Album: Systems - Ghost Medicine

Band: Systems
Album: Ghost Medicine
Label: Unsigned
Year: 2011









Tracklist
01. I. Procession
02. II. Healing Tides
03. III. Witch Ritual
04. IV. Burial
0V. Ghost Medicine (tetradymia canescens)
06. VI. Datura Hallowing
07. VII. Visionary
08. VIII. Unveiled by the Fall
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Systems is a band from Carrboro, North Carolina that plays primarily hardcore-, and metal-, and post-rock-influenced music. One of the premises for the band’s songwriting is the description of certain scenes. For example, the band has played music representative of the winter solstice and season, spring equinox, and desert. Each of these scenes is composed of smaller, isolated scenes.

At the core of Systems' brilliance, at least on the Carrboro band's debut, is the band's ability to navigate the uneven line between thrash and post-rock. Here, these two disparate styles cooperate within a churning, nuanced soundscape, where thrash elements take on a cinematic, lonesome beauty. Post-rock has rarely sounded so rightfully oppressive.

As such, Ghost Medicine is one complex document, an anxiety-inducing and supremely dark album about the inevitability and totality of death. In these 41 minutes, brief periods of soaring triumph only make the general state of cathartic terror that much heavier. It all starts gently enough, with an ambient invocation familiar to fans of Mono or Explosions in the Sky. The band subverts the slow-blooming form by replacing familiar, euphoric post-rock tones with nervy, diminished chords. "Now our ship will sink," Cameron Zarrabzadeh rasps in a shriek that approximates black metal. Subsequently, the record gets obsessively heavy and mean.

For Ian Creath and Drew Wallace/ continued dosing/ of one sacred root," Zarrabzadeh screams as the music hits its turbulent crescendo during "Datura Hallowing." "Until I'm through/ coughing up and learning/ from their ghosts." Both Ghost Medicine and Datura Hallowing are names for southwestern plants: the former is used in native medicine to help deal with loss, while the latter is a dangerous natural hallucinogen. Through this lens, the opening chant of "datura/ datura" takes on new menace and meaning, as if the fatal drug itself is calling its new victim.

Is this post-thrash? Systems draw from all over the heavy spectrum to create a sound that has the space and atmosphere of a Neurot band but an immediacy that indicates a background in hardcore. Ghost Medicine, the juggernaut full-length to be released this summer, pits harsh black metal roars against haunted baritone countermelodies, all atop a tempest of doom and death metal that threatens to drop the floor out with its bassy heft.

Systems carry this dark catharsis to the end. Closer "Unveiled by the Fall" approaches epic release and perhaps redemptive resolution. A Red Sparowes-style progression marches toward an implied conclusion, but it's repeatedly interrupted by guttural screams and bass-heavy, math-metal churn. Midway through one of these parts, the song and album simply stop. For a record about death and grief, it's a fitting, devastating end.

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Album: Scientist - Scientist

Band: Scientist
Album: Scientist
Label: Unsigned
Year: 2013








Tracklist
01. Au (79/196.97)
02. Ti (22/47.867)
03. O (15.999)
04. Kr (36/83.80)
05. Pb (82/207.2)
06. h2o (18.152)
07. Co2 (1.1/44)
08. Os (76/190.23)
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Scientist is an experimental noise metal act from Chicago, Illinois formed in 2011. Scientist exists from the "ashes" of such groups as Profound Lore artist YAKUZA, (still active), FIREISBORN and RAISED ON ZENITH featuring Eric Plonka (guitar/vox), Justin Cape (drums) and Patrick Auclair (bass). With a wide range of influences, Scientist's goal to compose music that challenge them artistically while remaining accessible to their audience has been an interesting journey.

You will find some unconventional "metal" instrumentation on Scientist's first effort like, saxaphones, piano and lap steel guitars and they make it work. 

Starting originally as a two piece band by Plonka and Cape (and having actual results) and having played many, many shows for over a year, they then decided to add Auclaire for that missing "something". 

Refreshed and looking forward, and having just recorded with Sanford Parker (Buried at Sea, Nachtmystium, Corrections House) featuring guest appearances by Stavros Giannopoulos from Atlas Moth, Bruce Lamont from Yakuza, Jeff Lyman from Dead Sheriff and Sanford Parker.

