Another round of recommendations from the folks of Hellbound. This is what we’ve been spinning over the past month.
Heavy Listening
Steve Earles
New release: Exhorder – Mourn The Southern Skies
Non Metal: MC5 – Kick Out The Jams
Wild Card: Horslips – Greatest Hits
Arta Gailuma
New release: Schammasch – Hearts of No Light. Released on November 8th 2019 via Prosthetic Records.
https://schammasch.bandcamp.com/
Live: Buckcherry headlining the second day of hard Rock Hell.
Gruesome Greg
Listening to: Black Mountain – Druganaut
New release: Solace – The Brink
Live: High on Fire, Power Trip, Creeping Death @ Danforth Music Hall, November 26.
Non-Metal: Kirk Windstein – Dream in Motion (not sure if I’d call the Crowbar frontman’s solo album “metal” per se, but it’s still pretty interesting)
Wild card: My Calgary Flames have now lost six straight games — maybe they should hire Mike Babcock? 😉
Matt Hinch
Listening to: I’ve been spending most of my time lately listening to music I listened to in high school that came out at that time. 1992-1997. I went on a really nice Alice in Chains run yesterday.
New release: It came out in October I think but Pollinator by Cloud Rat is really the only new release I’ve listened to in the past two weeks. Wicked grind! I’ll make time for Cattle Decapitation though.
Live: I listened to Alice in Chains – Unplugged twice. That should count.
Non-Metal: A lot of that ’92-’97 music was not metal but I’ll go with Florence + the Machine – High As Hope
Wild card: THE MANDOLORIAN!!!!!
Sarah Riley
Listening to: Suffocation – Entrails of You (Suffocation, Relapse Records, 2006). Forever will be the best love song ever written and the only one I want to hear.
New release: Well, the new release I’ve been anticipating and impatiently waiting for is unsurprisingly Cattle Deceptions new record Death Atlas (Metal Blade Records, November 29th, 2019). To say the very least, it was exactly what I expected. The previous album released by Cattle Decap (The Anthropocene Extinction, Metal Blade Records, 2015) I can easily say is in my mental list of top 10 all time favorite albums. With that being said, a very high bar had been set for this latest release. Throughout The Anthropocene Extinction, Travis Ryan would tease these fairly minute and further between peculiar sounding clean vocals; my circle of friends have taken to referring to this vocal maneuver as the “Sméagol” vocals. The “Sméagol” vocals received a crazy amount of positive feedback from their fanbase, myself included. They were unique and sound super distinct in a sort of melodic way. So, I’d find myself always eagerly waiting for the break of irregularity within the album. Death Atlas has become the album where Cattle Decapitation has really decided to embrace those vocals. And why wouldn’t they? Like I said, it was receiving such good feed back. Where I now have a little bit of a dilemma with this is, my enjoyment of the “Sméagol” vocals stemmed from the build up and progression, as well as how they were dispersed further apart. Now that almost every song on this new record consists of this vocal pattern and it isn’t placed in short powerful segments, I’m not enjoying it as much as I did prior to this release. Does that mean I don’t think the record is sick? Not at all, its a solid piece and I still have an undying love for Cattle Decapitation, I probably always will. I have no doubt this album will go great lengths for them and be extremely successful. However, the heavier Decap just holds a little more space in my heart.
Live: Arrival Of Autumn, Red and In Flames @ The Phoenix Concert Theatre, Toronto, November 27th. Wildly nostalgic seeing In Flames play Only for the Weak live.
Non-metal: The Hillbilly Moon Explosion – Northern Crown. I really don’t know what’s been up with me and these rockabilly/cowpunk/rebel country groups lately. Wack.
Wild card: The DFA Nacho’s from Sneaky Dee’s, Toronto, are pretty damn tight.
Laura Wiebe
Listening to: Opeth – In Cauda Venenum (Swedish Version)
New release: Avatarium – The Fire I Long For and the Völur/Amber Asylum split – Breaker of Rings / Blood Witch
Non-metal: my own mental mashup of “Dynamite” by Taio Cruz and the Pet Shop Boys’ version of “You’re Always on My Mind”
Wild card: Murder, She Wrote reruns
Adam Wills
Listening to: Alcest – Spiritual Instinct
New release: Cattle Decapitation – Death Atlas
Non-metal: Mike Patton & Jean-Claude Vannier – Corpse Flower
Wild card: Parasite, directed by Bong Joon-ho
