Bezoar
Wyt Deth
No World Order Records

That’s it. You’ve convinced me, Brooklyn. You are now thee number one spot in the world for heavy, weird, fuzzy, psychedelic music. Okay? Hull, Elks, Bad Dream, Weird Owl, Children…and now Bezoar. I’m sure there’s plenty more rats crawling around in the sewers there that I’m not even aware of, but as far as I’m concerned right now, none of ‘em are bigger — or carry more diseases — than Bezoar. I mean, even their name invokes images of a mythical beast from children’s fables, and this three-headed varmint more than lives up to the hairy, red eye scares it promises. Expounding doom-infused wyt noize, Bezoar’s debut full-length, Wyt Deth, is a lumbering mess of feedback and mildewy riffs, a witchy, warbling deth-psych album that’s definitely hard to listen to, but surely impossible to turn off. Whether it’s the short and sweet allure of songs like “Burn Everything” and “Nikola” or the long and devastating hold of songs like “We Are Not Alone” and “Knight,” the whole damn thing is nauseously enchanting, and you might think it sounds like a dungeon full of hungry, dying prisoners moaning for sunlight, water, and mercy, but that’s just Sara Palmquist (bass/vocals), Tyler Villard (guitar), and Justin Sherrell (drums) laying down the most mystical stoner metal you’re likely to hear all year. Awesome stuff.

Listen to Wyt Deth in it’s entirety right here!

Toxic Holocaust
Conjure and Command
Relapse

Metal fans are so particular that Toxic Holocaust’s seemingly innocuous change in logo and cover art (opting for black and white this time around instead of the usual radioactive neon of covers past) nearly started a rash of hangings by bullet belt across the whole of the thrash world, an overreaction not experienced since Metallica took a trip to the barber shop (although something has to explain the music that followed, I suppose). Add to that the fact that Mr. Toxic Holocaust himself, Joel Grind, brought a full band into the studio to help pull off what he usually does alone, and you can pretty much taste the vile panic. But one spin ’round the ol’ graveyard gravel pit and it’s abundantly clear that Toxic Holocaust are as evil and furious as ever before, so I’d urge anyone with any doubts as to Conjure and Command‘s integrity and legitimacy to take their skullets out of the noose, crush a million fucking beer, and mosh their neurotic aggression into oblivion. Every one of the 10 songs here drip with toxicity and disease, a battery of riffs as sharp as wolves’ teeth, and will send you straight into Hell, all clenched fists and burning eyes, on a mission to desecrate the underworld. And don’t worry if you’ve got an old logo patch on your denim jacket when you do, that will just earn you extra desecration cred with the souls of the damned .

Listen to “Bitch” from Conjure and Command!

Howl
Full of Hell
Relapse

Yeah, yeah…I know I’m late with this one by a bunch of months, but I figure I better catch up on all the stuff I missed throughout the year before it’s too late. In fact, most of the reviews from this point forward until the end of the year will probably concern albums that have been out for awhile that, for one reason or another, I never got around to attacking when it mattered. Cue Providence, Rhode Island’s Howl, another big, fat pack of flesh-eating rats in Relapse’s verminous army, which means they’ve got the disease n’ doom down pat. Their debut, Full of Hell, is just that, teeming with ambitiously black riffs and emitting a world-eating belch with the heaviest, most foul stench. True, there’s not much musically that separates the nine songs here, but that hardly matters when they take on this kind of sludge metal groove, chugging and rolling like a mean-ass motherfucker with blood on his boots. An impressively boss full-length debut, and bonus points for the epic Ryan Begley cover art.

Listen to “Gods in Broken Men” from Full of Hell!