Donnerstag, 20. November 2014

conan - monnos

in my second post this month (life of agony) i spoke of my new mailorder find, hhv.de namely. this mailorder has a very, very decent metal section and huge part with small european and u.s. label distributions. all the stuff you don't get via the big labels nuclear blast, century media and metal blade. they have literally thousands and thousands of titles to offer. and in my foolish attempt to browse through them all in one go without losing  perseverance, i came across this one here.
the first thing that caught my attention was the artwork. it has a nice comic touch to it and reminded me vaguely of stephen bissette and his work on eighties swamp thing comics. it also reminded me of the 'death is this communion' cover art from high on fire. with reminiscence of two things i really like, i ventured over to the tube to see if my gut instinct could be proven right. i listened to 'grim tormentor' and fell in love. i'm not the biggest doom metal fan. in fact, a year ago i didn't even know one doom metal band by the name. things changed with austrian's iron heel and my interest grew. but, you know, there is doom and then there is doom. i love the mean kind with bottom low down-tuned guitars. and hell yeah, liverpool's conan is definitely that kind.
so i checked back with the label that released this cracker. burning world records from the netherlands is the name. never heard of them though. but my unknown concerning this metal sub-genre explains that to an extend. the first pressing of 'monnos' was long gone, as it actually appeared in 2012. but they had a fresh re-press available. probably to cash in on the release of conan's latest album this year. not that this would be a bad thing at all. the new pressing, now on green vinyl, was all coloured. so i didn't hestitate to throw this in my cart and check it out along with another record, that will be featured here next.
in natura this baby looks brilliant. this great artwork which reflects parts of the lyrics and the album title (if researched correctly, monnos is a figure taken from the world of warcraft video game, which people get crazy over but fails to excite me in any way), lovely thick, 180gr apple green vinyl and a black dust sleeve make it a pleasure for almost every sense. check this shit out and if you love your music neck crushing, steam rolling heavy, than this is your address. don't know how many were made. burning world records. 2012.