CYNABARE URNE, MORA PROKAZA Among Gimme Metal's Top Track of the Week

Gimme Metal Program Director Brian Turner delivers the week's top 5 office buzz-worthy tracks.

CYNABARE URNE – Hidden In the Higher Light

Admirable amount of songcraft to go hand in hand with these Finns' take on death metal. At times billowing slow and smoky circles, a generous nod to history envelops this dark music while still making its own stride to define something unique and drawing from many avenues.

LIE IN RUINS – Earth Shall Mourn

While their new Dark Descent label EP clocks in at less than half an hour, Finland's Lie in Ruins strings together all its tracks as a 'death metal opus' of sorts to keep things relentless. Frothing at the mouth intensity, surging waves of melody behind the wall of grimness punctuated by explosive guitar solo outbursts and completely throttling drums.

MORA PROKAZA – Madonna

When you take a Belarusian band like this and saddle them with the tag 'extreme avant garde black metal' you're pretty much opening the door to speculations and conceptions and misconceptions about the true meaning of metal, who's cvlt and who's not, etc. The duo of Farmakon and Hatestorm have shaken up any formulaic approach, injected real eastern European darkness and created something evolutionary, otherwordly, sometimes abstract and always strange, and do it well.

HELLFEKTED – Method of Destruction

Loving the sick guitar tone in their trio out of the UK Midlands, deeply dirty blackened thrash chaos to whip up a fearsome speaker racket. The physical onslaught is tempered by some good atmospherics: sirens, bells, etc. add color to the scene but overall this is relentless, pit-worthy and true to the cause.

GISM – Death Agonies and Screams

After years of sketchy reissues, Relapse has done up the first official rerelase of the 1983 'Detestation' LP, a landmark slab of music that has turned both punks and metalheads' soft tissue to goop. It's advanced state of being is rooted in so much of what we'd see from GISM's native Japan later in the 90's and beyond: total meld of stylistic approaches into a nuclear reactor of industrial, thrash, speed, glam and more, regurgitating everything at breakneck speed while still leaving the space within to give you the notion that this is some really thought-out, experimental craziness going on. Vocalist Sakevi Yokoyama certainly had some side stories of public violence and erratic antics but commands this fierce unit with unhinged authority and this debut still stands up with some of the most advanced aggressive sounds of today (and beyond).

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