Music

In our never-ending quest to provide you with the best music available, we present the Revolver Bootleg Series. Every month we'll feature new, rare, and often exclusive music. This installment comes from South Carolina quartet Emery. Their album, We Do What We Want (Solid State/Tooth and Nail), comes out tomorrow, but they share one track off the album, "The Anchors," a day early. Singer Toby Morrell fills us in on the song below.

The Anchors

REVOLVER: What's "The Anchors" about?
MORRELL: This song is very personal to me. It is based on a true story from second grade. A girl that liked me was making fun of me, because in elementary school that's what you do: You pick on someone because you like them. I know that now but at the time I was just getting my feelings hurt. I lashed out and said something terrible, and my words have haunted me for years. In a matter of seconds I realized nothing would be the same.

Which part of it did you come up with first? And what was the inspiration?
We came up with the music first and then lyrics. That's how we usually write. The music seems to help create the lyrics and lead us to the meaning or story in the song.

Was this an easy song to write or record? Why or why not?
Well, yes and no. Matt [Carter, guitar] did most of the recording and production so us other guys didn't have to worry about that part. But the lyrics were a little brutal to get out and to really capture what I wanted to say.

What sort of feedback have you gotten on this song so far?
It's been unbelievable. I think it is and will be a lot of people's favorite song on the record.

Amon Amarth—who are featured in the current issue of Revolver—have included a cover of alt-metal band System of a Down's "Aerials" as a downloadable track with the purchase of their new album, Sulfur Rising. Check out the audio below, and let us know what you think in the comments.

Be on the look out for Revolver's review of Sulfur Rising next week. In the meantime, enter to win an Amon Amarth prize pack, including a collectible 5.5?-tall action figure of the fire giant Surtur, right here.

Former Thieves - "Trust Fund Kids"

REVOLVER: What's this song about?
JOSH SPARKS: Bad people in great situations

Which part of it did you come up with first? And what was the inspiration?
They sort of happened in tandem with one another. Musically it was riffs we'd had floating around for quite a while and finally felt we had a direction for.

Was this an easy song to write or record? Why or why not?
Yes, actually it turned out to be both. We wrote the song literally a week before we went to Seattle to record. The song took three days to complete, so we had just enough time to get it solid before the studio and not enough time to over think it while we were in the studio.

What sort of feedback have you gotten on this song so far?
Great so far. Stylistically it stands out a bit more than our other material, mostly due to the D-beat in the first half of the song, and that's been a positive. Honestly, I think it's collectively one of our favorite songs on the record.

Preorder the album by clicking here.

In January 1988, the members of Death convened in Orlando, Florida, to rehearse six of the songs that would eventually wind up on the band's second and highly influential album, Leprosy—and MetalKult is proud to offer the rarely heard audio captured during that rehearsal.

The Death lineup at the time included guitarist/vocalist Chuck Schuldiner, guitarist Rick Rozz, bassist Terry Butler and drummer Bill Andrews.

Right-click the song names to download each mp3.

Photograph courtesy of Frank White.

Originally part of the road crew for fellow countrymen Celtic Frost, Swiss thrash trio Coroner—made up of bassist Ron Royce, drummer Marquis Marky and guitarist Tommy T. Baron—went on to become one of the most progressive extreme metal acts of the Eighties.

The connection between the Zurich band and Celtic Frost was so strong, in fact, that Frost frontman Tom G. Warrior offered to handle vocals for the emerging band's demo. Warrior and Coroner entered Switzerland's Magnetix studio on October 10, 1985, and nine days later they walked out with the impressive four-song 1986 release, Death Cult.

Right-click the song names below to download each track.

While subsequent bootlegged CDs included the bonus tracks of "Arrogance in Uniform" and "Hate, Fire, Blood," the original four-track demo consisted of the following tracks: "Spectators of Sin," "Spiral Dream," "Aerial Combat" and "The Invincible." (Only "Spiral Dream" would make it onto Coroner's 1987 debut LP, R.I.P.)

After getting some serious scene recognition for Death Cult, the group went back into the studio to record its first full-length, R.I.P., on which Broder took over vocals.

Check out this classic gem of progressive thrash, and dig the technical prowess that these guys possessed even at such an early stage in their careers.

On May 7, 2007, MetalKult met Celtic Frost guitarist/vocalist Thomas Gabriel Fischer and bassist Martin Eric Ain at their hotel near The Fillmore East at Irving Plaza in NYC. Frost were on the third leg of their international tour behind 2006's brutal return to form Monotheist, this time in support of headliners Type O Negative.

After arriving at Ain's room—and enduring a tense moment when we had to rouse the sleeping metal giant from his pre-show slumber—Fischer showed up and the two extreme metal pioneers soon warmed to our cameras and revealed the events that surrounded the creation of arguably one of extreme metal's most influential records, 1984's Morbid Tales.

In this four-part, 25 minute interview, Fischer and Ain talk about their formation in the cold-war Eighties, the gear they used to conjure Morbid Tales' "inhuman" sounds and how they inadvertently created one of the one of extreme metal's most influential albums.

