Next Friday, Batillus kicks off a tour with fellow Brooklynites Hull that takes both bands down to SXSW in Austin, Texas. These dates were announced before, but there were a couple changes, so if you were planning to head out to one of the shows (and well you should), make sure you take note.

The PR wire’s gory details follow:

New York doom quartet Batillus and Seventh Rule have announced the first tour in support of the upcoming release of Furnace, the band’s debut full-length effort. In March, Batillus will tour alongside Brooklyn‘s Hull to Austin, Texas for SXSW and back.

Batillus / Hull 2011 Spring Tour
03/11 Philadelphia, PA Kung Fu Necktie w/ Ominous Black
03/12 Richmond, VA Strange Matter w/ U.S. Christmas, Balaclava
03/13 Johnson City, TN Hideaway w/ U.S. Christmas
03/14 Little Rock, AR Downtown Music w/ The Body
03/18 SXSW Austin, TX Triple Crown Tattoo w/ Pack of Wolves, Mutilation Rites
03/19 SXSW Austin, TX Lovejoy’s Brooklyn Vegan/Profound Lore Showcase w/ Tombs, Dark Castle, The Body, Castevet, Deafheaven, Grayceon, Wolvehammer, Altaar*
03/19 SXSW Austin, TX Shiner Bar w/ Pack of Wolves
03/21 New Orleans, LA Siberia w/ The Body, Mutilation Rites
03/22 Nashville, TN Little Hamilton Collective w/ Mose Giganticus, Sacaea
03/23 Chapel Hill, NC Reservoir Bar w/ Caltrop
03/24 Baltimore, MD Sidebar w/ Caltrop, Billows
03/25 Montclair, NJ The Meatlocker w/ Caltrop
03/26 New York, NY The Studio at Webster Hall w/ Caltrop
* no Hull

Brooklyn heavy-hitters Batillus are set to issue their debut full-length, Furnace, on Seventh Rule Recordings on April 19. Seventh Rule has also opened up a webstore through Bandcamp where, awesomely, you can name your own price for downloads of their releases. Check that out here, and dig the Batillus news from the PR wire:

New York doom quartet Batillus and Seventh Rule Recordings have finalized details for the release of band’s debut full-length record, Furnace. The album, which was recorded at Semaphore Recording with engineer Sanford Parker (YOB, Unearthly Trance, Nachtmystium, Pelican) and mastered by Collin Jordan (Ministry, Ohgr / Skinny Puppy) at the Boiler Room, will be released on April 19 in North America, with the LP version available for Record Store Day.

Furnace will however, be available as a special tour-pressing LP from the band directly at shows prior to its official release. This tour pressing will feature art silk-screened by hand and will be limited to only 55 copies.

Furnace tracklisting:
1. …And the World is as Night to Them
2. Deadweight
3. Uncreator
4. The Division
5. What Heart
6. Mautaam

Congratulations are in order for Brooklyn doom bashers Batillus, whom it was announced this week have signed with the ultra-awesome Chicago imprint, Seventh Rule Recordings. Good for them. I’ll always be able to tell people I was at their first show. Or maybe it was their second. Or maybe I’m thinking of another band entirely. In any case, way to go, dudes. Best of luck.

I’ll be seeing those guys, along with Man’s Gin, Moth Eater, Evoken and some band nobody’s ever heard of, at the Bowery Electric on Sunday. It’s an early show, and I’ll be getting there even earlier, so if you’re free, in New York and want to check it out, the flier is below.

Hope you all had a great week. This is probably the first weekend in the last six that I’m not going to spend the entire thing doing homework. Long story that involves a jumbled schedule and it’s actually the reason the last five days were so hellishly short on posts (three per day? What is this crap?), but at least I don’t have to spend tomorrow and Sunday trying to get caught up. Off the hook. I plan to sleep late tomorrow.

But until then, I hope the Batillus clip helps you kick off your weekend right if you haven’t already. Stick around for next week, when one way or another, we’re going to discuss the new Electric Wizard, and I’ll be posting an interviews with Spiritual Beggars, High Watt Electrocutions, and if I have time, The Roller. That’s right, we’re going deluxe. And so help me Robot Jesus, I’m going to change the header. You won’t want to miss that.

Stay safe the next couple days, and we’ll see you back here on Monday. Here’s that flier for the Sunday show. Some band nobody’s ever heard of is on before Moth Eater. They got the shaft as far as having their logo included goes.

Heavy without being oppressive and familiar without being redundant, Portland, Oregon, post-sludgers Diesto’s second album, High as the Sun (first for Seventh Rule Recordings) is an hour of righteously brutal ambience made flesh with crunching riffs, post-metal rhythmic churn, hypnotically chanted vocals and drone just where it’s needed most. The four-piece seem modern in their influence, but as much as one could point to YOB, Kylesa and more recent A Storm of Light for comparisons, elements of Unsane, Earth, Oceanic-era Isis, Neurosis and Sleep are also audible, and the range of vocal presentation from guitarists Chris Dunn and Mark Basset helps bring to the fore the fierce dynamics on which High as the Sun is built.

