Many years ago when I was heavily into Dream Theater I stumbled upon a band that sounded interesting but was unable to hear their music (this was before Youtube made it insanely easy to hear most of mankind's recorded output). The band was Spock's Beard and I bought several of their albums sight-unseen from the Thoughts mailing list admin (Thanks, Lisa!). Fortunately in this day and age with sites like Jamendo and Bandcamp you don't have to guess what an album sounds like and once I heard the band Anasazi's "Drop Dead Silence" I was immediately reminded of Spock's Beard and that moment when The Kindness of Strangers (and not just the album) set me on another musical rabbit-hole. Speaking of proggish rabbit holes, we also have a proggish track from Wall of the Eyeless, as well as crushing tracks from FLYING RENOS, Avolation, CABEZA DE CABALLO and Umor. And if you like your metal with a little King Crimson / Frank Zappa then the latest from Peculate will fit the bill quite nicely. And it thrills me no end when I see bands that I know release material under a Creative Commons License so I'm thrilled to welcome Arsis to the show. So if you like multiple time signatures, thoughtful music, and crushing riffs you're ini for a treat. Cape and Mellotron not required.

Please support the bands in this show! Buy a T-Shirt, head to the shows, or offer to send the band's music to random folks on the Internet. Whatever you can do to help these bands keep making music, please do it!

Also check out the other great podcasts at Metal Injection, and be sure to listen to all of the great shows (including Open Metalcast) streaming 24/7 at Metalinjection.FM.

If you have any suggestions for Creative Commons licensed metal, send me a link at craig@openmetalcast.com.

Open Metalcast #096 (MP3)

Open Metalcast #096 (OGG)