It’s not likely they aimed for this, but it reminds me of NYHC raw fire with an Iron Maiden sensibility. Recommended. Check out their Myspace here.

Asaf Levy dropped us an e-mail with some news about what’s doing with Xenolith…

“Our plans to record an album about 8 months ago went up in smoke, when our drummer for the past 3.5 years decided to quit…we already had over an hour of solid material waiting to be recorded. Anyway, now we have more, plus we finally found a new drummer.

“The new single, “Austere Perceptions”, was recorded during October 2007. It’s going to appear in a British compilation that comes with the magazine “Alternative”, (distributed in Europe), along side other bands like cradle of filth and dimmu borgir.

we plan to record an album some time next year. On our Myspace (www.myspace.com/xenolithisrael) we added an instrumental piece, called “Winds”. I recorded that one in my room…”

Anatholy Bonder, vocalist of excellent Yiddish industrial metal act Gevolt gave us some time for an interview. I didn’t have enough time to get to part two, but there will definitely be more to this interview. This has been translated into English from very thick Russian English so it’s not exactly the way he said it, but I tried to stay exactly close to what he did say.

Continue reading »

Dunno why they’re calling it Disengagement, but whatever…

Click here to be a part of the Metal Israel Facebook Group.

Fernando Ribeiro of Portuguese goth metal act Moonspell was gracious enough to answer a few questions via e-mail. Alexei Raymar of Desert helped to make this interview interesting and informative by his knowledgable questions, on which he collaborated with myself.

Had the phoner worked out there would have been arguments regarding the religious outlook (cause that’s fun for me) but you’ve been spared.

Continue reading »

Why do I care?

Well, Noah Shulman directed Betzefer’s video for “Early Grave” –

yeh yeh, that one…

AAAnd he’s one of the tribe. So check it out –

hey I knew I heard of Black Water Rising from somewhere – they’re from Brooklyn!

Also, check out The Afterlife’s brand new Myspace layout here.

A lot of the Israeli bands are finally getting onto Facebook, a move I think quite intelligent for marketing purposes. With Facebook, a band can add themselves onto ILike and then their friends and fans can specifically add bands and the songs of bands they enjoy by using that application on their Facebook profile.

I personally have been using a hell of a lot more Facebook than Myspace recently, just because I’m dealing with people I actually know and am interested in vs. the whole whoever is wanting to spam me crowd on Myspace.

Then again, the benefits of Myspace are that you can send a bulletin out to whomever you want to spam without having to know what each one of your audience is doing.

In any case, for all of you Israeli bands out there: if you’re on Itunes, you’re already on http://ilike.com and you should go claim your artist profile so your friends using Facebook can add you and promote you to their friends. It’s great if you want to engage in a more direct form of marketing. I specifically think it’s extremely valuable because there are so many American Jewish college kids and teenagers who are proud of any good rock or metal coming out of Israel, and thousands, if not millions, of them are on there. An audience waiting to happen.

Go for it, guys.