Here in the U.S., we’re in the middle of Labor Day weekend, a 3-day break that culminates in Labor Day tomorrow. Most Americans probably don’t know the history of the holiday, or maybe even the fact that it’s intended to celebrate the labor movement (only about 12% of salaried workers in the U.S. still belong to a labor union). It’s simply viewed as a sign that summer has ended, football season is about to start, and school is resuming.

Most people spend the holiday taking it easy, goofing off, partying, enjoying the break. Here at NCS, we’re still working away like demented bees, or ants, or some kind of mindless insectile creatures that just mindlessly work until they mindlessly die. That’s how much we care about you. So we sure hope you get something out of the posts this weekend, because if you don’t, we’ll feel even stupider than we really are. Yeah, we know that’s tough to imagine, but still.

So today we have part two of the MISCELLANY post we began yesterday, finishing off the log of new music or videos we randomly checked out in a recent exploratory session. Yesterday, we left off with Synapse Defect. Today, we resume with Gloria Morti (Finland), and finish up with Steven Wilson (Kingston-Upon-Thames, Hemel Hempstead, Tel Aviv, London), and Resistant Culture (U.S.).  (music and video after the jump . . .)

As fodder for this latest installment of MISCELLANY, I once again played the human pinball machine, randomly bouncing from one thing to the next, checking out new music and videos without knowing much about what I’d see or hear. With one exception, I’d never heard the music of the bands I checked out in this session.

As usual, this post is a log of what I heard and saw, without filtering. I spent so much time exploring that I’ve decided to split up the report into two parts. If you’re like me, you have the attention span of a hummingbird, so I won’t push my luck with a really long post. We’ll post the second part tomorrow. The subjects of today’s post are King of Asgard (Sweden), Fractal Gates (France), and Synapse Defect (U.S.).

KING OF ASGARD

I’ve lost track of where I first read about this three-piece Swedish band, but I’ve had their debut CD for a couple weeks. It was released by Metal Blade on August 16 and it’s called Fi’mbulvintr. And no, I have no fucking idea how to pronounce that.

From the band’s name, I deduced that it might be Viking metal — Asgard being the home of the Norse gods, and the king being Odin. The very cool album cover (by Ola Larsson) reinforced that guess. And I just sort of felt in the mood for Viking metal, so my first stop was to fire up this CD and pick a track. (more after the jump, including the chance to hear the music and watch the vids . . .)

Sunday mornings really aren’t any better than Saturday mornings, but we’ve run that riff already, so no more NCS prescriptions about how to get your ass in gear (at least today). Instead, this is just another installment of MISCELLANY.

We did one of these earlier in the week, but we’re still catching up, so we’re doing another one. May have to do even one more before next weekend, because the list of things to check out has grown to ginormous proportions.

To remind you of the ground rules: I randomly check out music I haven’t heard or videos I haven’t seen, trying to stick with bands I’ve never heard before, and keeping my fingers crossed that it will be worth the time. I make a list during the week of things that come our way and then go exploring without much rhyme or reason.

It would be like throwing darts at the list, except I’m not allowed any sharp implements. So I just imagine I’m throwing darts. In my mind, I’ve only put out someone’s eye once.

What’s fun about this game is that I don’t know what I’m gonna find, or whether it will be worth a shit, except (usually) I know it will be metal. Here’s what I heard or saw, in the order of doing it, for this installment of the series: Mytra (Hungary), A Life Once Lost (U.S.), Vulture Industries (Norway), SiC (Faroe Islands), and Loading Data (France?).

Yes, this is a long list, but it’s fucking Sunday. What else are you gonna do today? You can hear and watch what I heard and saw, after the jump . . .

Because of our trip to Portland last weekend to take in the awesomeness of the SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour (for the second time), I didn’t have time for my usual weekly foray into the interwebs looking for new metal.  I’ve been catching up since then and I’ve made enough headway to warrant another installment of this MISCELLANY series.

For new readers, here’s how this thing works: I randomly follow up on e-mails we get here at NCS, or MySpace “friend” requests, or demos that come in the mail, or tips we get from readers, or blurbs that catch my eye on metal sites like Blabbermouth — and I listen to the music or watch a video. Most of the time, I don’t know in advance what the music will be like, or whether it will be good, bad, or just meh.

And then, in this post, I dutifully write up what I found, without filtering out anything. I’m usually pretty lucky in finding new music that’s worthwhile, but there are no guarantees, for me or for you if you choose to read along.

