Maudlin of the Well has posted their latest album, Part the Second, online for download. MotW are giving this album away for free, but they are asking for a “pay-what-you-want” donation, which can be done quickly and easily via PayPal.

Part the Second is a culmination of previously unfinished MotW tracks, and the support of their fans, as Toby puts it:

It’s about that time of year again when ghosts and ghouls break free from their fetid slumber to haunt the dark misty streets. It’s also the time of year I dig out my “Halloween” music, you know the usual: The Misfits, White Zombie/Rob Zombie, some Cradle of Filth just for starters. It’s also the time of year I start looking for some new monster-rock to add to my collection. Last year for instance I found Lordi, and before that Stolen Babies both excellent band in their own right.

It looks as if this year’s search will be no less fruitful. I’ve already discovered one such new(ish) band, Creature Feature. While their latest album The Greatest Show Unearthed was released last year on October 30, it’s still new to me. Creature Feature is a horror-rock duo consisting of vocalist Curtis RX and organist Erik X. They have a classic spook-rock sound, that’s heavy on maniacal funhouse organ grinding and distorted guitars. The most immediate comparison that I can draw is that they are a bit like a mash-up of Idiot Flesh and Tim Burton’s A Nightmare Before Christmas with quirky uptempo songs with fiendish subject matter. My affinity for zombies has naturally drawn me to Aim For The Head, the second track on their album. Anyone who’s seen a George Romero film knows exactly what their talking about here.

A band that I have been spinning pretty heavily this week is Crystal Castles, and their new self titled album. This Toronto based duo produces catchy chiptune electronica straight out of your favorite NES cartridge. The mastermind behind this project is Ethan Kath who uses modded keyboards to recreate the lo-tech blips that make the Nintendo generation feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Add to that the squelching vocals of Ms. Alice Glass and you get an enticing palette of aural experimentations. The album runs a pretty wide gamut of tempos, which is pretty well illustrated in the first two tracks.

Untrust Us—While heavily layered the track is relatively light. Overall, Untrust Us flows smoothly and sounds like it’s pumping you up for a major boss battle, which would be track two…

Alice Practice—The polar opposite of track one, hard edged and aggressive with bomb-blast bass lines. This track features Glass, and she tears it up with her shrill vocals. This track is reminds me the most of Hanin Elias’ work with ATR, or the Swedish group 64Revolt. A side-note, if you are trying to show a guy who’s into shoegazer(?) music how awesome Crystal Castles are, then this is not the right track for him.

This is a continuation of Monday’s post regarding the new NIne Inch Nails release Ghosts I-IV. I finally got around to ordering the album by 8p.m. Monday evening which is right around the time that the site went down. I managed to place my order and after getting my confirmation email and download link I selected my file format and when I hit download… Nothing, just a “can’t connect to server” message. After a few minutes This message popped up on the site:

Unfortunately, the Ghosts I-IV site is down for the next few hours for maintenance.

We quietly released this album last night without any warning, and without any press. Because we know how devoted our fans are, we planned for an overwhelming response, and expected heavy traffic. To our surprise, the traffic was more than three times what we anticipated, and has only been getting heavier throughout the day. The response has been absolutely phenomenal, and we couldn’t be happier, but our servers have taken a beating, causing numerous problems with the download site. Our developers, who have been working non-stop to combat the surge of traffic, feel that taking the site down for a few hours to fix some crucial issues is the best way to get things running smoothly again. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

Instead of writing any honest to goodness reviews—which I’ve noticed tend to get long in the tooth and I really don’t have to time for at the moment—I decided to just let you in on what new(ish) and exciting things I’ve been spinning.

For the record, I think that it is still safe to call it “spinning” since, while not exactly a record, your hard drive does a considerable amount of twirling around to play your music.

For the last half of our weirdo metal exploration, we’re going to leave the avant-black metal scene in Scandinavia and head all over the world for avant-death and avant-grind bands.

A very quick discussion of “black metal,” “death metal,” and “grindcore” is probably in order. There are differences in sounds, lyrical approaches, and historical origins of each macro-style. If a person wants to dive deeply into these distinctions, the following is pretty oversimplified, but hopefully this will be a helpful level of information to help folks who are just getting into these kinds of “extreme music” styles.

Death Metal

Musically, death metal grew out of more “traditional” metal music genres, particularly thrash. The lyrics and associated imagery tend to deal with morbid/graphic/deathy stuff. Vocals are generally “death grunts,” snarled or grunted yelling at a relatively low pitch range. Being closer to traditional metal’s evolution, these bands are generally highly technically proficient musicians, and you’ll likely hear a lot of guitar soloing on most death metal records. This music started to form into a “proper” subgenre in the mid 80s, with quite a lot of bands working in the style by the late 80s and early 90s.

Many times I’ve heard my friends, musicians and non-musicians, complain that there just isn’t that much “good music” out there to discover. That’s certainly never been an issue for me. One just has to know where to look. Now that bands from all over the world have an online presence, it’s easier than ever to find music that suits your own particular tastes.

Take my last month’s musical explorations, for example. Somehow I’ve ended up on a huge avant-metal kick for the last month or so. Though I’ve always had some metal or metal-related music in my diet as a guitar player, it’s not a genre that I’ve found myself motivated to investigate with much depth. I was listening to Ved Buens Ende and Sleepytime Gorilla Museum one afternoon in early January, and I wondered to myself if there were any bands out there that were stylistically somewhere between the two of them. So I popped both band names into Google and hoped for the best.

While The Golden Foretaste of Heaven’s sound is nothing revolutionary it does mark a new direction for Alec Empire and the DHC gang. Along with the new sound also comes a new label to distribute it—Eat Your Heart Out. With a bubbly lettered logo and a DIY ethos, Alec and the gang are primed to set the world on fire… or something to that effect.

Alec Empire is no stranger to change, and fans of his music have come to expect a certain degree stylistic variation from one project to the next. Though, historically Alec’s work has gotten harsher—going from the scream infused techno sounds of Atari Teenage Riot that he coined as Digital Hardcore to glitch electronica, and then to noise metal in his more recent albums. Contrary to this trend, The Golden Foretaste of Heaven is actually quite tolerable by the average listener’s standards. I mark this by the fact that Ivy didn’t tell me to turn it off or rankle whilst playing it for most of the weekend.