BELUSHI SPEEDBALL, FUNERAL STORM Among Gimme Metal's Top Tracks of the Week

Gimme Metal Program Director Brian Turner delivers the week's top 5 office buzz-worthy tracks.

BELUSHI SPEEDBALL – I'm Already Halfway There

Name-wise these guys certainly achieve the tastelessness of Australia's Danny Whitten's Veins I guess, but I love their grubby grind fronted by Kinison-esque barkin' and oh how I can't wait for the pandemic to end so we can see this Louisville band play in their moving van with Mad Max gear on. The cover art is so great, it looks like Trevor Strnad, George Michael and Dabney Coleman are fighting zombies. Win win!

FUNERAL STORM – Mistress of the Night

Culled from a new split 7" with Synteleia on Hells Headbangers, these grimy Greeks definitely park in the same spaces as their predecessors in the black metal genre (it's pointed out this track shares the same drum machine as a Rotting Christ track). Moody, stark, sensory-assaultive.

EXIMPERITUSERQETHHZEBIBŠIPTUGAKKATHŠULWELIARZAXULUM – Utpāda

From their second LP 'Šahrartu' just out now on Willowtip the band-whose-name-will-take-up-the-rest-of-the-alloted-space-here excrete a healthy slab of Belarusian brutarianism. Relentlessly raw death chops mingle with tortured vocals and strident waves of riffage into a dizzying stew of strangeness.

FUATH – Prophecies

From SAOR's Andy Marshall comes this cinematic slab of atmospheric black metal out of Scotland. Ripe with crisp energy, FUATH's second LP (out in March on Season Of Mist) infuses some traditional Scots sounds deep into the Darkthrone tunnels from where some of these ideas were fermented. Rawness and melodicism co-existing quite well here.

CULT BURIAL – Abyss

Can we invent the genre New New Wave of British Heavy Metal? So many of Jolly Olde's henchmen have come to get us good this past year with forward-thinking, amazing sounds, and Cult Burial triumph here with a messy-yet-orderly onslaught of death, black, industrial, doom and several other miscellaneous corners addressed. The evolution may not be televised but it's on the radio.

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