Rolling Metal Thread 2014

YES! Now 2014 may begin...

Slough Feg launch title track and pre-orders for “Digital Resistance”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuTgTrhzUCo

http://www.metalblade.com/us/covers/SloughFeg-DigitalResistance.jpg

Slough Feg have launched the title track from their brand new album, “Digital Resistance.” The record was recorded with Justin Weis (who produced the album with vocalist/guitarist Mike Scalzi) at Trakworx in South San Francisco from January-October 2013 andmarks the band’s first new studio album since 2010′s “The Animal Spirits.” When asked if the new album was a concept album, singer and vocalist Mike Scalzi explained that “Digital Resistance“is a concept album in the sense that The Beatles Sgt. Pepper is a concept album. “It has somewhat of a consistent lyrical theme that runs through several of the songs, but not every song— it is not a concept album in the sense that our “Traveller” album is.” Listen now and pre-order your copy at metalblade.com/sloughfeg.

Mike Scalzi elaborates on the concept behind the title track: “This song represents a last ditch effort to escape the inevitable. There will be no victory over technology– nor should there be in a broader sense— but I do fear what we are becoming. Biological evolution moves so slowly that we cannot perceive it. But social and moral evolution may come in great jolts or leaps. This can be dangerous to the preservation the species, biologically and morally/socially. But it’s also just fun to sing about ‘killing technology’ (like that other band from Canada did a long time ago). It’s a very dramatic subject. That’s why I call it “Voi-Vaudeville”.”

Scalzi discusses the cover art: “The artwork for this album was, as usual, a bit of a struggle. I had no idea how to represent an album called “Digital Resistance”. We finally decided that we wanted the background of Kiss’s “destroyer” album (a city in ruins), but instead of a rendering of our band in the forefront, I wanted the space-dog (Vargr) from “Traveller.” But we’d already used him, so I thought about wolves. I thought maybe a symbol (involving a wolf) representing the birth of a civilization might be appropriate. And that’s what we did—- we put Romulus and Remus, the two mythological children who founded Rome, and were raised by a wolf, in front of this destroyed civilization. What does it have to do with “Digital Resistance”? Modern primitivism? An atavistic civilization? Nothing whatsoever? Well, I suppose only time will tell.”
So what does Mike hope the listener will walk away with after listening to “Digital Resistance“? “Hopefully just enjoyment, entertainment. Perhaps a little bit of a lesson about the dangers of technology’s tendency to sort of dumb us down when things become so easy. The more we indulge in technology and allow it to do everything for us, especially allowing it to think for us (as in the case of looking everything up on your phone or computer rather than trying to remember and retain information), the more physically and mentally “flabby” we become. So there is somewhat of an urgent message, or complaint about this increasingly human tendency.”

Digital Resistance is set for release in North America on February 18, 2014 and will see SLOUGH FEG on the road with a few West Coast shows scheduled in March with the guys’ “sister band” Bible of the Devil, from Chicago. The band is hoping to do a short tour of Europe in May/June, and then hopefully to Chicago in July to do the “Ale Horn of Power” Festival.

Slough Feg is:
Mike Scalzi – Guitars/Vocals
Angelo Tringali – Guitars
Adrian Maestas – Bass
Harry Cantwell – Drums

Digital Resistance track listing:
1. Analogue Avengers / Bertrand Russell’s Sex Den
2. Digital Resistance
3. Habeas Corpsus
4. Magic Hooligan
5. Ghastly Appendage
6. Laser Enforcer
7. The Price Is Nice
8. Curriculum Vitae
9. The Luddite
10. Warriors Dusk

Great news!

It's a mighty fine album. Better than the last one, I think.

if you click on the order in uk button it takes you to amazon and no sign of the album.

As I just said on Twitter, metal must be doing way better than I think if Metal Blade is willing to sign Slough Feg and Relapse is willing to sign Ringworm. Slough Feg's last album hasn't even sold 1000 copies yet, and Ringworm's last one has sold a little under 1600 copies.

I wonder how the Slough Feg reissues did for them last year.

Well in Slough Feg's case its time a good metal band was given a chance. An alternative to Avenged Sevenfold and Attila is needed!

