The Radavist

I absolutely love Finnish death metal and I can now add Krypts to the rank of Claws / Hooded Menace, Unholy and Amorphis. This band creates such an enveloping sound that they very well may be the new, true arbiters of death in Finland. The torch of heaviness has been passed and with the buzz surrounding this new album, they’re doing a hell of a job.

Enter the metaphors: Krypts’ sound is a dying behemoth, flailing its limbs before death. It envelops you like a breached submarine as it topples into an abyss, seconds before crushing you like a tin can. Their riffs crawl like a venomous centipede out of decaying corpse and the percussions thunder like the drums of an ancient, subterranean cannibal race of rats.

That’s how menacing Krypts’ highly-anticipated album, Unending Degredation is. Over four years in the making, this album represents the hard work of a band that made its name by crawling from the crypt to the pit. Simply listen to “Inhale” before “the Black Smoke” surrounds you. Like their death doom brethren, some tracks linger. “Dormancy of the Ancients” and “Beneath the Archaic” are as slow as a swarm of maggots, devouring a carcass.

How else are you to describe death metal? Just look at the fucking artwork. Are you not scared shitless? As dark and foreboding as their sound may be, Krypts brings a smile to my face and a tear to my eye. Maybe 2013 won’t suck for death metal after all? Check out one track from Unending Degredation below and pre-order the vinyl direct through Dark Descent.

Bongripper? What do I have to say about Bongripper? For starters, I’ve been a fan of these Chicago doom destroyers since I first heard Hate Ashbury in 2008. Then Satan Worshipping Doom hit me in the gut in 2010. The intense momentum this fucking band has picked up since then is insurmountable. Everything they touch turns green and emits pure heaviness when sparked. After a successful show at Roadburn last year (which you can now buy their live recording here), the band has been working on re-issuing one of their classic albums, Great Barrier Reefer (also for sale now). Still, it had been a while since there was new material from the band. Their Sex Tape / Snuff Film 7″ was just enough to hold over my craving for wall-punching heaviness and now, their new split with Hate features their newest track “Fisting”.

So how is it? Fucking brutal. It’s difficult to type this write up while the song is playing. 11 minutes of giant riffs, heavy as fuck bass and colliding percussions. Just imagine the Old Ones colliding in a battle for the last rip from the bong. Around the 9 minute work, the well-coined Bongripper riffs hit the table and the entire world collapses before a cacophony of d-beat erupts. What I’m trying to say is, this album is intense and I haven’t even talked about side B…

By contrast, Hate’s songs crack open the sky and shatter the stars. As hell rains from the heavens (yes, that is possible), you’re left picking up your teeth. It’s an interesting contrast but that’s what make splits so great, right?

Pre-order the Bongripper / Hate – Split LP here at BONGRIPPER’s site and listen to the whole thing for free at their Bandcamp, where you can also buy the digital version.

It’s only by coincidence that this week’s Tuesday Teardown pick is also on Profound Lore. Hey, I’m a sucker for USBM and SF’s Bosse-de-Nage has been on my radar for the past year or so. While re-organizing some desktop material, I came up on their latest album that I never got around to listening to (cue my discussion on vinyl vs the digital junkspace that is MP3 music). Anyway, onto post-black metal, or as Bosse-de-Nage comes to call it, grey metal. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a suitable title for this band, as is post-hardcore and for that matter, I tend to think of USBM as a little ambiguous anyway.

Check out more Tuesday Teardown below!

As far as I’m concerned, the bands on Profound Lore are some of the best. Krallice and YOB are just a few of the bigger names on their roster but by chance, if you let Ash Borer slip past your fingers while flipping through the stacks at your local shop, you better get back there and pick it up. Named after an invasive species of beetle, this USBM group resides in beautiful Arcata, California. Like their Cascadian brethren in Oregon, Wolves in the Throne Room, Ash Borer mixes a bleek and atmospheric sound that at times is closer to Sunn O))) than black metal pioneers, Mayhem or Gorgoroth. But don’t you dare think for a second their sound is the same! Their newest release, Cold of Ages was released in August of last year (bear with me here) and it’s quite the album. In fact, it should have been in my Top 10 of 2012 list.

Check out more Tuesday Teardown below!

This year made it really tough to keep up with Tuesday Teardowns, mostly because of my travels. It’s hard to schedule album reviews while you’re in another city. I also had an epiphany one day: digitalization has essentially killed my music library. Not in a necessarily bad way, but an over-indulgent way. I used to comb over music blogs, downloading music from all over. It’d then sit on my hoard drive and go unplayed for months. What good was that? My appreciation for good music had started to die.

The final straw was when Kim.com’s Megaupload was kicked and other sites followed suit (literally). One by one, all my favorite music blogs started to dwindle and the whole time this was going on, I was already coming to terms that downloading music is killing the industry. Every week, I’d head out to my local record shop and flip through stacks like I used to as a kid in high school. My ears were tuned in differently and I began to appreciate albums once again.

That’s where this list comes into play. A lot of these albums were on such heavy rotation that I barely put them back into the stacks. They were either purchased at my local shop, or ordered directly from the artist / their labels. While not all of them are metal, you can definitely feel a reoccurring theme…

Check out the PiNP Concert Slave Top 10 Albums of 2012 below in no particular order.

This Tuesday Teardown, we’re taking it slow and low, beginning with Seattle’s King Dude. I’ve plugged this band numerous times here on the site over the years, so little or no intro is needed. While a lengthy review of King Dude’s newest album, Burning Daylight, might help introduce you to this dark folk / Americana act, the above video just lays it all out. What’s the purpose in explaining something that’s so well composed? Burning Daylight is not your parent’s Johnny Cash, nor is it as neo-folkish as King Dude’s previous releases. It’s just damn good (dark) rock and roll. Stream the entire album at Stereogum today and pick up the LP at Dais Records.

