New playlist: Mad Cravin'

Time for another heavy, math-y mix on 8tracks.com. I call this one Mad Cravin'. Remember the Crazy Craving monster from the Honeycomb commercials?

We start with some heavy alt rock by new French band TACKLEBERRY, the opening track from their self-titled album.

Next is a new one from Seattle's Helms Alee, whom I'd heard a few times before. Their new album is called Sleepwalking Sailors. This track, "Fetus. Carcass." starts out sounding a little thin, but it soon gets a bit massive.

Italian band The Glad Husbands are up next with a track called "The Day He Made Up His Mind." It has a classic math rock sound with spoken word and groaning vocals. [EDIT: Turns out this release is a year-and-a-half old. Oops.]

Next is a new Canadian band called Dynomite Broad with "The Kraken," from their self-titled album. They're pretty talented, and parts of this song have kind of a math-y reggae feel. I dig it.

Things start getting a little heavier with the band Claw Marks American and a post-hardcore song called "Able Bodied." The playlist gets a little shouty from this point.

After that is Chicago's The Calm Before with more post-hardcore from a split with another band called I Made You Myself.

Then we return to Italy with heavy metal band Warknife and a song called "The Infected Enigma" from their second album, Amorphous.

That's followed by a band with only one song on Bandcamp, a Norwegian groove/thrash/death metal band called Abode. The tune is called "King," and yes, it rules. Their forthcoming EP is called Self-Inflicted Damage.

After that is Baltimore's SwampHög with a mid-tempo sludge metal song called "Dead Reckoning."

And we wrap it up this week with punkier indie math sounds from an Orlando band called Neat Freak. They have a new four-track EP called Too Late. This track, "You're It," ends with a long bit of storytelling. Kind of interesting.

Lots of good stuff here, but I didn't find anything exciting enough that I'd want to hear it all the time. But this mix will be great for an intense workout.

I won't be making a mix next week since I'll be on vacation in the Keys all week. Back in March.

Blast from the past: Keelhaul

Here's a great blast from the past:




New 8tracks playlist coming tomorrow!

New Playlist: Empire of the Eaten Sun

My new playlist on 8tracks this week is called Empire of the Eaten Sun. You can play it in the sidebar. It's named after the bad guys in one of my favorite new webcomics, Mega Hyper Ecchi Overload Groperion, by Andy Pinkard. I'm a big fan of Pinkard! Comix, possibly the biggest. When I went to look for an image to go with my mix, I found out that a green lion eating the sun is an alchemy symbol from the Middle Ages, I guess. I wonder if Pinkard knew that.

I just realized that this comic has its own soundtrack on 8tracks, made by Pinkard. 

All the tracks on my playlist were released on Bandcamp in the last couple of weeks, as usual. My playlists often get a little weird, but this one's more off the beaten path than usual.

EEPEETOO by Steady States

We start off with the afore-promised tracks from Steady States and Edgecrusher. I'm really liking this Steady States band from Kansas City, which is not to be confused with the much more popular Steady States of England. These guys plays heavy, mathy noise rock with just enough twang to get me really fired up. Love it. I chose a track called "Whitecaps."

Edgecrusher's new single "Undertaker" is dark groove metal with a big southern drawl. I've never heard such sounds from Russia before. Pretty impressive.

UI is a one-man metal act out of Oakland, as far as I can tell. His new single "Teknatura" puts death metal vocals against a progressive noise metal backdrop. It's dark and interesting, but it's a bit quiet compared to the rest of the playlist.

We get a lot louder with the new single from Texas five-piece Can't Kill the Ugly, "Verse One." I'm pretty sure this is a new release, even though it's a bonus track on their 2012 album. I think they probably stuck it on there very recently, since that album was only put on Bandcamp in the last week or so. This is powerful southern metal with yelling vocals and plenty of changes and riffs. It's great.

Then we get super loud with a track from Florida's Vileplume, an experimental garage band that just put out a three-track demo called Weaving Out Of. I don't include many demos in my playlists, but this one's pretty cool, if a tad raw. I find the track "Hialeah SuRf?GnarGnar" hard to describe. It's three minutes of punky instrumental craziness, like Hella on acid. Just take a listen.

That's followed by a heavier track called "veglia opaca" from a new Italian band called Squieti on their new album Impronte Nella Cenere. It's fairly basic post-hardcore, but I dig it.

Then we get a little crazier with some chaotic hardcore from a new Baltimore band called Neck First. They have a five-track release called I Can Feel My Skin Crawl, and I chose the last track, "Thread Through."

We stay on the hardcore path with a seemingly comics-inspired Massachusetts duo called Frank Castle., which always ends with a period. It's pretty hardcore.

