This is the second release from German label Ván this year that’s got me really excited. Whereas The Devil’s Blood take a playful approach to pagan rites, Griftegard cast an epic pall of quasi-religious, existential gloom – this is not a criticism, this is remarkable stuff.

Sacred.Solemn.Severe is the musical equivalent of a Doré etching, or perhaps a rainy day in Highgate Cemetery. Chants, hymns and histrionic, impassioned crooning tell of hatred of the flesh and solemn introspection. The overwhelming protestant puritanical aesthetic is both claustrophobic and apocalyptic – Griftegard wield Christian symbolism like a sledgehammer.

Unlike many doom acts who lurk on the periphery of parody with Hammer Horror theatrics, Griftegard emanate a sense of solemn, ernest duty – this is serious stuff, and at times is somewhat unsettling. This is underpinned by some exemplary song writing and haunting soulful melody. These 6 long songs end at with the ultimate finale – death, but there are undertones of rebirth or perhaps redemption, and you get the feeling that Griftegard have a lot more to say.

Griftegard display a depth, clarity and coherence that other Doom bands could only aspire to. A steamy breath of cold, dank winter air – both refreshing and unnerving.

Listen on Myspace

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Even more technomologically advanced than this!

While I seem to have found myself in the position of giving advice to aspiring bands on how best to use and abuse these new-fangled interwebs, I’ve yet to be particularly active in these pursuits myself. So in an attempt to ‘put my money where my mouth is’, so to speak, I’ve devised The Inevitable Nose Metal Mixtape. There’s nothing particularly new about the concept – a compilation of music from new bands – and the only ‘cutting edge’ thing involved is the use of Soundcloud (more on this in a later article). I merely intend to practise what I preach, and attempt to draw some attention to unsigned metal bands that are worthy of it.

So, demand permitting, I’m going to put together a regular mixtape of (mostly) downloadable tracks, which will also stream from this site, with ‘cover notes’ including a review of the band by your’s truly and links off to the bands’ sites/Myspaces. I’ll then employ all my best CRM, SEO and PPC strategies (and whatever other corporate marketing acronyms I can find) to drive some traffic to the mixtape.

Bands wishing to appear on the mixtape just need to commit to the inclusion of a single track, read the T&C’s and follow instructions here. The selection of tracks for the mixtape assumes a level of quality (both technically and artistically) so not everyone band submitted will make it on. There will be a broad range of styles and sub-genres but it will all be at the heavier end of the rock/metal/*core scale. Reviews will represent any tracks up on Myspace as well as the track submitted.

The first mixtape will be delivered as soon as I have 10 or so tracks of sufficient quality to release. Subscribers to my newsletter will receive notification when it’s available.

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However, for this to work, I need bands to submit themselves, so please pass this on to any bands that you think may be interested.

The classic rock revival, for the most part, has left me cold. Bands like The Answer and Stone Gods indulging in big riffs and big balls show such a lack of imagination. Dutch classic rockers The Devil’s Blood have snuck into the metal arena on the back of Doom Metal’s recent surge in popularity. Their occult leanings and intermittent Sabbath referencing appears to have endeared them to the Doom community perhaps on the lookout for some light relief, particularly with their feelgood hit of the late summer I’ll Be Your Ghost. But what a welcome interloper this is!

Delivering classic rock in the vain of Blue Oyster Cult and Coven with Sabbath and Thin Lizzy flourishes, The Devil’s Blood are retro, but have their own distinctive identity. The singer’s quivering vibrato may polarise listeners as it can get pretty grating, but is largely smoothed out by the silky multi-part vocal harmonies of which this album is awash. Their sound is darkly atmospheric and truly epic. Huge riffs and harmonised dual guitars cut through the dreamy sheen giving this album some real punch and there are some razor sharp and perfectly timed guitar solos displaying prodigious fret board agility without being too showy.

Final track The Ant-Kosmik Magick is surely one of the standout tracks of any band this year. This sublime psychedelic rocker concludes the album with the best Floydesque guitar duel since Opeth’s Burden or Coheed and Cambria’s The Final Cut (indeed this is one of many parallels with C&C’s retro prog).

This album is perfectly executed and immaculately timed. There there’s no fat here at all – every track is a stormer. Despite the dark lyrical themes of witchery and black magick, this album is ultimately uplifting. Backward leaning without every being a parody, showing contemporary flourishes and some exemplary pop songwriting smarts.

German label Ván appear to have hit paydirt having also signed superb Swedish doomsters Griftegård. This will be in my albums of the year. Go buy it, because these guys deserve to be very popular indeed.

