Here at NCS, we have an uncomfortable habit of forgetting our friends’ birthdays. But hey, we forget our own birthdays, too. So there’s that.

For example, we overlooked the fact (for the second year in a row), that November 21 was the anniversary of the first post at NO CLEAN SINGING. We are now two years and two days old. Still not potty-trained, but old enough to have discovered the fascination of our own genitals. So there’s that.

Our credibility as arbiters of taste and intelligent assessment of music is still highly suspect. However, this hasn’t stopped bands from asking us to listen to their music or prevented most metal labels from sending us albums to review. And over the last 30 days we’ve had 57,808 page views and 32,475 unique visitors from 131 different countries (only about half of whom are trying to interest us in receiving large cash transfers from the estates of dead Africans in exchange for our personal details). So there’s that.

Since our launch, we’ve published 1,498 posts (including this one) and received 14,406 comments (only about half of which are my own). We haven’t missed a day, publishing at least one post every day since we started, even on those many days (including today) when I was viciously hungover.

We’ve remained reasonably true to our founding principles: We still don’t run ads; we still don’t spend much time slagging bad bands or posting negative reviews (preferring to concentrate our time on music we can honestly recommend and not writing about the music that doesn’t impress us); and our news reporting has also been reasonably true. (more after the jump . . .)

Over time, we’ve devoted increasing amounts of space to Exceptions to the Rule, i.e., music that includes clean singing. I blame this on the other writers who inexplicably continue allowing us to post their pieces at NCS. I do my best to counterbalance their insurgency by focusing my own posts on really ugly, vicious, intestinally disruptive, reptile-brain music with vocals that strip paint from the walls and make ears bleed (and if any of the bands whose music I’ve reviewed are reading this, I mean this in the nicest possible way). So although we’ve broadened the scope of our musical coverage, and have confused the shit out of people who take the title of this blog literally, we still mainly concentrate on the kind of extreme metal that omits clean crooning. So there’s that.

(Andy, this means that I still don’t intend to re-name the site NO, CLEAN SINGING!)

I continue to have a shitload of fun with this blog. Yes, part of that is due to the continuing opportunity it gives me to use my favorite word, which begins with F and ends in UCK. But mainly, I have benefitted hugely from the chance to interact with bands, with our writers (both regular contributors and guests), and with the wonderful community of people who have chosen to spend some of their time each week visiting our site. I’m certainly not objective about this, but I also think our Comment sections are among the best in the metal segment of the web. And it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: Our readers are clearly the most intelligent metalheads on the planet. This can be objectively proven by the fact that they read NCS. So there’s that.

In closing, allow me to thank all of you for giving us a reason to forge ahead with the third year of NO CLEAN SINGING. We will continue to do our best to earn your continued attention, and to give you reasons to recommend us to your friends (or at least your enemies).

Now, please make a wish and blow out our candles, because this bit of birthday celebration is for you, too. And in lieu of a happy birthday song to accompany the blowing, I leave you with a bit of fucking Mayhem.

If you’ve registered as a user at NO CLEAN SINGING and ever posted a comment, you know that the image accompanying your post is a random icon called a Gravatar. If you get tired having a computer algorithm pick your icon for you, and you’d like to pick your own image, you can.

Thanks to our buddy byrd36, who reminded us, the way to do that is visit the Gravatar web page (here) and register a profile by providing an e-mail address, and then picking or uploading an image to be your icon. For example, a bunch of bats hanging from a tree like putrescent fruit. If you’ve already registered here, I assume you need to use the same e-mail you used for the NCS registration if you want the image you choose at Gravatar to appear when you post comments here. Once you’ve created the Gravatar profile, the image you picked will appear anywhere else on the web when you post a comment using the same e-mail address, as long as the site is Gravatar-enabled (and all WordPress blogs, like NCS, automatically enable Gravatar).

