Posted in Whathaveyou on March 4th, 2019 by JJ Koczan
The first lineup announcement from Pittsburgh-based Descendants of Crom III is a doozy. The headliners are apparently still to be announced — though would anyone complain if Solace or Valkyrie headlined a night? — but between them and the likes of Irata, Argus, Backwoods Payback and Foghound, it’s already shaping up to be a killer three-dayer this September. Awesome to see Sun Voyager on this bill and the likes of Void King and Fox 45 getting a look. Pale Grey Lore might even have their new record out by then — Solace too, for that matter — but either way, there’s a lot here to dig immediately, and of course for this kind of announcement that’s the whole point.
They’re selling early-bird tickets this month, so you know, get out that calendar and add another one to your already-absolutely-slammed festival schedule. It’s madness, but, you know, the good kind of madness. Here’s hoping the universe doesn’t collapse between now and then.
Thus-far confirmations follow, as per social media:
DESCENDANTS OF CROM III – Announces 2019 Event For Sept. 20-22; Bands Incl. VALKYRIE, BACKWOODS PAYBACK + More!
– A GATHERING OF THE HEAVY UNDERGROUND – – SEPTEMBER 20-22, 2019 – – STEEL CITY, USA –
The third annual DESCENDANTS OF CROM will be held once again in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, spanning the weekend of September 20th. The PGH underground scene of heavy rock and metal is healthy and thriving and the location is perfect. Feeding great regional bands to a hungry crowd and serving up internationally legendary fan-favorites to entice music lovers in the door to experience these amazing local artists.
Descendants of Crom came out of the gates running with the first event in 2017, becoming a strong contender among other established regional music festivals. The 2019 events begin on Friday, September 20th, with a Pre-Gala evening at Howlers, followed by two full-day events on Saturday and Sunday at Cattivo.
Shy Kennedy has once again hand-picked and curated a beautiful mixture of acts for Descendants Of Crom III. While a few more updates will complete the lineup for the full schedule of events over the weekend, a most incredible roster of bands is included today. All are invited to become part of the experience at the 2019 Pre-Gala and Weekend Events!
Lineup so far: Solace Valkyrie Argus Irata Backwoods Payback Enhailer Icarus Witch Brimstone Coven Foghound Kingsnake Sun Voyager Witchkiss Leather Lung Frayle Tines Spacelord Pillärs PALE GREY LORE Lightning Born NIGHT VAPOR Pyrithe Riparian Fox 45 Void King Official: COMA Action Camp White Alice Old Dream Motometer
Posted in Whathaveyou on February 15th, 2019 by JJ Koczan
New York two-piece Witchkiss have Northeastern dates booked for the better part of the Spring, and little doubt the highlight is a stopoff in Jewett City, Connecticut, at the New England Stoner and Doom Festival. Then a trio, the band released their debut album, The Austere Curtains of Our Eyes (review here), last year through Argonauta Records and have been building forward momentum ever since. These shows should do nothing of course to curb that, with key dates and venues locked in for Philly, Brooklyn and Providence along with dates in the company of Castle, Clamfight, Shadow Witch and others. You know the drill. The up and coming band plays cool shows.
Familiar though that story is, the fact remains: cool shows. And that’s the best kind! I’m looking forward to seeing them at NES&D.
From the PR wire:
WITCHKISS ANNOUNCE EAST US TOUR
New York doom band WITCHKISS are pleased to announce that they will embark on a tour of the Eastern United States this spring.
The band commented “This Spring, as we emerge from our winter riff writing hibernation, we will be hitting the road with some new songs and a new bassist as well We will be playing some killer shows with our friends in CASTLE, BACKWOODS PAYBACK, SHADOW WITCH, CLAMFIGHT and YATRA along with a slew of other bands that were looking forward to jamming with for the first time also! Along this run we will be hitting a bunch of rad places we’ve played already, new spots in DC, NH, RI and NY and a stop at the New England Stoner & Doom Fest! We are Beyond Stoked! Hope to see you in the Spring!”
All dates will be in support of the band’s 2018 album The Austere Curtains Of Our Eyes which was released last year.
