The Howling Wind – Into the Cryosphere

The Howling Wind's Into the Cryosphere was added to the Profound Lore Bandcamp. Very heavy and sludgy black metal. Read the Allmusic review and a great stream of consciousness review from That's How Kids Die.

...this is a blasphemous blizzard of filthy occult energy, the frozen corpse of black metal stuffed with dope, crammed into a blast chiller and then violently yanked out, pissed on, and set ablaze.

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Whitehorse - Progression

I got a heads up on Whitehorse's Progression from The Obelisk. Heard one track and I was sold. The review states that Progression is an album that inflicts its dreary, darkened atmospherics well beyond the point of oppression, and this is truly dark doom with cavernous death metal growls, harsh blackened screams, and droney noises and electronics. The last song Time Worn Regression is a great example of how Whitehorse creates a crushing atmosphere by gradually adding more and more layers of noise, until it becomes almost too intense. Check it out below. Here are a few more reviews from Metal Archives and Cvlt Nation.

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Chaos Frame - Another Life

Chaos Frame's Another Life mixes progressive metal technicality with a power metal sense of drama and melody. Stellar musicianship, especially in the soloing and drumming department. Synths are there to accompany, not dominate. The clean vocals are occasionally a little off, and the harsh ones could be better (but are used sparingly). Check out the reviews from Blistering and Metal Archives, and give it a spin.

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Check out this YouTube clip, a blazing version of Kate Perry's I Kissed a Girl by one of the members of Chaos Frame.

Hot Fog - Wyvern and Children First

"Wyvern Skull" graphic by Alan Forbes

Sometimes you need your metal to be fun and awesome, and Hot Fog are happy to oblige. Cosmo Lee plugged Wyvern and Children First in a Decibel column:

The riffs are rough and ready; the vocals are rough and sometimes unready. But mostly it’s hot rockin’ times from dudes who appreciate the art of the harmony lead.

Listen to Death Killers below and enjoy the tasty NWOBHM riffage, and some great heavy metal screams. Click the player to let Hot Fog Kill You In The Face!

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Krallice - Dimensional Bleedthrough

Krallice's second album Dimensional Bleedthrough from 2009 was added to the Profound Lore Bandcamp (their debut album from 2008 is also available). In the comments to this review from Metal Review it was called Mastodon gone black. That does sound good doesn't it?

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Altar of Plagues - White Tomb

Altar of Plagues - White Tomb from 2009 was added to the Profound Lore Bandcamp. The journey begins when the evocative opening chords of Earth: As a Womb explodes in powerful blastbeats, and the words

Who will guard these hills?
Those which are abandoned.
Those which are exhausted.
Everything is collapsing, can you see it?
Awareness will come slow, if at all.

This is hypnotic and epic black metal. Aggressive and experimental. Not of the forest or the land, but of the city. Quoth the Autothrall:

The imagery conjured through Altar of Plagues is not one of abandoned forests and mountains, but the dark and forgotten underbelly of urbane, mundane existence, transformed into a dark beauty often overlooked.

But as the lyrics implies it is a beauty that is on the brink of falling apart. Perhaps the destruction is needed, and the journey isn't a way forward, but a way back.

...like a barren, human-less landscape in the future after an epidemic infection has wiped out the human race, leaving concrete jungles rotting and deteriorating with foliage. White Tomb is mother-nature reclaiming her territory.

As Teeth of the Divine so elequently put it.

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Saros - Acrid Plains

Profound Lore Records have been busy updating their Bandcamp and I will add some of the new releases to Metal Bandcamp starting with this post. First up is Saros - Acrid Plains from 2008. This Invisible Oranges review calls it a mix of hope and despair, sunshine and fog, dirt and water. I really like the mix of progressive rock, black metal and shoegaze, this one goes straight on to the must-buy list.

Update: I bought it and Acrid Plains became a favorite. For some reason Profound Lore has now changed the album to be streaming only. Listen to my favorite song from the album below. Adrien Begrand from PopMatters has this to say about it:

the band never meanders, and nowhere does this become more evident than on the 12-and-a-half-minute closer “The Sky Will End Soon”, which shifts beautifully from folk-influenced metal reminiscent of Agalloch to expressive solos by Ben Aguilar and more of those sumptuous vocals by Leila Abdul-Rauf.