Sorry about the lolcat-speak in the post title. Sometimes I can’t resist — especially since I read a few days ago this stunning piece of news: There’s a Seattle-based company called Cheezburger that owns the icanhascheezburger web site, plus a shitload of other idiotic sites, all of which collectively draw more than 16.5 million people a month and generate more than 375 million monthly page views; and on January 18, Cheezburger announced that it had raised $30 million from venture capital investors. Huh. You can make big money from lolcatz but not from playing in a metal band. Go figure.

To show you just how discombobulated I am after a little time off, I totally missed the fact that yesterday was the one-year anniversary of NO CLEAN SINGING. It’s true: On November 21, 2009, my two co-founders and I put up our first post on this site. We had 9 visitors. We couldn’t even get all our friends to pay attention.

We’ve learned a lot since then, we’ve met (virtually speaking) people from all over the world, and we’ve had a fucking blast doing this. NCS has evolved into something we never would have predicted — and few things are better than a pleasant surprise.

We never set out to make money by doing this, which is why we don’t run ads, but we did promise ourselves that if we couldn’t generate interest, we’d just shut down and go find some other way to spend our free time — cuz we really had no interest in writing only for ourselves. That’s what diaries are for.

Thankfully, we found an audience for our ravings, and so we’re still here, working on Year Two. This morning we tried to think of some clever way to celebrate our One Year Anniversary, but we must have used up our weekly allotment of cleverness because all we really want to say is this: To all of you who spend part of your precious time visiting NCS, and sometimes even leaving us your comments (which we love getting), thank you for allowing us to continue with NO CLEAN SINGING. You’ve enriched our lives more than we can say. Stay metal!

We’re taking a little break from our usual posts today to celebrate a milestone (although below this post, we did put up our monthly update on forthcoming new releases). Tomorrow and the next day: Reviews of some new albums that will make your heads explode.

Not too long ago, we passed a milestone here at NO CLEAN SINGING. On May 21, 2010, we hit the six-month anniversary of this site. Six months ago, we put up our first half-baked post. We had 9 visits for that ugly little baby, including the 3 of us who collaborate in putting this thing together. Shit, most of our friends weren’t even interested.

How things have changed! In the six months since we gave birth to this monster, after a slow ramp-up, we’ve had more than 21,000 unique visitors from 122 different countries. The posts we’ve written have drawn more than 35,000 page views, and the number of unique visitors is now over 500 per day — with the trend continuing to climb. (How do we know all this? For you non-bloggers out there who may not understand, stay with us, and we’ll eventually get to that below).

We’re not quoting all these stats to slap ourselves on the back — even with the growth of our audience, the traffic we get here at NCS is a drop in the bucket compared to some other metal blogs that you probably also read. And the truth is, we’re kinda bewildered by the attention.

At the same time, we’re also pathetically grateful — and we owe some thank-you’s to people who’ve helped us get noticed: to bands, fellow metal bloggers, and NCS readers. So, bear with us while (once again) we wear our hearts on our sleeves.  (more after the jump . . .)

Does it matter to us that people visit NCS? Well, hell yeah it does! If we didn’t care whether anyone read what we wrote, we’d just keep a fucking diary.

We write about metal not just because we like writing about something so important to us and because we get to use words like “fuck,” “fucking,” and “fucked” in print whenever we like, but because we want to share what we know and what we’re thinking with other people who care about the music and the scene as much as we do. In a nutshell, we definitely do want to be read!

But, we’re not only interested in being noticed. If attention is all we wanted, we’d just drop trow and moon a cop. We also want to believe we’re offering something that’s useful to readers, or at least entertaining — and we do try hard to pull that off every day.

At the same time, we’re honest enough with ourselves to know that what we’ve accomplished is mainly due to the efforts of lots of other people who’ve helped spread the word about NO CLEAN SINGING — bands we’ve written about, other metal bloggers, and metalheads who’ve visited us regularly.

So, in commemoration of our six-month milestone, we offer the following thank-you’s, plus a few other random observations. And our pictorial theme for the day, of course, is “throwing the goat.”