Then things get especially weird with a Canadian act calling themselves Mr. Guelph. Their track "Landscape Destruction" starts fast and noisy, and then they stop and wax poetic before falling silent and then suddenly launching into more chaos. Truly crazy stuff from a three-track demo called & His Profligate Sons.

 Then we go a little electronic industrial with Induxcorp and their self-titled demo track. I really went crazy with the demos this week. Induxcorp are from Mexico, and they make dark instrumental sounds with a technical, progressive edge. I can't really tell how this was made, but it's cool.

We finish it off with a Turkish five-piece called Kinesis and a track called "Kireç." This is nice, heavy math rock with sung vocals, and I dig it a lot. Their new five-track release is called Lavdanom, and the cover art rocks.

The last one might be my favorite release of the week, followed closely by Steady States.

Enjoy!

New goodies you gotta hear.

Oh man. I included a track by a new French math/punk/rock band called Mammouth a couple of weeks ago, and then I just forgot about them. I heard them again yesterday, and I'm listening to them now, and this band is really great. They have two short songs with vocals and the rest are instrumentals, including a fourteen-minute burner, on their seven-track album called Mortis Missouri (love that title). You gotta check 'em out. I'm gonna be listening to these guys for years. Here's the album closer.



Also I want to give a shout-out to a very impressive solo musician who seems to be on a huge creativity binge lately. Marcos "Mimic" Meza, a.k.a. RawSteak, of California makes instrumental metal, largely of the progressive sludgy kind, all by himself, and it's the type of work that makes me really envious. You never know which direction he's gonna go, and it all flows extremely well. And he's putting new stuff out so fast I can barely keep up. Two full albums in January. Yeah. And they're amazing. Really nice guy when I talk to him online, too. I've put two of his songs on my 8tracks playlists already, but here's an even newer one, the title track from his new album DeathCrawl.

KC's Steady States

I found a nice KC rock band on Bandcamp today called Steady States. Dumb name, but a pretty cool noisy and creative band with a genuine rock 'n' roll sound. They have two EPs, one from 2011 and one from last weekend called EEPEETOO. I think they need help naming stuff, but you can't fault their sound. Added to this week's playlist!

Two great 2012 releases

Two releases from 2012 I'm adding to my collection after hearing about 30 seconds of each on Bandcamp:

Can't Kill the Ugly - Reality Slips EP

Powerhouse southern metal from East Texas




Edgecrusher - Damagemaker

Angry groove metal from Kaliningrad, Russia










Can't wait to drive my Expedition really fast with these tunes pumping in my speakers. I'll be including brand new tunes from both of these bands in this week's 8tracks playlist.

I'm back...with ninjas

So, after a nearly three-year absence, I'm thinking about trying to write about music again. I'm not even listening to the same kind of music that I was three years ago. Nowadays I'm really into southern metal and heavy math rock, in equal measure. And I've been making playlists of new tunes on 8tracks.com every week, so the title of this blog is even more fitting now than it was before.

The plan for now is just to write whatever I want about any kind of music, whenever I want. I'm challenging myself to write at least once a week.

Today I just want to promote my most recent playlist on 8tracks.com, which happens to be my 40th. I started the weekly playlist last July 4th. I get all the new tunes from Bandcamp.com. It's mostly artists I've never heard of, but I find great stuff there all the time. My new playlist, like most of them, is a mix of southern metal, stoner metal, math rock, and mathcore. That's just what I do. It's great music for working out or driving.

For this week's playlist theme I chose the anime Naruto, but in the future. I've been thinking of ideas for a future novel I might write someday, and one idea I had was "No Country for Old Naruto"...I won't bother explaining it, but I decided to make it the theme of my playlist. I did a search for an image and found an awesome painting on DeviantArt of the two central characters of Naruto as older men with mustaches, returning to their village arm in arm after years of absence. It was perfect. And nearly every tune I had chosen, before I even picked the theme, had a title that seemed to fit this theme perfectly. So it turned out to be one of my best playlists. I ended up calling it No Country for Old Ninjas.

The only band I'd heard of before was The Last March of the Ents, from Phoenix, and only because I had chosen them for another playlist months ago. Their new track "Blood of the Giver," released four days ago, is pretty awesome and is one of my favorites this week. It's a creative hardcore punk tune with lots of shouting. I'm not sure what I find appealing about it, except that it has lots of energy and just feels novel somehow.

I'm no music writer, but if I can help some of these bands get noticed, I'm happy to try. So check 'em out if that sounds interesting to you. They've been releasing music for a few years, including an EP last July 4th called The Ever Distorting. So yeah, they were actually one of the first bands I heard when I started making these playlists.

Here's a link to No Country for Old Ninjas. Maybe these blog posts will get better. Here's hoping.