Tour dates: April 24 – The Anchor – Kingston, NY April 30 – Kung Fu Necktie – Philadelphia, PA May 1 – Atlas Brew Works – Washington, DC May 2 – The Kingsland – Brooklyn, NY May 3 – New England Stoner & Doom Fest – Jewett City, CT May 4 – News Cafe – Pawtucket, RI May 5 – The Bungalow Bar – Manchester, NH June 6 – Ralphs Rock Diner – Worcester, MA June 7 – Geno’s Rock Club – Portland, ME June 8 – Dusk – Providence, RI
Posted in Whathaveyou on February 5th, 2019 by JJ Koczan
It’s time to talk about the real potential of the New England Stoner and Doom Fest. No, I don’t mean the lineup. That’s awesome. You know it and I know it. I’m talking about the acronym. That’s always huge for a festival. How is it abbreviated? Think MDDF or SHoD or any of the DFs spread around the universe. These things matter.
I’ve seen NESDF tossed around for New England Stoner and Doom Fest, and that’s cool, but it’s missing the opportunity. You could have a festival abbreviated NES! Who the hell wouldn’t buy that t-shirt? I hereby cast my vote in the imaginary referendum on festival abbreviations for New England Stoner and Doom Fest to henceforth and forthwith and withhence be known as NES fest. Second the motion?
There’s reportedly one more band to be added and reportedly several in the running for that slot, so this might not be the final update before May 3-5 gets here and NES fest kicks off (see me using the acronym already?), and the lineup for a pre-party at 33 Golden St. in New London has been announced as well, which will be headlined by Fox 45, so, you know, more of a good thing and all that.
The full lineup as has been revealed follows. Note the Wretch reunion. NES fest!
New England Stoner & Doom Fest II
The New England Stoner and Doom Festival will make its return in 2019 on May 3,4, and 5 at Altones in Jewett City, CT.
Earthride Brimstone Coven Wretch Kings Destroy +1 TBA Foghound Pale Divine Vessel of Light Spiral Grave Solace Black Road Curse the Son Shadow Witch Hell Camino Clamfight Eternal Black Thunderbird Divine Stonecutters When the Deadbolt Breaks Mourn the Light Entierro Bone Church Buzzard Canyon The Age of Truth Void King Horseburner Scuzzy Yeti Witchkiss Cortez Benthic Realm Faith in Jane Conclave Set Fire 3 Parts Dead Insano Vision Old Earth Analog Pinto Graham The Stone Eye Sentinel Hell
Pre-party @ 33 Golden St.: Fox 45 VRSA Dark Ritual Owl Maker Feed the Beast
Posted in Reviews on December 5th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Good morning from the kitchen table. It’s a couple minutes before 4AM as I get this post started. I’ve got my coffee, my iced tea in the same cup I’ve been using for the last three days, and I’m ready to roll through the next 10 records in this massive, frankly silly, Quarterly Review. Yesterday went well enough and I’m three days into the total 10 and I don’t feel like my head is going to explode, so I’ll just say so far so good.
As ever, there’s a lot to get through, so I won’t delay. I hope you find something here you dig. I certainly have.
Quarterly Review #21-30:
Sandrider, Armada
Armada is the third full-length from Seattle noiseblasters Sandrider, and at this point I’m starting to wonder what it’s going to take for this band to get their due. Produced by Matt Bayles and released through Good to Die Records, the album is an absolute monster front to back. Scathing. Beastly. And yet the songs have character. It’s the trio’s first outing since 2015’s split with Kinski (review here) and follows 2013’s Godhead (review here) and 2011’s self-titled debut (review here) in melding the band’s West Coast noise superiority with a sense of melody and depth as the trio of guitarist/vocalist Jon Weisnewski, bassist/vocalist Jesse Roberts, and omegadrummer Nat Damm course and wind their way through intense but varied material. “Banger” has been tapped for its grunge influence. Eh. Maybe in the riff, but who cares when there’s so much more going on with it? “Brambles” is out and out brutal but still has a hook, and cuts like “Industry” and the closing “Dogwater” remind of just how skilled Sandrider are at making that brutality fun. If the record was six minutes long and just had “Hollowed” on it, you’d still call it a win.
