Sep 302010
 

Musica Diablo is a relatively new band based in São Paulo, Brazil, with a self-titled debut album that’s been on the streets since late May.  We got interested in these dudes shortly before that album dropped and put up a post about them (here). What interested us?

Well, first, the band’s vocalist is Derrick Green, who’s been the frontman for Sepultura since 1997.  Second, the band has described its music as “Jurassic thrash”, or, somewhat more descriptively as “extreme fast thrash metal, with with the characteristic Brazilian style and a strong root into the 80’s veteran veterans.” And third, the album cover by Gustavo Sazes was damned cool (we’re featuring the South American variant cover up above).

So, all that was enough to draw our attention to the band — particularly that bit about “Jurassic thrash”. We wrote this about our initial reactions to the music in May:  “We’ve been listening, and let’s just say it will kick your ass all the way up to your shoulder-blades. The music is blistering in its intensity and speed and features some cool dueling guitar solos — and Derrick Green’s raspy howls and guttural growls are skull-scrapingly vicious.”

Since then, we’ve listened to the entire album, and all our initial impressions were vindicated. The album is joltingly good, and we get the “Jurassic thrash” reference: It’s like a pack of velociraptors on the hunt.

And as of yesterday, we now have some video of the band performing songs from the album. To be precise, Musica Diablo performed a handful of songs from their debut on the September 15, 2010 episode of “Estúdio Showlivre”, a Brazilian Internet TV show. We picked two clips to show you after the jump, and more song performances can be viewed on YouTube. Continue reading »

Sep 302010
 

Another month has passed. The fall season is approaching — unless you live in Los Angeles, which is pretending that it’s Phoenix in August. Fuck is up with that? It’s like that town has been placed in a cosmic microwave and the user likes his burritos very well done.

On the other hand, we’ve had way too many grey, chilly days in Seattle this September, which is traditionally one of the best months of the year. The weather gods have clearly dropped acid over the last 30 days and forgotten which end is up. But eventually they will get themselves straight, remember which season is approaching, and get ready to just blast the fuck out of our whole country with a vicious winter. Won’t that be fun?

No, it won’t be fun. It will suck like a new-born piglet at dinner time. But one pleasant constant will remain true — there will be new metal, regardless of how foul the weather becomes. And that brings us to another monthly installment of  METAL IN THE FORGE, a forge being the old name for a place where a blacksmith heats metal and works it into the shape of something useful.

And that’s what we’re interested in — new metal that will be useful in scrambling our brains, or uplifting us to a place where it really doesn’t matter what the fucking weather is doing.

What we do in this series of posts is update the list of forthcoming new albums we first posted on January 1. (All the other updates can be found via the “Forthcoming Albums” category link on the right side of our pages.) Below is a list of still more projected new releases we didn’t know about at the time of our previous updates, or updated info about some of the previously noted releases.

Once again, we’ve cobbled together news blurbs from other sites, or from press releases, about bands whose past work we’ve liked, or who look interesting for other reasons. Perhaps needless to say, these are bands that mostly fit the profile of music we cover on this site — the kind that would like to tear your head off.

So, after the jump, in alphabetical order, you’ll find our list of cut-and-pasted items from various sources since our last update about forthcoming new releases. Continue reading »

Sep 292010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we have another album review from our guest contributor Andy Synn about the brand new album from a band near and dear to our own hearts . . .The Crown. Back in July, we hyperventilated about the band’s release of a song from the then-forthcoming album, and provided a brief history of the band (that post is here). Now, the album is here, and so is Andy’s review. ]

Do you like metal? Do you specifically like metal that is fast, heavy and so aggressive you’re actually slightly afraid to touch the cd with your bare hands?

If the answer is yes, stop reading this review. You don’t need to know any more. Simply get up and go buy the new album by The Crown. You won’t be disappointed.

Doomsday King is a masterpiece of wild fury and calculated aggression. Blurring the lines between razor-sharp thrash and full-speed death metal, the 5 members of The Crown (now including new vocalist Jonas Stålhammar) have all brought their ‘A’ game back to the table with this one. The ominous tolling bell that heralds the start of title-track “Doomsday King” immediately brings to mind the darker tonality of “Crowned Unholy”, before shifting into the band’s trademarked full-speed assault.

