Fetid Bowel Infestation is a one-man, electronic metal outfit whose new album, “Born Into Darkness,” provides a gruesome addition to the slam and brutal death metal lineage. Flying in the face of the cliché that metal is the modern equivalent to classical music, Fetid Bowel Infestation comes from the lineage of brutal death metal that crawled from the primordial ooze, saw the virtuosic sweep-picking, finger-tapping guitarists and mechanically precise percussionists and shuffled back into the water to embrace a more chugging, more odious take on the genre.

The band bears comparison to Devourment’s classic slam death metal, with the electronic elements reminding me of German cybergrind outfit Libido Airbag. At times a bit of Mortician’s more neanderthalic tendencies creep in, though mostly by virtue of the synthetic drumming. The music is uniformly dank and sludgy, giving the whole album the claustrophobic ambiance of a damp, muggy catacomb. All of this might sound negative, but words like “disgusting” and “gruesome” are high praise for an album like this.

“Bathing in the Blood of Angels” begins with an atmospheric soundscape that suddenly gives way and thrusts the listener into the album. Downtuned guitars laden with distortion (HM-2 perhaps?) form a dense sonic jungle, while unnaturally low gutturals drench track after track. Throughout the album — as on the track “Wrath of Cerberus” — the meticulousness of the drum programming shows, with tasty fills and varied beats cutting through the swampish music like a machete. At times the drums even reminded me of the cybergrind flourishes one would hear on Agoraphobic Nosebleed’s “Agorapocalypse'.'

The electronic instrumentation and animalistic vocals work together to create a sound that is both mechanical and bestial. This is most evident on “Ancient Corpse Exhumed,” which employs screeches as well as the grunts and low growls that one hears throughout the album; all this over a precise, double-kicked rhythm section. The effect is at times dizzying, and almost always feels like a caveman bashing your head with a leg-bone. All in all, if you’re a fan of slam and brutal death metal “Born Into Darkness” is a disgusting delight.

- Tín Rodriguez

Much of the story of American black metal involves mutations — bands taking the tropes of the largely European genre and recontextualizing them. Whether it means eschewing the more questionable politics of some of the genre’s forebears or just not writing so many songs about being cold, American black metal is constantly evolving. “The Void Gazer” is a refreshing release; it is black metal, but it eschews some of the form’s staler conventions (think impenetrable cassette production and overly linear song structure) in favor of originality. Though one can hear numerous sources of inspiration in the album’s roughly 27-minute runtime, the expansive and winding tracks remind me of Altar of Plagues, while some of the riffs would not sound out of place on Cobalt’s boundary-pushing “Gin.”

“The Void Gazer” immediately surprises the listener with its immaculate production. Starting with “The Void Gazer Part I,” the drums sound full, coupling with filthy arpeggios reminiscent of Genghis Tron circa “Board Up The House.” From there, the track unfolds into a chimeric behemoth in which chasmic, sludgy riffs quickly give way to clean, progressive-sounding guitar grooves and then to rapid-fire, tremolo-picked, blackened ferocity. Shrieked vocals mingle with low, deathly growls, giving the song the feeling of a beast that may very well swallow the listener up.

The second track, “A Citadel of Birch,” provides a necessary eye in the storm. The song is an intimate instrumental performed on classical guitar, with a fire crackling in the background — the sort of thing that might heighten suspense towards the end of a full-length release. On this EP however, the song functions as an interlude — if “The Void Gazer” is a journey, this track is a moment of respite by a campfire, steeling oneself for whatever trials lie ahead.

And “The Void Gazer Part II” does not hold back: it is a chugging continuation of Part I, with doom-metal guitars, punctuated by the type of rhythmic passages that would not be out of place on a brutal death metal album. Though the vocals are largely obscured, one can discern words like “wretched” and “wicked” creeping through the murkiness, adding to the track’s vitriol. The song builds on the beastial vivacity of the first part so well, that by the time the final lines have been shrieked it feels almost as if the EP has devoured itself.

All in all that’s gonna be a “kinda great” from me!

- Tín Rodriguez

Instrumental Prog Metal group Aziola Cry has released visuals for the latest single and opening track, "And Coward", from their forthcoming album, The Ironic Divide, which is set to be released on March 26th.

This is the trio of Jason Blake on Warr Guitar, Mike Milaniak on guitar, and Tommy Murray on drums, and this will be the band's third album.

Metal brand From Those Ashes have released the opening track, "Drown The Earth In Sorrow", from their forthcoming EP, "Lamentations", which set to be released on February 26th.

From Those Ashes is the work of Aaron Pokoj (Vocals/Guitar), Jose "Mop" Valles (Lead Guitar), Ryan Compton (Bass), and Omar "Pockets" Diaz (Drums).

