Deftones are gearing up for the release of their upcoming album Diamond Eyes, and  releasing their next single. “Diamond Eyes” March 15th via Amazon. A short sample of the song can be heard below.

Diamond Eyes [Sample]

This sounds fucking great. This is shaping up to be a surprise hit for 2010.

Diamond Eyes will be out May 18th.

- JR

Spanish brutal death metal band Wormed have thrown their new demo/promo CD out on the internet for you to hear. If you are unfamiliar with the band, their style of brutal death is very distinct. The guitar work on the first album Planisphaerium was muddied in the mix, while Phlegeton’s crazy angry frog vocals slurred away against a solid rhythm section. The brutality achieved by the band was purposeful and didn’t feel forced. The debut full length had a few unexpected sections, such as a very post-rock section in the song “Geodesic Dome”. All the riffs were masterfully constructed with a odd timing and sound. This bizarre sound is continued on the demo Quasineutrality with a early Immolation sounding structure. Peep the new songs “Uncolored Plasma Orifices Transported” and “Undeciphering the Inquantificability” on their myspazzzzz.

-MW

The new album from highly recognized black metal band Darkthrone is all up on the tubes. If you’re not familiar with Darkthrone, their early material is 2nd wave bm which was at the forefront of the movement. Their more recent work, however, is a throw back to 1st wave with the huge punk and thrash influences. Peep this awesome stuff.

-MW

This is a good thing. I didn’t like it when they tried too hard to be 80s metal.

I haven’t been following Trivium in the last little bit, so I don’t know if Matt went back to screaming most of the time or not, but his screams are turning more into lower growls apparently. I like it. It’s definitely a step up.

“Shattering The Skies Above” is from the God Of War 3 soundtrack EP God of War: Blood & Metal, which also features Dream Theater, Opeth, Killswitch Engage, and Taking Dawn. The soundtrack is available with purchase of God Of War 3: Ultimate Edition, which sells for about $100. It’s due out in March.

- JR

Previews for the new and highly anticipated Burzum album Belus are now available on Amazon as small clips for each song. I was pretty skeptical of it actually being Burzum at first, but you can look up the lyrics and they match with what Varg posted on burzum.org

Burzum Belus Preview

Shit is sounding cash money and I can’t wait.

-MW

Every now and then I just kinda feel like things are getting stagnant. I wouldn’t say I was getting bored with the music scene, but sometimes I crave a new sound and I just want to be enthralled by something I haven’t heard before. Luckily, I came across Norway’s SHINING.

Not to be confused by the blackened emo Swedish band by the same name (he says as he alienates a portion of his audience), SHINING play a style of music that amalgamates jazz fusion, black metal, and industrial. Some of you may cringe at the thought, but this blend of genres makes for a truly engaging and challenging listen.  The music is weird, but sometimes weird is good; and with Blackjazz, weird is spectacular.

The music is abrasive in nature, although it wouldn’t take a genius to come to that conclusion by the album’s title alone. The first few tracks, “The Madness and Damage Done” and “Fisheye“, make heavy use of fuzzy distorted guitars and vocals with synth accompaniment; Shining wear the industrial influence on their sleeves. As with anything jazz related, expect odd time signatures and changes in meter. Don’t expect to be turned off if you think this will be too hard of a listen, however, as a lot of the synth lines and guitar riffs are catchy and memorable, serving as hooks. In “Fisheye“, we get our first taste of saxophone, played by vocalist/guitarist Jorgen Munkeby, who also played sax in Ihsahn’s After, which I praised as the first great album of 2010.

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The only thing I cared about is their cover of “Cars” with Gary Numan. The rest is just meh. I know they were influential and whatever, but I honestly don’t get why everyone’s popping e-boners over the “reunion”. I’ll just listen to Strapping Young Lad (which features half of the members of the current FF lineup) and Meshuggah, who did that whole industrial death metal/chuggy thing better, if you can call Fear Factory death metal.

Not only is the sound generally aged and boring, but to listen you have to navigate through the clunkiest site I’ve had to endure in a long while. You need a Facebook account to listen, and you have to unlock tracks by leaving comments spamming your friends on Facebook and Twitter. I listened to opening track “Mechanize” and gave up, because fuck that noise. Snap judgments are too damn easy.

If you still care, here it is. Meh.

- JR

New Cynic song, live unfortunately.

It’s even less metal than Traced in Air, but it’s fucking good.

-MW

I say this because Dillinger Escape Plan Fansite Spreading Like Wings reports that over the weekend, teasers of every track from DEP’s upcoming album Option Paralysis have hit the net (which you can listen to below), along with a track by track review at Rocksound.

These teasers have got me pumped up for OP even more than I already was. It features everything I’d want in a Dillinger album: Chaos, jazzy shred, and Faith No More influenced rocking melodicism. If they can make an album half as good as 2007’s Ire Works, then I’m sold. However, judging on what I’ve heard so far, it’s going to be up on that level, if not greater.

Option Paralysis is due out March 22nd, and I can’t fucking wait.

- JR

But then again, did they ever? It’s a new song from Korn. Supposedly it’s not mixed yet, but who can tell? This shit is seriously awful even by their standards.

Terrible vocals, the bass isn’t bass, bad drum lines with no creativity, and mediocre riffs (though I like the guitar tone admittedly).

Eugh.

