free-download. I just wanna say this, on one hand the legal – or not – free downloads helps to spread and popularize the music and the new bands mainly, but on the other hand, every and each free download makes the artist lives one grade harder and one drop bitterer. So, I’m just telling you, support your favorite artists in any way you can, please share this album as much as you can, give them as much as you can. You may not realize how much that matters. The underground and the new artists deserves at least this much. Otherwise in a few years we may left exclusively with the plastic stuffs offered by the big corporated shitheads. Fuck. I had to say that. Thanks.
The Phantom Carriage are an extreme, but excitingly experimenting band combining different genres from black metal to jazz. “New Thing” is gloomy, intense and exciting, so don’t let yourself scared away by the very first impression. Read more The Phantom Carriage – New Thing (2011)
Ocoai – The Electric Hand (2011)
Ocoai are an awesome surprise. Guitarist and engineer/producer Travis Kammeyer and drummer Tim Smith met in in the summer of 2006 and wanted to try something different, they wanted to be the loudest and heaviest band around. And the sound of Ocoai is kind of muddy, sludgy, spreading into multi-layered dimensions, imagine Moody Blues jamming around with Down or Sigur Rós playing some Mastodom songs. I hate labels and labeling music, but this is kind of cinematic Metal. Ambiental, spacy constructions, ingenious use of the cello, gentle guitar tunes or crushing riffs and noisy explosions completing and overlapping each other in a nice, natural flow. Without a vocalist they managed to fill up the wide spaces, but still, I believe a powerful throat can take them much further. In any case, not a James LaBrie copy I had in mind, but eventually someone with the qualities and abilities of John Bush (Armored Saint, Anthrax). Read more Ocoai – The Electric Hand (2011)
Otep – Atavist (2011)
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“Drunk on the Blood of Saints” will rip your head off before you know it and all the 12 new songs from “Avavist” are intense and unforgiving bulldozers of modern Metal, even “quieter” songs like “We Dream Like Lions” will smash you into the ground. Read more Otep – Atavist (2011)
Abraham – An Eye On The Universe (2011)
Formally known as Le Baron Vampire, Abraham was formed in 2007 around members of metal acts Kruger and Nabokoff. Abraham is a post-hardcore quintet from Lausanne, Switzerland and they recently singed to Pelagic Records and making their debut with this dark and heavy album called “An Eye On the Universe”. Abrasive and heavy, tenebrous and cloudy, Abraham bring to the surface a contorted universe, they shifting from dark and intense moments to mysterious and spacier passages, but maintaining permanently the tension, the gloomy atmosphere. Shreds of light sometimes comes through the cracks of the crushing themes they construct and that brings color and interesting shades into their music. Read more Abraham – An Eye On The Universe (2011)
Poisonblack – Drive (2011)
Poisonblack sounds just like James Hetfield & Co. disguised are playing in some Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy) tribute band. Well, some Gothic resonances are still vibrating mainly in their slower themes, but Poisonblack – just like many other bands – left behind their roots and strip down to the bones their sound and it results nothing but pure Rock. And above all this parallels, Poisonblack sounds mature, grinding powerful and those cracking guitar tone, catchy riffs, simple but colorful guitar solos and clean, powerful vocals are quite convincing. This Finnish band rocks literally.
After the departure of Juha-Pekka Leppäluoto in 2003 (currently in the bands Charon, Harmaja and Northern Kings), bringing of Ville Laihiala (ex-Sentenced) seems to be a winning card. Laihiala wrote very few songs for Sentenced whose main-songwriters were Miika Tenkula and Sami Lopakka, became the band’s principal songwriter, assumed vocal duties himself and has since led Poisonblack in a musical direction that closely mirrors that of his former band. Read more Poisonblack – Drive (2011)
Lake Of Tears – Illwill (2011)
Four years after their 2007 effort “Moons and Mushrooms”, Lake Of Tears will release on April 29 their eight studio album. “Illwill” it’s dark, it’s heavy, it’s beautiful, it’s always recognizably Lake Of Tears, but they always evolved, searched, experimented and vary their sound and this ongoing development has continued through to this new album as well. There’s still gloomy reminiscences of Doom Metal, persist some polished Gothic shines, but Lake Of Tears have a strong and simple line of pure Rock groove in their vein and what make them different from most of the now days bands it’s their determination and focus to quality and music without fitting into some strictly delimited genre. Read more Lake Of Tears – Illwill (2011)
Asking Alexandria – Stepped Up And Scratched – Remix Album (2011)
After the April’s release of their second full-length album “Reckless And Relentless” , “Stepped Up And Scratched” is the remix version of their debut album from 2009, “Stand Up and Scream”. It’s pretty strange, or at least unexpected, while on their second album they turned to a much heavier side of their music, this remix album step back to the much electronic, “dubstep feel” content. So, they still trying to “Ride Two Horses at Once”, and definitively they will piss off one or other of their fans because metal fans will not digest this dance-club oriented mixes easily as the club music consumers are not huge fans of noisy guitars and deadly growls. If sexually it may be acceptable or at least tolerated to be bisexual, in the music business it’s pretty hard to take it both way simultaneously and keep on smiling just like nothing happened. The facts are facts: metal-heads always been extremely conservatives. Read more Asking Alexandria – Stepped Up And Scratched – Remix Album (2011)
