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Promise Ring kinda morning
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Dog Day Afternoon. Wat Pairongwua, Thailand (Photo by Richard Bishop)
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PlayWu-Tang Clan Wu-Tang Clan Aint Nuttin To Fuck Wit
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(F) flourine (U) uranium (C) carbon (K) potassium (Bi) bismuth (Tc) technetium (He) helium (S) sulfur (Ge) germanium (Tm) thulium (O) oxygen (Ne)...
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Car Tapes
The Pete Flesh Deathtrip is one of the stupidest band names I’ve heard in a long time. “Fallen Bliss” is one the most gut-cutting death metal songs I’ve heard in a long time. So…
Autopsy still plays nasty death metal, but “Arch Cadaver” is also a bit of a rock ‘n’ roll party. Sandwiched between a minute of deranged doom and a left-right-channel guitar-solo face-off, there’s a whiskey-swigging, Motorhead-pounding rhythm that boogies at an insane pace.
Gonna be a demented rock ‘n’ roll party tonight…
With swine-like growls and switchback riffs cutting razor-sharp corners like a Tron light cycle, Wormed’s “The Nonlocality Trilemma” is engineered to bludgeon you into multidimensional submission.
Sometimes I think I test the limits of the NPR audience.
I don’t know whether to be terrified or delighted that some metalhead dad got a bunch of kids together and had them dress in ski masks to make a fan video for Portal’s “The Back Wards.” Also, The Curator’s next outfit should totally include a cereal box.
(I premiered “The Back Wards” at NPR a couple weeks ago.)
The guitar tone on Asphyx’s Deathhammer + the grueling speed of Autospy or Convulse = Vorum’s killer and rather catchy debut, Poisoned Void. There’s nothing new, of course, but these Finns clearly have ingested and vomited up the ’90s death metal scene.
New Wormed. You are moshing contortedly.
Sometimes NPR Music likes to keep the year-end list deal tidy. Top 10. No more, got it? I get it: wheat, chaff, etc. You can read my opening spiel and blurbage for my top 10 metal records of 2012 there, but get everything else here. At some point, these things just become bullet points of the dumb stuff I listened to, so these are the metal records that I really hated to cut, feel me?
The list in alphabetical order because ranking is silly. There are also links to stream full albums where available. And by year’s end, I’ll publish my personal top 25 here — you know, the one with “Call Me Maybe” on it (seriously).
(Converge fans get super mad in 5, 4, 3…)
The “top 10”…
- Aksumite, Prideless Lions [Colloquial Sound Recordings]
- Asphyx, Deathhammer [Century Media]
- Bosse-de-Nage, Bosse-de-Nage III [Profound Lore]
- Derketa, In Death We Meet [self-released]
- Horseback, Half Blood [Relapse]
- Pallbearer, Sorrow And Extinction [Profound Lore]
- Panopticon, Kentucky [Handmade Birds]
- Pharaoh, Bury The Light [Cruz del Sur]
- Pig Destroyer, Book Burner [Relapse]
- Testament, Dark Roots Of Earth [Nuclear Blast]
15 more for a neat 25…
- Accept, Stalingrad [Nuclear Blast]
- Baroness, Yellow & Green [Relapse]
- Blood of the Black Owl, Light The Fires [Bindrune]
- Gaza, No Absolutes In Human Suffering [Black Market Activities]
- Hivesmasher, Gutter Choir [Black Market Activities]
- Ilsa, Intoxicantations [A389]
- Incantation, Vanquish In Vengeance [Listenable]
- Kowloon Walled City, Container Ships [Brutal Panda]
- Krallice, Years Past Master [self-released]
- Malignancy, Eugenics [Willowtip]
- Royal Thunder, CVI [Relapse]
- Saint Vitus, Lillie: F-65 [Season of Mist]
- Satanic Bloodspraying, At The Mercy Of Satan [Hells Headbangers]
- This Station Of Life, Plastic Fire [Colloquial Sound Recordings]
- Unknown Artist, RH-12 [Rhinocervs]
Bonus: 5 hella sweet splits…
- Adversarial/Antediluvian, split LP [Nuclear War Now!]
- Alaric/Atriarch, split LP [20 Buck Spin]
- Deafheaven/Bosse-de-Nage, split LP [Flenser]
- FALSE/Barghest, split LP [Gilead Media]
- Robocop/Detroit, Dead Language, Foreign Bodies [Grindcore Karaoke]
No blackened this, no industrial that, just face-ripping, nuclear death/thrash outta Australia, got it?
Who knew that Atlanta had some Autopsy-style death metal trawling ‘round its muggy-assssphalt streets? Mangled is ugly as it gets, y’all.
In short, there’s another Lars at NPR and we often get each others’ emails, packages and even phone calls. When he first came on the scene, it was like Highlander up in here: “There can only be one,” etc. But Lars is a good dude, and we thought it’d be a funny idea if he reviewed one of my promos, specifically, a death metal CD.
By the way, that death metal CD is the killer Deathless Master by Acephalix.
