“THAT’S METAL! — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 83.5): “MUTE”

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  1 Response »
Oct 302013
 

Our frequent guest contributor Leperkahn sent me a link to a recent video last night, urging me to use it in the next installment of our THAT’S METAL! series, in which we feature videos, photos, and news items that are metal even if they’re not music. I refused — because, having seen the video, I can’t wait that long. I need to share it right now, all by itself. The title is “Mute”.

It’s clever as hell standing all by itself, but as I watched it I thought it was also a metaphor for metal (though conceivably I’m so metal-obsessed I’m predisposed to see the meanings I want to see). It’s not just that the video is weird and twisted, it’s the idea that the sharpness of a knife edge, the slash of violence, and the blood of wounds sums up an awful lot of what makes metal . . . metal . . . and what makes it such a powerful way of expressing what we feel.

As Leperkahn pointed out, the video manages to be really metal while at the same time being “light-spirited, uplifting, and happy”. But even though the process may be painful, that’s how you feel when you find your voice, isn’t it?

I smiled all the way through this, but got one genuinely laugh-out-loud moment from it. You’ll probably guess when that happened after you see it. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: SKELETONWITCH, CHTHONIC, SAKTMÓÐIGUR, AND HATSUNE MIKU

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Oct 292013
 

In this post we bring you three globe-spanning videos that premiered either yesterday or today, with our performers hailing from the exotic locales of Ohio, Taiwan, Iceland, and Japan.

SKELETONWITCH

The lyrics to the title track from Serpents Unleashed tell you a lot about what you hear in the song: “Demonic, defiant, eyes of burning chaos / With darkness at our side / Evil at our command / Crush the weak and feeble, their place within the dust / Rain fire from the shadows / Striking hard and fast / Vomiting the blackest hate / The spawn of wickedness…”

The new video for the song strikes hard and fast, too. Rapidly strobing between shots as the band deliver the goods, the film makes effective use of light and shadow, slo-mo interludes, and split-screen views. Check it out next: Continue reading »

EAST OF THE WALL: “REDACTION ARTIFACTS”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  3 Responses »
Oct 292013
 

(NCS contributor Austin Weber reviews the new album by New Jersey’s East of the Wall.)

I first heard about East Of The Wall a few years ago while talking to their old bass player Brett Bamberger in Indianapolis. I talked to him after The Binary Code set when he proceeded to tell me he was merely a touring bass player and his actual band was called East Of The Wall. He ended up giving me their debut because I had spent all my money on merch. I listened to Farmer’s Almanac several times on the way home and became an instant fan. Now a few years later, and times have changed, yet East Of The Wall have only grown stronger with age. Since Farmer’s Almanac, they added vocals to their music and dropped several more albums, each a different snapshot of a multi-faceted style always in flux. This new album Redaction Artifacts is no different in that regard and is yet another welcome change sonically for the group.

A series of recent line-up shifts has seen Brett Bamberger leave and their guitarist/harsh vocalist Chris Alfano switch to bass in his absence. Guitarist Kevin Conway left as well, which made room for two new guitarists⎯Ray Suhy and Greg Kuter. While this did inevitably change some of their sound, the music here is no less experimental or tastefully complex than before. Redaction Artifacts includes the most clean singing of any album, as new guitarist Greg Kuter sings frequently in addition to an enhanced singing output from longtime guitarist Matt Lupo. Their combined range hits everywhere from what Tommy Rogers to what Chino Moreno sounds like, and then some. For a truly progressive band such as East Of The Wall, all this new blood and focus on singing are just more tools in the shed for them to use in making their music even more eclectic and captivating. Continue reading »

I’LL EAT YOUR FACE IS DEAD… LONG LIVE I’LL EAT YOUR FACE

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Oct 292013
 

(We are honored to bring you this review, epitaph, and fictional imagining from Professor D. Grover the XIIIth in honor of the last gasp of Ireland’s I’ll Eat Your Face.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. Your Esteemed Professor has returned, albeit briefly, to mourn the passing of a personal favorite band, that dastardly Irish prog/grind duo known as I’ll Eat Your Face. A few of you, peering back through the mists of time to the heyday of The Number Of The Blog, will recall that the band’s 2010 release Irritant appeared, almost from the æther, and promptly seized the top spot on my year-end album list. Since that day, I have kept in touch with The Boy and Barrytron, the two miscreants whose cartoonish musical misadventures fill the brief discography of I’ll Eat Your Face, and thus was saddened to receive notice from the both of them that they were laying their project to rest and going their separate ways.

Now, I suspect this won’t be the last that we hear from these fanciful lads. Barrytron is, to my knowledge, still manning the skins in [r]evolution of a sun and also drumming for the delightfully odd StreisBAND, a hardcore band that does Streisand covers with only drums and vocals. And The Boy, well, he’s currently pursuing his PhD, but I suspect that he may pick up his guitar again somewhere down the line. Continue reading »

LUMBAR: “THE FIRST AND LAST DAYS OF UNWELCOME”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Oct 282013
 

There’s an unusual story behind the making of his album, one that’s both painful and inspiring. If you know the story, it can’t help but affect the way you hear the music. And that’s as it should be, because the story is at the heart of the writing and the recording of the music, too. That story has been told elsewhere, through our own interview of the music’s creator Aaron Edge, and an even more in-depth interview that appeared last week at The Obelisk. But even if you were ignorant about the album’s deeper significance, it would still hit with tremendous force.

For an album that consists of seven tracks totaling only about 25 minutes of music, there’s a temptation to say that it flies by. It does, and it doesn’t. You can read first-hand accounts of combat or other traumatic events, in which time seems to slow down. The intensity of Lumbar’s album plays a similar trick on the mind. The music itself moves in slow time, the massive distorted chords flowing like magma, groaning like titanic drawbridges being raised with rusted chains, pounding like a wrecking ball. But the slow rhythms are only part of the explanation for the music’s time-warping effect.

