Doom legends Saint Vitus have announced a UK tour around their Hammerfest appearance. Tickets for shows go on sale on Friday 11th January and support comes from self professed Seventies Rock preservationists Mos Generator.
Dates are as follows:
11th March The Haunt, Brighton
12th March The Cellar, Southampton
13th March O2 Academy 2, Birmingham
14th March The Cathouse, Glasgow...
When Colum isn't turning up late to review gigs in his home town of Brighton you'll generally find him hidden in the darkness of the crowd on the lower floor of the Camden Underworld. A lover of all things Japanese, his tastes in metal are as wide as his world travels, but regardless of genre it's the impeccable pick of the crop.
Top 15 albums of 2012
Conan’s first full length debut is certainly the primal barbarian riff fest that we were all hoping for. You can’t just can’t help headbanging to tracks such as Battle in the Swamp! The albums success has helped propel them to being one of the most talked about underground bands around! Slay some orcs and raise your tankards to Conan...
Rich is normally behind the lens for metalgigs covering gigs "oop North" and you can check out his photography work here.
2012 Top 10 albums by Rich Price
10) Lazarus Blackstar - Hymns for the Cursed
Glad to see these releasing a new album, not many come close to being as slow and bowel evacuatingly heavy as these lot. Now if only they'd play gigs outside of Bradford I'd be a happy man.
9) Anaal Nathrakh - Vanitas
It's Anaal Nathrakh doing what they do best, another one to get...
I've paid little attention to the releases of this year and correspondingly the dramas surrounding them, such as last year's Liturgy fiasco and Leviathan court case which felt almost unavoidable. For that reason I find myself largely unable to construct a list consisting solely of full-lengths or one that can be logically structured into any kind of order that runs from 'worst' to 'best' or vice versa (and so I opt for an alphabetic approach), something I struggle with in any and all cases anyway. None the less I've found myself revising this list a few times, removing releases (such as Deathspell Omega's "Drought" - a release which just missed out on being included in this list) and replacing them with others and I've surely missed some off which I'll later be kicking myself for.
Some fantastic records such as Swan's "the Seer" have been dropped for their not being a metal release and others such as Pallbearer & Hooded Menace have been removed in order to be replaced with releases that I'd forgotten had come out this year. Equally, I've removed albums that I hadn't realised upon inclusion were actually released last year. Without further ado...
I met Matt quite a few years back at a Roadburn festival. Considering how many similar bands we like and the sheer number of gigs we both attend it was pretty odd we'd never met at a gig in London. Matt somehow manages to fit time around being a father, a loving husband, and a fulltime job, to attend more gigs than you've had hot dinners. He gets labelled a grumpy old git (by me included) as he moans alot about modern metal, but get him talking about anything slow or dark (and usually Finnish) and you'll see his eyes light up as he starts reeling off a ton of bands you need to go and check out. Whilst I'm busy editing photos Matt and Gary (Lukes) manage to keep me well informed on the cream of the underground. Massive thanks to Matt for sending over his list.
Matt will be curating the Seven Churches stage at the 2013 edition of Desertfest along with his partner in crime Josh Retallick (from the Black Heart pub in Camden). Tickets for Desertfest are on sale now priced at £87.50 available from www.leedstickets.com...
This is the Norwegians second full length album. Described in the read up as black metal, I had high hopes as coming from Norway with the country's previous calibre would this be another cracker? Now what they failed to say was this is more like progressive or what they call in the trade post black metal and being a disciple of the 90’s era I don’t usually have much time for this style but I will give it a fair crack of the whip.
The undercurrent of the whole album bases itself on melodic atmospheric guitars with same chord repeat riffing to create the breaks and form that broken and twisted structure that this genre seems to emulate. Some of the riff structures remind me a bit of Osculum Infame in feel in the parts when the music really gels together. The vocals throughout are a consistent mid range scream in style which to be fair tie...
2 UK dates were announced a while back for The Wounded Kings with support from Montreal's Dopethrone and Brittany's Huata. The Birmingham venue was revealed sometime back, but we have now received word that the London venue is confirmed and will be The Water Rats in Kings Cross.
Heavy line up indeed for this one, should be an awesome two nights.
Dates are:
24th March 2013 - The Asylum, Birmingham...
Kvelertak 2013 UK tour announced:
Those crazy stranglehold fans Kverlertak will be heading back over from Norway to grace the shores of the UK once more in March 2013.
Dates confirmed so far are as follows:
MARCH 2013
5 Talking Heads, Southampton...
In a few hours' time American band Huntress will pop their British live cherry in a small club beside the seaside. As the band begin setting up for soundcheck, a tiny figure in a dark hoodie glides past in the semi-darkness. This is no ghostly apparition but their leader and self-proclaimed witch, singer Jill Janus. She is petite and pretty with piercing eyes and bright blonde hair. You may have seen her. A lot of her. She is not shy about using her good looks in the band's promotional material. Even in civvies-type gear she is striking, and takes a seat on a large couch with a comedic plastic skeleton looking down on her from the bright purple wall. It is almost Hallowe'en and spirits are most definitely high.
Jill has no worries about the first gig on these shores...
At a time when even long established metal media seem inclined to push floppy-fringed, full-body-inked formulaic screamo/deathcore (whatever the fuck that means) at their readership, it is heartening to note that the kids are not all taken in by such bollocks.
Motorhead have never fitted in. Anywhere. Lemmy stands by the mantra of being “rock n' roll”, never identifying his band as heavy metal. His audience has always comprised a motley crew of punks, crusties, metal-heads, thrashers and...