An important and popular fixture on the Real Gone calendar, the free sampler has offered a broad range of tracks for keen-eared listeners since its inception back in 2010. Usually, the samplers would cover a broad range of music. This year, in line with 2014, we’ve covered so much metal, it needed it’s own free download!
Tag Archives: metal
SERPENTINE CREATION – Incest EP
Bulgaria’s Serpentine Creation are one of those extreme metal bands whom seem to become more assured with every release. While they’ve not necessarily become any more melodic, it is easy to hear how their music has become grander with the passing of time. Their 2012 debut album ‘Dystopia’ featured some fairly straight black metal, played quite well but let down by budgetary constraints. Three years on, ‘The Fiery Winds of Armageddon’ was afforded a bigger send-off, with clearer separation between the instruments. The band showing a broader musical palate on those tracks, too, with some great solos and twin lead sounds to balance out the heavy pneumatics. More than just a stop-gap, 2016’s ‘Incest’ not only continues from where the previous recordings left off, but also introduces more new ideas.
RITUAL KING – Elixir EP
Although marketing themselves as a blues rock band, Ritual King don’t always play much in the way of anything too bluesy on most of their debut EP, ‘Elixir’. Their sound is very much of a late 70s rock persuasion, occasionally injected with a very slight bluesy swagger – a sound that, although fairly solid, too often lacks that special something needed to distinguish them from so many other UK bands at the time of release.
AWOOGA – Alpha EP
Sheffield’s Awooga play music with a dark soul, but it could never be tagged gothic. Their music has a doomy heart, but it’s not straight up doom metal. It’s progressive and can be heavy, but never in the half-arsed way that three thousand Dream Theater wannabes think is acceptable. If you were to try and pigeonhole them, the closest comparison would be to liken them to a hybrid of Amplifier and early Deftones. The Amplifier-ish elements within their heavy and wandering arrangements probably went some way to scoring the band support slots with Amplifier themselves even before they’d released any studio material. How they got to support the Soft Machine obsessed Knifeworld, on the other hand, is anyone’s guess…
RED CAIN – Red Cain EP
There are too many bands within the progressive metal sphere that desperately want to be Dream Theater. Why, in the name of sanity, would musicians think that ten minute fretboard masturbatory noises and rhythmic histrionics would represent the apex of such talents? It’s bewildering to say the least, especially considering Dream Theater’s abominably boring live “shows”. With this in mind – and so much progressive metal leaning towards the unlistenable because of it – it’s refreshing when a band comes along that appreciates the necessity of a reasonable chorus and knows that shorter track lengths are necessary if a wider audience is to be reached. Calgary’s Red Cain are one such band. The spectrum affected purists might dismiss some of this debut EP as just metal, or alt-metal, but these four songs take in a variety of moods – and the forays into instrumental complexity, albeit without self-indulgence, still places them within the progressive bracket.