Today’s grab-bag of listening and watching included offerings from Enos (UK), Nightfall (Greece), Anachronaeon (Sweden), Against the Plagues (multinational), and Shades of Dusk (Canada). It’s kind of a long post, but here’s a top-level hint — the music is divergent in style, but everything I heard was very sweet. No filler, all killer. So stay with me.  (explanations, music to hear, and videos to watch, after the jump . . .)

With apologies for the delay in finishing this post and getting it up on the site, here’s another installment of MISCELLANY. If this happens to be your first visit to NCS, here’s what MISCELLANY is:

About once a week I browse around the webz checking out music from metal bands I’ve not heard before. Picking them is mainly a random process, based on things like news items we’ve seen or e-mails we’ve received or MySpace friend requests that come our way or promos that show up in the mail. And in these MISCELLANY posts, I just describe what I heard and/or what I saw, pretty much as it happened, and provide the music or the videos for you to check out, just as I did.

Because I haven’t heard the music of the bands when I start browsing, I have no certain idea whether it will turn out to be good or just a waste of time. So, no guarantees for me — or for you. But most of the time, it turns out these explorations reveal at least a few gems. And that certainly happened today. Today’s finds, which once again have an international flavor: Canopy (Sweden), Purified in Blood (Norway), Man-Eating Tree (Finland), and Pristina (U.S.).

CANOPY

My first stop of the day was a Swedish band called Canopy (that’s their photo at the top of this post). Something of a convoluted story about how this band hit our radar screen: Earlier this week, we posted our review of the debut album by a kick-ass Montreal band called Incarnia. That album was released by a Montreal label called Panoptic. Panoptic and a sister label called Disconcert Music are run by a dude named Stéphane Paré (former vocalist for a Montreal melodic tech-death band called Quo Vadis).

I got an e-mail from M. Paré that led me to Disconcert’s web site, and there I found Canopy — and man, was that a good find.  (much more after the jump . . .)

I guess this MISCELLANY thing is turning into a weekly installment. I do have fun with it, and I hope you continue to find it worthwhile, too.

For new readers, it’s a record of how I spent my time on a recent morning (in this case, yesterday), checking out music I hadn’t heard before. The process is pretty random. I see something that looks interesting — whether from an internet post somewhere or an e-mail we receive here at NCS or a MySpace friend request or something that shows up in the mail.

I’m still hoping our cat will bring me a new CD someday, thinking it’s a mouse. That would really be random, but it hasn’t happened yet. I try to explain what I want, but he just looks at me like that rare Sri Lankan loris over on the right. Except he’s a cat. I wouldn’t want a loris for a pet because they have hands. That would worry me.

Anyway, this MISCELLANY post is a record of what I heard, not knowing in advance whether it would be good, so you’re kind of taking pot luck right along with me. As usual, there’s an international flavor to what I found. And as it happens, I had amazingly good luck on this most recent excursion. Not 100% satisfaction, but pretty fucking close.

The performers whose new music I heard (or whose new videos I watched) were: Navene Koperweis and Alex Rudinger (U.S.), Sole Remedy (Finland), The Red Shore (Australia), Apocalyptica (Finland), and The Autumn Offering (U.S.) — with a little bonus from The Crown (Sweden).

You can hear the music and watch the vids after the jump . . .

This is really the fourth installment of MISCELLANY, but I like my photo caption better as a title than “Miscellany (No. 4)”.  And actually, seeing the photo up above was part of my morning’s journey around the webz, so it’s a legitimate part of this post.

The eye-catching image at the top is a new addition to the photo albums on Grave’s Facebook page. I don’t know whether the person executing the autograph is a member of Grave or another band, but his penmanship is amazingly good, under the circumstances. (To see our review of Grave’s new album, go here.)

The rest of this post is a log of my morning’s browsing around the internet, randomly checking out music from bands I’d never heard before. The way this MISCELLANY thing works, I have no advance idea whether the music will be good, bad, or indifferent, so I can’t offer you any guarantees either. I just dutifully set out what I found, and presume you’ll be interested.

Here are the bands I checked out this morning: Drudkh, Sickening, Psycho Enhancer, and Infinite Tales.

Oh yeah, as icing on the cake, we’ve got a stupendous Gojira video to close out this post.  (all this shit, after the jump . . .)