Goodness gracious. Cavernous echo accompanies the roars of guitarist Scott Prater that are offset by the more subdued melodies of drummer Amber Burns, but even in the most spacious reaches of 11-minute second cut “Blind Faith,” Witchkiss are fucking massive-sounding. Their debut album, The Austere Curtains of Our Eyes, presents an especially crushing take on ritualistic volume, sounding its catharsis in a song like “Spirits of the Dirt” and sounding natural as it trades between a rolling assault and the atmospheres of its quieter moments. With the departure since the recording of bassist Anthony DiBlasi, the New York-based outfit will invariably shift in dynamic somewhat coming out of this record, but with such an obvious clarity of mission, I honestly doubt their core approach will change all that much. A band doesn’t make a record like this without direct intention. They may evolve, and one hopes they do just because one always hopes for that, but this isn’t a band feeling their way through their first record. This is a band who know exactly the kind of ferocity they want to conjure, and who conjure it without regret.
Argentinian instrumentalist trio Satta Caveira make a point of saying they recorded MMI, their second or third album depending on what you count, live in their home studio without edits or overdubs, click tracks or anything else. Clearly the intention then is to capture the raw spirit of the material as it’s happening. The eight songs that make up the unmanageable 62-minute listen of MMI — to be fair, 14 of those minutes are opener “Kundalini” and 23 are the sludge-into-jam-into-sludge riffer “T.H.C.” — are accordingly raw, but that in itself becomes a component of their aesthetic. Whether it’s the volume swell that seems to consume “Don Santos” in its second half, the funk of closer “Afrovoid” or the drift in “Kalifornia,” Satta Caveira manage to hone a sense of range amid all the naturalism, and with the gritty and more aggressive riffing of the title-track and the rush of the penultimate “Router,” their sound might actually work with a more elaborate production, but they’ve got a thing, it works well, and I’m not inclined to argue.
Vocalized only by spoken samples of astronauts, the thrice-exclamatory Lizard! Lizard! Lizard! is the debut EP from Perth, Australia, three-piece Apollo80, who are given mostly to exploring an outpouring of heavy molten vibes but still able to hone a bit of cacophony following the “godspeed, John Glenn” sample in second cut “FFH.” There are four songs on the 26-minute offering, and its spaciousness is brought to earth somewhat by the dirt in which the guitar and bass tones are caked, but it’s more the red dust of Mars than anything one might find kicking around a Terran desert. Unsurprisingly, the high point of the outing is the 10:46 title-track, where guitarist Luke, bassist Brano and drummer Shane push farthest into the cosmos — though that’s debatable with the interstellar drone of closer “Good Night” — but even in the impact of “Apollo” at the outset, there’s a feeling of low-oxygen in the atmosphere, and if you get lightheaded, that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be.
The prevailing influence throughout the untitled debut EP from Minnesota’s The Great Unwilling is Queens of the Stone Age, but listening to the layer of wah intertwine with the solo on “Sanguine,” there’s more to their approach than just that, however dreamy the vocal melodies from guitarist Jesse Hoheisel might be. Hoheisel, bassist Joe Ulvi and Mark Messina present a clean four tracks and 20 minutes on their first outing, and for having been together for about 18 months, their songwriting seems to have a firm grasp on what they want to do. “If 3 was 7” rolls along at a heavy clip into an effectively drifting midsection and second half jam before returning to the initial riff, while “Current” leads off with a particularly Hommeian construction, and soon gives way to the flowing pace and apparent lyrical references of the aforementioned “Sanguine.” They finish with the dirtier tonality of “Apostasy” and cap with no more pretense than they started, bringing the short release to a close with a chorus that seems to finish with more to say. No doubt they’ll get there.