THE BANDS

Our first thank-you’s go out to the bands. The music, after all, is what this site is mainly about. We continue to be humbled by how many talented artists are turning out kick-ass new music every week — despite the massive obstacles to building a career in the world of extreme metal.

We like discovering new music, and one of our goals from the beginning has been to turn you on to sounds you might now hear about in another way. That’s one reason why we pay attention to bands from countries all over the world (including ones that aren’t exactly the best launching pads for our kind of music) and why we like trying to give a leg up to DIY acts with talent.

We certainly don’t expect thanks from the bands we write about, but we’ve been amazed at how many musicians have taken the time to e-mail us some really nice thank-you notes — from Bruce Fitzhugh of Living Sacrifice to Sakis Solis of Rotting Christ, from Franck Quintin and Mika Andre of Eryn Non Dae to Jesper Zuretti of The Binary Code, from Gus Drax to Mike Kvidera of The Brown Book, from Henke Zinger of God Dethroned to Jorgen Munkeby of Shining and Afaque Azad of Infernal Wrath, from Rich Hoak of Brutal Truth to Keith Putnam of Flaming Tusk and Billy Anderson of Ever Forthright — and dozens more.

It’s been a vivid reminder of something we already knew and the rest of the world doesn’t really understand — that although metalheads play and listen to some unusually aggressive and often down-right nasty music, it’s a community of really decent people who care about each other.

Apart from all the e-mail exchanges, lots of the bands we’ve written about have also helped spread the word about this site to their fans via links on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace. The guy who gets the grand prize for that is Cameron “Big Chocolate” Argon — and all his fanatic fans. We’ve had over 2,000 hits on the posts we wrote about him (here and here) — and they’re still coming in.

We’ve met some very cool musicians through this site, but we’ve got to single out the experience we had with Kansas City’s Ares Kingdom. As a result of our review of their superb new album and a related follow-up post about parents, we got wonderful messages not only from the band but from their friends and family members, including a report about the wedding reception of drummer Mike Miller where our blog was a topic of discussion (you can see some of those messages here).

On the subject of bands, our one regret is that we can’t write about more of them.  Unfortunately, there’s a limit to how much blogging time our fucking day jobs and the rest of our lives will allow. And when someone sends us new music to hear and we fail to write about it, many times it’s got nothing to do with how good the music is, and a lot more to do with just running out of fucking time before we need to move on to something else.

THE BLOGS

Moving on. We’ve benefitted from some truly heart-warming support from a number of other metal blogs — all the more heart-warming because, in some sense, we compete with each other for your eyeballs.  At the top of our thank-you list are the two blogs that inspired us to start NCS in the first place.

Reign in Blonde remains one of our without-fail daily reads. Their quirky posts always put smiles on our faces, and those three ladies can all really write. Apart from being inspirational to us, they were the first metal blog to add us to their list of recommended links — way before we even came close to deserving it — and they’ve paid attention to us in other ways, too (including picking me as one of their monthly “Panty Raid” winners).  Thank you ladies!

Metal Sucks is the other site that inspired us to start this one. They are, of course, the 800-pound gorilla of metal blogdom, with a massive and well-deserved fan base and a daily mix of posts that are by turns informative, thought-provoking, and funny as shit.

The site’s co-owner Vince Neilstein has patiently replied to e-mails from me about bands I get enthusiastic about, but the biggest, over-the-top solid he did us was to put up a post recommending this site just as the Memorial Day Weekend was about to start, when people had a little more time than usual to spend web-surfing. As you might expect, that brought us a ton of new readers, and we’re very grateful for that well-timed bit of kindness.

We also want to send out special thanks to the people who create Steff Metal (whose author periodically shares her wit and wisdom through guest posts here at NCS), The Number of the Blog, Positively Bleak, and Baroque, Bleak and Brutal, both for their support and, more generally, for being such cool fucking people.

