Early Fall Metal Roundup
Also, new releases on Burning Ambulance Music!
First things first: New music!
Burning Ambulance Music, the label division of this small but determined media empire, will be releasing two new albums on CD and digitally on October 13. You can pre-order them now, though, and I hope you’ll do so.
Polarity 2 is a collection of tenor sax/trumpet duos by Ivo Perelman and Nate Wooley, who helped inaugurate the label with the original Polarity in 2021. That one got very positive reviews from The Wire, DownBeat, and other places, and this one is just as good if not better. Pre-order your copy now!
Seis Amorfismos is a six-part work by guitarist/composer Diego Caicedo for electric guitar, extreme vocals, and string quartet. The disc also includes three tracks of improvised solo guitar. It sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard, I promise, but if you’re a fan of Imperial Triumphant or Krallice, you might like it a whole lot. Pre-order your copy now!
The amazing artwork on both of these releases is by I.A. Freeman, who is available to design album covers for you at very reasonable rates. Visit her website to see more of her work, and then get in touch!
Intermission, Part 1: This article about monster trucks is the best thing I’ve read in the New Yorker in years. (I had hoped to go to a Monster Jam event when I lived on the East Coast. Now that I’m in Montana, the closest ones to me are in Idaho, Washington, and Calgary, so that’s unlikely.)
Intermission, Part 2: Some footage of Tony Williams Lifetime (with guitarist John McLaughlin, organist Larry Young, and bassist/vocalist Jack Bruce) turned up on YouTube last week, creating a sensation among folks who like Williams’ fusion music better than I do. Vinnie Sperrazza’s take is the one to read. Or you could just watch the clip.
On to our main subject: Now that summer is over and autumn is upon us, it’s time to crank up the riffs, a bulwark against the encroaching cold and the inevitable onslaught of winter. Seriously, Stereogum’s metal column recently went long on the question of why there’s no such thing as a “Song of the Summer” in metal, and in my opinion, it’s because metal isn’t really summer music — except for power metal and trad metal, and you can go back and read my thoughts on Air Raid for more about that.
There’s a ton of really good metal out now, or coming very soon. There’s a new Cannibal Corpse album coming later this month, a new Baroness album, and many other awesome heavy things. Because I am a huge Baroness fan and a huge Cannibal Corpse fan, I have pre-ordered both those albums, and in order to preserve the purity of my fandom, I am not going to write about them below. Instead, I am going to review seven other new or recent metal records that publicists sent me, all of which I recommend you buy, or at least stream. Because they rule, and they will keep you warm when the weather gets cold.
Celestial Sanctuary are a UK-based death metal band whose music is full of heavy, chugging riffs that’ll make you want to walk on your knuckles like a gorilla (and possibly spin in circles like a gorilla). The vocals are a hoarse but comprehensible roar, and every once in a while the bassist gets a moment in the spotlight to grind and rumble. Both of these little stylistic touches link them to hardcore, but the songs have titles like “Glutted With Chunder” and “Swivel Eyed and Gurning in the Shadows,” keeping them in the slimy realms of death metal. If you like Vader, Benediction, and other music that makes you want to shove your head through the wall, Celestial Sanctuary are gonna be one of your favorite bands in a hurry.
Cryptopsy are a French-Canadian group who’ve been around for a long time, and had a lot of members come and go; their debut album, Blasphemy Made Flesh, came out in 1994, and while Flo Mounier is the only person currently in the band who’s played on all their records, he wasn’t even their original drummer. As Gomorrah Burns is their first full-length album in 11 years, and it gets right to the point — eight tracks, 33 minutes, no fucking around. Their early releases (Blasphemy…, None So Vile, and Whisper Supremacy) were great, mind-whipping technical death metal; later side trips into more conventional DM and even deathcore were less successful, but they never flat-out sucked. AGB is pretty straight-ahead, by Cryptopsy standards; it often sounds like Cannibal Corpse! But then they’ll throw a straight-up beautiful guitar solo into the middle of “Godless Deceiver” and remind you what brilliant weirdos they are.
