Metal Connoisseur

While this may be just as much punk as it is metal, this record deserves mentioning. Post-punk drones effortlessly meld into blackened doom as Lenny Smith gives a remarkable vocal performance. The tracks here find a nice equilibrium between atmosphere and catharsis, making for a very satisfying album that succeeds at incorporating all the influences Atriarch sought to inject into Ritual of Passing.

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Ninetales

75. Murmuure - Murmuure - (2010)



29 minutes. all you need to get your mind blown by this album is 29 minutes. Im not even sure it's actually metal. black metal certainly has a large influence on this but theres so many sounds and genres furiously shaped into this that its hard to call it anything specific. drone here, industrial there. There is no other album that i would recommend anyone listen to if only to see how reaching the metal genre has gotten. it's dark but romantic; beautiful yet frightening. theres something ritualistic about it. It's like being at a funeral procession. except youre the corpse slowly decaying into another world.

if you've never listened to this you are missing out on one of the most astonishing albums I have ever heard. metal or not.

Primeval Scum

This RYM review describes this album better than I ever could:
Ye gods, what a whirlwind of filth! It’s a pleasingly rare happenstance to find a death metal album that feels intrinsically unique, a beacon of individuality in a storm of sameness that also does nothing to betray the established archetypes of genre. Indeed, Cattle Decapitation are planted firmly within the established bounds of their constituent influences, those being technical death metal and grindcore, respectively. However, the way they utilize these building blocks is unlike anything we’ve yet seen, blurring the boundaries and sculpting their own filthy icon, brick by brick. The end result is a mentally unhinged, brutal, and dare I say progressive take on their chosen stylistic marriage, eliciting reactions of fear, excitement, and pure disgust at the resplendent decrepitude of this malevolent monument.

Aside from the insane finger-f*cking riffing, what truly needs focusing on here is vocalist Travis Ryan, who has developed the most interesting vocal style I’ve heard in years. Yes, his gurgling lows and shrieking highs have continued to grow stronger, but now he bellows out this unsettling, inhuman… "clean" vocal style. It sounds completely inhuman, like some disheveled apocalyptic mutant bellowing to the sky on top of some corpse-strewn altar of damnation. It’s so weird, so different, and so unbelievably filthy that it adds a strange weight to the whirling, grinding predilection of Monolith of Inhumanity. That’s perhaps the most fitting title imaginable, I must say. In every aspect, this is a Monolith of Inhumanity.

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Don't grieve for me, I'm not there. I am the gentle autumn rain. Hold up my lamp to light your way. Farewell to thee...

The Batlord

^^^

I listened to a bit of Cattle Decapitation back in the day when they only had like two albums out, and they just sounded like a second-rate Suffocation. Good to listen to if you had that itch, but not much to call home about. Have they evolved since then?

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LoathsomePete

I've written about this album before in my 101 Albums... thread so this will be more of a summation of that particular post (you can read the full thing here).

This is easily one of the most ambitious debuts of a band I have ever had the fortune to hear. Essentially it's a double album, with one disc being the harder metal, and the other being ambient noise. When you sync bother albums you get an incredibly heavy and atmospheric album that really feels crushing with the right headphones. The "Post-Metal" term is pretty nebulous, and this band in particular have not endorsed it or considered themselves to fall under the umbrella, however sometimes people have a way of making things stick, and enough people in the metal community have tried there hardest to make it a real genre label. Whatever you want to call it, if you like sludgey metal with a deep wall of sound and lyrics about exploring the cosmos, Rosetta's debut album definitely deserves your attention.

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101 Albums That May Not Change Your Life, But I Really Like And You Might Too

Primeval Scum

Leaps and bounds. I disliked their early material. They've really come into their own on the last two albums though. Their music has more progressive and melodic elements than before, while somehow becoming even more brutal at the same time. Try songs like The Carbon Stampede, Your Disposal, Lifestalker and Kingdom of Tyrants for a taste of what CD does now.

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Don't grieve for me, I'm not there. I am the gentle autumn rain. Hold up my lamp to light your way. Farewell to thee...

The Batlord

I'm currently in a metalcore phase, so I won't be checking them out today at least, but what would you compare their current sound to? It's hard to get a handle on what you're talking about, but I am definitely intrigued and will be listening to that album pretty soon (my metalcore phase is concerned with only the most brutal of bands ATM, so I may very well transition into death metal soon if I hear of anything that interests me, such as this.)

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The Batlord

Quite possibly the best extreme metal album I've heard which has come out in the past few years. It combines modern (non-Hot Topic) metalcore with death metal brutality and the chaotic energy of grindcore/crust punk. Blast 'n' grind sections seamlessly merge with devastating breakdowns that set themselves apart from deathcore bands by being based around honest to god riffs, rather than nondescript chugging. All set off by what I guess you could call post-death metal hardcore screaming (i.e. not growling, but far too ugly to compare to Black Flag, Madball, or even Hatebreed.)

The thing I love about this band (apart from everything else about them) is that their attack is simple, primitive, and goes straight for the throat, same as any other extreme metal band, but their influences keep them sounding eclectic. Why every band doesn't combine metal and punk in such a way I really don't know, but Homewrecker show a lack of genre purity that makes many extreme metal bands just as dedicated to aggression seem irrelevant. Still, this isn't experimental by any stretch of the imagination, just intuitive.

If there's any justice, this band will soon be knocking critically acclaimed boots with other first tier extreme metal bands.

Edit: After careful consideration, I have come to the conclusion that this band is the modern successor to Terrorizer, and they are just as awesome. They also have two albums that rule, as opposed to just one.

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Mondo Bungle

79. Flourishing - The Sum of All Fossils (2011)



So this is basically the absolute best fusion of metal and post-hardcore ever. An atmospheric blend of early tech-death a la Immolation and Pestilence with Fugazi-esque melodies and noise rock and sludge metal. It's still death metal above all though. I guess it falls into the weird group of bands like Gorguts, Gigan, Ulcerate and whatever, but this sounds nothing like anything else.

If you wanna make extreme metal/post hardcore, do it right and take after this album

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The Batlord

A primitive, brutal, dense, unrelenting blast of black/death/grind. If you like death metal, but feel it's too polished, like black metal, but don't dig the dissonance of Norwgian BM, and like grindcore, but wish they'd add some more extreme metal influences, then Blasphemy is your band. There's not a single thing pretty about this band, but they ****ing rip.

They also inspired their own sub-sub-genre of black/death metal known as "war metal", populated by such awesome, sonically regressive bands as Black Witchery, Bestial Warlust, and Diocletian. I'll probably have to make posts for each of those bands too.

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