Slough Feg are terrible. You want a trad metal band that deserves to be huge? Grand Magus is that band.

I hate to be that guy but I think Grand Magus were much better earlier in their career.

What, when they were doomier? Nah. Hammer of the North and The Hunt are definite peaks for me; the new one hasn't 100% won me over yet, but it's still really solid. It's just kind of all-of-a-piece and doesn't have any real standout tracks that I've noticed so far.

The new Grand Magus needed some time to grow on me last month, but I'm really into it now. Not as hooky and Rainbowy as The Hunt, but very, very solid front to back. They can do no wrong, I've been into that band for a long time now.

Long-time lurker... Anyone else thinking the Aevangelist album got kind of lost in the year-end shuffle? It seems to beat Gnaw Their Tongues in the found sound/classical samples/weird chaotic noises game. But brutal as f--- too, in a Streetcleaner kind of way, with accomplished musicianship and actual riffs.

I think the big thing for a lot of critics is that it technically came out in 2012.

I just got emailed a promo on that - it's being reissued on vinyl. Gonna check it out this week.

It's from 2012? Had no idea. I only started seeing reviews of it recently. Anyway, it's pretty rad. Need it on vinyl.

I'm talking about the "Omen Ex Simulacra" album btw. Are you sure it's 2012? Everything I'm seeing says November 2013.

Ah, I was talking about their debut, De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis.

Phil -- have you ever seen Slough Feg live? I don't listen to any of their albums. But every time I see them, they blow the roof off. It's a superlative performance. But I won't argue on the studio output.

Early contender for album of the year:

Dad Metal

hai kvlt ppl you probably saw this already but a friend posted it on facebook so i thought i'd share in case you hadn't
http://www.cvltnation.com/world-burns-bolt-thrower-live-1993-now-showing/

23 HOURS LEFT TO VOTE
~~~ ILM METAL POLL 2013 - ALBUMS & TRACKS VOTING & CAMPAIGN THREAD~~~ (VOTING ENDS FRIDAY JANUARY 10th 11.59pm UK time/6.59pm EST) )

I'm really enjoying this Aevangelist album, now that I'm finally getting around to listening to it. In the subgenre I think of as "monster music", like Mitochondrion and Ulcerate. More waves of noise and groaning than anything rhythmic.

turns out I'm going to MDF this year, I am pretty fuckin amped about it

my body has been too fucked up for the last 6 months or so for me to commit to getting in the pit but I may actually ask a doctor to give me clearance to go in just once

Kinda got to bring the doctor with you and make him block for you.

I don't know a bunch of those MDF bands, but I ran the list through my playlist generator and made an Rdio list with a song from each one that was available: http://rd.io/x/QUPlBzMoOuY/

~~~ 2014 ILM METAL POLL TRACKS & ALBUMS COUNTDOWN! ~~~ (Tracks top 30 first then Albums)

I just got my last mailorder of 2013 in yesterday's mail! Finally just now getting Avenger's Bohemian Dark Metal, which is kinda ridiculous given how much I loved Feast of Anger, Joy of Despair. Also two on Dark Descent, big favorite label recently: the Fulmination double CD and the Craven Idol one.

― combination hair (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Wednesday, January 1, 2014 8:33 AM

yeah, this is pretty epic, good strangled vox

eagerly anticipating: new Gridlink album Longhena next month! the first track sounds great and seems to me to edge a little closer to the more melodic Hayaino Daisuki stuff:

Gridlink - "Ketsui"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ZprczVr_k

unfortunately also sounds like this album will be Gridlink/Jon Chang's last; statement via facebook:

In a few weeks you guys will lay your hands on the last GridLink record and probably the last record I will ever make. It wasn't always going to be that way, but during the recording I realized that this was the end of the line for me. I don't think I will make a better record and I don't want to be in a band with anyone other than Takafumi Matsubara, who was cashing out his chips as well. This is a hard genre to play in. I've loved the style since I first heard it in the late 80's, via Napalm Death, however I have been notoriously critical of the genre and really only ever liked a handful of bands that play "grind"(I have gone so far as to say 99% of bands that call themselves grindcore are just playing short death metal songs). It's earned me a lot of scorn over the years but I haven't lost any sleep over it