Check out more Tuesday Teardown below!

God, I fucking love this band. When I first found out about Blut Aus Nord in the mid 2000’s, something made them stick out from the rest of the more traditional black metal acts I was into at the time. Now, over a decade later, I’m no longer listening to the older bands and have been addicted to these French black metallers. I’ll even go out on a limb here and say that the 777 series is hands down the best thing to come to black metal in the past few years. Each of the chapters is unlike the last and yet, the symbols and songs somehow tie together.

Their latest release under the 777 guise is Cosmosophy and it plays larger than life. Huge, swooping riffs undulate before crashing against cymbals and percussions. This is not your Pure Norwegian Black Metal. It’s more intelligent, even more solitary and by all means less self-aware. The Epitome tracks arise from the darkness and pick off right where they left off, at “Epitome XIV”, before finishing at “Epitome XVIII”. And the only critique is the female vocals threw me off a bit. Pick up this record at your local shop. It’s well worth it. I only hope they release the entire 777 series in a box set.

Check out more Tuesday Teardown below!

Tuesday Teardown is back and in a new format. Rather than review a single album, I figured it’d be better to post up quick reviews on albums that recently came out, in various genres. They’ll all be metal(ish) and they’re all worthy of a record store visit. Starting off with Panopticon‘s newest LP, Kentucky. Just listen to that opener. Since when has black metal and blue grass waltzed hand in hand through the forests of Kentucky? Believe it or not, it works. Really well.

See more Tuesday Teardown below!

So yesterday, I rode the dragon toward the crimson eye and opened up Illustrator to finally design the Necronomicog jersey that everyone’s been bugging me about. Since posting a few teasers up on Instagram, I’ve gotten a ton of emails asking for more details. So here you go.

As it stands now, Endo will be making me a sample kit to wear. Once I’m 100% sold on the design, I’ll open up a pre-order. This will be the standard pre-order with a pre-season lead time. The main difference is, I’ll ONLY have it open for a week, to ensure it doesn’t take too long to produce. This will take place in exactly two weeks, so put some money aside. YES you will be able to order just the jersey too.

In the next few weeks, there will be a series of product drops, coinciding with my new Webshop and PiNP v2.2. Expect some rad, Made in the USA products, including wool jerseys, collaborations, the introduction to the Purple Label goods and a few other surprises. Regarding the kit, don’t worry, I’ll give everyone plenty of time to prepare for the pre-order. It won’t be like my stickers…

FBM’s Thousand Yard Stare was one of my favorite DVDs of the year and Kenny Horton’s section is about as metal as they come. The first few clips will get your gut wrenching…

The guys at GSC may front like they’re strictly into CCR and Neil Young but deep down, they’re metal heads.

“We were once sitting here on a Tuesday evening and one of our friends turned to us and said, “I’d love to have a Golden Saddle Cyclery shirt but it would have to be in the style of the Black Sabbath Vol.4 album cover.” We sat there scratching our heads, trying to figure out where that came from and if he was serious. A few days later we decided to make this a reality and now you can be the master of this reality. Come in and swoop before they’re all gone!”

You can only pick these rad shirts up at Golden Saddle Cyclery, so head in and swoop!

Venom, FBM and American steel? Hell yes! To coincide with Dillon Leeper’s newest team edit, FBM just released their newest lookbook featuring shirts, rad photos, girls and America. Check it out here, or I’ve embedded it below.

Now something you might not know about Kyle is that below those Birkenstocks lies a doom-metal head, as evident here by his latest video for GSC and Moth Attack:

“I needed a travel bike but didn’t have the money for a custom frame. So Megan at Moth Attack just put S&S Couplers on my FBM Sword.”

Fucking Electric Wizard!

“No Love”

Even if you don’t know who Chris Colohan is, or what his previous projects are, it’s damn near impossible to listen to Rotten Things to Say and not make a connection, at least audibly to his earlier project, Cursed. Now, I loved Cursed. They were one of my favorite bands and like my taste has changed, Colohan’s has evolved a little bit. I say evolved because it implies for the better, or at least more fitting to this environ of a war and violence filled world.

Burning Love‘s Rotten Things to Say is not metal. It’s not hardcore. But it is somewhere in between. The aggression found in hardcore is there but the riffs and breaks all scream good old fashioned rock and roll. Just the “Intro” alone tells you this band has their shit together, even if it is in the form of a shit-eatin’ grin. But don’t let that catch you off-guard because “No Love” immediately busts through the wall and goes for your throat.

Check out more Tuesday Teardown below!

Oh man. This is bad and good all at once. The Aerospoke and the Slayer flip, intertwined into a bad-ass shirt from Pristine. The Euro (€29,95) conversion will up the price a bit for the American consumers but if you wanna pick one up, do so here.

“Home of the Grave”

If I could sum up Black Breath‘s newest album up with one word, it’d be “Entombedcore”. Since their debut LP, Heavy Breathing, the Seattle band has really come into their own. Mixing hardcore, thrash and death metal, their newest release Sentenced to Life on Southern Lord really solidifies the band’s sound.

You know how a pair of leather gloves take a little to wear in and form to your hand? That’s how I look at Black Breath over the past few years. It’s like they finally broke in that tough, black leather and the end product is an audio assault. I’ve been listening to the vinyl of the album since it was released and am in love. To be honest, I can’t think of a better Tuesday Teardown at the moment, so read on!

Pick one of these up instead. Up the punk! Email Velo Death for more info. Tracko is more metal than I thought.