NEW ALBUM DETAILS: ANATHEMA, GOATWHORE, SEPREVATION

 Metal News  19 Responses »
Mar 282014
 

Here are a few notices sent my way by my NCS colleagues that we agreed were worth mentioning.  They concern forthcoming albums.

ANATHEMA

Following up on their well-received 2012 album Weather Systems, the UK’s Anathema revealed this morning that their new album will be named Distant Satellites and will be released by the Kscope label on June 9. The album art was created by Korean new media artist Sang Jun Too and was based on his “Distant Light” installation. Some of the songs were mixed by Steven Wilson. The band’s announcement also included these words:

“Distant Satellites is the culmination of everything ANATHEMA been working up to so far in our musical path. It contains almost every conceivable element of the heartbeat of Anathema music that it is possible to have. Continue reading »

A NO METAL POLL

 Off Topic  77 Responses »
Mar 282014
 

(NCS guest contributor Leperkahn has embarked on what appears to be a foolish endeavor. Against our better judgment, we’re helping him out by letting him solicit your suggestions for this hair-brained escapade. This will end in tears.)

Greetings, NCS comrades.

As a few of you may know, I’m still in high school (only for a couple more months, though). My elective class for this semester is a journalism class. For one of the capstone-y projects of the course, I am supposed to do an experiential blog. More precisely, I am tasked to alter my life in some meaningful (but feasible) manner, and write about the process as I go along.

I have listened more or less exclusively to metal for a couple years now, with only a few conscious forays into other areas (by conscious, I mean outside of the pop music that cannot be escaped by any sociable person). Thus, I thought it fitting – difficult, but certainly feasible – to try and live an entire week without any metal in my life. None. At the many times I would usually listen to metal during the week, I will instead listen to another largely unrelated genre. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: LORD MANTIS, INVINCIBLE FORCE, YOUNG AND IN THE WAY, TARTHARIA, ATHANATHEOS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 282014
 

I spent some time last night searching for new music worth recommending. Found quite a lot. Damaged my ear drums in the process, but oh so worth it. (They were so screwed up beforehand that it didn’t really matter. As for you, play this stuff loud enough to cause pain, so I don’t feel lonely in my deafness.)

There’s a lot of music in here — I could easily have spread it across five posts today — but there probably won’t be many other posts on this Friday because I’m on the road again. So, take your sweet time with it.

LORD MANTIS

We already reviewed Death Mask. We’ve heard it all, but most of you haven’t. Some of you will want to run away from it, some of you will eat it up like whatever it is you can’t stop eating even when you know you should. I’m in the latter category — it has made an indelible mark, as deep as all the black tattoos that beautify my limbs. Continue reading »

SÓLSTAFIR ANNOUNCE FIRST-EVER “NORTH AMERICAN” TOUR

 Metal News  9 Responses »
Mar 272014
 

I don’t have the data at my fingertips. It’s possible that we’ve written about some other band more than we’ve written about Iceland’s Sólstafir over the years — but I’d be surprised if that were true. And so it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m posting the following announcement of the band’s first “North American” tour, even though some literary license has been taken with the term “North American”:

Icelandic rock heathens Sólstafir have announced a string of North American tour dates. The band’s first-ever North American trek starts on May 15 in Brooklyn, NY and will continue through the band’s stop at this year’s Maryland Deathfest on May 23. Support on these dates comes from JUNIUS. A full list of confirmed tour dates can be found below.

SOLSTAFIR North American tour dates
5/15 Toronto, ON @ Hard Luck
5/16 Brooklyn, NY @ Saint Vitus Bar
5/17 Philadelphia PA @ Underground Arts
5/18 Boston, MA @ Middle East
5/19 Springfield, VA @ Empire
5/23 Baltimore, MD @ Maryland Deathfest Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BARBELITH — “REBIRTH”

 Premieres  5 Responses »
Mar 272014
 

Following up on their self-titled 2012 EP, Baltimore’s Barbelith are poised for the release of an untitled two-song 7″ EP by Fragile Branch Recordings. One of the songs (“Caverns of the Mind”) has previously debuted and today we premiere the second track, “Rebirth”.

Barbelith’s dark, genre-bending music as displayed on this new release melds together eerie ambience, black metal vehemence, raw hardcore rage, and shimmering guitar melodies that cross into post-rock territory. The resulting music is bleak and depressive, but quite riveting — and “Rebirth” is a fine summing up of the band’s unusual blend of styles. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: AUTOPSY, LOUDBLAST, BLACK ANVIL, AND ARCHSPIRE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 272014
 

I’ll spare you the why’s and wherefore’s, but your humble editor has fallen behind in monitoring developments in the world of metal.  As a result, the collection of new songs is even more random than usual. Nevertheless, I think all the music is very good, and it’s diverse enough that it should please a range of tastes.

