Blog: INVISIBLE ORANGES - THE METAL MP3 BLOG

. . . Death is the end, and so in this series' finale, we'll find out what happens when death metal's brutal and technical side is robbed of power. 1. Suffocation - Breeding the Spawn Spawn is so murky and flat that it's difficult to hear what is going on. It's so bad that it's nearly lo-fi. If pressed, I couldn't even tell someone if the songs were good based on the original album. Sometimes the drums are swallowed up by the guitars, and sometimes they [...]

Napalm Death has been on a decade-plus streak of strong if not spectacular albums: Enemy of the Music Business , Smear Campaign and Time Waits For No Slave among them. That doesn't mean there weren't jitters before they started writing their 14th studio album, Utilitarian . "You always wonder if this is going to be the one where I'm going to get writer's block and not be able to do anything," vocalist Barney Greenway said from England recently. Napalm started recording Utilitarian – named after the John Stuart Mill philosophy [...]

Blaakyum frontman Bassem Deaïbess was born in Beirut in 1977, in the midst of a 15-year civil war. When he was 3, his family left for Qatar, which was relatively peaceful and still under British rule. Despite being a Christian, in Qatar Deaïbess was forced to memorize the Koran and Islamic prayers, was forbidden to wear a cross, and was mocked by other students. Despite the ongoing war, he returned to Lebanon each summer. "Sometimes we'd get stuck in my grandfather's house, since artillery were located few meters away," he says. "The sound of bombshells dropping, and machine [...]

. . . Click here to view the embedded video. The above video is Michael Dafferner's hour-long documentary Why You Do This . Dafferner is the vocalist of the Long Island math-metal band Car Bomb, and his film follows the band on three tours in the late aughties (2007, 2008, and 2009). Why You Do This originally came out in 2010; Dafferner posted it in its entirety to YouTube in December 2011. Why You Do This raises an uncomfortable [...]

. . . Watching Slow Southern Steel as it was screened at Asheville, North Carolina's The Orange Peel a few nights ago, left me with a strange mix of satisfaction and a degree of skepticism. For those unaware, this is a documentary of the Southern metal scene; in particular it is an explanation through interviews and the odd sound clip of where that distinctive Southern Metal sound came from, why it sounded the way it did, and the rationale of the culture behind it. In short, this is a documentary about a regional sound, something [...]

Blood, skulls and crucifixion have been major themes in metal for quite some time; however, I have never seen a band amp up the grim and create an album cover that shows the slitting of Jesus' wrists as the blood pours into a skull. (Not even Cannibal Corpse!) So imagine my surprise when this is the image that greets me on the front of Goatwhore 's new album Blood For The Master , to be released on Valentine's Day. Taking things to the next level of gruesome translates past the artwork on this album and pertains to the music as well. Relentless riffs, blackened thrash [...]

. . . In the third part of this series, we'll cover a classic metal gem, wonder what would happen if a symphonic power metal classic put itself on a diet, and revisit recent history. 1. Judas Priest - Stained Class Numerous modern bands suffer from sterile and synthetic production. I believe it's due to an inability to experiment with tone in the studio because shrinking budgets push bands to record and mix as quickly as possible. Stained Class was an all-analog recording done for [...]

Without retreading what has already been beaten to death here , there , and everywhere else , Black Metal has come a long way. As time marches on we break down the changes into waves, then scenes. USBM, Cascadian Black Metal, Post-Black Metal-they're all outgrowths of what has come before and the way creativity continues to push artists and musicians endlessly forward. As the mainstream media gradually acknowledges Black Metal and its many-headed offspring, it is inevitable that the genre will bleed into other, more commercial styles. And vice-versa. Tonight's show at the Echoplex, in the Echo [...]

. . . In the second installment of this 4-part series, we'll look at some melodeath mistakes, and we'll also mourn a victim of the Loudness War. 1. Amon Amarth - anything recorded before Versus the World Studio Abyss produced the exact same sound on every album from the day it opened to the present day. It's a sound as distinct and unvaried as the infamous Sunlight Sound. The Studio Abyss sound worked for Immortal and Hypocrisy, but it robbed Amon Amarth blind. It didn't do [...]

. . . Cannibal Corpse were writing songs for their twelfth album last spring when guitarist Pat O'Brien got the call of a lifetime: come play for Slayer. O'Brien had written several songs for the upcoming album Torture , but his bandmates weren't about to hold him back. "It happened right in the middle of writing," drummer and founding member Paul Mazurkiewicz said recently. "The first two songs were Pat's songs. He has four songs on the record and got the call [from Slayer] in April. We were in the thick of writing, but we [...]