A prominent current of organ alongside the guitars gives Grusom‘s aptly-titled second album on Kozmik Artifactz, II, a willfully classic feel, and even the lyrics of “Peace of Mind” play into that with the opening lines, “I always said I was born too late/This future is not for me,” but the presentation from the Svendborg six-piece isn’t actually all that retro-fied. Rather, the two guitars and organ work in tandem to showcase a modern take on those classic ideas, as the back and forth conversation between them in the extended jam of “Skeletons” demonstrates, and with a steady rhythmic foundation and soulful vocals overtop, Grusom‘s craft doesn’t need the superficial trappings of a ’70s influence to convey those roots in their sound. Songs like “Dead End Valley” and “Embers” have a bloozy swing as they head toward the melancholy closer “Cursed from Birth,” but even there, the proceedings are light on pretense and the atmosphere is more concerned with a natural vibe rather than pretending it’s half a century ago.
Having originated as Träd Gräs och Stenar, the group now known as Träden is the product of a psychedelic legacy spanning generations. Founder Jakob Sjöholm has joined forces with Hanna Östergren of Hills, Reine Fiske of Dungen and Sigge Krantz of Archimedes Badkar to create a kind of supergroup of serenity, and their self-titled is blissful enough not only to life up to Träd Gräs och Stenar‘s cult status, but to capture one of its own. It’s gorgeous. Presumably the painting used on the cover is the cabin where it was recorded, and its eight tracks — sometimes mellow, sometimes more weighted, always hypnotic — are a naturalist blueprint that only make the world a better place. That sounds ridiculous, I know. But the truth is that for all the terrible, horrifying shit humanity does on a daily basis, to know that there are people on the planet making music like this with such a genuine spirit behind it is enough to instill a bit of hope for the species. This is what it’s all about. I couldn’t even make it through the Bandcamp stream without buying the CD. That never happens.
Last year, Spanish experimentalists Orthodox released Supreme and turned their free-jazz meets low-doom into a 36-minute fracas of happening-right-now creativity. Krèas, a lone, 27-minute track with the core duo of bassist Marco Serrato and drummer Borja Díaz joined by saxophonist Achilleas Polychronidis, was recorded in the same session but somehow seems even more freaked-out. I mean, it’s gone. Gone to a degree that even the hepcats who claim to appreciate free-jazz on anything more than a theoretical level (that is, those who actually listen to it) will have their hair blown back. The rest of the universe? Well, they’ll probably continue on, blissfully unaware that Orthodox are out there smashing comets together like they are, but wow. Challenging the listener is one thing. Krèas is the stuff of dissertations. One only hopes Orthodox aren’t holding their breath waiting for humanity to catch up to what they’re doing, because, yeah, it’s gonna be a while.
Danish bruisers Disrule run a brash gamut with their second album, Sleep in Your Honour (on Seeing Red). Leading off with the earworm hook of the title-track (premiered here), the album puts a charge into C.O.C.-style riffing and classic heavy rock, but shades of Clutch-y funk in “Going Wrong” and a lumbering bottom end in “Occult Razor” assure there’s no single angle from which they strike. “(Gotta Get Me Some) Control” elicits a blues-via-Sabbath vibe, but the drums seem to make sure Disrule are never really at rest, and so there’s a strong sense of momentum throughout the eight-song/29-minute EP, perhaps best emphasized by two-minute second cut “Death on My Mind,” which seems to throw elbows as it sprints past, though even shouted-chorus closer “Enter the Void” has an infectious energy about it. If you think something can’t be heavy and move, Disrule have a shove with your name on it.
First clue that all is not what it seems? The artwork. Definitely not a picture of cake on the cover of Ozymandias‘ debut album, Cake!, and accordingly, things don’t take long before they get too weird. “Jelly Beans” hits on harshest Nirvana — before it goes into blastbeats. “Mason Jar” scathes out organ-laced doom and vicious screaming, before “Hangman” gets all danceable like “All Pigs Must Die” earlier in the record. The wacky quotient is high, and the keyboards do a lot to add to that, but one can’t really call “Doom I – The Daisies” or the later “Doom II – The Lilies” anything but progressive in the Devin Townsend-shenanigans-metal sense of the word, and as wild as some stretches of Cake! are, the trio from Linz, Austria, are never out of control, and they never give a sense that what they’re doing is an accident. They’re just working on their own stylistic level, and to a degree that’s almost scary considering it’s their first record. I won’t claim to know where they might be headed, but it seems likely they have a plan.