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Heavy

Do you ever get those “did I miss something?” moments? Perhaps you were still under the impression that the word ‘gay’ still meant ‘happy’ until you announced you were ‘feeling gay’ to your mates that time.

I’ve been having a slowly unfolding “did I miss something?” moment with the word ‘heavy’ when applied to metal music. You see, the understanding that I had of this term, in my 25 years of listening to metal music, was that it referred to music that is fantastically loud and aggressive. So if you asked me to name a song that personified ‘heavy’ I’d probably say Battery by Metallica or anything by Napalm Death – super fast, aggressive blast beats, screaming, you know, stuff that makes your nose bleed when you listen to it. But more recently I’ve heard it applied to bands like Electric Wizard or Earth (the early stuff) – in fact, doom in general and specifically anything that sounds like Sabbath. Now, these bands are almost the antithesis of what I would have previously considered ‘heavy’. They are slow, frequently have no drums or screaming – they’re more likely to cause the onset arthritis than a nosebleed. Now, I can see why this could be termed ‘heavy’, this term may well actually be more appropriate for that sort of music, it’s just not what I thought it meant.

I’d actually convinced myself that I had it wrong all these years and begun training myself into using this other meaning of the term, until I recently I started reading the fabulous book on the roots of Grindcore and Death Metal Choosing Death by Albert Mudrian. Here’s a bunch of folks talking about a period when the pursuit of speed and aggression superseded just about any other artistic value, and they’re all attributing these sonic properties to ‘heaviness’. These guys clearly understand the term in the same way that I always have.

So what changed? When did the word ‘heavy’ go from meaning aggression to depression? I’m actally genuinely confused about this. Someone please help.

It’s perhaps suprising given my constantly developing taste for ever more complex and ponderous music that this album arrived into my life several weeks ago and was filed in the “too damn daunting for where my head is at currently” pile after a single listen. After a several week long odyssey into drone (Earth, Sunn O))), Boris) this suddenly didn’t seem so intimidating any more, so I gave it another whirl.

Apparently lumped into the post-hardcore bucket with the likes of *shels (who also don’t belong there) The Pax Cecilia wafts evanescent over the sorry arse of any dreary musical subgenre they damn well please. Labelling them anything containing the epithet ‘core’ seems painfully beside the point. These slow building arrangements melt effortlessly from from folk to caustic hardcore to sparse drone to proggish melodic interludes. Anyone sampling opening track The Tragedy would be forgiven for thinking that this isn’t even rock music. These lengthy tracks are peppered with baroque strings, soaring guitars and subtle melodic vocals which occasionally erupt into a harrowing scream.

The sheer array of ideas and undisguised talent on display here is astonishing. That this band have done little to bother the popular consciousness is both a testament to the bravery of this album and a self fulfilling prophecy – The Pax Cecilia may well have “too damn difficult for their own good” chiselled on their tombstone, something that wouldn’t be said for the aforementioned Enio Morriconeists *shels who have the potential to really break through.

This album is made to be loved and cherished and played alone on rainy days (perhaps on long train journeys like the one from which this article is being written). This is not a happy album, and not one that you will truly grok in few listens, but like all truly exceptional albums it’s worth the effort. What’s more astonishing is that an album of this quality is being given away free. Yes, you heard me right, if you want to grace your world with this work of loveliness then it can be downloaded in its entirety for free here. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

Some bands are amazing on record, but can’t pull it off live while others are spectacular live, but don’t manage to capture this magic on record. Electric Wizard tend towards the latter category – somehow their bass laden, toxic cacophony never packs the punch it should on record. Live, on the other hand, they’re simply stunning.

Last night’s double dose of doom begun with label-mates Blood Ceremony from Canada. Basically Sabbath, if you swapped Tony Iommi with a flautist and Ozzy with a fit bird, they played an entertaining set of old school psychedelic doom. Singer Alia O’Brien dominates proceedings with her sultry pagan chants and multi-instrumentalism, although the band deliver some convincing old school noise, albeit with some Jethro Tull style jazzy flute. Blood Ceremony delivered a great performance, and the crowd really seemed to appreciate it, but it would be difficult to not be somewhat squished by what came next.

Electric Wizard don’t play live very often, and it’s not hard to see why. This short set of bludgeoning noise is delivered with immense amount of energy and conviction – with portly singer/guitarist Justin Oborn playing like his life depended on it and the commanding presence of sumptuous second guitarist Liz Buckingham adding a touch of class to the overall sweaty dingefest. Their music, hernia inducing on record, really comes alive on stage, and wow, that bass – I think it may have triggered the onset of osteoporosis for those in this little hall. The noise these guys create with their instruments is magnificent – the feedback they generate alone is worth turning up to hear – and where they can sometimes be ponderous on record, I found myself wishing these songs wouldn’t end.

