Gimme Metal Program Director Brian Turner delivers the week's top 5 office buzz-worthy tracks.
TRIAL – The Plague
Britain's Damian B (Techno Animal, Khost, Deathless) knocked us out with his debut LP this past year, a monolithic slab of dystopian thrash incorporating a wide and disparate range of influences. It's no secret that the late great UK singer/composer Scott Walker's spectre looms over the music from everyone from Bowie to Sunn O))), so Trial covering his 1967 great B-side "The Plague" comes as a pleasant but not unexpected surprise. Here the baroque goth pop stylings of Walker's song descends into its true core of madness. Well done.
SONIC FLOWER – Super Witch
Besides holding a bass guitar in the coolest fashion in Japan's Church of Misery, Tatsu Mikami poured some more style into his offshoot project Sonic Flower. While output has been dry for the last decade, the Italian Heavy Sounds labels has just exhumed Mikami's lost 2005 opus 'Rides Again', full of biker rumble and wacked wah that weds some Flower Travellin Band-style heaviosity with downtuned greazy funk (evidenced in Meters and Graham Central Station covers). Sonically rich and buttshake-friendly jams to be had.
MY HEART, AN INVERTED FLAME – You Will Never Hear From Me Again
This is music from our Battleflutes and Sideways Skulls host Andee Connors, who is half of this heavy duo. Guitarless and really incategorizable in many ways, their sounds stretch lava-like through every dark corridor enveloping one's senses with dissonant synths, astral projections and drums that utilize silence as much as motion with the constant pall of dread and doom. It's meditative and marvelous, a sprawling 2LP release forthcoming in December on Zum Audio, with cassette on Deathbomb Arc.
WARFECT – Into the Fray
Awesome blackened thrash trio from Sweden, meditating on a Soviet sub disaster on this track from their forthcoming Napalm label LP 'Spectre of Devastation'. Rich production courtesy Fleming Rasmussen who manned the board for three classic Metallica LPs. Look out for a guest DJ special from the band December 7th on Gimme.
FOLKTERKAMMER – Die Hymn
Andromeda Anarchia, Zachary Ezrin (Imperial Triumphant), Darren Hanson, and Brendan McGowan make up this wild quartet, incorporating the dark jazzy walls of black metal-informed gunk Imperial Triumphant is well known for with soaring operatic vocals in German. It's a wild juxtaposition (especially when evil troll-style backing vocals join in) but there's a dirty regality and corrupt classicism to this band that one doesn't hear virtually anywhere else. 'Die Lederpredigt' (The Leather Sermon) is out on Gilead Media in December.
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