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Vit - -

A live review at No Clean Singing made me check out Vit's album "-" from 2010. I really like their mix of raw sounding acoustic passages and crunching blackened doom. The grungy and upbeat opener The Ardour of Saints is a bit of a smokescreen, the rest of the album is a sludgey soup of constantly changing songs. The production is crisp and leaves lots of room for all the instruments and the vocalists throaty croak. Check it out and read these reviews from Lurker's Path and Sunyata - Mindful Of Metal.

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Pallbearer - 2010 Demo

One of my Bandcamp favorites is Pallbearer's 2010 Demo. This is flawless melancholic doom with an old school vibe, great guitar solos and killers vocals in the traditional Ozzy style. Here's a review from Lurker's Path.

The last song of the demo is a fantastic cover of the Billie Holiday song Gloomy Sunday. Pallearer even replaced the last verse with its I-was-only-dreaming-everything-is-ok lyrics with a soaring guitar solo. Doommantia calls it A great track but the weakest track out of the three tunes on the Pallbearer demo, they are much better at sticking to their own material in my opinion. I disagree, but listen to Gloomy Sunday below and judge for yourself, then go to their Bandcamp and hear the rest of 2010 Demo.

Dearest the shadows I live with are numberless
Little white flowers will never awaken you
Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you
Angels have no thought of ever returning you
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?

Gloomy Sunday

Gloomy is Sunday, with shadows I spend it all
My heart and I have decided to end it all
Soon there'll be candles and prayers that are sad I know
Let them not weep let them know that I'm glad to go
Death is no dream for in death I'm caressing you
With the last breath of my soul I'll be blessing you

Gloomy Sunday

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Update: Here's a piece on Billie Holiday by Dan Obstkrieg from Metal Review. Pallbearer's debut full-length Sorrow and Extinction is now available on the Profound Lore Records Bandcamp.

Mournful Congregation - The Unspoken Hymns

Mournful Congregation - The Unspoken Hymns is a collection of all of the bands four splits over their 15+ year career, plus a cover of Thergothon's Elemental. It was released on the 20 Buck Spin Bandcamp as a prequel of sorts to their next full-length The Book of Kings.

This is emotional funeral doom characterized by droning guitar passages and simple, but incredibly heavy drumming. Mournful Congration's take on the genre is dynamic, but off course still incredible slow moving. Here are reviews from Doommantia and Metal Review.

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Cut Your Teeth - CYTII

Recently Bandcamp made it possible to add a band biography to the sidebar. Cut Your Teeth did the obvious thing and wrote WE ARE THE GREATEST BAND OF ALL TIME.

Read the Heavy Blog is Heavy review here, watch the video below, click that play button and listen to the metal!

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Lake of Blood - As Tide and Time Erodes Stone

Lake of Blood - As Tide and Time Erodes Stone is two long songs of blistering black metal. This review at Metal Archives mentions both Wolves in the Throne Room and Altar of Plagues. And this, from The Inarguable, says that As Tide and Time Erodes Stone:

take the listener through this post-apocalyptic wasteland that man has created. If you want something both majestic and bestial, look no further.

Here's an interview with Lake of Blood from Lurker's Path.

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Update: As Tide and Time Erodes Stone has now been released on LP by Flenser Records.

Tiger Flowers - Tiger Flowers

The Path Less Traveled Records added the self-titled debut album by Tiger Flowers to their Bandcamp. This is ferocious and metallic hardcore. Read the review by Atanamar Sunyata at Metal Injection.

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De Profundis - A Bleak Reflection

Photography and Artwork by Darryll Jones

One of my favorites. This review calls Cease To Be a song of an incredible beauty and intensity and I agree. I really like the way Craig Lands death metal growl floats on top of the haunting melody:

Submerged in this abyss
Lost in the desolation

Listen to the track below and click the player to go to their Bandcamp. Check out the review from Don't Count on it Reviews.

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Odyssey - An Abstract Existence

Art by Kathryne McKinnon

Odyssey released their new album An Abstract Existence a month ago. They got a great review at The Number Of The Blog. And I agree, An Abstract Existence has a great balance between technical display and instrumental songwriting.

I found this picture in the download package. Nice to see a band that doesn't take itself too seriously. Read this fantastic review from No Clean Singing and enjoy the music.

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Burnsred - Burnsred

Progressive sludge, who would've thought? Doommantia gave it an 8/10 but called it a little too heavy on the experimentation. I'm not the worlds biggest sludge fan, but the combination of sludge and experimentation worked for me.

