April seems to be the month for extreme music online shopping discounts.  Prosthetic Records has a 15% discount deal on everything in their store from April 3rd - April 8th.  You just need to enter PRMYSPC15 on checkout.  See the Prosthetic Records MySpace page for more details. 

The End Records’s Omega Mailorder also has a couple specials going this month.  There’s a 17.5% sale on Nuclear Blast titles, which amounts to a ton of good, cheap music.  They also have a Roadrunner Records sale, with reduced prices on several Roadrunner releases.  It’s not just a plethora of nu-metal either, lots of old death metal like Deicide, Gorguts, Death and Cynic are part of this deal. 

Check out Musical Warfare’s updated Deals and Discounts page for more great deals on music and merchandise. 

San Francisco atmospheric black metal act Lurker of Chalice is planning a reissue of its highly sought-after debut album through Southern Lord Records.  "Lurker of Chalice" was originally an extremely limited-edition, hand-numbered release, and has long been sold out.  The reissue will come as a digipak and will feature a bonus track previously found only on the vinyl edition.  The release date for "Lurker of Chalice" is mid-april, and preorders are available through Amazon and Omega Mailorder.

Lurker of Chalice is also planning a new album, presumably later this year, according to Battle Kommand Records.  The new album will be titled "Perverse Calculus, and the release will be split between Battle Kommand and Ajna.  

For those who don’t know, Lurker of Chalice is the one-man project of Leviathan mastermind Wrest, and takes Leviathan’s black metal sound to much further depths of darkness and malevolence.  The music resembles acts like Fields Of The Nephilim (Elizium era) and Bauhaus just as much as it does any of the current depressive/ambient black metal acts.  Leviathan recently released new album "Massive Conspiracy Against All Life" earlier this year.

It doesn’t actually mention anything related to Justin’s drumming ability or Killswitch Engage’s music, but it’s damn entertaining anyway - MetalSucks recently interviewed Killswitch drummer Justin Foley on the subject of his beard.  Topics of discussion include how long it took him to grow it (a surprising 1.5 years), beard maintenance, whether it’s harder to eat with the beard (that’s a yes), and what he plans to do with it.  After having covered SF Weekly’s the Top 10 beards list, I felt I couldn’t let this one pass.  Definitely worth a read.

Methadrone is the ambient doom/drone project of ex-Incantation vocalist and Craig Pillard, with David Galas of Lycia contributing some additional guest vocals.  The band’s unusual setup centers around two basses, one lead and one rhythm, with soft drum programming, ambient effects and haunting vocals rounding out the sound. 

The band plans to release a new full-length titled "Sterility" this March/April, and Foreshadow has posted a free internet-only single as a teaser to the album.   The single consists of two tracks, one taken from "Sterility" and one exclusive track called ‘Nalbuphine.’  The single page also has a link to preorder the new album at a special price.  You can also order "Sterility" directly from the band through Methadrone’s MySpace page.

Swedish tech-metal band Meshuggah and death metal legends Deicide have recently decided to put modern technology to good use in promoting their new albums.  Meshuggah drummer Tomas Haake has announced a video drum competition, while Deicide is putting the creative burden of music video direction into the hands of their most talented fans with a music video competition.

The Meshuggah contest lets aspiring drummers record themselves drumming along to the track ‘Bleed‘ from the "obZen" album, which was released earlier this year.  Haake has stated that ‘Bleed’ is by far the most complex on the album, and even he had to spent a good deal of time practicing it, so fans should have their hands full replicating the performance.  Promising entries will be uploaded Meshuggah’s MySpace blog, which also contains some very intimidating drum tabs for the song.  The winner will be announced April 6th, with prizes including a signed copy of the album, a huge signed poster, and a congratulatory phone call from Haake himself.

Deicide, meanwhile, have announced an intriguing competition to create the best music video for the track ‘In The Eyes Of God’ off their upcoming release "Till Death Do Us Part."  Awhile ago I posted about the unfortunate lack of creativity among many metal videos, so I’m quite eager to see what the metal community comes up with.  Visit the competition page to download an mp3 of the song, video clips, logos, lyrics, and anything else to get the creative spark going.  The winning video director will receive an Ibanez bass signed by the band, bragging rights, and presumably the chance to create more metal videos in the future.   

Los Angeles’s Red Sparowes is currently taking a break from recording to play a few shows along the West Coast, supported by Russian Circles.  Both bands have albums due out later this year, and are taking the opportunity to debut several new songs for lucky fans. 

Red Sparowes’s still-untitled album apparently will veer away from the bleak, emotionally-heavy themes of than 2006’s "Every Red Heart Shines Toward The Red Sun," and back towards the lighter territory of their debut, "At The Soundless Dawn."  Though the band’s typical ultra-long song titles haven’t yet been made public for the new album, imagery on the band’s video projection during the show featured star-filled skies and undulating jellyfish.  Contrast this with the fiery explosions and political imagery displayed during songs from "Every Red Heart…" and you get some idea of where the new album may be headed.  The typical epic Red Sparowes sound is of course still present, with intricate guitar arrangements forming layers of melody and atmosphere, but once again the band appears to be taking their sound in a new direction.  If the early versions are any indication, the new material will be at least as powerful and captivating as anything from the last two albums.