Immediately, the vocals of Stålhammar put to rest any misgivings I might have had about replacing Johan Lindstrand as his high-energy delivery, whilst being highly reminiscent of elements of both his predecessors (Lindstrand and Tomas Lindberg), is noticeably darker and perhaps even a shred more aggressive than either.  (more after the jump, including a track . . .) Continue reading »

Sep 282010
 

 

The video above has nothing to do with metal. It’s simply a gentleman from Brooklyn expressing his feelings about our hometown icon here in Seattle (that would be Starbuck’s).  But if you’ve spent any time at all visiting NCS, you’ll understand why I’m putting it up here today. It made my Starbuck’s coffee come out my nose in a hot torrent.

Enjoy the rest of your fucking day.

Sep 282010
 

That got your attention, didn’t it?

Some small number of you might have been visiting this site back in January and some even smaller number might remember that we wrote then about a South African band called Haggis and Bong. Maybe more will remember than we think,  because that’s a name you don’t easily forget.

Back in January, when we first heard about Haggis and Bong, they were a 3-man show:  Angus “Haggis” Nixon on the Great Highland Bagpipes, Thomas “Bong” Hughes on the kit drum, and Dominic “The Dominator” Skelton on the Great Highland Bagpipes.

Yes, you read that correctly.  This was an instrumental metal band that consisted of nothing but bagpipes and drums. But man, could they rip the hell out of a song, combining a furious double-bagpipe attack with lots of blast beats and double-bass.

Now, the line-up has expanded, and Haggis and Bong have added a full-time bass-player, as well as guest musicians, including a trombonist.

Back in January, the band had released one album, brilliantly entitled Fire in the Bowl.  Only problem was that unless you could catch a live show in South Africa, there was no fucking way to get a personal copy of the music.

Ever since January, we’ve waited and watched and searched, and there has just been no fucking way to download the tunes, either legally or illegally. We were completely hostage to the Haggis and Bong MySpace page. Now, finally, that frustrating situation has changed! (more after the jump, including Haggis and Bong music to hear . . .) Continue reading »

Sep 272010
 

When my comrades and I started this site last November, I set up an e-mail address to use for NCS-related stuff. It took about 6 months for the spam to start polluting my new in-box. I guess it’s remarkable that it took so long, but it’s now happening. Recently, I got a string of three e-mails in almost as many days that were so choice, both individually and in combination, that I just couldn’t resist answering them.

And now I can’t resist sharing the exchanges. This isn’t metal, but maybe you’ll find it amusing anyway, and we do have some musical accompaniment selected for the occasion. So, without further ado, here are those three messages I received, and my responses:

FIRST MESSAGE

From: Mrs. Bintu Mahmud <Bintumahmud@ymail.com>
Subject: **Assalamualaikum…..
Date: September 15, 2010 12:34:51 AM PDT

Assalamualaikum I am Mrs. Bintu Mahmud. Please contact my lawyer Ramli Sariman (ramlisariman@gala.net) for a very important thing ALLAH wants you to do for Him. May ALLAH be with you always.

REPLY:

Dear Mrs. Mahmud, thank you for your interest in NO CLEAN SINGING and for your warm personal salutation, which I understand is a phonetic rendering of the Arabic greeting, “Peace be upon you”. I am all in favor of peace being upon me, and I’m sure the more people who say that to me, the more likely it will be to happen, especially when it comes from someone so obviously sincere and kind-hearted as you are, and with a direct channel to ALLAH.

We would be happy to listen to the new music, which I’m sure is fucking sick, and yes, we would be fucking stoked to write about the songs here at NCS, especially because it appears that ALLAH wants me to do that for Him.

Is this actually ALLAH’s music?  Because, y’know, if it is, I am really fucking stoked that He would pick our humble site out of all the metal blogs in metal blogdom to hear His latest sick tunes. Is it deathcore?   (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

Sep 262010
 

Yes, it’s time for more random fucking metal, selected in completely impulsive and unpredictable ways for your listening and viewing enjoyment.

Okay, that’s not exactly true. Yes, we acted impulsively and unpredictably, but no, we didn’t select any of this for your listening and viewing enjoyment. We don’t know whether you’ll enjoy any of what we have for you today, and we didn’t select any of it with your enjoyment in mind.

