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!

The Crown
Doomsday King
Century Media

The Crown have returned. After a six year absence, the Swedish death metal band has a new singer (Jonas Stålhammar of God Macabre) and a new album, the colossally brutal statement, Doomsday King. That statement, as best as I can make it, is a steadfast one, a waving, tattered black banner under which a united front of undead, steel-helmeted militia stand tall and hungry, whose demise was nothing more than a self-imposed exile from which they could choose to rise at any time. Well, the time is now; the front-line swells, sharpened scythes are held high, the victor’s spoils waiting to be plucked from the night sky amidst flying blood and angel’s screams. Perhaps driven by the desire to erase their absence from our collective conscious all together, the resurrected Crown strike with obvious purpose, unleashing a relentless slaughter of death thrash that sounds ultimately more sinister than anything they’ve done before. It isn’t, of course. It just sounds that way because it’s been so long, but there does seem to be a slight shift away from the motor-driven death n’ roll of previous albums, probably because they’ve turned off the long highway through Hades and now it’s time to kill…and eat like kings.

Listen to “Age of Iron” from Doomsday King!

Souvenir’s Young America
The Name of the Snake
Init Records

Souvenir’s Young America hollow out a small part of your mind in order to separate themselves from the dense din of all the instrumental post-rock and experimental metal out there, and in that crater they lay something so remarkably vast, so terribly scary, that a mere whisper of its presence alerts you to your certain doom. Not that the Virginia band’s latest album, The Name of the Snake, is abundantly evil, it’s just that it exudes a numbing solitude that borders on hallucination desolation. The four songs laid down here (you get three bonus tracks from their September Songs EP as well if you happen to have the CD) moan like a five-hundred-year-old desert wind, beat on the old, dry, cracked earth like a chain-gang of ghosts, and lead you on a callous, lonely walk through the valley of the shadow of death. The star of this album, however, is the harp. The heavy momentum on “Water (Forgetting the Past),” “Vanishing (Remaining),” and “Amnesia (A Victor’s History)” isn’t disrupted by the haunting harmonica that calls you home with a totem’s tongue; instead they work together in some kind of brazen, taunting harmony. The backwoods brass and cowboy harmonica of “Dust (Erasing the Future),” the album’s commandeering ballad, is for outlaws only, and captures the spirit of wide open, starry nights and circling, hungry vultures. Again, the dichotomy of hope and desperation abounds. You don’t get the same old epic, aural sound scape with SYA that you do with other bands of their ilk. What you get instead is the distinct, suffocating, and palpable feeling that the end is near. Deep, awesome stuff.

Listen to “Vanishing (Remaining)” from The Name of the Snake!