 |
| Artwork by Tony Roberts |
Have you ever wondered what death metal sounds like to your non death metal friends? Now you can with Legion of Andromeda's first full length album, Iron Scorn. This 2 piece from Tokyo, Japan gets right to the point with the opening note. What can only be described as sounding like a rabid dog barking over a steel worker repeatedly smashing his sledgehammer, it drones on and on for 43 minutes. Admittedly you will have to be in a certain mood or mindset to digest this, but I'd be remiss if I didn't say it has a certain undefinable charm. And in case your synapses are slow to fire, it's not an actual dog.
 |
Hailing from the United Kingdom, Austerymn have been around in one form or another since 1990, but never had any material until their 2007 demo and now this EP, In Death...We Speak. I see 3 separate bandcamp pages with release dates ranging from February 2013 through November 2014. Metal Archives lists it as 2013, so I'm going with that. This is one of those bands I never knew existed until last week when they appeared in my Facebook newsfeed. As much as one can easily say this is old school death metal, this is really old school Entombed/Dismember worship, maybe even more than Entrails does (hard to imagine, right?). While its not going to set the world on fire for originality, (for some reason an English band doing this intrigues me) it's convincing enough to put on my radar to check out their debut album, which is due this April.
 |
| Cover art by Marco Hasmann |
Cut from a somewhat similar musical cloth (punishing death metal) as fellow countrymen and labelmates, Destroying Divinity, Czech Republic's Heaving Earth unleash their sophomore full length album via Lavadome Productions. While they are not going to win any originality awards with an album title like Denouncing the Holy Throne, they will surely score points with those wishing for a return of Morbid Angel style death metal (ala the Steve Tucker era). They even have a good amount of Immolation style off tempos thrown into mix on the later half of the record as well. Wearing your influences on your sleeve, when it's done well and convincing, ain't a bad thing at all.