To be fair, we didn’t select it with our enjoyment in mind either. That’s not how this MISCELLANY series works. The way it works is this: I keep a list of new music from bands I’ve not heard before, and then on a given day (yesterday, as it happens), I start checking out their music and/or videos at random, and I include in this blog exactly what I heard and saw, regardless of the outcome.

As regular readers know, we usually have pretty decent luck, because I don’t put anything on the list that doesn’t look interesting for some reason, even though I don’t know what the music is going to sound like. On the other hand, I don’t exclude anything I heard, even if it proved to be disappointingly ghastly.

In this installment of MISCELLANY, I checked out the following bands from the following places:  Drag the Lake (England) (pictured above), Kunvuk (Australia), Winterfylleth (England), and Elvenking (Italy). So, gird your loins, and follow along after the jump . . . Continue reading »

Sep 252010
 

We are so very fucking grateful to Goat the Head. Before we discovered these Norwegian troglodytes in mid-July, we had an aching void in our lives, an unfilled longing for contemporary primal caveman death metal. More than that, we wanted primal caveman death metal played in a contemporary way by cavemen who would be equally comfortable wearing either spacesuits or animal pelts.

And then we found Goat the Head, and it was as if all our feverish prayers had been answered. Suddenly, that void in our lives was filled, and we became complete, at least briefly.

But we owe Goat the Head our gratitude for more than their primal caveman (but contemporary) music. For so many years, we had wondered about the fundamental mysteries of the universe: Where did television come from?  What enabled our primitive ancestors to play the electric guitar?  What causes trailer homes to spontaneously explode?  Goat the Head answered those questions, too.

Thanks to a short but eye-opening documentary film by the band, we now know the answers — and in fact, it turns out that all those questions (and many more) have the same answer: The fucking cube. It all makes so much sense now.

There was only one problem: Back in mid-July, we only had access to two of the songs from a new Goat the Head album (called Doppelgängers) that was then scheduled for release on September 13. It would have to do, but we knew then that only a full album’s worth of material would fully eradicate our painful longing, and hopefully stop our bed-wetting at the same time.

And September 13 came, and as promised, so did Doppelgängers. We have heard it, and it is all we hoped for, and so much more. (our review continues after the jump . . . ) Continue reading »

Sep 242010
 

Well, fuck it. This is clearly new-video Friday. Seems like about every hour of the day so far a new video has popped up on our radar screen. And there’s really no reason why we should stop with those Animals As Leaders videos we put up earlier today. We’ll just continue putting up videos for as long as we see new ones to put up. How ’bout that?

Just tell your boss or your teachers or whoever is attempting to control your lives today to just fuck right off, get yourself a big ol’ fucking bag of popcorn, and just veg out and watch metal videos all day. Because at this rate, we’ll find a dozen more new ones before we call it quits today.

So, here’s what we’ve got so far: A brand new video for the title track from the new album by The Absence (“Enemy Unbound”); a brand new performance video from August Burns Red off their forthcoming live CD/DVD (the song is “Barn Burner”); and a new video from a California black-metal band called Valdur (the song is called “Vicious Existence”). Get the popcorn and go see ’em after the jump . . . (and don’t get faked out by our screen capture up at the top — clicking on that arrow won’t start the video, which is after the jump). Continue reading »

Sep 242010
 

Not long ago, we posted a video retrospective of the meteoric career of multi-instrumentalist Navene Koperweis. When we did that, we had trouble finding a decent performance video of Animals As Leaders — the band in which Koperweis plays drums with the godlike Tosin Abasi on guitar. Now, METAL INJECTION has remedied that problem.

They were on hand when AAL played the Sonar in Baltimore on the SUMMER SLAUGHTER 2010 tour and filmed some of the band’s performance using multiple cameras. The video quality and the sound quality are both far superior to any other videos currently available of AAL playing live.

The one at the top of this post is the song “Tempting Time”, and after the jump, we’ve got a second METAL INJECTION video of “Wave of Babies”. If this doesn’t make you come, then it’s possible you were neutered in your sleep last night.  Plus, when’s the last time you saw a metal guitarist playing in a polo shirt and white shorts? Continue reading »