CD

The bandname, the artwork, the length of the 5 songs (shortest = + 8 minutes longest plus 12 minutes),  it all breaths  POSTROCK/DOOM and thus that’s what Mountains Among Us have on offer.  “Commision The Twelve” can be described as the  perfect – instrumental - soundtrack to the current weather,  cloudy, melting snow, wind gushes and  more grey then green. Mountains Among Us will prove to be hard to digest for the wider audience, but I am sure these guys earn their place in the ever growing postrock scene…

Led by frontman, songwriter and guitarist Jeff Lohrber, Enabler stands as one of the most honest, pissed off and heartfelt hardcore bands around today (or so they proclaim). The band's sound is based on a mixture of thrash, death metal, punk rock and hardcore. Several full-length albums, three EPs and multiple split and compilation appearances and many more have been released on various labels since then. And now the band is back with something new witch I actually like.

A band with Carl Johan Grimmark on guitars – known from his work with Narnia, but also from many guest appearances on albums by other bands like Rob Rock, Divine Fire and others, is sure to draw my attention.  While at the start of this band, vocals were handled by German Pascual, who also sang with Narnia in 2009, this latter was replaced during the recordings of this album by Richard Hulteke.

Weltfeind are a new label, formed by Castellum Stoufenburc’s Soldat D. This label, with three releases at this moment (all of them will be reviewed, evidently), was founded in order to support and promote ‘Depressive Underground Music’. Two projects out of these three perform so-called DSBM (Depressive Suicidal Black Metal), but the label does not want to focus on that specific genre only, which I think is very honourable.

I like to read the great works by the hand, and mind, of J.R.R. Tolkien. Everyone knows The Lord Of The Rings and The Hobbit in mean time, thanks to the two movie-trilogies, but Tolkien’s other works are at least as interesting, if not more attractive! In The Lord Of The Rings, the ‘Dagor Dagorath’-battle gets mentioned, but there was a first reference to it in the posthumously published The Silmarillion (the Valaquenta-edition, more specifically).

Back in December 2011, guitarist/ bassist Will Peplinski (see also Omnipresent, Reeferhead, Necrosectomy, Clitoral Putrescence and Breast Ripper) and a close friend of his started a novelty band project under the name Malignant Abomination. It however soon turned into something more serious, and becoming Will's solo project, was renamed Hypoxid.

Darn, the life of a music journalist is an odd one : waiting around for those couple of rare releases which make one sit at the edge of the seat...and then having to let go to move on to more of those middle-of-the-road releases which make up the bulk of music put out into the world today.

2009, the provincial town of Gorlovka (40 km from Donetsk) in the Ukraine. A depressive industrial setting, where a population of 240,000 people are trying to survive on the remains of the Soviet era. It's in that setting that 5 Metal-hungry youngsters decide to start a band of their own, playing their favourite music, but influenced by the great variety of alternative bands that had always been around in their town's Underground scene.

Wow...I recently mentioned that this reviewer stays in his voluntary (and therefore quite un-paid) side-job for the sole benefit of encountering the music of bands which come by only every once in a blue moon, those who manage to create albums which grab me from the get-go, and have me hold on until the final notes. Sometimes this happens with bands which have only been around for a couple of years only, but occasionally this reviewer comes across bands which have been in existing for much longer, and already have several releases to their credit!

Humiliation are a band from Malaysia, not immediately the country-number-one when it comes to Death Metal nowadays. There was quite a vivid scene at the end of the eighties (as well as in the neighbour countries, like Indonesia – it truly was the case!), but nowadays it’s rather an exception to hear (new) material from bands hailing from that part of our ugly globe. But Humiliation are such a band that will put Malaysia on the map again.