01. A Shrine to Madness
02. Moonlight Equilibrium
03. On Stirring Seas of Salted Blood
04. Conspiring With the Damned
05. The Window
06. Carbonized in Cruciform
07. Den of the Piquerist
08. Malenchantments of the Necrosphere
09. The Grave Robber’s Work
10. The Raven
11. Great Burning Nullifier
12. Blood in the Ink
[6/17/2011]
[Metal Blade Records]
The Black Dahlia Murder have been one of the most prominent and loved American death metal bands since the release of their first major record, Unhollowed, back in 2003. They released Miasma in 2005, a record considered their best work by many of their fans. After releasing two very successful records after Miasma, entitled Nocturnal and Deflorate, the band has released Ritual. How does it fare, you say? My answer: it’s the best material they’ve ever recorded, and is sure to overtake Miasma as the favorite of many fans.
[Heavy Blog Is Heavy would like to announce its newest writers, Gunnar (DeusExMachina) and Tim (Amnesian). We've already heard from Tim, who reviewed This Time It's War's Terror Plots. Today, Gunnar talks about how he got into metal. Welcome guys! - JR]
I’ve had a very long road down the path to extremely innovative and unique material. The bands I now enjoy include Periphery, Tesseract, Volumes, The Crinn, Son of Aurelius, Shining, Quartered, Between The Buried and Me, and Arsis. However, without the aforementioned bands, I’d still be listening to terrible rap music like I was back in the early days of my existence.
Finding All That Remains is what I really consider to be the beginning of my metal days. I discovered them when they released The Fall of Ideals, an album I’ve considered seminal ever since its release. That band helped me get into numerous other bands, including another one of my old favorites, The Black Dahlia Murder, whom Shannon Lucas had since left to play drums for. This helped me get into metalcore, death metal, melo-death, and black metal. And from there, it was a chain reaction of sorts. With that came Blackened Death, Grind, Mathcore, Progressive, etc.
Thank god I found these bands before All That Remains released Overcome and …For We Are Many. Those albums disappointed me so much. But you know what? I bought them, even though I knew that they were not that good. Because you know why? I still support them. Every time I can. For two reasons.
I find that one of the greatest things about being a music blogger is that it sort of pushes me into being more open minded and observant when it comes to discovering new bands. It has also given me the opportunity to exchange a few words with musicians in bands that I admire.
A reader sent in music suggestions to me at one point, and on his list were Painted in Exile, which were described as being kind of like Between the Buried and Me with more jazz influence. I knew I had to hit that up. Since then, I featured PIE in my first Sumeriancore Sunday post for The Number of the Blog. This captured the attention of their vocalist Robert Richards, with whom I exchanged a few emails.
Painted In Exile – Revitalized
First off, introduce yourself!
My name is Robert Richards. I’m 23 Years old, I’m from Seaford, NY and I’m the vocalist of Painted In Exile.
Painted In Exile’s first EP showed signs of progressive metal, but on Revitalized you guys really went all out, incorporating more clean singing, extended jazz sections, and songs that come close to hitting ten minutes in length. Was this a conscious thing with the band to want to be more progressive or did it just sort of work out in a happy accident?
Well Jimmy, When we got together we were looking to add more clean sections onto ideas that we already had. We had a fairly new member line up so we had a lot of new ideas that we wanted to get out. Everyone wanted to put their two cents in, so it was a semi-conscious effort to make the songs more clean sounding, and at the same time kinda letting the pieces fall where they may.
I understand there’s a full length album in the works?! How’s that coming along? Any cool details you can divulge at this point?
Yes, we are working on a full length as we speak! I’m very excited to be honest with you. Every Sunday we practice and every week James [Murphy--guitar], Eddie [Decesare--drums] & Mr. Lambert [Marc--guitar] show me stuff they have been collaborating on and they keep blowing my fucking mind, pardon the French.
It’s coming along great, I just wish we could pick up the pace a little bit–but we all have jobs and shit, and school, so we are trying our hardest to not let our fans down and drop this album as soon as possible. It’s going to be heavier, faster, slower, jazzier, more poppy and more evil… if that makes sense.
I also saw that you guys filmed your first music video, and in the process you managed to get the police called on you?! Care to spin us a manly yarn about what happened at the beach that day, and how that situation played out?
