Today’s listening schedule is much more digestible, only eight albums since Tuesday!
First up is the highly anticipated third album from Veilburner: The Obscene Rite. The songs here can be really hit-or-miss. For example, the single, “Eucharist of the Breathing Abyss”, is great, filled with dissonance and heavy riffs, but others, like “Dilemma Manifestation” almost sound like a Pagan metal song, and I don’t think there’s anything I despise more than this genre of metal. So, in short, some good tracks, some meh tracks, I say you should wait for the full stream before buying or not!
On a wholly different frame of mind, Culture Vulture is an experimental progressive pop band related to blog-favourites Doom Salad. Their newest album, Girls’ Night Out, came out in March of this year. “Girls’ Night on Acid” is most probably the best song on the record, and it’s just fantastic! The other ones are very good too, they just don’t reach the degree of perfection of the third track. It’s a really fun, math-ish pop album complemented with saxophone.
No preview yet for A Constant Knowledge of Death‘s upcoming album, Vol. II: Organic Emotions, but you can listen to Vol. I on their bandcamp, for a general idea. Out on September thirtieth, it’s a good blend of post-metal with hints of blackgaze and atmospheric black metal to it. There is a good variety of songs, too so it’s a bit hard to mention only one genre, but you’ll definitely want to listen to this once it’s streamable!
Listen to Oddland‘s Origin in full on Heavy Blog Is Heavy. Out tomorrow, Origin is a high quality progressive metal album. It’s a Meshuggah-obsessed Haken, or a less atmospheric Leprous. Be sure to check back tomorrow for its release!
Going against the current, Cthulhu Rise doesn’t make it easy to listen to and buy their album. Their bandcamp only shows short previews of the songs and no link to buy it. However, you can buy it on CD Baby. The Second One is a collection of nine opera (plural of opus). This Ukrainian band plays really top notch avant-garde fusion metal, bringing math metal to the jazz world. It’s an improvement on all fronts from their debut album, “42”. Don’t miss them!

The Dear Hunter is back with the fifth instalment of their crazy concept story, and they’re about to equal Coheed & Cambria, which, up to now, have released six albums under the same concept story. Act V: Hymns with the Devil in Confessional is, I have to say, the band’s best work yet. With previous ones, I always had something that made me reluctant to the music on repeated listens. I’m glad to say this is not the case here. The album does fade a bit after “The Moon/Awake”, which is a surprising and delectable first song (after the introduction, that is), but it remains very good throughout!
Directly from Toronto, ART the Band released Boost Unavailable back in February. I think the tag “jazzcore” has rarely been so appropriate. It’s a high-energy jazz full-length with some elements borrowed from math rock and mathcore. I’m really glad I stumbled upon them, and I have to thank bandcamp’s tags for that (and I have to say that something’s coming pretty soon about that!)
And finally, For What It’s Worth, here’s Imbroglio‘s latest album. Out about a year ago day for day, it’s an intense sludgy post-metal with grindcore elements album. The bass is so low and fuzzy, I didn’t know it could do that, but it remains discernable in the mix, thanks to the guitars not getting in its range, timbre and pitch. The two singers give some much appreciated diversity in the vocal department, with both harsh and clean singing. Overall, it’s a powerful and well-executed album that you should get if you didn’t know the band already!