-MW

Spawning from Auburn, Californa Dismal Lapse are a technical death metal band who have just put out their first full length titled Eon Fragmentation. For the most part, it’s pretty straight forward technical death metal. If I had to describe their sound from other bands they’d be between Necrophagist and Severed Savior. There are some rare appearances by jazz influenced and clean sections here and there, but overall it’s just killer technical death metal to remember. The riffs don’t get lost in over-technicality and it’s quite head bangable if you catch my drift. Since this is a debut by a not so well known band, I figure some details are in order. The band is a three piece with Chris Banrum on drums/vocals, Jason Brehm on bass, and Evan Gravatt on guitar. A big sound for a three piece band. The guitar grinds, and the bass is fragile, smooth, yet still heavy. Chris Banrum blasts away keeping the album steady while delivering an excellent vocal performance. This album is just really solid material, and I’d listen to it any day before some shitty ass “prog” that’s really just wank in disguise.

3.5/5

http://www.myspace.com/dismallapse

-MW

One of my favorite brutal death/technical death bands Defeated Sanity has posted a track from their upcoming album Chapters of Repugnance on their myspace page. It’s nothing groundbreaking, but shit damn is it good.

The new album will be released April of this year, so get excited for that shit because it’s going to be beast mode engage.

Check the song Carnal Deliverance out here, at their myspace.

http://www.myspace.com/defeatedsanity

-MW

If you aren’t familiar with the band Aborted for some stupid reason, they were a generic death metal/goregrind band that put out some pretty good material in their early career (the albums Purity of Perversion and Engineering their dead mostly).  Their later work is just pseudo core metal on the edge of deathcore. Also known as, it’s terrible. I heard rumors their new EP Coronary Reconstruction was actually good. False as Mastodon’s Crack the Skye.

I’ve been waiting for Aborted to hopefully make a turn back to their old roots, and I was promised that with this.  It’s not even close, but I can see some hope in there still. It’s the same thing over and over, no memorable songs or riffs at all. The production is pretty damn crap too. This isn’t much of an in depth review, because this album doesn’t have enough depth to it to drown someone.  Eugh.

One decent band turned shitty, out of five.

-MW

Guy with big hair = gone.

Hell if I know how many different singers Periphery have through so far. They haven’t even put out an album yet and they’ve had three or four different vocalists on board. I don’t know when previous vocalist Chris Baretto was dropped, but when listening to the new album sampler posted on MySpace, I noticed the singing was different. Specifically, in the clip of “Light”, the new vocalist is hitting notes a whole fucking octave higher than the version recorded with Baretto.

The new vocalist is Spencer Sotelo, and I think I’m liking his voice better than Baretto’s. Periphery’s debut album is shaping up to be one of the most anticipated albums of the year. It will be out on Sumerian Records April 20th.

Again, check out the sampler on Periphery’s MySpace and get excited!

- JR

Carving out a niche of their own in a genre filled with Meshuggah clones, London based experi-metal group Cyclamen is making a name for themselves with a fanbase growing by the day. Cyclamen boasts a repertoire featuring both mathcore chaos and technical aggression to the seemingly polar opposite with post-rock atmospheres and calming beauty in a genre I like to call post-djent.

I swapped emails with Cyclamen mastermind Hayato Imanishi for Heavy Blog Is Heavy’s first ever interview to gain some insight to the world of Cyclamen.

Revenge-of-the-Geeks1.mp3

A quick Google search for Cyclamen leads one to find out that a Cyclamen is a flower. What inspired you to name your project after a flower?

Cyclamen is pronounced “Shikuramen” in Japanese, and since “Shi” means death and “Ku” means suffer in Japanese, so even though it’s a pretty flower it’s a taboo to give it in some occasion, like to people who are in a hospital. Also its “Hanakotoba” (translates to “flower word” – In Japanese culture, pretty much every flower has some sort of meaning and it’s important to know the meaning when you are giving flowers to someone) changes according to its colour. Red means “Envy”, white means “Innocence”, for instance.
I thought Cyclamen was fitting name because my music isn’t restricted in one genre – it could be aggressive (e.g. Revenge of the Geeks) or beautiful (e.g. Senjyu) or both in one song (e.g. Never Ending Dream) depending on what songs need to express certain emotion I am aiming to translate via music.

I remember reading on the Cyclamen MySpace a while back that Cyclamen basically started out because you missed your favorite band, Sikth, and wanted to write music in the same vein as them. In light of this, getting the attention of [Sikth vocalist] Mikee Goodman must have been a surreal experience for you, to say the least. How did this collaboration come about and how did it go down?

It was very valuable experience to work with such an awesome and creative vocalist, but since we both are perfectionists we ended up exchanging mails for about 3 months until the final version was made! He was very open to my opinion and understood what I wanted – Awesome guy all around and was real pleasure to work with him. Everyone should check out his new band The Painted Smile, it’s very different from SikTh but still very exciting : )

Sleep-Street.mp3

As time moved on, Cyclamen started to sound less like Sikth and started sounding more like its own thing. Was this a conscious decision or was it just an organic change that happened as writing progressed?

It may sound selfish, but I always write music just for myself. At that time I really needed SikTh-esque tech metal, but right now I am enjoying more post-rock (MONO, This Will Destroy You) and pop (The Ting Tings, B’z (Japanese rock duo)) so that probably reflects to what I write. I am sure once I get enough of these music I will write songs with different influences. But I think there is always certain Cyclamen sound that stays in every song I write – And I always make sure they are good songs obviously haha

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