This is a pretty big venue for the Wizard, but they dominated it like a band used to arenas. Strangely, the Scala is well lit, which  distracted from the overall ambience, and the folks enjoying the show the most were doing so with their eyes closed. The show ended after a hour and a quarter with (apparently typicaly) no encore – with the amount of energy they put into their performance it’s not hard to see why. Being left wanting more is better than being bored shitless, and although I left feeling slightly short changed, it’s hard to complain after seeing such an awesome show.

Never having seen the Wizard live before, they provided an amusing, but not essential, diversion on record, but having seen this show you now find me a convert. All hail the Wizard!

Fun, comfortable, unchallenging. Should these words be applied to something calling itself Thrash Metal? It’s not easy to say this, but that’s how I perceive Municipal Waste.

Harking back to the early days of Thrash, when it was as much a product of Punk than Metal, Municipal Waste make a heady, energetic noise that does exactly what the likes of DRI and Exodus did nearly 25 years ago. This is all nice and lovely, but certainly not essential.

The Waste spearheaded the recent thrash revival, which I greeted with utter enthusiasm at first, followed by nervous anticipation ending with mild disappointment. This style of thrash is fun and really gets your head nodding, but it’s so lacking in substance. While Exodus were making Bonded in Blood, Slayer were churning out the seminal Reign in Blood, Metallica Master of Puppets, Megadeth Peace Sells. These albums tore up the rulebook and pushed boundaries. That the recent Thrash revival seems to stop dead at this paradigm-shift is typical of flagrant lack of adventurousness displayed by Municipal Waste and others. If the bands that MW reference so heavily didn’t already have their tongue’s lurking in cheek territory, then we’d be talking about them is the same context as The Darkness and Steel Panther.

Massive Aggressive sounds like their previous album and has some utterly superb old-school riffage. The lyrical themes are stoopid and overall this is totally unchallenging, but that’s OK, you weren’t intending to listen to this sober anyway were you?

The Good

Devin Townsend nonchalantly Tweets:

@dvntownsend counting down…late nights, great progress…suddenly very happy about record 2. Released around Nov 20.

and unleashes more verbose psychobabble on the world:

Musically, ‘Addicted’ is along the lines of the big, wall-of-sound hard rock/heavy metal of Ocean Machine and (The Devin Townsend Project’s) ‘Accelerated Evolution’ — even Physicist at points. It is a very direct and ‘to-the-point’ album with an emphasis on groove and the chorus.

Exciting stuff, seriously. If it’s 1/10th as good as Terria or Accelerated Evolution, it’ll be amazing. Perhaps more tantalizing however is:

On other notes: I have been rehearsing with a new band, and we will start touring in early 2010, representing all the back catalogue of solo material, from ‘Ki’, ‘Addicted’, Physicist, Ziltoid, Terria, Ocean Machine, The Devin Townsend Band, Infinity etc… I have some big plans for this and rehearsals are sounding amazing. The touring entity will be called ‘Devin Townsend’ and is essentially a way for me to get out there and interact again and showcase 15 years of music that never really got its fair shake. We look forward to seeing you out there!

Yeah! You better be doing that in the UK Mr. Townsend!

Next – A new track released off of Megadeth’s anticipated new album:

Do I hear some leanings back to Countdown to Extinction days? Speed metal loveliness indeed!

Every Time I Die released another new track off of the forthcoming New Junk Aesthetic on their Myspace. This is a delightfully pleasant recording, but does anyone else notice a hint of a softer, more commercial sound seeping through? Could this be the beginning of a slippery slope for the southern hardcore mavericks?

This week I discovered that not all Metalcore sucks, with the introduction to my music vocabulary of Burnt by the Sun. Like a darker version of Hatebreed, they keep the breakdowns to a minimum and deliver top notch aggressive metal. I may even put on some big sunglasses and a fake beard (to wear over my real beard) and venture out surreptitiously to but a copy.

Other stuff keeping me happy:

• No Made Sense with their brutal progressive hardcore and stupid sounding album title
• Photonic, which has lead me to dust off various albums by Fugazi, Pavement and Guided by Voices
• Oceansize. Apparently they have an EP out soon.
• Earth. Slowly I’m getting my head around this most frustrating of bands. Albums Pentastar and Hex are simply beautiful but also infuriating.
• Revocation. Everyone is carping on about them like infatuated teenagers thanks to Cosmo Lee’s article suggesting that they may be the next great metal band. That’s probably going a bit far at this early stage, but they are pretty good. The guitar solo on Dismantle the Dictator is to die for. No doubt Metal Hammer will be forcing them down our throat for the next 3 years.