Time for another installment of this Twitter-ish log in which I presume you’re interested in how I spent my morning, skipping over such vital details as what I ate for breakfast, what I’m wearing, and where my cat is licking himself right now.

Have no fear, this is just a log of the metal I listened to and watched in my latest internet browsing session — following up on press releases, MySpace add requests, and e-mail recommendations, and just some general fucking around. In all cases (with one exception), I had no previous exposure to the bands, and so no real clue whether what I found would be good, bad, or indifferent.

So, here’s what I did, in order of doing it, with no filtering and no guarantees that any of this will be worth your time — though I’m guessing most of what I found will be as new to you as it was to me. The bands I checked out are: Hellish Outcast (Norway); Citi (California); Episode 13 (Turkey); Darkness Dynamite (France); The Forrest Gump Mile High Marathon (Mars); and the one exception mentioned above, Bloodbath (Sweden).

HELLISH OUTCAST

I started off by exploring the music of Hellish Outcast, which is from that historical hot-bed of black metal, Bergen, Norway. We’d received a press release announcing the news that Thebon, frontman for the awesome Keep of Kalessin, would be joining Hellish Outcast as its new vocalist. (Have no fear KOK fans, Thebon hasn’t left that band, he’s just pulling double-duty). And then I found out that one of Hellish Outcast’s founders and its current drummer is Mads Lillevedt, who’s a member of the also-awesome Bergen band Byfrost. (We reviewed the latest albums by KOK and Byfrost here and here.)

That was more than enough incentive to visit the band’s MySpace page (here) and listen to some tunes from their 2008 EP, with the inviting title, Raping – Killing – Murder. And I’ll tell you what I thought — after the jump.

Almost two weeks ago, we tried out something new here at NCS, kind of like what some people do with their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts when they tell you hour-by-hour (or minute-by-minute) what they’re doing — except we limited our disclosures to metal and hoped it would be more interesting than a lot of the social networking blather.

To be more precise, I posted a log of exactly what I listened to or watched on that particular morning, whether it turned out to be good, bad, or indifferent. I got enough encouragement from readers that I decided to continue doing it.

In the interests of complete candor, I should say that it takes very little encouragement for me to do anything, unless it involves actual work, in which case it takes a great deal of encouragement, plus threats of being pistol-whipped.

So, here we go again — a log of exactly what I heard or saw in one of my recent sessions of poking around for new music to check out, and what I found, for better or for worse.  (after the jump, of course . . .)

Lots of social networking feeds are used in ways we don’t understand. We’re talking about people who use Twitter and Facebook posts and MySpace bulletins to tell the world about their latest bowel movement or what they just ate or their current mood or what they just did with their right index finger. Sometimes it’s funny, and we know lots of bands think it’s good marketing — a way to keep their names in the forefront of people’s heads. But most of this minute-by-minute minutiae is just dull as dishwater, or worse.

But because we’re still feeling slightly guilty about using up today’s NCS space with an extended rant about Dave Mustaine, we thought we ought to do something else before calling it quits for the day. So we’re indulging in that same Twitter-esque impulse to just tell the world what we’ve been doing this morning. Don’t worry — we’ll keep the details of our latest bowel movements to ourselves. This will have something to do with music, though in a completely random way.

It’s just a log of what we’ve listened to and/or watched in our day so far. We’re not even recommending it. It’s just what we did, and like all those tweeters out there, we just presume you’ll be vividly interested.

First up is something that’s NSFW, but since it’s a holiday for most people in the U.S. and since most of our readers are probably out of work anyway, we’ll forge ahead. Plus, it will give us a chance to one-up some of the video nastiness that our guest contributor Steff Metal served up in her post about Metal from NZ a week ago.

This lead-off video, which is brand new, is from an Austrian band called Mastic Scum. It’s for a song called “Construcdead” from the band’s 2009 album, Dust. The song is a bruising piece of street-gutter death metal that’s pretty good. The conceptual theme of the video is someone’s idea of over-the-edge debauchery, framed in a metaphor of vehicular wreckage.

So, if it’s been a while since you snorted coke, shot-up with heroin, cavorted with oiled-up dominatrixes, stuffed your face with food, been bull-whipped, had a golden shower, took it up the bunghole with a black dildo, or dribbled snot uncontrollably — well, you can relive those fond memories by watching this:   (after the jump, of course — and more of our morning log follows it . . . .)