Manipulator - Voidbound (Soulseller Records, 2012)

While I was soaking up a week of software development hell, Metal Injection published my review of Manipulator's Voidbound.  Expect filthy, filthy death.

Pallbearer - Sorrow and Extinction (Profound Lore, 2012)

Pallbearer's debut LP is easily my favorite album of this young year. Read my review over at Metal Injection, where I revel unreservedly in transcendent doom.

Nephelium - Coils of Entropy (Self-Released, 2011)

Nephelium have been fulfilling my death metal need to feed of late. I reviewed their excellent debut LP over at Metal Injection. A Bandcamp stream is included, of course. (link fixed)

Dissection - The Somberlain (No Fashion Records, 1993)

While I was off pondering the drone of wind chime arpeggios on a beach in the Florida Keys, Metal Injection published my retrospective review of Dissection's The Somberlain.  I had a hard time articulating my love of the album, and this piece precipitated a particularly tenacious bout of writer's block.  I'm hoping that the blissful isolation has cleared my mind.  We shall see.

Beaten To Death - Xes And Strokes (Mas-Kina Recordings, 2011)

I drooled a bit over Beaten To Death's delectable debut album at Metal Injection.  Expect some melodic sauce on a bed of spastic grinding death-punk.  Delicious.

King Giant - Dismal Hollow (Graveyard Hill/The Path Less Traveled, 2012)

I've been rocking the fuck out, constantly, to King Giant's new LP. Check out my review of Dismal Hollow over at Metal Injection.

Mollusk - Mollusk (Pact Ink Records, 2012)

I wrote about Mollusk's debut album over at Metal Injection.  It's a pleasing pile of aromatic, doomed sludge.  There's a bandcamp stream there as well.  Do it.

Horrendous - The Chills (Dark Descent, 2012)

Horrendous have put out a massive, preposterous debut LP.  Start off your year with some righteous death.  My review is up at Metal Injection.

Submit to the Bits

2011 is the year I came to terms with the inevitable decline of physical media.  I’m behind the curve on this, but my worship of audio fidelity, physical portability and consumer freedom have held me back. Three factors have changed my curmudgeonly, compact disc hoarding ways: Bandcamp, Google Music and cheap hard disk space.

I’m never going to pay money for compressed music; it’s as simple as that.  You’ll never get me to pay a cent for an MP3 file.  I listen to music in four discrete scenarios: in Hi-Fi on the home stereo, on a portable digital music player while commuting, in the car, and at work.  If I buy music, I expect to own it in the highest possible fidelity.  Bandcamp enables this by selling music in the open source, lossless FLAC format.  With a FLAC version of an album, I can burn it to CD with no loss of quality (covering the home and car scenarios, for the time being).  I can also convert FLAC to any compressed format I desire without the usual cross-encoding degradation.  I’m a big fan of the open source Ogg Vorbis format, so my portable music player (iAudio 7, at the moment) is filled up with those files. FLAC makes my music collection future-proof.

Google Music has drastically changed my listening habits at work.  Instead of being stuck with the same set of albums on my portable device all day, I have my entire music collection in front of me.  For all intents and purposes, Google Music looks exactly like my CD racks.  Google Music did, however, force me to convert all of my music to 320 kbps MP3 files.  Since I already had my music in FLAC, this was a triviality of CPU horsepower and disk space.

Sure, I still like to sit and admire the loaded, looming CD racks in my living room.  But my house isn’t getting any bigger, and my hard drives are.  Despite the best efforts of flooding in Thailand, hard drive space is still ridiculously cheap.  I’m now able to store my entire music collection in three formats and back it all up correctly.  Yes, I’m a bit loony.

Somewhere in the confluence of these factors, I made a mental leap.  I started to regard my “music collection” as something greater than the physical shelves of CDs.  The bits are ubiquitous enough to have changed my idea of ownership.  I now feel just as comfortable buying an album from Bandcamp as I do purchasing a CD.

I’m never going to get rid of my CD collection, and I certainly won’t stop buying them; I probably just won’t buy quite as many.  Now the rest of the record labels just need to get a clue and sell music through Bandcamp; my dollars are waiting.

As an aside, this excellent blog is an incredibly useful, ongoing summation of all the metal to be found on Bandcamp.

Botanist - I: The Suicide Tree / II: A Rose from the Dead (tUMULt, 2011)

I’m entirely enamored of the hammered dulcimer. The instrument sounds like the mutant offspring of a piano, harpsichord and harp.  Botanist employs the instrument’s powers for evil; it’s a refreshing and ingenious idea.  The band crafts twisted black metal in which the hammered dulcimer replaces guitars altogether.  The results exceed all possible expectations. Botanist’s ambitions, however, don’t end with this sonic switcheroo; the music is augmented with a vicious, verdant lyrical narrative.

Botanist doesn't possess any of the somnambulant torpor of the “world” and “new age” music that usually features the hammered dulcimer; these are fucking sinister compositions.  Botanist is the brain child and product of one enigmatic man bearing the pseudonym Otrebor.  He accompanies these manic orchestrations with well trained beats and blasts, overlaying it all with a crepitating croak.

The most stunning aspect of these songs are the riffs.  Each track is filled with distinctive and memorable musical phrases that ebb and flow with sonic tension. Creeping, chromatic formations battle with abject dissonance and fascinating harmony.  Vibes of victory, loss and sorrow take to life, enveloping the listener in a sylvan cocoon. The hammered dulcimer is produced with perfect clarity, making excellent use of the stereo field to transmit its staccato tintinnabulations.

Otrebor's drumming prowess imbues the hammered dulcimer with a particular vehemence.  The peculiar synergy of blastbeats and hammered strings radically rethinks black metal's tremolo picked  raison d'être.  Botanist unmoors a staggering raft of rhythms; I'm repeatedly inclined to bang my head to this music.

Tossing orthodoxy to the wind, Botanist ably embodies black metal's chaotic ethos.  Otrebor's saurian vocal ministrations convey only the utmost misanthropy.  Infinite care is given to the meticulous, poetic lyrics, which detail the constituents of The Botanist's Verdant Realm. The eponymous character tends his flock of  deadly flora as if they were family.  With melancholy and hatred, our narrator eagerly awaits the annihilation of mankind.  It's unclear whether or not he'll personally participate in the impending holocaust.

Don't fear this new horizon of sound; Botanist has produced something coherent, compelling and crucial.  Botanist's music won't please all ears, but don't discount these xenomorphic anthems without due diligence and an open mind.  Do beware the gorechid.

91/100

I bought the gorgeously packaged double album from Aquarius Records.  You can stream both discs in full over at Brooklyn Vegan.

Vore - Gravehammer (Self Released, 2011)

My review of the new Vore album, Gravehammer, is posted at Metal Injection over here. Behold glorious death metal devastation.