[playlist:mk-classickult-celtic frost]

Originally a cassette-only release, Canadian black metal group Akitsa's 2002 debut full-length, Goétie, has just received a proper CD reissue by New York City's Hospital Productions. Now, all you lo-fi black metal fiends who missed out on the hard-to-find original, can finally get your fill of Goétie's slashed-throat vocals, bouts of blasted noise and distorted suicidal rage.

Opener "Ouverture de l'Espirit" sets the dark mood nicely. Drummer Néant delivers arrhythmic beats, while multi-instrumentalist O.T. deploys an ambling, clean guitar line that delicately weaves through a billowing curtain of fuzzy guitars as his vocals slowly chant "ahhh."

"Haine et Vengeance" (translated "Hate and Vengeance") boasts some killer jackhammer snare/kick-drum action and jagged guitar assault. This is some traditional gritty black metal topped with Akitsa's powerful, hateful vocals.

But the kicker comes with the surprising, "Les Ruines de la Modernité."

The song trudges along like a beautiful lamentation only to suddenly drop into a pit of scorching and blistering noise. Warning, if you're not careful this bubbling black mass of chaos will fry out your speakers.

Akitsa's Goétie is the sound of a band taking form by forging itself in the fire. At times they veer off the path ("Affront Final" has an actual surfer-punk 'a go-go' beat), but mostly Akitsa are locked into a singular purpose: to slay and hate and distort oneself beyond recognition. And that is where Akitsa shine. Goétie is a beautifully blackened work of overdriven madness. Get a copy. Rip it open. Gorge yourself. – Ian Caskey

Birthed in an abysmal New York City basement, black metal band Ash Pool issue forth smoldering, dark and noxious metal. World Turns On Its Hinge (Tour De Garde/Hospital Productions) is their latest batch of truly, and quite literally, underground black metal. Like unknown soldiers, their identities are unlisted, kept in the dark, letting their music reign in pure black mass.

Ash Pool waste no time before igniting the subterranean blaze. World Turns On Its Hinge's opening track, "Sin of Life," begins with crashing cymbals and brash guitar, a gated technique reminiscent of Ukrainian black metallers Hate Forest's work on Sorrow. "Mouth is cracked, stuffed with feces," hawks Ash Pool's singer from under the assault of metallic guitar and drums.

Track four, "Shade of Rape," continues the unforgiving assault with its incinerating wall of thrash. This visceral, hack-and-grind

approach is what makes Ash Pool's underground lo/fi style so utterly terrifying…and invigorating. By stripping the production down to its basest elements, Ash Pool create a sonic intimacy that is rarely, if ever, found on top-dollar, studio-polished metal albums.

Continuing this raw trend—and sounding like early Burzum in the process—"Under Zyklon Blue" begins with kick drum patter, fuzzy picked guitar and a deathly enticing melody. The song soon crashes into motion with what sounds like entombed monks chanting while the lead singer's dismal shouts crackle into the mix.

It's hard not to make connections between the song's menacing namesake—Zyklon B was the poison used by the Nazis to kill over one million people in the gas chambers during the Holocaust—and the origins of Ash Pool's own moniker. After all it was outside those chambers, beyond the crematoriums, where the fields turned grey as death camp soldiers dumped the remains into pools of water that turned black with human ash.

Thus Ash Pool mimics its own title through its sound and in the process creates true, brutal lo/fi black metal captured on World Turns On Its Hinge. – Ian Caskey

Dizzying! Cephalic Carnage's latest record Xenosapien (Relapse) contains such advanced levels of math-metal deathgrinding stoner madness that it's a wonder the Colorado five-piece didn't set the studio ablaze while tracking it.

Definitely a more sophisticated (if the term can even be applied to Cephalic) successor to their previous 2005 pot-fueled masterpiece, Anomalies, Xenosapien finds guitarists Zac Joe and Steve Goldberg playing more mind-bendingly complex riffs, unexpected changes and floor-punching breakdowns than you can shake a Thai stick at.

And in fine grind style, on top of Cephalic's metallic geek frenzies you get plenty of samples and inhumanly gargled vox. These guys like to mix it up, and it shows in the album's scope—Xenosapien jumps from Dillinger/Cryptopsy craziness to doom sludge to hardcore breakdowns to epic moody jazz weirdness.

With Xenosapien, Cephalic Carnage not only deliver just about everything your stoned metal mind could possibly handle, but also what may prove to be the best grind record of 2007. – Jimmy Hubbard

Check below for Episode 1 of Cephalic Carnage's two-part Making of Xenosapien video:

Where Today Is the Day's last album, 2004's Kiss the Pig, was a sprawling, sometimes flawed masterpiece of moody, metallic experimentation, Axis of Eden—the trio's latest record and its first on vocalist/guitarist Steve Austin's own SuperNova Records—is a more concentrated and focused dose of blasting, misanthropic ugliness, an album that is as extreme emotionally as it is musically.

15 years into their career, TITD continue to innovate, and Axis of Eden confirms this without a doubt. As is expected from TITD, Axis is dissonant and mathy, but the addition of ex–Hate Eternal drummer Derek Roddy gives the record a faster, fiercer bite. Ready yourself for another sonic beating from this artsy, aggro, noise-metal outfit. – Jimmy Hubbard