The Bad

Desparately naive wannabe journo’s laying into indisputably legendary bands like Black Sabbath. Why on earth would you write such an ill-informed bucket of badger shit is totally beyond me.

Music streaming site Spotify is part owned by the evil overlords of the music industry in an attempt to keep the site afloat in the face of pitiful advertising revenues and in lieu of paying out royalties to the record labels. If this isn’t depressing enough, it sounds like the artists aren’t getting any royalties either and are unlikely to see any dividends when some cash burdened corporate is stupid enough to buy this service which is as likely to see profit as I am likely to turn green and transform into a million dollar bill.

…and the Ugly

This dude bustin’ some classy moves. I have been known to do this after a couple of beverages, which is when it gets truly ugly.

iPhone - making people seem smaller the world over (in this case, Alice in Chains)

I wasn’t sure whether I’d bother going to Sonisphere, it all looked too commercial to me, like V festival. It was also ridiculously expensive. However, since I couldn’t get to Download or Bloodstock I decided to give it a whirl. The line-up on the Sunday was also hard to resist.

The sun had mad an appearance for the first time in weeks and not even the police with sniffer dogs arresting skunk-laden youths and the ridiculously long wait for the festival bus could dampen genial my mood.

Walking past the campsite, was an eerie experience. It was like a ghost town. You usually expect to hoards of youths wallowing in beer cans and piss sodden dirt attempting to dampen their hangover with stale beer. Not here. It even looked fairly tidy!

I turned just in time to catch Lamb of God (7/10). LoG are heavy hitters in the modern metal arena. With over a decade of experience behind them, and some highly acclaimed albums, they should be pretty good at their art by now. The ferocity of their music translates well to the festival environment, and their performance is tight. Randy Blythe has real presence, but his incessant intra-song posturing wears thin after a while. Yes we know you are real metal and your music stimulates circle pits. Yes, the idiots at the front will continue to beat each-other up for your gratification. Shut up and get on with the music!

No sooner had LoG finished than Mastodon (9/10) lumbered onto the other stage. Now, I recently threw my toys in this post about Mastodon’s performance at Islington Academy. I was expecting an abridged version of Crack in the Skye, so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to their set or surprised when they kicked off with album opener Oblivion. I’d also resolved not to be such a cancerous old git this time, so I stuck around. What we were actually treated to was a spirited set that, although was largely derived from Crack in the Skye, also contained some classics from previous albums (although Blood Mountain was entirely absent). Flying through Megalodon and Blood and Thunder, we were then treated to a note perfect performance of this year’s best metal track The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral – the whole bloody thing. Crack in the Skye’s title track was an absolute pleasure, followed by the brutal Iron Tusk and March of the Fire Ants from Remission.

Mastodon are on flying form. I saw them a few years ago at Wembley arena supporting Tool and they really seemed like they felt out of place in such a large venue. The band I witnessed on Sunday seemed like they owned the place. Not only are Mastodon recording some of the most original and high quality music in any genre, but they are one of the coolest bands around – these guys a really starting to look like rock stars.

That left me with a smile on my face and wondering if anyone could top such a gargantuan performance.

Metal fans amuse themselves by making themselves dizzy while Machine Head play

The crowd now meandered back to the main stage – the subject of everyone’s conversation: who are the mystery “Special Guests”. The subject of much media speculation since Machine Head acrimoniously pulled out of the festival when (infinitely more successful) Limp Bizkit usurped them out of their original slot in the line-up. Randy Blithe had previously let the cat out of the bag but obviously no-one was listening as they all seemed surprised when Machine Head (5/10) took the stage. Confusing? The word you’re looking for is demeaning. The Brits, never known for their likelihood to forsake a little ironic taunting, were chanting ‘Limp Bizkit’ while MH vocalist gave his speech about “doing it for the fans”. Also, the boasting about the 28 circle pits, or whatever, formed by obviously bored fans during their set, made him sound like a ego bruised 12 year old.

MH’s set was uninspired at best. They never sound good live. Their set was punctuated by long, uncomfortable silences and self-aggrandising rhetoric. Robb Flynn has since been demeaning himself further online by continuing this one-sided war of words, while (somewhat ironically) Limp Bizkit remain commendably reticent. This isn’t David and Goliath, it’s Goliath and some irritating little fly that needs swatting.