ALL THE REST OF YOU MOTHERFUCKERS OUT THERE

Last on the list, but first in our hearts — all you readers out there who had the fortitude to continue coming back here after your first visit, and maybe even told your friends about us. By the way, sometimes we like to pretend we’re Frank Mullen, so when we call you “motherfuckers,” we mean that in the fondest possible way.

We want to give an especially loud “Fuck Yeah!” to the readers who take the time to leave a comment on our posts. We certainly don’t expect that (and in fact we’re pretty bad ourselves about leaving comments on the sites we visit), but when it happens. it perks us right up — and we make a point to respond to every comment we get.

We know we’ve got to earn your support every day. There’s just too little time and too much to do for people to come here, even for a few minutes, unless they really get something out of it. So that’s our main motivation.

So far, we’ve kept the promise we made ourselves in the beginning to put up something new every damned day. We’ve had some near-misses on that promise, and, slackers that we are, there’s bound to be a day when we fuck up — but so far so good.

We’ll also continue trying to improve our writing — though don’t expect our taste to improve, or to see reduced usage of “fuck” and its derivatives. We’re only human after all.

I suppose that’s more than enough blather about our six-month milestone. You can just imagine what it will be like if we’re still here after a year. What we write then will make this post look like a tweet.

P.S. How do we know those stats about visits to our site? Well, we signed up for a service called Google Analytics. When you do that, Google puts little bits of code in your web pages that enables it to track and report your site usage. Odds are that any site you visit that includes ads, and many (like this one) that don’t, is a participant in Google Analytics.

Google says the info they gather is anonymous (i.e., no personal identifying information about site visitors). Of course, they’re a big money-sucking corporation, so I automatically distrust them. But whether they’re being truthful or not, the reports we access certainly don’t include that kind of detail.  All we get is a bunch of aggregate numbers – and it is kinda cool to see our total visits broken down into country-of-origin.

Online advertisers live and die by their Google Analytics reports. We don’t advertise (and have no plans to advertise), so we look at these reports solely out of narcissistic curiosity.

[Editor's Note: NO CLEAN SINGING was originally founded by three metalheads who go by the names of Islander, Alexis, and IntoTheDarkness. In this post, IntoTheDarkness tells you a little bit about himself, and below that, Alexis introduces herself. Islander hasn't yet written anything about himself, other than what you can read into what he writes on this site -- and this photo.]

Why is there such a separation within the metal scene? Why is it that if someone likes more than one distinct type of metal, he or she gets ridiculed? For example, if you’re someone who likes both death metal and deathcore, you are suddenly no longer a true metal fan.

It’s even worse if you’re me because I like a wide range of genres that include death metal, tech death, viking metal, folk metal, black metal, prog metal, post hardcore, deathcore, and even the occasional exception to the NCS rule. Not to mention, I do not look the part of virtually any metal scene so I am considered an outsider. Why does it have to be this way? What is wrong with liking both deathcore and death metal? I feel like they both have their pros and cons and which one I prefer to listen to depends largely on my mood. You see, I am a fan of the music itself not the scene that comes with it.

If I could do away with the bumbling douche bag hardcore dancers that think they are badass or the tool who thinks he is all that because he listens to only the classic death metal bands like Cannibal Corpse or Obituary, then I would. In fact,  I think that the metal scene would have not only a larger fan base but more success as well if the metal community would stop passing such harsh judgment on each other. Most of this judgment is passed on the people who like anything with a “core” attached to it.  Most of this judgment occurs because of the scene that is associated with the genre. Much of this scene consists of 15 year old idiots who like to wear uber tight pants combined with artificially straightened hair and eye make up. They must think that having what looks like a mop on top of their heads is some “sick-ass shit.” Regardless, the point is that I do not look anything like that and yet I am still judged for liking some deathcore bands. Why? To most of the population, deathcore is still metal, so what makes deathcore “unmetal” besides the stupid scene that goes along with it?