I think about how lucky I have been to work with such talented people over the past 20+ years creating music in a genre that few can understand or engage with. I'm especially lucky to have met and worked with people like Rob Marton and Takafumi Matsubara, people who were not content to play in that space, but were committed to carving out a whole new sub-genre that was distinctly their own. Then there's the percussion team of Witte and Fajardo, both guys who were the absolute best at what they did, eclipsing not only their peers but those that inspired them to something more. And then there's the bass, which I grudgingly agreed to but turned out pretty damn good LOL

To this day, I am still surprised anyone listens to or vaguely understands any of the music I've been a part of. So once again, I find myself saying goodbye. I'm going to be focusing on writing new graphic novels, making video games and films, etc. Feel free to tag along.

Yeah the Gridlink is pretty damn good, and OTM with the Hayaino Daisuki nod - it's like a merger of those two projects. Also, it's pretty prog by Gridlink's standards, at a bit over 20 minutes run time!

Not to mention the instrumental that sounds like Starless-era King Crimson to me. (No, I'm not joking.)

oh man, excited for this! hope chang gets bored watching anime during his free time and grinds again. I've def come to view his involvement in a project as a serious mark of quality.

Phil -- have you ever seen Slough Feg live? I don't listen to any of their albums. But every time I see them, they blow the roof off. It's a superlative performance. But I won't argue on the studio output.

I'll argue. Start with last year's nicely priced reissue set of Twilight Of The Idols (1999), Down Among The Dead Men (2000) and Traveller (2003). I don't see how anyone who likes that type of music could say those albums are terrible.

This one is pretty brilliant. The Simpsons featured Judas Priest in the last episode but erroneously had a character call the band "death metal." Apparently the ire of thousands of raised, angry fists reached the show's creators who issued an apology of sorts with Bart's ubiquitous introductory chalk board mea culpa:

http://metalinjection.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/The-Simpsons-Judas-Priest-is-not-death-metal.jpg

I got bored with the Simpsons but should definitely watch that episode.

