Sneak Peeks: New Releases From Something Fierce + Omotai, Coming Up

One of the best perks of this SCR deal is that sometimes the kind-hearted folks who actually make the music about which I tend to obsess will occasionally throw some of their newest, coolest stuff our way before it pops up in the general eye of the public. They don’t necessarily want it shown to the world at that point, but it’s still neat to be able to get a glimpse of what they’re working on & see how the eventual end product might sound.

The reason I bring this up is because I’ve been fortunate enough to be handed new-new stuff lately by some excellent bands I happen to love, and while I’m not going to go too far down the road & talk about it in a lot of depth, I wanted to point to these things and say, “look! this is gonna be fucking cool!”

I was planning on giving a little peek at Black Blizzard, the soon-to-be-out new album by {The Literary Greats}, btw, but being the overambitious/lazy slacker I am, by the time I got ’round to it, it seemed more appropriate to actually review the damn thing. So if you want to read about that, head on over here, instead. (And yes, it’s really good, in unexpected ways.)

OMOTAI
Got sneakily handed an in-progress song by these heavy, already-making-waves doom-metallers, and while it’s not yet in finished form, it’s still pretty damn promising. Heavy as fuck (duh) and even more intricate than last year’s Peace Through Fear EP (see here for details on that), it’s a little different from that previous effort in that it sounds — to me, at least — almost cleaner than the earlier stuff.

Which isn’t to say that it’s bad, by any means, but rather that the band appears to be ratcheting down their sound to an even tighter level of lockstep precision. It comes off as being a bit more technical and Pelican-like than what I’d heard before, even though there’s still the neck-snapping mathcore breakdown in the middle, reminiscent of “What the Misanthrope Said” (from Peace). After this brief taste, I’m seriously looking forward to what the band’s got up its collective sleeve.

SOMETHING FIERCE
I’ve been sworn to secrecy on the details of this one, but Steven G. of Something Fierce was nice enough to pass along a copy of the band’s forthcoming third full-length, Don’t Be So Cruel. And trust me when I say that it’s been a bit of a surprise — I think fans who’ve gotten used to the band’s previously raw, power chord-heavy sound are going to be in for a shock.

I’m hearing a lot in here that I’d never, ever heard from the trio ’til now, and it’s pretty freaking great. Cruel is a definite sign, I think, that Something Fierce are growing, maturing, and branching out; for one thing, while the band’s always had somewhat of a Clash influence, I’m hearing a lot more of that this time around, including more of a political focus than I’ve ever noticed before. And once I got past my initial amazement, I was well & completely hooked.

There you go, then; keep an eye out for new releases by both bands…