Feeder were up next so I wondered off and bought an Alice in Chains t-shirt and got increasingly drunk while I waited for them to finish. The only tracks I saw them play were an ill-advised cover of Nirvana’s Breed, and a rendition of their only good song Just a Day, which was very enjoyable in the sun with a pint of cider.

Next up were the mighty Alice in Chains (9/10). Here’s an occasion that was making many folk nervous. The legendary Layne Staley replaced by some unknown bloke with an afro? You better be sure about this Mr. Cantrell!

Going straight for the nuts with Angry Chair merging into Man in the Box the crowd’s tension dissipates. AIC sound massive – heavy and assured. New guy William Duval gives his own spin to these classics. He’s no Staley, but then who is? He sings the tunes faithful to the originals but doesn’t try and ape his distinctive predecessor. He’s got a strong voice and is very much his own man. He still lacks a little of the stage presence needed to really command a festival stage, but he’s strutting his stuff with the best of them.

4th track in and Duval broaches the subject of the new album before launching into Looking in View. Several folks around me (who clearly hadn’t heard this new track) were audibly nervous about hearing new AIC tracks, but were blown away by the tracks slow, heavy doom genius. AIC are really back!

The band saunter effortlessly through Dirt‘s Them Bones and Dam That River and the crowd are getting really animated. We’re then treated to a second new track, the much jauntier Check My Brain. Like a perkier Again, this track has a really memorable chorus.

The closing salvo of crowd pleaser Would? and the haunting Rooster has the crowd singing at the top of their voices as the sun sets. Perfect.

So, fired up and raring for more top grade metal, the crowd once again makes the merry trek up to the main stage for Nine Inch Nails (3/10). This supposedly NIN’s last ever tour. They’ve had a long and distinguished career, and countless, memorable tracks that the majority of the crowd would surely know. So did they rattle of a greatest hits set for this rapturous audience? No, like the petulant and self indulgent tosser he is, Trent Reznor ‘treated’ us all to a set comprised of mostly ambient and barely audible arty numbers. I can’t even be bothered to track down what was actually played. Every time a track finished (it was kind of difficult to tell one track from the next) you could hear an audible intake of breath from the crowd hoping that the next sound would be the first few notes from Closer.

They closed the set with a note for note version of their (now) best known track Hurt. This seems entirely out of place as the crowd mumble along dispiritedly with the Jonny Cash version in their heads.

I’m a big fan of NIN, but this display was nothing short of offensive. Not appropriate or impressive, just shit.

I’d like to tell you all about Avenged Sevenfold, but they’re shit, so I didn’t watch them. I got through about 3 songs of Metallica’s set before James Hetfield, clearly taking notes from Robb Flynn’s earlier waffle, decided to indulge in some sycophantic crowd wooing. I saw then live, and much closer, a few months back, and I had a long journey home ahead of me. There was no way they would top AIC and Mastodon, so I left Hetfield wittering on and went home.

Having virtually created the mathcore genre with their revered debut full-length album Calculating Infinity, The Dillinger Escape Plan had to set about reinventing the wheel. A band not satisfied with continually repeating former glories, there is the stench of reinvention about Miss Machine. That’s not to say that Dillinger had morphed into a jazz-funk fusion, or indeed the more obvious route of sloping down the emo stadium filler route we all know that they’re capable of (and have strayed uncomfortably towards with Unretrofied, and several tracks on follow-up Ire Works).

After parting ways with their original singer Dimitri Minakakis and collaborated with (ex-Faith No More singer and musical alchemist) Mike Patton, among others, on the EP Irony is a Dead Scene, Dillinger finally recruited Greg Puciato after hearing an audition tape sent in response to an advert on the band’s website. Puciato brought with him a greater vocal range than Minakakis and a melodic pop sensibility which inflated the band’s chaotic, claustrophobic sound into a jazz-metal-punk-industrial chimera. The edgy industrial stylings and commercial smarts outraged the fanbase, as the band knew it would, but evolution is a fact of life in Dillinger’s universe – stagnation is the death of art.

Miss Machine’s opener, Panasonic Youth is like a sledgehammer to the face – an anarchic statement of intent that both celebrates Dillinger’s intricate staccato violence and ushering in a new dynamic and cinematic sound. There is no chorus here; the song barely repeats. Despite the fact that this is not in the slightest radio friendly this was the first single from the album.

Clearly a message to the old guard Puciato states with unarguable gusto “Evolution gave us a clock that’s always winding down” in full knowledge that they were winding it up once more; Dillinger is dead, long live Dillinger!