. . . "Every time a curtain rises, so does the quality of our lives." - Bryan Davis In Steven Rosen's Wheels of Confusion: The Story of Black Sabbath , Tony Iommi recalls having the budget for two days in the studio when recording Black Sabbath's debut album. To put it mildly, the recording situation was less than ideal. With just two days of time, one of which would be used for mixing, the band recorded everything live with few second takes. I think that Black Sabbath [...]

From Ozzfest to Summer Slaughter Tour to Deathfest, many a metal music festival has come to fruition in recent years. But none can promise the excellent combination of doom, drone, sludge, and black metal that will be defacing the ears of audience members at the first-ever Gilead Media Music Festival in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The stacked festival line-up includes low-end masters Loss, Thou, Ash Borer, False, Fell Voices, and many more. And Invisible Oranges is proud to announce that we are officially co-sponsoring the festival! The chaos goes down on April 28th and 29th, and Invisible Oranges will keep your Gilead Fest thirst quenched with updated [...]

"Of course, Neverlands vary a good deal" -J. M. Barrie as quoted by Alan Moore in Lost Girls . Recently, Arthur Von Nagel, via Facebook, linked me to an article on the Metal Pigeon blog about top 10 lists and, among other things, power metal. It's a flawed read, but a critical one. Pigeon takes the blogosphere to task for ignoring genres which receive less critical attention: classic metal and power metal. My associate Mr. Street-Jammer has also returned the importance of power metal to my attention. Though the genre rarely grabs [...]

. . . I saw Kayo Dot when they toured on the back of their second album, Dowsing Anemone with Copper Tongue , at a now defunct dive-bar in Eugene, Oregon, with about a dozen other people in 2006. They ended up staying at my house that evening, and later told me they were unmoved with their performance because they'd got really high before their set, which was apparently not a normal tour ritual for them. Living in Eugene, where everyone is constantly stoned, this struck me as a funny admission. Despite the band's unenthusiastic assessment of [...]

. . . Last fall, I came across a Washington Post profile of endurance athlete Frank Fumich . The piece followed Fumich as he completed an impossible physical feat: the Virginia Triple Iron Triathlon. Yes, you read that correctly. Fumich and 16 others subjected themselves to three consecutive Ironman triathlons. That's 7.2 miles swimming, 78.6 miles running, and 336 miles biking, all told. Most normal humans can't manage even one of these feats, much less all three. The notion of completing them consecutively sets the mind to reeling. Most of the [...]

. . . The fact that Corrosion of Conformity's new album is self-titled makes perfect sense. Thirty years into an expansive and rollercoaster career, Corrosion of Conformity is less a sneer at missing link Pepper Keenan and more a statement about what the band has become. They've done the major label song-and-dance and survived, and markedly changed musical directions more than once, but fans have embraced them throughout it all. Reaction to news of the original trio recording an album was varied, from "It's gonna be Animosity part two!" to "No Pepper? Fuck that." [...]

. . . HEAR XES AND STROKES . . . Click here to view the embedded video. Beaten To Death - "Winston Churchill" . . . Click here to view the embedded video. Beaten To Death - "Xes and Strokes" . . . [...]

Aborted has been around the block. After 16 years, six studio ablums and many, many members, this Belgian band has mastered the art of grindcore seduction, and their latest album, Global Flatline, brings the pain. All of the classic elements of grind are there: slowly elevating intros, squealing guitars, punishing vocals and double bass for days. Recorded in Denmark, a few select guest vocalists make appearances, including Jason Netherton of Misery Index. And as is to be expected, gruesomely apocalyptic cover art is effectively utilized. The album is being released today, but for your chance to win a free copy, tell us in the comments [...]

. . . In black metal, there is always an urge to dwell entirely at one end of the genre or the other—either to create nonstop stampedes of riffy violence and militant Satanism, or to bring together airy clouds of cosmic vapor into spacey musical sprawls. One side has its work cut out for it (to remain interesting within rather rigid limitations), while the other allows for the input of pretty much any outside musical influence. What makes Pestilential Shadows so interesting is their ability to expertly dwell between the two extremes of black metal, channeling an atmospheric [...]

American black metal has experienced exponential growth over the last few years, but in my opinion, the scene reached an apotheosis of sorts in March 2009, with the release of Cobalt's Gin (Profound Lore), an album that truly, viscerally expanded the possibilities of black metal, both musically and thematically. Much of the press dedicated to that album focused on the band's vocalist, Phil McSorley, in no small part due to McSorley's day job: as an officer in the U.S. Army who had done numerous tours in Iraq. But anyone who actually listened to Cobalt's dizzying, assaultive, expansive, groundbreaking [...]