Music

Top 5 Metal Releases: May Edition

by Tyler Munro

Each month, tons of new music from many taste-spanning genres is released into a fast-consuming, unforgiving audience; it can be tough to get a handle on what’s new before it’s on to the next. In an attempt to highlight the standout releases, at the end of each month, AUX staff re-cap the month in Punk, Metal, Indie/Pop/Rock, Hip Hop, Pop, and Electronica/Dance with the top five releases in each. Consider it your cheat sheet for year-end lists.

Top 5 Metal Releases: May Edition

 

Autopsy – Macabre Eternal

Autopsy’s first full length since 1995’s Shitfun and their first to matter since 92’s Mental Funeral, Macabre Eternal bears a heavy burden of expectations: not that it’ll be great, or that it’ll suck, but that after last year’s The Tomb Within, we pretty much know what to expect. Here’s the thing: that’s the point. The EP was a taste of what these Floridians would bring to the table, but this full length is their return to filthy death metal at its most realized. Chris Reifert’s vocals can occasionally irk given that at times he sounds like a corpse of his former self, and his former self was already corpse-like, but you can probably chalk that up to the production: far from clean, it still lacks that trademark, swampy rumble of Autopsy’s two best albums. Still, don’t let these descriptions fool you: Macabre Eternal is one hell of a comeback.

Wormrot – Dirge

Blasting through 25 songs in 18 minutes, Wormrot’s Dirge is grindcore as it should be: blistering, piercing, pissed off and completely keyboard-less. Mixing bursts of grindcore classicism with some new school aggression, these Singaporeans have crafted one of the year’s most concisely pissed off releases. It’s quick but far from painless, and best of all, you can download it for free, legally, by clicking here.

Peste Noire – L’Ordure à L’état Pur

Peste Noire fill a niche in black metal that is uniquely their own: bluesy, garage-rock like with an emphasis on guitar-leads and drums so loud and crashing you almost expect kit-man Andy Julia’s arms to fall off at any point. On L’Ordure à L’état Pur, La Sale Famine de Valfunde (who apparently also goes by “DJ Famine” now) throws listeners through a loop. L’Ordure à L’état Pur takes Peste Noire’s trademark sound and adds in everything from horns and industrial drums to burped melodies and punk-y, polka-two steps…and that’s mostly just in album opener “Casse, Pêches, Fractures Et Traditions”. What’s weirdest is that it works. Sure L’Ordure à L’état Pur will probably piss purists off, but that might be the point. Regardless of intent, this is one of the more animated black metal albums you’ll hear this year, and probably the only one that’s better for it.

Cave In – White Silence

Is it hardcore? Is it metal? Does it matter? No. No it doesn’t. It doesn’t matter because Cave In has built a legacy on not only breaking barriers, but spitting on them afterwards. White Silence is their first album since 2005’s Antenna and their heaviest since Until Your Heart Stops, and it mixes the spacey, progressive hooks of the former with the pissed off rage of the latter, all of which is a fancy way of calling this an album of stunning highs, terrifying lows and really screechy guitars. Sludgy except for when it’s not and angry except for the occasional spurts of empyrean melodies, White Silence is anything but a by-the-numbers comeback. It’s a return to form in the strictest of senses and, as hyperbolic as this might sound, possibly their best album, if only for its comprehensive take on their ever-evolving soundscapes.

Nader Sadek – In the Flesh

Nader Sadek is apparently best known for designing stages for bands like Mayhem and Sunn O))), which is a pretty nice way of saying you’ve almost definitely never heard of him. As talented of a visual artist as he might be, Sadek isn’t much of a musician, which is why he called in some favours for In the Flesh, his first album and one for which he apparently only wrote about 30% of. If you can look beyond the bizarre circumstances of the album’s development as well as its silly concept–it’s almost exclusively about oil–you’ll end up with a surprisingly remarkable death metal album. With an all-star line-up of members from bands like Cryptopsy, Krallice, Monstrosity and Mayhem, In the Flesh is a challenging, technical take on the angular death metal of New York legends like Incantation and Immolation.

Surprises, disappointments and albums to watch for next month
Surprise of the month: Hate Eternal has always insisted on playing as unrelentingly fast as possible, and Phoenix Among the Ashes makes no attempts to change that. The difference this time is they remembered to write songs around their blast beats. It won’t go out of its way to win the pissiest of sceptics over, but Phoenix Among the Ashes is a surprisingly dynamic album from Erik Rutan & co.

Disappointments: Anaal Nathrakh’s Passion jumped the shark. It doesn’t sound all that different from their previous albums–it’s still a blur of shrieks, screams, gurgles and suffering–but its unremarkable at best and atrocious at worst. “Drug Fucking Abonimation” is their first real exploration into a more expansive sound and its not really working. Everything else is a blur; not far off from the death-meets-black-meets-grind metal of their past outputs but without the certain ‘je ne sais quoi?’ that made those releases special. And the vocals on “Tod Huetet Uebel” are stupid as fuck; there’s tortured and then there’s four minutes of what sounds like Bobcat Goldthwait trying to swallow a cat. Guess which one “Tod Huetet Uebel” sounds like.

Out in June: Devin Townsend Project’s Deconstruction and Ghost, Falconer’s Armod, Pharaoh’s Ten Years and Symphony X’s Iconoclast