Announced for the big NAMM trade show, prog-metal instrumental outfit Scale the Summit has partnered with Strandberg Guitarworks to release the Boden CL7, an instrument based on guitarist Chris Letchford’s specifications, and bassist Mark Michell has released an instructional book for right-hand bassists.
Grizzly Bear: Shields (Warp, 9/18/12)
Brooklyn-based indie rockers Grizzly Bear produced a killer album last year in Shields, a sweeping combination of the electric and acoustic that cements them as one of the genre’s elite. Now they’ve produced a disturbing but beautiful video for “Gun-Shy,” one of the album’s standouts. Evoking elementary-school science videos as well as body horror, the band’s use of animated GIFs might just win it some sort of newfangled Internet award.
Converge: All We Love We Leave Behind (Epitaph, 10/9/12)
Vocalist Jacob Bannon, frontman of Converge, balances a career of music, fine art, and business. His raw vocals belie a depth, beyond the bleeding paint and canvas of tattoos, explored in the short documentary “Rungs in a Ladder.”
A twelve-minute meditation on life, meaning, and intention, “Rungs in a Ladder” is an eloquent creative manifesto — the musings of someone fighting insecurity, staying active, and dealing with being out in the open when he really just wanted to “be a bass player or a drummer…to be completely anonymous.”
Check out “Rungs in a Ladder,” directed by Ian McFarland.
Soundgarden: King Animal (Universal, 11/13/12)
Soundgarden’s King Animal, its first album in 16 years, is both a welcome return to form and an exercise in creative experimentation. Now the band has teamed with renaissance man Dave Grohl in a video for heavy rocker “By Crooked Steps.” And with Dave behind the lens, the serious tone of the music doesn’t mean that you can’t have a little bit of lighthearted fun.
Nile: At the Gates of Sethu (Nuclear Blast, 7/3/12)
“The Inevitable Degradation of Flesh”
Nile: “The Inevitable Degradation of Flesh”
Nile guitarist and occasional vocalist Karl Sanders has been living death metal for as long as the genre has existed. From a brief but storied stint living with Morbid Angel to Nile’s breakthrough in 2000 with Black Seeds of Vengeance, Sanders has been there. It is then all the more remarkable that his songwriting and lead playing have been ratcheted up another notch for Nile’s newest full-length, At the Gate of Sethu.
Listeners have reasonable expectations of what they’re getting when they pick up a Nile album: guttural voices chanting lyrics based upon ancient Egyptian texts, a torrent of Middle Eastern modal riffing, inhuman drumming with copious cymbal accents, and interludes of melody played on traditional Egyptian instruments. Sethu will not disappoint anyone expecting these things.