Are you like me? When you watch lingerie ads, do you wish there were a death metal sound track? I thought so. I mean, doesn’t everyone wish for that? Well, Agent Provocateur has made your fondest dreams come true.

Agent Provocateur is a UK-based maker of high-end lingerie. And by high-end, I don’t mean the kind of butts that defy gravity. I mean the kind of lingerie made for people with more money than sense. Agent Provocateur’s latest line of undergarments, with an S&M flair, is called Soiree. To promote these look-good, feel-good undergarments, the company made a promotional video that’s kind of a horror-movie take-off, that is, if you find supermodels feasting on each other scary.

The video was directed by a guy named Justin Anderson, working with Agent Provocateur’s Creative Director, Sarah Shotton. According to Justin, “Putting Agent Provocateur and horror together seemed the natural direction for the collection, but we needed a music track that would add a layer of humour.  Sarah came up with the idea of using a Death Metal track which would be perfect for the brief, and I promised her I would make a film that would be like listening to Slayer whilst reading Italian Vogue.”

Wow. It’s like Justin has been stalking and surveilling me. How did he know that I like nothing better than listening to Slayer while reading Italian Vogue? I mean, it’s like having bacon with your cheeseburger. In this case, Justin went with a Parisian-based band called Omaha Bitch. Watch the ad after the jump (for those watching this in a public place, there’s bare boobage in the vid . . .).

Only two days have passed since I began my vacation, and I’m already feeling mellow. My brain is slowing down, as I would imagine the molecules of freezing water slowing as they approach the tipping point between liquid and solid. Time is passing, but the firing of neurons in my head are becoming muffled, and so time is beginning to feel like something that happens to other people, but not to me. I am entering a kind of stasis.

Part of me relishes this experience, and part of me is disturbed by it. While wallowing in the absence of any need to act, I am not yet entirely comfortable. Why is this? I know why. It’s because daily life in the Western world makes no room for mellowness, except grudgingly. You can make your own room for it, but in my case there’s a nagging fear that if I become completely mellow, I will be crushed like a line of ants in the path of a steamroller. While you meander at the pace of universal entropy, something or someone else is at the steamroller’s controls and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your inner peace.

Is this a sickness or simply a clear-eyed recognition of the way the world works?

Where was I? Oh yeah, feeling mellow. I haven’t been listening to metal, because it has dawned on me that I have almost no metal that’s mellow. The only recent thing that comes to mind is Devin Townsend’s Ghost. I may listen to that. Surely I have something else that will suit my current mood, something that will ease my irrational worries and aid me in the honeyed slide into . . . mellowness. Do you have any ideas?  (more after the jump . . .)

Tonight is possibly the most metal night of the year, at least in countries where Halloween is celebrated. In addition to giving extroverted chicks an excuse to dress slutty and dudes yet another opportunity to act like idiots, it’s the night when goblins, orcs, reanimated corpses, blood-suckers, demon spawn, and headless horsemen all come out to get fucked up and headbang.

Almost every metal blog will be doing some kind of Halloween-themed bullshit today, and we don’t want to stick out like a sore penis thumb by doing nothing to celebrate the event. But I’m too fucking lazy to create something myself, so I’d like you to do it for me. So, here’s the deal: In the Comment section, please give me your suggestion for a metal song that would be a good one to play on Halloween, and before nightfall I’ll pick three of them to play here at NCS in a follow-up post to this one. If you like, feel free to give more than one suggestion. And if you’re the shy type, feel free to e-mail me your suggestion instead of leaving it in the Comments (islander@nocleansinging.com).

And speaking of me-being-lazy-and-wanting-you-to-do-all-my-NCS-work-for-me, I’m about to turn into a pumpkin myself. Because of a work crunch that I’m now about to start, followed by a greatly deserved vacation, my blogging time is about to be severely compressed. I wrote about this a while back and made a general call for guest posts that I could run here at NCS while I’m in pumpkin land. I’ve already received a slew of great shit, and I know more submissions are on the way. BUT, it’s not too late, even if you haven’t started writing anything. Details after the jump.

If this doesn’t make your whole damn week, well then you’ve had a stupendously sucky week. Fuck, this may make your whole damn month.