Don't forget everyone to join us on the rollout. Some really great albums so far on 101-83.

~~~ 2014 ILM METAL POLL TRACKS & ALBUMS COUNTDOWN! ~~~ (Tracks top 30 first then Albums)

Wow I thought for sure that Bart pic was fan art. If it's really directly from the Simpsons, then I have to say, "apology accepted!"

and really only ever liked a handful of bands that play "grind"(I have gone so far as to say 99% of bands that call themselves grindcore are just playing short death metal songs). It's earned me a lot of scorn over the years but I haven't lost any sleep over it

I agree with this statement!

Looks like Graveyard and Bombus are touring together this spring. That's a sweet bill.

If you haven't seen Graveyard, you need to see Graveyard. INSANELY good live band.

I haven't seen Graveyard.

The new Avichi just kinda dropped my jaw. Their (his) last album wasn't anything extraordinary but this might be. Comes out next week on PL. Black metal that manages to sound modern without wobbling into other subgenres.
http://profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/catharsis-absolute

glenn m on pazz n jop results:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2014/01/pazz_and_jop_tabulation_notes.php

• Enthusiasm scores (the average number of points awarded by each voter, which can range individually from five to 30) favor the extremes. Four of the top 10 albums by enthusiasm are metal (In Solitude, Black Sabbath, Locrian, Carcass), and three of the others (Dean Blunt, Autre Ne Veut, Julia Holter) are conversely atmospheric and oblique. The top of the full Enthusiasm table is quite a bit more adventurous than the raw winners list, and well worth poking through for new discoveries. At the bottom, the top 10 album with the lowest enthusiasm score is Haim's Days Are Gone, whose 9.6 average indicates that voters actually went out of their way to change the suggested 10-points-per-album default in order to properly quantify the limpness of their support. Sky Ferreira's Night Time, My Time would be ninth by simple vote count, but drops to 16th on points. The lowest enthusiasm score for any album with at least five votes is the Bon Iver spin-off Volcano Choir's Repave, which managed a remarkable 6.3.

• If those aren't quite adventurous enough, the Kvltosis table re-ranks the albums with an inverse weighting by how popular each voter's tastes skew, to deliberately look for intriguing anomalies. This reveals even more underground metal (SubRosa, Gorguts, Ghost B.C., Inter Arma, Windhand) and a variety of contrastingly rootsier folk/world/psychedelia (Tedeschi Trucks Band, Wayne Shorter, Mavis Staples, Rokia Traoré, Tal National, William Onyeabor). The Kvltosis winner (the album that people who don't tend to agree with anybody kind of agree on) is Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's English Electric. (Did you know OMD had a new album this year?) At the other end, the least kvlty album, and thus arguably the one even more definitively representative of the voters' aggregate tastes than the raw winners, is Miley Cyrus's Bangerz. Let this modulate your opinion of the whole enterprise however it must.

some album placements… i don't think i missed any before #89

19 Deafheaven, Sunbather
Deathwish Points: 361
Mentions: 35
37 Carcass, Surgical Steel
Nuclear Blast Points: 220
Mentions: 17
64 Black Sabbath, 13
Vertigo Points: 120
Mentions: 9
68 Gorguts, Colored Sands
Season of Mist Points: 110
Mentions: 10
79 SubRosa, More Constant Than the Gods
Profound Lore Points: 92
Mentions: 9
81 Kvelertak, Meir
Roadrunner Points: 91
Mentions: 9
89 In Solitude, Sister
Metal Blade Points: 81
Mentions: 6

o and:

• The Metalism table, which re-ranks the albums by prorating each voter's votes according to how much metal they voted for, turns up mostly metal, as it better, with In Solitude taking the title of Most Metal. Scanning through the rest of the Metalism top 20, though, makes me wonder if voters have actually listened to the things they say they like, as the non-metal entries show a distinct and frankly suspicious bias toward names you might mistake for metal bands if you didn't know: Chelsea Wolf(e), Burial, Forest Swords, Joanna Gruesome, Darkside. Although they didn't fall for Chvrches or Volcano Choir, which both seem like perfectly good metal names to me, so maybe it's fine. The two most popular completely un-metal artists, by this calculation, are the hip-hop group the Uncluded, and Elvis Costello and the Roots, which seems plausible.

They're having some technical difficulties, but that will all be back again soon...

60% of my ballot was metal, but i had two albums in the top ten so i think my kvltosis and eccentricity numbers are going to go haywire this year :/

congratulations, metalists:

http://furia.com/pjs/table_voter_2013_metalism.html

Chelsea Wolfe makes sense as metalist imo.

SURRENDER OF DIVINITY SINGER/BASSIST MURDERED FOR "TARNISHING SATANISM": http://www.ztmag.com/blog/news/?p=19655

heir (his) last album wasn't anything extraordinary

mebbe not, but there's no way I can fail to queue up a song titled "The Devil's Fractal Part I"

new finnish metal documentary, no subtitles in the trailer (and a pretty shocking-to-me 91k views so far) - some sieg-heiling a band at one point that's pretty ugh, I think a fair number of these finnish bands are some strain or other of nazi (Goatmoon, Ride for Revenge maybe?) which sucks because they make good records imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWzlSeGR5bU

Currently loving Exmortus's Slave to the Sword. Firstly because that's the title, secondly because this is the cover (apologies for gigantism)

http://www.metalsucks.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/exmortus-slavetothesword.jpg

and thirdly because the band has this totally kick-ass blend of death metal, thrash, and shredtastic power metal going on, like 3 Inches of Blood with less shrieking and more balls. Basically, they're what I wish Revocation sounded like. How power metal are they? There's a version of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" on this album.

Revisiting the classic 1982 debut now. Has that edgy Max Webster meets UFO feel, but with that little early-'80s Canadian weirdness to it.

^ me too, so good ("stand up"!)

which has me now listening to the stupid grate Sea Hags LP

the earlier High Spirits stuff is fantastic, think I missed this new one coming out tho

listened to the new Goat Semen album yesterday and it fully kills, so I'm looking forward to spending however long in 2015 cheerleading for a band called Goat Semen

New thread!

Rolling Metal Thread 2015