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Album: Russian Circles - Memorial

Band: Russian Circles
Album: Memorial
Label: Sargent House
Year: 2013








Tracklist
01. Memoriam
02. Deficit
03. 1777
04. Cheyenne
05. Burial
06. Ethel
07. Lebaron
08. Memorial
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Perhaps the most immediately apparent characteristic of the fifth RUSSIAN CIRCLES album, Memorial is its wide range of emotion. Vacillating from somber-yet-soaring melodies on one track to pummeling metal heft on the next, Memorial sounds like an album with split personalities. Where one song showcases guitarist Mike Sullivan, drummer Dave Turncrantz and bassist/keyboardist Brian Cook’s mastery of lush melancholic melody, the next exhibits their most abrasive underground metal leaning sound, with washed-out 16th-note riffs and crushing rhythms. The band’s penchant for endless hooks remains a constant, but Memorial embodies their most dramatic ranges in tone. In search of such a streamlined sound, the trio focused on each individual song having its own emotional and musical characteristics. As such, Memorial almost feels like stages of grief. That notion might be aided by the album’s clever structuring, in which it ends in the same place as it starts, and special guest vocalist Chelsea Wolfe lending her hauntingly somber vocals to the album closing title track.

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Album: This Will Destroy You - Live In Reykjavik, Iceland

Band: This Will Destroy You
Album: Live In Reykjavik, Iceland
Label: Magic Bullet Records
Year: 2013








Tracklist
01. A Three Legged Workhorse
02. There are Some Remedies Worse Than the Disease
03. Black Dunes
04. Burial on the Presidio Banks
05. Glass Realms
06. Communal Blood
07. Quiet
08. They Move on Tracks of Never-Ending Light
09. Little Smoke
10. The Mighty Rio Grande
11. Threads
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11 gorgeous live versions of the band’s material spanning across Young Mountain, S/T, and Tunnel Blanket. All songs were performed and recorded at Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Issued as a triple LP, double CD, and digital, you can now hear 

THIS WILL DESTROY YOU in a far more textured and visceral live environment.

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Album: Lehnen - I See Your Shadow

Band: Lehnen
Album: I See Your Shadow
Label: Cloud Contact Records
Year: 2013








Tracklist
01. Death Angel 
02. Eighty Years 
03. Acceptance 
04. Thomas 
05. I See Your Shadow 
06. Breathing Machines 
07. Draw What You Know 
08. Figures 
09. Take Me Home 
10. Deadhymn
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Two Americans, two Austrians that make loud, beautiful music.
Loudness next to tranquility: Opposites find their way together here, and through the many expanded classic rock line-up elements, find their way into the big picture. Conservative electronics and synthesizers play as important of a roll as accordion or glockenspiel, not to mention the often multi-layered vocals. 
“Diverse” is a word that frequents the subconscious while listening to Lehnen; something that is due, no doubt , to the eclectic listening tendencies of the four band members: from Post-Rock and Post-Hardcore, to a variety of electronic music, all the way to classic Indie-Rock and Folk, which in the end adds up to a sum that is worth more than each of the individual parts.

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Video: Kyte - You & I

Album: Gnosis - So Above So Below

Band: Gnosis
Album: So Above So Below
Label: Self Released
Year: 2013








Tracklist
01. Forever A Stranger
02. Cosmic Release
03. Remembrance Of Things Past
04. Ketamine
05. What Have We Become
06. Drifting Into The Deep
07. The Far Side Of The World
08. A Distant Light
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So Above So Below is a musical outflow that is unbroken and yet is made of infinite patterns. A sound that’s so comforting and yet each time you listen, its a different experience. Where the smallest of matter is engaged into rhythmic motion. A sound where words lose meaning and thought becomes one. Where sound can have so much emotion. Where a single instrument becomes a symphony. Where a sound can drown you. Where the sound can capture an entire moment and yet may fade into nothing. Something that is living, but which also embraces end of existence. Of countless things in a single moment. Of every moment in a single thing.

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