A scant 10 days ago, first-time NCS guest contributor The Baby Killer gave us his review of the new album by the wonderfully inventive and technically mesmerizing Blotted Science. The album is called The Animation of Entomology. Before it came out, guitarist Ron Jarzombek was reported as saying:

““As many of you know, all 24-plus minutes of the EP are a musical score to some type of bug movies. We will reveal the first one at my YouTube channel next Friday [Oct 14]. We’ll miss Friday the 13th by one day, but hopefully this viewing will be creepy enough for you. And so until the video appears, enjoy the audio. I realize that it all may be beyond wacky at this point, but it all will soon make perfect sense.”

Well, the first clip has now been released. Whatever you may think of the 2005 remake of King Kong, starring Jack Black and Adrien Brody, it was worth every penny because it has furnished the video accompaniment to a Blotted Science song called “Cretaceous Chasm”.  (more after the jump . . .)

My good friend Tre Watson is a very busy man who’s up to pretty much everything you can imagine in the world of music.  He’s either recording and producing someone else, writing and recording his own music, or playing with his band Carthage.  I’m reviewing not only the debut EP of Carthage, but also Tre’s recent solo EP called Gravestones.

Carthage plays a style of less-is-more and simple-is-best deathcore with “a little of everything” thrown in, as he put it.  This is pretty accurate, as the music has very small doses of thrash, melodeath, traditional hardcore, and death metal thrown into the mix to keep it varied despite the music’s simplistic approach.

Listening to the EP is like getting smashed over the head with boulders repeatedly.  There is undeniable, consistent groove here, combined with moments of melodeath riffing, deathcore and djent syncopated chugs, tremolo riffing, and badass lead-work everywhere.  I really like what’s going on here — it’s worth checking out.  It’s only a tiny bit underdeveloped, but that’s to be expected with even the best of first EP’s.  The potential is bursting at the seams.  You can stream the entire EP at Bandcamp, or right here at NCS after the jump.

It’s that time of year again, and by that I mean it’s vacation time (almost)! Yes, your humble Nitwit-in-Chief will soon be embarking for sunnier climes, leaving behind the fucking day job and the Seattle dank in search of a little R&R. While I’m gone, my blogging time will be significantly restricted. My wife, Mrs. Nitwit (which I can say because she never reads NCS) remains adamant that when she and I are on vacation, hours spent blogging every day will NOT be tolerated. She can be a scary person when angry and she’s good with a knife, so I don’t plan to push my luck.

I know our regular staff members — Andy, BadWolf, and TheMadIsraeli — will step up their game while I’m gone, and I’m hoping for the same from some of our more or less regular guest writers (Phro and Trollfiend, I’m lookin’ at you). But, as I did last year, I’m also appealing for help from our loyal cadre of NCS readers to help keep the site from going dark while I’m away by sending me guest submissions.

If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of writing something for publication at NCS or some other metal blog, now’s a good time to give it a shot. Or maybe you’re already writing for another blog and you’d like to upgrade the content quality at NCS (good luck with that).  Regardless of your situation, we want your shit! Uh, I meant, we want the eloquence of your written expression! Details after the jump . . .

What I know about rap and crunk music isn’t worth a popcorn fart. It’s not that I think it’s bad, on some objective scale of “blows” to “awesome”. It’s just that, in my current frame of mind, it’s like everything else that isn’t metal: 99% of it is just BORE. ING.

But there are exceptions to every rule, and Lil Jon’s song “Stop Fuckin Wit Me” is one of them. I just heard this yesterday. The only reason I even found out about it is because there’s a metal connection: The song includes samples from Slayer. Some will say this pollutes Slayer, Some will say this pollutes crunk. And some will say this is a crime against all music, and a crime against nature on top of that. But me? I just wanna get in my car, roll the windows down, and blast this shit at random strangers until my speakers plead for mercy, “give em some of my fuckin pain”.

It’s kind of like that Archgoat song we featured yesterday. Sometimes, you just get some irreplaceable pleasure out of annoying the shit out of other people. But beyond that, this song just speaks to me. It gives voice to that small, meek voice that wants to be a lot bigger than it is, the voice that just wants to say, almost every day, to one person or another, who may or may not have it coming to ‘em but I’d like to give it to ‘em anyway, STOP FUCKIN WIT ME!

