Music I Like – May Metal Releases

Most weeks my music list includes some metal. But there were a couple weeks in May that I discovered so much metal I liked, it made sense to collect the bands in one post.

Krypts

Maybe food metaphors aren’t the most appropriate for an album called Cadaver Circulation but Krypts is all kinds of crunchy and chewy tastiness. Plus, that album cover is pretty, like the romantic landscape paintings my daughter fell in love with in Norway. Even if it is a picture of bones decaying in the forest. (And doesn’t that image recast the album title to something more ecological and less gruesome?)

.

Aseethe

The hardcore-ish screams are not my usual taste, but in Throes they only serve to make the subsequent growls like falling rock in a subterranean cavern and chugging riffs even more satisfying than they already would have been. Aseethe build a very pleasing tension with their combination of things both grating and soothing.

.

Isoctrilihum

I don’t appreciate a tongue-twister band names, but I will forgive Isoctrilihum because The Telluric Ashes of the Ö Vrth Immemorial Gods (and I am somehow susceptible to the overwrought album title, ever since Fiona Apple’s When the Pawn…) is so good. When I was in India, I used to go to the beach and wade out to where the waves were breaking. I’d stand in the hip-high water and let the waves crash over me. Sometimes they pummeled me as they passed; sometimes picked me up in a dead man’s float; and sometimes knocked me end over end until I landed on my butt higher up the beach. That’s what this album feels like.

.

Pound

I broke a personal rule when I wrote about the unGoogleable Pound before. At the time, only one song had been released, and I prefer to write about whole albums. But when a band fulfills the promise of its name so perfectly, exceptions must be made. Now the entire album named .. (yes, that’s dot dot) is up on Bandcamp. Give it a listen, and if you survive it, you’ll love it.