Recorded by Adam Pike in the band’s hometown and mixed by Alex Newport on the other side of the country in Brooklyn, New York, High as the Sun offers glimpses of surprisingly adept melodicism. Not so much in the vocals, which despite being mostly clean are still chiefly rhythmic in their nature — Dunn and/or Basset aren’t crooning by any stretch, but they do well with what they do à la Phillip Cope — but in the guitars, and, as in the later section of opener “Beyond the Graves,” Captain John’s bass. It’s clear Diesto were reaching with this album, challenging themselves creatively. I hear hardcore or post-hardcore roots in their playing, though that could just be the Isis influence shining through. Nonetheless, although digging into High as the Sun will probably not be a challenge to sludge-heads or post-metallers checking it out — it’s worth noting I don’t completely consider Diesto post-metal, despite their focus on atmosphere — the record still has plenty of intricacies that justify the time.

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Listening back to it now, I think what I enjoy most about Swedish atmospheric doomers Kongh‘s second album, Shadows of the Shapeless (review here) is the potential it shows. The album, released last year in Europe on Trust No One and given American issue via Seventh Rule Recordings at the beginning of April, isn’t an outrageous standout from the scores of post-metal that has come up in the last half-decade or so, but the trio of David Johansson (guitar/vocals), Oscar Ryden (bass) and Tomas Salonen (drums) are able to infuse the recording with individualistic glimpses of creativity to come, and on that level, it’s a very positive record.

That, however, is about the only level on which it is positive. Sonically, it oppresses, seems to hold you down at the shoulders. Even in its most atmospheric moments, it crushes with abandon and is the kind of heavy that brings to mind images of giant unmanned machinations in some factory building a Babel tower to rip open the heavens. Massive, in other words. Fucking massive.

After much delay on my part (most but not all of it completely my fault), I finally got my crap together enough to fire off some questions to Johansson for an email interview. Of course, what I wanted chiefly to ask him was, “Your album sounds big,” but that’s neither a question nor a basis for discovering anything about Kongh‘s processes, so I did my best to avoid it and only failed a little bit.

Following the jump, the guitarist/vocalist fields queries about writing, recording, Shadows of the Shapeless‘ suitably bleak artwork, how the band came to play the Kuma’s Fest in Chicago and subsequently got hooked up with Seventh Rule, and whether or not more US touring is in the cards. Please enjoy.

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Why, it feels like less than a month ago, I was putting up a review of Swedish post-doomers Kongh‘s second album, Shadows of the Shapeless. Oh wait, that was less than a month ago. Well, in the time since, Kongh have hit the big time and premiered a track via our friends over at BrooklynVegan.com. The song is called “Voice of the Below,” and because BV‘s a little less tightassed with their hosting than some of their more corporatized fellow outlets, here it is, followed by some PR wire info:

Kongh – Voice of the Below

Appearing on the Swedes’ second album, Shadows of the Shapeless, “Voice of the Below” shows off the band’s intense brand of progressive doom metal. Kongh’s sound covers vast musical ground — from forward-charging sludge metal to icy doom to ambient rock — yet it is delivered seamlessly and with unstoppable momentum.

Shadows of the Shapeless sees its first official US release on March 30 via Seventh Rule Recordings. Shadows of the Shapeless was originally released in Europe by Trust No One Recordings (Isis, Khanate, Cult of Luna) in 2009.

Echoes of YOB’s The Unreal Never Lived pop up on Swedish trio Kongh’s sophomore full-length, whether it’s the driving rhythm that built tension “Quantum Mystic” transposed onto opener “Unholy Water” or the malevolent triplet riffing of “The Mental Tyrant” in the closing title track. By keeping their sound generally darker, though, and adding elements vocally and otherwise out of black metal, Kongh make it through the five tracks of Shadows of the Shapeless without sounding overly redundant or derivative.

Issued first in Europe by Trust No One, Shadows of the Shapeless finds distribution Stateside via Chicago imprint Seventh Rule Recordings. No strangers to the town, Kongh played the 2008 Kuma’s Doom Fest, which marked their first US appearance. Whether the narrative actually goes that that’s where and when they came to the attention of Seventh Rule (one imagines it was actually before), it’s impressive they’d wind up on the label nonetheless, Seventh Rule in the past having issued albums from Akimbo, Sweet Cobra, Indian and Wetnurse.

The music on Shadows of the Shapeless is bound to inspire all manner of antler-laden hyperbole and metaphor, but what it rounds out to is post-metal crunch with darker and heavier shades that set it apart from the pseudo-cerebral approach that so much of the genre has taken on these last few years. To call it progressive wouldn’t be a mistake, but guitarist/vocalist David Johansson successfully averts the Isis trap and crafts a more natural-feeling soundscape. As the press release suggests, the music is cinematic, but sitting and parsing through its ups and downs, blasts and lulls, feels like a waste of time as compared to experiencing the whole of each of these songs.

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New school extreme death/doomers Lord Mantis are from Chicago, and I mean that as much as an analysis of their sound as I do a point of simple fact. The band features guitarist/vocalist Greg Gomer, drummer Bill Bumgardner of Indian, ex-Nachtmystium guitarist Andrew Markuszewski – who also performs as half the black metal duo Avichi; Lord Mantis vocalist/bassist Charlie Fell drums as the other half – and, of course, Sanford Parker produced their first album, Spawning the Nephilim. They couldn’t be more Chicago if they had Polish sausages lodged in the lining of their blackened hearts.

If you were to leave Lair of the Minotaur in the depths of whatever cavern Khanate existed in, they might come out sounding like Lord Mantis, whose appropriation of Morbid Angel-type mythological references (I can just hear David Vincent talking about spawning some nephilim), and a black metal-type logo, underscores the varied influences playing out in Spawning the Nephilim‘s seven tracks. Look hard at the title cut and you’ll even find a little of the Neurosis-style shouting which seems to pop up everywhere these days.

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