If Freidrich Nietzsche were somehow alive today he would conceivably be the biggest metalhead in your local university’s philosophy department for there is no other musical genre in existence that so clearly and ably illustrates his theory of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. When it comes to the latter, heavy metal has long been notorious for its Dionysian side due to popular associations with primordial urges, raw power, and a fixation on subjects like madness and sex and unbound chaos. But equally true, if less acknowledged, is that metalheads are often unabashedly nerdy--enter the Apollonian side of the equation--and just as fixated on control and mastery and order as on sheer anarchic energy with said control expressed through disciplined instrumental and vocal mastery, elaborate lyrical conceits and album concepts, and a tendency to adhere to established conventions whether in death/doom/black/thrash/glam/power/prog metal at least until the next musical leap forward.

Speaking of philosophical concepts and musical leaps forward is perhaps as good way as any to introduce Liturgy’s latest release, a literal “rock opera” titled Origin of the Alimonies. Led by Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy established themselves out of the gate with their 2008 debut LP Renihilation (the title a neologism for the countervailing and balancing force to “annihilation”). By the time their widely lauded but also widely debated follow-up Aesthethica was released in 2011, Hunt-Hendrix had composed an elaborate manifesto on "Transcendental Black Metal" written for an academic symposium, granted one held in a nightclub and bar. This intellectualized approach to metal ruffled more than a few feathers, while the band itself stood accused of being “Brooklyn hipsters" by many in the ruffled-feathers contingent. So yeah there were some big words and big ideas in effect, and a sculpted beard or two in evidence, but does it really stop the rock? The music they put out and live footage from the time strongly indicates otherwise.

Fast forward nearly ten years and Liturgy has doubled down, maybe more like quintupled down, on their ambitious approach by releasing an album that comes accompanied with multiple YouTube lectures covering an assortment of musical, philosophical, and cosmogonical concepts relating to their new music with the promise of an accompanying full-on opera soon to follow. Building on their surprise 2019 release H.A.Q.Q., Origin of the Alimonies features a chamber ensemble playing strings and woodwinds, church organ and harp, that's just as heavily featured as the musicians in Liturgy. 

The notion of a religiously-themed opera couched in Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuzian philosophical concepts being released by a band that's in any way associated with black metal will come as a surprise to your average man on the street (gender choice deliberate) who likely associates the genre with church burnings and the physical desecration of deceased bandmates. The book Lords of Chaos has a lot to do with the familiarity of these images, based on some undeniably sensational real-life events, which have since sedimented into stereotype. But for a smaller group of initiates the music of Liturgy is in keeping with a New Wave of Experimental Heavy Metal (a clever play on NWOBHM) and the queering of metal and its boundaries advocated by Hunt-Hendrix and some others. 


Whatever one's perspective it's hard to deny that the music of Origin of the Alimonies effectively balances out its Apollonian conceptual grounding with some seriously Dionysian furor--as much in the quiet bits as in the guttural howling and seismic burst-beats which are Liturgy's version of blast beats. In its overture section Origin starts off not unlike that other staged musical work that got a riot going on with its depiction of "primitive" human origins, namely Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Both these works open with a vulnerable sounding solo woodwind (flute for Origin, bassoon for Rite) that's soothing for about a second but quickly becomes uneasy with its sense of lonely, aimless wondering. And then more unnerving still as more instruments enter the picture adding layers of tension-generating dissonance and you can just tell something "wicked" this way comes. 

And indeed it does when Liturgy enters the fray and by the beginning of the third track “Lonely OIOION” (you’ll have to watch those YouTube videos if you want to understand the titles, or just wait for the debut of the opera itself) we’re off to the races. Again this feels like a parallel to The Rite and the "Augurs of Spring" section in particular where likewise a few minutes into the ballet the whole thing gets blown wide open, and it does actually sound like an early 20th-century orchestral equivalent to blast beats. This is where the Parisians started really losing their shit supposedly and it didn't help that the dancers were stomping around like rabid orgy goers forming an ballerino/ballerina mosh pit on stage.

By the time the dust settles on Origin of the Alimonies you’ll have heard everything from violins played with screwdrivers to a very angry demon baby playing a piano (admittedly I'm taking some stabs in the dark here) to a trap music beat to a free-jazzy-ish interlude to a glitching CD player (neat trick since there’s no CD player in sight) to a fourteen-minute piano-and-metal-band adaptation of a work written for cathedral organ by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1932 (talk about literal heavy metal heh-heh-heh, sorry). In other words this opera is a great deal of fun despite the seriousness. And I figure God up in Heaven is grateful He’s finally got something new and kick-ass to listen to meaning that He can finally get rid of that Stryper cassette that's been stuck in His Walkman for the past several decades. 

One final note regarding the quite striking cover image to Origin of the Alimonies (strategically cropped in the YouTube video above) which is in keeping with the theme of binaries and their subversion in heavy metal and in life in general. This is best expressed in the words of Hunter Hunt-Hendrix herself as taken from a recent Instagram post alongside the uncensored album image in which she addresses the process of actualizing and ultimately presenting as transgender: “I came to terms with my gender over the past five years in part through the somewhat torturous development of this piece, and I was only able to turn it into an album and put vocals on it upon deciding I could play the role of the female protagonist. That’s the importance of having exposed breasts on the cover.” 

When one considers that the music of Alimonies is only one element of the overall Gesamtkunstwerk still to be unveiled, you had better prepare to have your mind blown all over again... (Jason Lee)