AUTOPSY

Tourniquets, Hacksaws And Graves is the name of the seventh studio excrescence by the mighty Autopsy. Ever since the Wes Benscoter album art and April 21 release date were disclosed by the Peaceville label back in February, I’ve been waiting for a taste of the music, and we finally got it yesterday, with the premiere of “The Howling Dead” at Noisey.

I’m not surprised at how good this song is, but I’m surprised at how wretchedly good it is. That driving beat at the beginning, shrouded in dense distortion, is just killer. So is the thoroughly horrific doom slow-down that follows it. So is the lurching, rocking stomp that comes next. And so on… Chris Reifert’s vocals have never sounded more horrific, the riffs are as putrescent and grisly as they’ve ever been, and the closing guitar solo oozes decay. Fantastic! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE (AND REVIEW): OWL — “INTO THE ABSOLUTE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Mar 272014
 

I discovered Germany’s Owl and their 2013 album You Are the Moon, I Am the Night through a guest post on our site last summer by KevinP. That was Owl’s second album, and I was hugely impressed by it. Now, this two-man band have completed a four-song EP entitled Into the Absolute, and I’m hugely impressed by it as well — so much so that we obtained the privilege of premiering its title track for you.

Owl’s Christian Kolf says that if that last album was drenched in the atmosphere of night, the new EP is “set right before dawn, when the first light appears,” with “a feeling of a new awakening”.  There are in fact moments of beauty in the music, most strikingly in the latter part of the long, stately closing track, “Unearthly Arcana”, but when these moments come, the atmosphere is one of deep melancholy. And if the EP as a whole stands on the brink of dawn, it is nevertheless still very much wrapped in the mantle of night. Continue reading »

OCULUS INFERNUS: IN WHICH THE PROFESSOR EXAMINES SOCKWEB, JUMALATION, DEMON EYE, ANGELSPIT, AND CULTFINDER

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 272014
 

(It is always such a treat for us to bring you the investigations of Professor D. Grover the XIIIth. They come in the night, when you least expect them, and they open your eyes, and your ears. Blessings be upon his wizard head.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. I return to bring to your undoubtedly overcrowded attention new releases from a quintet of artistic purveyors of the Devil’s Musick. You may be familiar with a few of these artists, and that in itself is laudable. If, by some odd confluence of fate, you are familiar with all of them, then I warmly shake your hand and wish to know more about you, as clearly we are of a similar mind when it comes to music. And now, let us commence.

SOCKWEB

If there is one of these musical groups I would expect most of you to know, it would be Sockweb. After all, they have been widely discussed in the annals of No Clean Singing before. Still, for those of you a bit slow on the uptake, Sockweb are a grind duo comprised of multi-instrumentalist Adam “Blackula” Young and his now seven-year-old daughter and vocalist Joanie “Bologna” Young, and it is that initially gimmicky quality that has gained Sockweb their notoriety. At any rate, the duo’s debut album Werewolf is finally available for purchase, and as many had hoped, it’s actually quite excellent. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: A STORM OF STREAMS

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 262014
 

(Austin Weber brings us another round-up of music and metal news, featuring The Conjuration, D’Arkestra, Divine Realm, Winter of Sin, and Posthumous Blasphemer.)

THE CONJURATION

After a long wait, The Conjuration’s new album, Surreal, has finally emerged—and it’s a gloriously twisted avante-garde beast that lashes out in progressive and schizophrenic fits. This is death metal turned upside down. Corey Jason has proved once again that he doesn’t need a band, only himself. He composed all of it, played all the instruments, did the vocals, and handled the production himself, too.

On Surreal, Corey skillfully pushes the limits of what a one-man death metal act is capable of creating. Most acts of this nature that play death metal are lacking compositionally and all too often create music that is too samey in the songwriting, and too often lacking a vital creative spark. By contrast, Surreal really does sound like the work of multiple people whose different ideas and approaches led to a diverse group of songs. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INFECTING THE SWARM — “ABERRATED ANTIBIOSIS”

 Premieres  6 Responses »
Mar 262014
 

At this site we focus our attentions on a broad range of metal, but if there is a common thread to all the music, it’s that it exerts a powerful pull on the emotions — and/or the viscera. The subject of this post is a band from Germany named Infecting the Swarm, whose debut album Pathogenesis will be released by Lacerated Enemy Records on May 5. And as you will learn from the new song we’re about to premiere, Infecting the Swarm is coming for your viscera.

The name of the song is “Aberrated Antibiosis”. Your first clue to what it holds lies before you in the album cover by Federico Musetti. Those creatures are humanoid, but not human. They look hungry. They look violent. They yearn for something that may be better left unsaid. All that is true of the song as well. Continue reading »

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