New Music Monday: Tellusian and Woccon
Guys, if you’re not regularly visiting NoCleanSinging.com you’re doing it all wrong. For years the site’s proprietor Islander has been a reliable bellwether for lesser known metal bands bubbling up from the underground, both in terms of vindicating my own personal tastes (7 Horns 7 Eyes and Rivers of Nihil are two recent examples that come to mind) and putting new bands on my radar. Not that everything he highlights makes my nethers tingle, but the odds are pretty good relative to any other metal publication.
NoCleanSinging.com is a respectable 2-for-4 with today’s picks. First up we have Tellusian, who I’ve featured on MetalSucks many times before. NCS has the exclusive premiere of “The Collyer Brothers,” a brand new track from the band’s forthcoming album Collision (release date: “sometime in March”). It’s equal parts BTBAM, Gorguts, Intronaut and Cynic, and, well, I’m just gonna let NCS scribe Austin Weber do the talking from here because it’s pretty heady:
The song is a journey that, once it unfolds, reveals an oddball progressive nature nestled inside a ravenous core. Expanding freely from a recurring central riff segment, the song dives into technically complex sludge with death and black metal shards, and sneaks in a luminious instrumental reflection toward the end. “The Collyer Brother” lurches and grinds in perfect yin/yang layering. The monstrous growls, shrieks, and roars of Henrik Ivarson serve to blanket the song with a palpable sense of disgust. Caught up in the whirlwind are carefully balanced hypnotic leads and a warm, delicious bass presence prone to following its own path, all fused to a backbone of pummeling, stop-start drumming hell-bent on destruction.
Stream the track exclusively at NoCleanSinging.com.
Next up we have Woccon, a melodoom band in the vein of Insomnium, Omnium Gatherum, etc that’s not from Finland but… get this… Athens, GA. Together with Daylight Dies (North Carolina) maybe there’s a burgeoning Southeastern melodoom scene we don’t yet know about? Coming soon: metal titans Del Boca Vista, the ultimate in grimness, straight from West Palm Beach! Something about that just seems… off… but when the music is this good, who really gives a shit where the band is from. The new song “Giving Up the Ghost” premiered on Decibel last Friday, was re-posted by NCS today and, now, just for you, is embedded below. New album Solace In Decay will come out this spring.
An earlier version of this post credited Islander as having written the post about Tellusian. It was written by Austin Weber.