Posted in Whathaveyou on August 22nd, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Last time I heard from Florida’s Hollow Leg, it was this Spring when they announced they’d begun work on their next record. I don’t know what their recording process is like off the top of my head, but I’m going to guess that the album is probably done. Since they’re teamed up with New York’s Witchkiss to tour their way out to Doomed and Stoned Fest in Indianapolis — where Hollow Leg are set to play Oct. 6 — and back eastward after, and since Witchkiss‘ 2018 album is called The Austere Curtains of Our Eyes, and since the tour is called “The Austere Civilizations Tour,” I’ll further guess that not only is the new Hollow Leg record done, but the title in some way involves the word “civilizations.” Maybe that’s all it’s called. I don’t know, folks, these are just guesses.
If you’re looking for harder news, well, there’s the tour dates for starters. They’re right here, as per the PR wire:
HOLLOW LEG/WITCHKISS ANNOUNCE TOUR
HOLLOW LEG and WITCHKISS are pleased to announce that they will be teaming up for a short East/Mid-western tour of the United States this fall. The tour will also include a stop at the Doomed and Stoned festival in Indianapolis. (Hollow Leg only)
Hollow Leg commented “Hollow Leg are really looking forward to this upcoming run with our labelmates in Witchkiss as well as appearance at this year’s Doomed and Stoned fest! Cities like Chicago we’ve been looking to play for a while and our festival appearance is giving us a chance to get there this time around.”
Witchkiss further commented “We are super stoked to be doing this run with Hollow Leg in early October. Getting to play with our Argonauta labelmates who’s music we love in all of these new cities is a dream come true! We might even be playing a new song for y’all too!”
Posted in Whathaveyou on April 16th, 2018 by JJ Koczan
Down at the bottom of this post you’ll find the stream of the new track by Beacon, New York, heavy riffers Witchkiss. The trio work quickly to show their listeners what they’re all about: heavy-as-hell stomp, a somewhat inhuman feeling post-metal churn, and tonal the likes of which bands usually have to hone over a much longer period of time. Kudos to Witchkiss on the aural assault and on signing to Argonauta Records for the release of their debut long-player, The Austere Curtains of Our Eyes. How much the individual track may represent what Witchkiss do overall, hell if I know, but the song’s worth your time, so by all means, have at it.
Juy 13 is the release date and The Austere Curtains of Our Eyes will be on Argonauta Records, who sent the following update:
WITCHKISS signed to ARGONAUTA RECORDS
Argonauta Records is thrilled to announce a new exciting band in the family: WITCHKISS from the States.
Articulate, elegant and ridiculously heavy, WITCHKISS are part of a growing movement coming out of upstate New York in the world of crushingly loud and punishing music. Built around raw emotion, sonic poetry and a sense of longing for a life lost, there is a haunting majesty to the work of WITCHKISS. These Beacon, NY natives are fusing the sounds of bands like Subrosa, Yob and Isis to craft sounds that contemplates the neverending cycle of life and death.
Their upcoming offering, The Austere Curtains Of Our Eyes is a journey through depressed unrealities, punishing truths, and a sense that something better can be made of this world.
Founded by Scott Prater, a longtime metalhead, and his partner Amber Burns, a veritable novice on drums, this debut release has been a long time in the making. With a line-up completed by the thrilling bass playing of Anthony DiBlasi holding down the bands massive bottom end the Hudson scene is buzzing about these new heavyweights. Building on the interplay between eerie female vocals and crushing growls, the groove driven WITCHKISS can’t help but to fascinate. This is the kind of doom metal that fans of Yob, Cult of Luna, Windhand and True Widow can’t help but to love.
Ready to take on the world with an appetite for constant touring, loud riffs and the passion to tackle just about every festival they can, WITCHKISS understand what it takes to grow in the insular art doom community. With music based on raw and uncomfortable emotions, WITCHKISS are striving to bring their craft to the next level. The Austere Curtains Of Our Eyes will be released ARGONAUTA Records and available from July 13th, 2018.
