This Week's Recommended New Releases...

This week's recommended new releases (07/01/14):
[Click on band name for samples and more info]

Desecration - Cemetery Sickness (Metal Age)

The Welsh trio returns with their 8th full-length album and first since 2008. By now, you know what to expect from Desecration, but that doesn’t make the output any less fantastic. Short songs with ridiculous titles, brutal death metal riffage and pounding double bass drums are the main ingredients. The vocals are typically fashioned in the standard guttural death metal style, but the band sounds in top form when the singer crosses over to a screechy vocal style reminiscent of the later Death albums. It’s nice to hear some solid death metal these days that stands out from the tired 1993 format.

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Electric Citizen - Sateen (RidingEasy)

The debut album from this Cincinnati band is full of Sabbath-meets-Jefferson Airplane, retro occult rock. Actually, the fuzzed-out riffs owe as much to 60’s California psych bands as they do Sabbath, but the vocals do borrow liberally from the Grace Slick toolbox, especially when the singer drags out those vibrato notes. The drummer nails the retro vibe instead of just bashing away and the few bass runs that appear here and there are fantastic. Catchy stuff, definitely on par with the rest of the female-fronted occult rock revival of the last couple years.

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Trudger - Dormiveglia (COF / Sell Your Soul)

The debut album from these English sludgesters harkens back to the early Mastodon sound with a bit of Neurosis added in. You have a lot of the standard sludge ingredients here, with the  six minute songs, pounding drums and shouted vocals, but Trudger also throws in a couple of instrumentals and varies the pace just enough to keep things progressing throughout the record. There’s a bit of doom and black/death metal here, but this is a sludge record through and through. For anyone looking to get their skull caved in this week, this one’s for you. Strong debut.

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