I believe that people within the metal community should like whatever genre they want to because they like the music and not because of the scene that is associated with that particular genre. Therefore, I thought I would conclude my rant with a list of my top 25 metal bands, in which I will include the genre of each band to show the variation of my tastes. AKA I don’t just like deathcore, unlike most of those scenester kiddies. So without further ado, here it is:

1. Gojira (Death Metal/Groove Metal)-The best band in the universe, bar none.

2. August Burns Red (Melodic Metalcore)

3. Ulcerate (Technical Death Metal)

4. Pelican (Instrumental/Post-Hardcore/Drone)

5. Between The Buried And Me (Progressive/Technical Metalcore)

6. Necrophagist (Technical Death Metal)

7. Swallow The Sun (Melodic Doom Metal

8. All Shall Perish (Deathcore)

9. Animals As Leaders (Experimental Progressive Metal)

10. Gorod (Technical Death Metal)

11. Permillisecond (Technical Death Metal)

12. Whitechapel (Deathcore)

13. Scale The Summit (Progressive Metal)

14. Amon Amarth (Viking Metal)

15. The Faceless (Technical Deathcore)

16. Molotov Solution (Deathcore)

17. Suffocation (Death Metal)

18. Dark Tranquility (Melodic Death Metal)

19. Revocation (Death/Thrash Metal)

20. In The Midst Of Lions (Deathcore)

21. Nile (Brutal Technical Death Metal)

22. Ensiferum (Viking/Folk Metal)

23. Amorphis (Melodic Metal)

24. Behemoth (Blackened Death Metal)

25. Dissection (Black Metal)

After the Burial, Arch Enemy, Arcturus, August Burns Red, Between the Buried and Me, Book of Black Earth, Born of Osiris, Cephalic Carnage, Children of Bodom, Converge, The Crown, Daath, Dark Tranquility, Darkane, Decrepit Birth, Devin Townsend, Disarmonia Mundi, Emperor, The Faceless, Fear Factory, Glass Casket, Goatwhore, God Forbid, Gorod, Heaven Shall Burn, In Flames, Lamb of God, Lesbian, A Life Once Lost, Light This City, Mastodon, Meshuggah, Moonspell, Mors Principium Est, Necrophagist, Nervecell, Nightrage, Nile, Norma Jean, Opeth, Pantera, Pelican, Porcupine Tree, The Red Shore, Revocation, Rotting Christ, Scale the Summit, Skarp, Soilent Green, Soilwork, Strapping Young Lad, Suffocation, Swallow the Sun, Textures, Unearth, Veil of Maya, Wintersun, Xerath

First Principles (What We’re About)

According to the Font of All Popular Learning, “in philosophy, a first principle is a basic, foundational proposition or assumption that cannot be deduced from any other proposition or assumption.”  Here are our “first principles” for this site:

1. Almost all “popular” music sucks.
2. Metal doesn’t suck, unless it’s metal with clean singing, which mostly does suck.
3. Some metal with clean singing doesn’t suck, but that’s an exception to the rule.
4. Some metal with no clean singing also sucks, but that’s also an exception to the rule.

To elaborate:  In our evolution as metal fans, your Authors have reached the point where  we want to vomit when otherwise promising metal songs with good riffage and crushing drumwork are interrupted by an attack of clean crooning, particularly the breathy, whiny, upper-octave kind of excretions that used to characterize a lot of metalcore but still pops up in even the most unexpected places.  If you know what we mean, then you’ve come to the right place.  If you don’t, then please fuck off move right along.

So, this site is mainly about metal music, but not all metal music.  What we love and what we’ll spend most of our time writing about is extreme metal.  To be clear, what we mean by “extreme metal” is metal with No Clean Singing (“NCS”).  Mostly, we like it fast, punishing, cathartic.  Purely instrumental metal, if done right, fits the NCS bill.  But if someone opens his or her mouth in a song, what comes out better be growling, screaming, or squealing.