Dead And Dripping is a one-man project by a guy named Evan Daniele from New Jersey. Blackened Cerebral Rifts is his/its third album, coming out on the Transcending Obscurity label after two independent releases. The music is herky-jerky, combining death metal riffs with slapping punk-funk bass, multilayered vocals (guttural roars, whispered threats, and almost subsonic gurgles all appear), and surprisingly adventurous, even psychedelic guitar breaks. The drumming on brutal death metal records often has to occupy a specific and narrow frequency band in order to avoid being swallowed by the grinding guitars, and that’s the case here; they’re a little bit typewriter, a little bit pencil-tapping-on-a-coffee-can, but everything else is so weird and fascinating that you’ll accept it as the price of entry.
Exmortus are difficult to pigeonhole, which is why they’re not as popular as they should be. If I had to create a subgenre for them, it would probably be called “meta-metal.” They combine the thrash riffs of Megadeth or Testament with macho-man vocals in the vein of early Skeletonwitch, and add a whole lot of florid classical/power metal guitar soloing in the Yngwie Malmsteen spirit, and lyrics dealing with the Manowar-ish themes of metal, swords, and fire (“Mind of Metal,” “Metal is King,” “Kneel Before the Steel,” “Victory or Death!”). They also tend to metal-ize well-known classical pieces and shred through them. On their latest album, Necrophony, they deliver a version of Yanni’s (yes, really) “Storm of Strings,” which was itself a reworking of Vivaldi’s “Summer,” from The Four Seasons. It rips.
Incantation are one of my favorite death metal bands. They’re one of the pioneers of the form, having come together in 1989 and released their full-length debut, Onward to Golgotha, in 1992. Over the last 30 years, they’ve never made a bad record, and some of their albums — Onward to Golgotha, 1998’s Diabolical Conquest, 2014’s Dirges of Elysium — are as good as death metal gets. Unholy Deification, their 13th album, does what they usually do, combining fast blasting sections with crawlingly slow doom passages and layering in some squalling but somehow melodic guitar breaks courtesy of Luke Shively, a relatively new addition to the lineup who wasn’t even born when the band first formed. This is a crushingly heavy album, and yet its single-mindedness and weird beauty brings me joy.
Sarmat are a technical death metal band from New York — Cotter Champlain on guitar, Andrew Gonzalez on vocals, Steve Blanco of Imperial Triumphant on bass (and piano on two tracks), and James Jones on drums. Determined to Strike is their debut album, following a 17-minute, one-track live-in-the-studio EP. This album goes by fast, six tracks in 35 minutes, but it really stands out from the pack because of the guests and additional instruments. Jerome Burns plays trumpet on two tracks, Cameron Carella plays trumpet on two more and duets with Burns on one, Matt Hollenberg (of Cleric and John Zorn’s Simulacrum and Chaos Magick ensembles) plays guitar on one, and Ed Rosenberg III plays soprano sax along with the two trumpeters on one piece. Gonzalez’ vocals remind me of Brutal Truth’s Kevin Sharp, while the music is dissonant, highly complex technical death metal somewhat in the vein of Imperial Triumphant with even more chaos and hostility. The horns aren’t just playing charts, either; Carella gets actual solo space on “Enervated,” and seems to be deliberately operating at cross purposes to the rest of the song. Determined to Strike will whack you in the nuts but good. Let it.
Spirit Adrift are true metal classicists. Their albums Curse of Conception, Divided by Darkness and Enlightened in Eternity are some of the most fist-in-the-air, big-riff, screaming-solo, joyous music you’ll ever hear. You know how Dio’s songs were awesome and life-affirming, but when you actually sat down to parse the lyrics they were total jabbering nonsense? Spirit Adrift mainman Nate Garrett operates in that same mode — this is metal about grabbing life with both hands, and the music reflects that. Every lyric seems like some kind of bent self-help affirmation, and the riffs are just massive. Every song on their latest album, Ghost at the Gallows, sounds like Ian Gillan of Deep Purple singing songs from Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark at the Moon, and fully half their running time is devoted to twin lead guitar fireworks displays, some of which are subject to psychedelic effects reminiscent of Monster Magnet. They’re so good, instead of giving you a song from the new record, I’m showing you their whole set from the Into The Grave festival in the Netherlands, back in June. Horns up!
That’s it for now. See you next week!