Russian Circles have only one album to draw from, so their set naturally contained even more new material than that of Red Sparowes.  "Stations" will come out May 6th, and judging from the songs they performed live, the level of aggression in the songs is a notch above the sound on 2006’s "Enter."  You can get a taste of the new album via the track ‘Harper Lewis,’ currently available on Russian Circles’s MySpace page. 

Fans of the new wave of post-rock/metal/sludge bands (Neurosis, ISIS, Pelican, Rosetta, etc.) will should definitely plan to catch these guys on tour if possible.  Russian Circles puts on a flawless and surprisingly heavy show, especially considering that they play as a 3-piece live.  Red Sparows features a huge video projection to accompany their songs, Neurosis-style (guitarist Josh Graham is the guy who does Neurosis’s visuals, go figure).  Remaining dates are:

3/26: San Francisco @ Bottom of the Hill
3/27: Los Angeles @ Echoplex
3/28: San Diego @ Casbah
3/29: Phoenix @ the Brickhouse 

Latvian band Year Zero is currently offering their demo, titled "Timedemo," for free download on their website.  It features 6 songs displaying their diverse style. 

The band states "we have lots of influences - from black metal to avantgarde electronic tunes, from jazz to progressive," and the music somehow incorporates all these styles without sounding confusing or disjointed.  Some black metal tendencies can certainly be heard, but the songs also have a progressive flair, often sounding vaguely reminiscent of Ulver’s recent sound.  It’s perhaps fitting that Year Zero has also contributed a song to the freely available "My Own Wolf: A New Approach" Ulver tribute album.

I’ve always wished that metal music would find its way into more Hollywood films (Cannibal Corpse in Ace Ventura anyone?) but uh, this isn’t quite what I had in mind - a recent post by Seattle’s The Stranger brought to my attention the work of Matthew Barney, an experimental artist and filmmaker.  Barney is the boyfriend of Icelandic singer Björk, so you know he’s probably kind of strange. 

Barney is most famous for The Cremaster Cycle, a series of five surrealist films exploring the process of creation, linked through the concept of the male cremaster muscle and the theme of sexual differentiation.  Metal fans will be most interested in Cremaster 2, which includes Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo drumming while accompanied by… a swarm of bees.  As weird as it sounds, the end result is actually pretty cool, almost making you wish that more bands used controlled bee noises as a primary instrument.  Morbid Angel vocalist Steve Tucker provides some growls to go along with the insects and drums, and he was also a good enough sport to allow himself to be coated with bees while singing.  You can check out a clip of Lombardo’s performance in the movie on YouTube.

Speaking of Dave Lombardo, check out this month’s Decibel issue for an interesting article about Lombardo’s initial clash with the rest of the members of Slayer, and their subsequent reunion.  It really gives you an appreciation for Lombardo’s talent, and provides a glimpse into the various strong personalities of the band members in the early days of their career.

Last year’s crop of metal albums certainly showed off the genre’s diversity, with newcomers like Alcest, Rwake, Grayceon, Begraven and Baroness filling out yearly top album charts alongside heavyweights such as Pelican, Nile, The Red Chord, Neurosis and The Dillinger Escape Plan.  One thing 2007 didn’t give us much of is that which metal is perhaps most famous for: uncompromisingly brutal, nihilistic slabs of violent music.  For that we look to 2008, when many of the genre’s most talented death metal bands are gearing up to unleash their latest blocks of audio havoc onto the public.

This year’s list of releases is headed by two of brutal death metal’s best known bands, New York’s Suffocation and Montreal’s Cryptopsy.  Suffocation’s next offering is tentatively titled "Blood Oath", and Cryptopsy’s "The Unspoken King" will be their first release to feature new vocalist Matt McGachy and keyboardist Maggie Durand. 

Many of death metal’s veteran acts are somehow still cranking out quality music in 2008.  Most notably, Poland’s Vader is planning to release "XXV" to commemorate their 25 years in the business, which means that they started making music while many of their fans were still mastering breathing.  Deicide’s "Till Death Do Us Part", Sinister’s "The Silent Howling", and Dismember’s "Dismember" will all be released soon, and should satisfy fans’ nostalgia for the genre’s glory days of the early 90’s. 

Great death metal releases this year also include Hate Eternal’s "Fury And Flames" and Decrepit Birth’s "Diminishing Between Worlds," which are both already in stores.  The next few months will bring albums from Emeth, Origin (talk about bad-ass cover art) and Bloodbath.  Canada’s vibrant death metal scene will also be pumping out new albums from Kataklysm, Neuraxis and Augury. 

So basically, if you’re tired of all this crap about sludge metal, progressiveness, and whatever else, and you just want some brutal-ass metal, you’re going to have a very good year.

German label Northern Silence will be releasing the CD version of Angmar and Alcest’s split CD, "Aux Funérailles Du Monde / Tristesse Hivernale."  Northern Silence has samples from both artists’ contributions, and if the Alcest sample is any indication, "Tristesse Hivernale" is a huge leap in the black metal direction compared to the sound on the band’s shoegaze-metal masterpiece "Souvenirs d’Un Autre Monde." 

Due to an unfortunate mixup between Northern Silence, Alcest mainman Neige and Alcest’s label Prophecy Productions, the album’s production run had to be reduced from the planned 3000 copies to the current number of 500.  This of course means that you’d better grab these while you can - I’d bet that Aquarius Records will get their hands on a few, but copies will be disappearing pretty fast.  You can preorder the album directly through Northern Silence, which might be the best way to guarantee yourself a copy.