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Cormorant - Dwellings - Album art

Cormorant has released a sneak-peak of the artwork to Dwellings, their new album (planned release date December 6th, 2011). The gorgeous art is by British artist Alice Duke. Cormorant describe her work like this:

The art depicts several scenes from the album's lyrics, and was designed to evoke the same feelings of chaos, mystery, and exploration as a Pieter Bruegel or Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Cormorant is a completely independent band. You can find their 2009 release Metazoa at their Bandcamp. You can also support them by preordering Dwellings from their merch store. They have some nice pre-order packages available AND if you order before October 3rd your name will be printed in the credits of the album!

Laudanum - The Coronation

A growing number of metal labels have set up a Bandcamp. 20 Buck Spin has done a great job integrating theirs with the rest of the website. Check how the releases section has links to the Bandcamp page and notice how the widths of the website pages matches the width of the Bandcamp page. It's those small details that make a Bandcamp work with an exiting site.

My favorite 20 Buck Spin release at the moment is Laudanum - The Coronation. Some of the of the most gloomy and desperate sounding music I've ever heard. It almost feels wrong to call it beautiful, but it is. Beautiful and crushingly heavy. Here are reviews from Metal Review, Teeth of the Divine and AllMusic.

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Sioum - I Am Mortal, But Was Fiend

Art by Shannon Poehlman

Sioum was recommended by Cloudkicker after downloading his album Beacons. Those recommendations are a hit and miss affair, but I Am Mortal, But Was Fiend was definitely a hit!

Later I read an interview with Sioum where they said The three of us really love his music. We feel we could get an awesome sound going if we worked together. And that makes a lot of sense when you hear their music.

Read some reviews at Sputnikmusic and The Rocktologist. Currently Sioum focus on writing music and promoting because their drummer was diagnosed with tennis elbow. Hopefully this means that we get to hear new music from them in the near future.

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They also have nice tshirts available here

Giant of the Mountain - Mother Hydra

The Number Of The Blog alerted me to the fact that Giant of the Mountain had just released their new album Mother Hydra to their Bandcamp. I agree with the review; the music is excellent, but the production is very raw. It works for the music, but the vocals have an annoying clicking sound sometimes.

Well, they did write on the Bandcamp page written, recorded, produced, mixed, mastered, farted on, and barfed by Giant of the Mountain.

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Turbid North - Orogeny

Turbid North put up the entire Orogeny album on their Bandcamp. Epic death metal or awesome Alaskan mountain metal as mentioned in this Sputnikmusic review. Here's another review from The NewReview.

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Embers - Shadows

Art by Kelly Nelson from Embers

In July Embers added lyrics to their fantastic Shadows album. Full Metal Attorney reviewed it around that time and he wrote

Picture the last smoldering remnants of a great fire, a destructive force depleted by exhaustion. At times, it crackles, threatening resurgence, and new fires ignite in the distance, burning and killing with the capriciousness of nature. Now imagine the soundtrack to that scene.

The image he conjures matches perfectly with lyrics like the one to Dreams

Into the new dawn, I come alone into the world
A light in my eye dances with the shadow in my heart
Pondering I sit in silence while wings flap unseen in the morning mist

Listen to Dreams below (it's track 7). I created a pdf with all the lyrics and some of the artwork from Shadows, you can download it from here.. And here is a review of Shadows from Sputnikmusic.

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They also added tshirts and a long sleeve to the Bandcamp, all featuring Kelly Nelsons lovely art.

Wiht - The Harrowing of the North

Welcome to the blog.

One of the nice things about buying an album directly from the band is that they sometimes sends a personal thank you mail. Wiht wrote

Thanks so much for your support, it is greatly appreciated!! Hope you dig the new album.

And yes I do, a lot. I found them through this review at Doommantia. The review mentions doom mixed with Pink Floyd and Tool. I also hear some Pelican here and there. Here is another review from The Obelisk.

[Go to the post to view the Bandcamp player]

The also have good looking tshirts (featuring the cover design) available here.

That's it. I expect many posts will be like this one as this is not meant to be yet another review blog, I do expect to add some commentary pieces now and then though. The design of the blog is kept as simple as possible in the spirit of Bandcamp. Though I'm not sure about the colors yet, the white on black may be too difficult to read.

Feel free to comment on anything - and support the bands.