Within the realm of NCS Metal, we likes all kinds of shit.   We like brutal, old-school death metal, melodic death metal, tech death, grind, black metal, viking and folk metal, deathcore, progressive metal, doom – and hundreds of other sub-genres that would be too boring to catalogue at length.  (Who thinks up all these genre classifications anyway?)  Your Authors have got their own individual preferences, but as a group we pretty much cover the waterfront.

We even like some extreme metal that is occasionally punctuated by clean singing (see First Principle No. 3 above).  We can’t just cast bands like Opeth and Mastodon into the shit pile, can we?

And we’ll write about a few topics other than extreme metal, too.  More on that below.

Who We Are

Your Authors are three metalheads who live in the Seattle area.  We span a pretty broad range of ages, experiences, interests, and activities.  We’re also related to each other by blood.  One of us is a woman and the other two are guys.  We listen to a lot of extreme metal, but our tastes within the genre are not the same.  We go to lots of metal shows in the Seattle area, including lots of national tours.  None of us has yet spent time in prison.

As you’ll see, we also write with very different “voices.”  (If you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m the older boring guy.  The other two, whose occasional edits to this post I’ve deleted, are, how shall we say, more out there.)

What We Plan To Do For You

We’re going to do our best to add posts to this site every day.  Some of these posts will be regular features – reviews of new music releases and music videos, concert reviews, metal news, and random observations about the scene, among other things.   Every now and then, we’ll write about Exceptions to the Rule (see First Principle No. 3).

Because we live in Seattle, some of what’s on this site will be geared to what’s happening in the Pacific Northwest, but most of the content won’t be limited in that way.

Here’s one thing that will be Seattle-focused:  We’ve created a page called NW Metal Calendar, which will always be linked on the home page.  On this page we’ll collect in one place a listing of NCS Metal performances scheduled in Seattle, and sometimes elsewhere in the Northwest – bands, dates, and venues – and we’ll update it as we learn about new shows.  Your Authors don’t agree completely about which bands are worth listing, but we’re listing all bands that any of us think should be on there.

Our focus will be extreme metal, but we care about other stuff too, and we’ll write (occasionally) about some of our other interests – movies, video games, and books.  We’ll also have a feature called Mosh Pit — random observations about what’s happening in the non-metal world (we hate to venture out into that world, but as someone said, life ain’t fair).

And, because we care about you, we’ll have a feature called IQ Reduction – stuff you could read, watch, or listen to that would make you stupider if you did it.  We know some of you don’t have much IQ to spare.

What We Want You To Do For Us

One thing that sets metal apart from most other music is the sense of community.   Let’s be honest:  most people hate extreme metal and can’t begin to understand why anyone likes it.  Fuck them.Everyone’s entitled to their opinion.  The fact that so many people form bands in this genre, record music, tour, and throw themselves body and soul into this scene despite the fact that the fan base is relatively tiny and there’s no money in it still blows our minds.  To use a cliché, it’s us against the rest of the deluded, rapacious, ass-sucking world.  Really.

We want to bring that sense of community to this site, and to do that we need to hear from you.  We want your comments.  We want to read what’s on your minds.  And if you’ll speak up, we’ll respond.

Credit Where Credit Is Due

There’s a shit-ton of metal blogs and web sites out there.  Most of them suck.  We may suck, too.  I’m sure you’ll tell us if we do.

But there are two metal sites that definitely don’t suck:  MetalSucks and Reign in Blonde.  Those sites are in a league of their own.  Great writing, interesting perspectives, timely content, cool personalities.  They are what we aspire to.  They provided our inspiration.  If we could copy them without being sued be a West Coast version of MS/RIB, we would.

Having said that, we’re under no illusions about what we can pull off here.  Your Authors have all got “day jobs,” we don’t have the near-encyclopedic knowledge of metal that the writers on MetalSucks and RIB have, and we certainly don’t have their contacts and connections in the industry.  But we hope to make this endeavor good enough to draw you back here.  Horns up!