The sound is incredibly dense and contaminated, the guitars fuzz-bombed to the max, the music vibrating with radioactive decay, almost every second shrouded in a storm of static. The black, hallucinatory aura of the music is intensified by the layering of shrill, skittering electronic noise, shimmering cymbals, and a mega-dose of reverb. The harrowing sense of things falling apart, which pervades the album, reaches its apotheosis in “Day Five”, where rhythms and even the rudiments of melody are abandoned, leaving only the sounds of distant thunder growing into a battlefield bombardment and the howling of demented voices. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: MASTODON, CULT OF LUNA, IMPUREZA, UNFATHOMABLE RUINATION, YEAR OF NO LIGHT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 282013
 

Oh joy! Rapture! Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in ’t!

Okay, I’m just trying to put a good face on another goddamn Monday that blows, like a noxious wind coming off a tire fire. At least we still have beauteous metal, flights of fallen angels to sing us to our rest at nightfall. Here’s a collection of things, in no particular order, seen and heard over the last 24 hours.

MASTODON

I saw that on December 10 Warner Bros. Records will be releasing Mastodon Live At Brixton, a digital-only recording of the band’s live performance at London’s O2 Academy in Brixton on February 11, 2012. That show was part of the band’s world tour in support of their last album The Hunter. I caught another stop on that tour in Seattle, and it was a powerhouse performance.

Interestingly, the digital-only release (which will be sold through Amazon and iTunes) will come in two versions, one that’s audio-only and one that’s a live video version of the 97-minute show. Here’s the set list: Continue reading »

A PANOPTICON UPDATE: NEW ALBUM DETAILS

 Metal News  7 Responses »
Oct 282013
 

I didn’t discover Panopticon until Kentucky, but that’s all it took to turn me into a big fan. I distinctly remember my mouth falling open in wonder more than once as I made my way through it the first time, hearing the movement of the songs between the metal and the bluegrass, recognizing the samples from Harlan County U.S.A., understanding what the album was about. It connected with me on many levels, some of them opening up distant memories of the music my grandparents used to play when I was growing up in central Texas.

I didn’t really need any more reasons to start following Panopticon’s doings, but I got more when I heard the three tracks that Panopticon contributed to a split with Vestiges earlier this year. At least I wrote about that split, even though I fell down on the job with Kentucky; that split is one of the best releases I’ve heard this year.

All of that is by way of background, to explain why I’m writing now about an announcement that appeared on Panopticon’s Facebook page last night. It provides a lot of information about the next Panopticon album, to which I’ll add a few other tidbits of information I’ve picked up. Here’s the announcement: Continue reading »

SECTIONED: “REPEATER”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 272013
 

Your humble editor is going to be taking a blog break for the rest of the day, but before leaving I wanted to throw one more piece of music your way, and in this case it’s sort of like throwing a grenade after pulling the pin.

Sectioned are a band from Edinburgh, Scotland. I first came across them in May 2012 through a MISCELLANY excursion, which turned into a review of their second EP, Monotonne. Earlier this year they then finished work on another EP by the name of Outlier, and I wrote about a song from that EP named “Trismus”, which they debuted on Valentine’s Day.  Both of those EPs are available on Bandcamp as “name your price” downloads.

Sectioned have been working on an album, but in the meantime they’ve discharged a new single just in time for Halloween. Like everything else they’ve done, this is up on Bandcamp for free (though they’ll gladly accept a donation toward their future efforts). The song’s name is “Repeater”, and when I first heard it, it blew some of my brains out through my nose. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 83)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  6 Responses »
Oct 272013
 

Yeah, it’s that time again — time to present our latest collection of images and videos that are metal even though they’re not music. Today we have seven collections of items for you.

ITEM ONE

We’re just days away from Halloween, so it seemed only fitting to begin with that ugly fucker up there. It’s a photo of Artibeus planirostris made by scientists from Conservation International during a recent survey of an Amazon rainforest in the northern South American country of Suriname. During the survey, 60 new species were discovered, including six new species of frogs, one snake, 11 fishes, and many insects. Artibeus plairostris is not a new species, merely the most abundant species of bat seen during the expedition.

Those large teeth are used for seizing and eating large . . . fruits. Yeah, sorry to disappoint you. The common name for this creature is the “Larger Fruit-eating Bat”, not the “Larger Blood Sucker”. But hey, let me make it up to you with this photo of a juvenile planthopper that was also taken during the expedition: Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: PROMISCUITY – “BASIC INSTINCT”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Oct 272013
 

Israel’s Promiscuity proudly wear their influences like patches on the vest: Right there on the third track of their hellaciously romping EP Basic Instinct is a cover of Celtic Frost’s “Into the Crypts of Rays” from 1984’s Morbid Tales. That album, we know now, was a pivot point in the history of heavy music, along with rough contemporaries such as Bathory’s first full-length and Venom’s Black Metal, and Promiscuity are quite unabashedly happy to plant their flag in the same ground, albeit 30 years later.

Basic Instinct is an unholy stew of punk, speed metal, NWOBHM, and sulfuric acid — the kind of primitive, proto-black-thrash that conjures images of whisky-splashed moshpits in Lucifer’s favorite dive bar. With fairly simple, straight-ahead song structures, Promiscuity rely on the infernal infectiousness of their riffs and an array of screaming, unhinged guitar solos as the main source of their appeal — along with some truly venomous, echo-drenched vocals, the kind you can imagine came from gargling with a cocktail of crushed glass and lye. Continue reading »

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