HA! Yes, we did film our first music video with Andrew Pulaski with Abstrakt Pictures. The day we went to the beach, we thought that we could drive on the sand, cause there were tire tracks all over the sand and no signs saying “no off-roading,” so we drove on the sand and unloaded the equipment and started filming. Then some fucking JERK-OFF, instead of coming to talk to us and say, you know, “What’s going on here?” so we could have explained that we were filming a music video, calls the cops and told them to tell us to leave. So they came down, told us to get the car off the sand, handed out summonses, then tried saying we had to leave. Eddie asked if it was illegal to film there, and they said it wasn’t, so we finished up and left… To be honest, the guy who called the cops is smart, cause if he tried coming over to us like he owned the beach and told us to leave, I probably would have put him in his place.
Conducting From The Grave have been on the road, melting faces on the Facemelter tour with Dying Fetus, Arsis, Misery Index, and Annotations of an Autopsy. While out on tour, they’ve had a new vocalist on board and have been trying out new songs, which can be seen below.
The songs sound good, musically, but I’m not too fond of the new vocalist. I’m looking forward to the upcoming album though, and I’m sure everything sounds tight on there.
CFTG’s new album is due out later this year on Sumerian Records.
Let’s face it, there are way too many scene kids out there ripping off Gothenburg style riffs and throwing in whiny vocals and passing themselves off as a metal band. It’s hard to appreciate melodic death metal anymore (thanks a whole fucking lot, Massachusetts). And then there’s deathcore, a genre cluttered with chugging riffs, breakdowns at every turn, and a general lack of doing anything different.
But that’s not to say there aren’t good bands out there that make use of these musical styles. A lot of bands have their roots in metalcore/deathcore add their own flair of nuance and progressions that make everything seem interesting again. Between The Buried And Me, The Faceless, Arsonists Get All The Girls, August Burns Red; all great -core bands.
Sacramento based metal group Conducting From The Grave are a band that I feel don’t get enough recognition for what they do. They take the melodic death metal sound and add technical flair and subtle progression that makes for a great listening experience. I had to opportunity to interview their guitarist John Abernathy to discuss the music scene, their upcoming album, and future plans for CFTG.
For those that don’t know, who are you and what do you do?
I’m John Abernathy. I play guitar for Conducting From the Grave mainly, but also recently joined Embrace the End and a small local band with a kid I was giving guitar lessons to called Aurelia.
To me, it’s refreshing to hear you guys. I mean, you’re smack in between deathcore and metalcore, which have been getting fairly boring in the last few years. It seems that you take the good aspects of both and you make something that stands out from the rest of the mediocrity. Do you have any comments on the scene in general?
Thanks man! I don’t have much to say on the “scene” but as far as those two genres go I definitely think its very flattering to hear someone say they think we are doing something a cut above the rest because that definitely is what we strive for. That is definitely my biggest complaint about the genres or “scene” of both metalcore and deathcore is that they are so watered down with shit generic bands yet it definitely seems like kids going to shows support some of these other bands (I’m not gonna name names) far more than they are willing to support us. We don’t sit around writing like “man bro this next breakdown is gonna be soooo br00(00×10)tal, kids are gonna mosh soo hard bro!” we try to just be passionate about writing some killer riffage that’s progressive and forward thinking and structuring it in a cohesive manner that makes sense (like put breakdowns where they will be good for the song as a whole, not just filler for kids to mosh to), whereas it seems like there are so many no talent assclown bands out there that just play breakdown after breakdown after breakdown.
Are you familiar with the term “Sumeriancore?” If so, how do you feel about that label and it being applied to CFTG?
hahaha a while back some girl commented our myspace saying “you guys sound great, but you are on Sumerian, where are the polyrhythm breakdowns?” To which I responded “Well we have been a band for longer than Sumerian has been a label and we have always just written the music we would want to hear and that is fun for us to play.” So in essence it doesn’t make much sense to lump us in that category, we were playing progressive off time metal with sweeps and whatnot back in 2003, we are just fortunate that Sumerian recognized us for what we do and wanted to sign us. We definitely don’t compromise who we are as a band to fit some stereotype of what our label wants, but I think the material on our upcoming album does have a more modern sound since all 11 tracks were written in a few months as opposed to the last album which was songs spanning over 5 years of writing. Thus our influences have changed over time since we are constantly growing as musicians, but I think we definitely still have our own touch to the sound as you said in your first question that hopefully will set us apart from the pack.
The Black Dahlia Murder
Finding All That Remains is what I really consider to be the beginning of my metal days. I discovered them when they released The Fall of Ideals, an album I’ve considered seminal ever since its release. That band helped me get into numerous other bands, including another one of my old favorites, The Black Dahlia Murder, whom Shannon Lucas had since left to play drums for. This helped me get into metalcore, death metal, melo-death, and black metal. And from there, it was a chain reaction of sorts. With that came Blackened Death, Grind, Mathcore, Progressive, etc.