Oh yeah, one more thing: Credit to Cormorant for turning me onto this via a FB post, and who would’ve guessed that quite awesome band would be paying attention to this song? It came out years ago, and so some of you may find this to be really old news, but from my perspective if it’s new to me, then it’s just fuckin NEW. (listen after the jump)

A reminder:

NO CLEAN SINGING was originally launched by three people almost two years ago. My two comrades have sort of fallen by the wayside as time has passed, though on rare occasions one of them surfaces to contribute a post. On this site, he goes by the name IntoTheDarkness. Beginning last month, he became the Metal Director at KSUB, the internet radio station of Seattle University. He’s responsible for the station’s metal playlist and he also personally hosts a two-hour metal show every Thursday night at 10:00 Pacific Time.

There’s not a lot of talking on that show, apart from IntoTheDarkness telling you what you’re going to hear, or have heard, but I can pretty much guarantee that the music will be killer — all extreme metal with no commercials. Now, I know there are 1,000 other ways you can find metal on the web for listening purposes, wholly apart from your own personal collection of music, but this is one way that I can’t help but promote, (a) because I know the dude pretty well (that’s an understatement), and (b) because I respect his taste. So, give this a shot.

To hear the show, you’ll need Winamp, iTunes, XMMS or an mp3 player capable of listening to shoutcast streams on your computer. You can listen by clicking this link. And for future reference, here’s the URL:

http://www.seattleu.edu/ksub/default.aspx?id=66045

And yeah, this is Thursday, so the show will be on in about 30 minutes from now.

Here are four things that got my attention earlier today. I’m betting that everyone who reads this will be interested in at least one of these items. And, just in case that’s a bad guess, we have porn after the jump.

ITEM ONE

I don’t think I have to do anything but excerpt these quotes from the Metal Blade press release. It was enough for me.

Cannibal Corpse has begun recording their twelfth studio album at Sonic Ranch studios in Texas with producer Erik Rutan. The band has spent months writing the album and has recorded at Sonic Ranch in the past, but never with Rutan at the helm. More details on the album, including art, songs, title and more will be revealed in the months to follow. For now, the band is hard at work forging their next death metal offering.

Erik Rutan worked with Cannibal Corpse for both Kill (2006) and Evisceration Plague (2009) and is returning for a third time. Rutan explains further: “I am super excited to work with Cannibal Corpse for our 3rd album together. We are determined to make the best album we possibly can. Everyone is very focused and the new material is awesome. There is a great blend of classic, old school CC with a newer, more heavy, dynamic and aggressive approach. I look forward to the challenge of making one heavy as hell record!”

(more after the jump, including porn . . .)

This seemed as good a time as any to set out some thoughts that have been rattling around my head, but I’m doing it in the hope of getting some feedback from NCS readers — both those of you who are fans of metal and those of you who are musicians, too, to get both kinds of perspectives. Writers of other metal blogs, PR people, and even label reps sometimes stop by here, too, and those perspectives would also be useful.

So, by social media I mainly have in mind Facebook and MySpace. They serve many functions for their users, but today I’m only interested in what they have to offer metal fans and bands. As I see it, for fans, they serve three primary functions: First, they allow fans to track what the bands they like are up to (ie, news), and to interact with the bands at the same time. Second, they provide a vehicle for listening to new music. Third, they allow fans to interact with each other — and here, I’m thinking mainly about fans exchanging music recommendations and other info about bands and the scene.

For bands, social media serve goals that are connected to the functions they provide for fans: First, they give bands a way to stay connected to their fans by providing a place where they can post news items and comments and get feedback.  Second, they provide a vehicle for attracting new fans — a place where they can stream their music, provide music downloads and videos, and post basic info, such as how the band started and its history to date, who’s in the band, descriptions of the music, links to other sites related to the band, etc. Third, they provide a forum where musicians can exchange ideas among themselves and make connections with each other.

When we started this blog more than a year and a half ago, MySpace was the dominant social media presence for music. For me as a budding metal blogger, it was the one place where I knew I could go and listen to virtually any band’s music. I could read their MySpace blogs for news, and I could use MySpace messaging to communicate with them. It was like one-stop “shopping”. Back then, I didn’t pay much attention to Facebook, because it just didn’t really offer much in the way of music resources. (more after the jump . . .)