Todays music selection

I listen to a shit load of music, so here are a few snippets of what I've been listening to lately.

I just got hold of a leak of Mastodons new album, Crack the Skye. Haven’t listened to it very much yet, but it's sounding like they've gotten a lot more proggy and a lot less heavy. Leviathan and Blood Mountain were fucking intense, but compared to them this sounds like something by Dream Theater. On the other hand, I'm hearing a lot of complicated guitar fiddlery, which is always welcome, especially from a band as freaky and unpredictable as Mastodon. I've seen them live three or four times, the last time being with Slayer just before Christmas at the Unholy Alliance 3. They didn't seem to have lost their edge at all, but then again they didn't play any new songs either. SPLIT YOUR LUNGS WITH BLOOD AND THUNDER!


Gama Bomb's latest album, Citizen Brain, is everything I love about thrash. Songs about Robocop, zombies and hitting people with hammers never cease to entertain me, especially when they're played with such speed and tongue-in-cheek ferocity by a bunch of Irish maniacs. Gama Bomb are probably my favorite band from the new wave of thrash, second only to Municipal Waste perhaps. And, it turns out; they also put on an equally incendiary live show. They tore London a new one supporting Exodus and Overkill in February, it's just a shame I missed Torture Squad on before them.


Stabwound, from Necrophagists (I think it's pronounced Necro-fay-jist) album Epitaph, came on while my mp3 player was on random a few weeks ago, and I've been listening to that one song over and over ever since. It's so brutally technical in a way that only a classically-influenced death metal band from the land that brought us the likes of Ludwig van Beethoven (A bit of the old ultra-violence, my brothers?) and Johan Sebastian Bach, could achieve. Another particularly excellent song is Fermented Offal Discharge from their other album, Onset of Putrefaction.


Their new album's out already, but for some reason I don't have it yet. Instead I’ve been listening to a lot of Amon Amarths old stuff, and I reckon their album The Avenger is best. Amon Amarth used to play grind core under the name Scum, and only really found their current melodic sound in the mid 90s, hitting peak with this album in 1999 before slowing things down a bit for their latter releases. Compared to those, this album is a much more raw beast, faster and heavier than Fate of Norns and With Odin On Our Side which seemed to take a deeper and almost melancholy turn (as amazing as they are). Viking warriordom seems to be in great demand at the moment, so maybe the new album will regain some of that berserker ferocity; I'll probably pick it up at the weekend.


Also, I’ve been listening to Amorphis, Bloodbath, Vader, Cannibal Corpse, Turisas, Turmion Katilot, 3 Inches of Blood, Korpiklaani, Fintroll, Primordial, Equilibrium, Immortal, Municipal Waste, Exodus, Testament, Saxon, Destruction, Kreator, Suffocation, Zyklon, Lamb of God, Skyclad, Athiest, Dismember, Desecration... And many more, a lot of which are regular listening staples.


And finally, here's a clip of Exodus. You can't really see, but I'm the guy who crowd-surfs over the barrier at 0:57. The bouncer with the retard hair who pulls me over threatened to throw me out if I did it again. I did it again 20 seconds later.