(The time has come.  What time is that?  Why, it’s the time when we begin publishing our own series on the best metal of 2011 — lists created by our writers, guest contributors, and members of metal bands who we’ve specially invited to share with us their lists.  And what better way to start than by turning to Phro for the kick-off?)

Ahhh . . . 2011, how quickly you came and . . . went?  Are going?  Let’s just stick with came for now.

What a year it has been!  I think.  I don’t really remember it.  I think there was something to do with tentacles and a few zombie girls.  Seriously, someone please make the whole zombie/vampire/werewolf thing stop happening.  Please.  I’m begging you.  I can only take so much pithy teen angst foisted upon poor hapless creatures of the night.  GIVE THEM BACK THEIR BALLS, DAMNIT!!!

Seriously.  And wizards, too.  Enough of that shit.

Oh, right, and there was music, too.  Particularly metal music.  Particularly good metal music.  (Anyone who ever utters the words, “It’s been a bad year for metal,” should go out behind the chicken chopping shed and punch themselves in the throat with a rooster.  You fucking lazy scum fucker.)  But it`s the end of the year, and it’s not enough to simply say there was a lot of it.  You people from the Internet want proof all of the sudden!  You freaks with your memes and your porn and your meme porn and your porn memes.  And your rules!!!  So many rules!  Well, I have a new rule for you.  Rule number 0.5.  It states, quite clearly: anything that can be made into furry-rape-scat porn should be made into furry-rape-scat porn and then broadcasted on CNN, FOX, and MSNBC until foxes look sexy.  (But only when they`re covered in poop.)

Poop, poop, poop, poop . . . poop . . . poooooooooooooop . . .

(Today is something of a rare instrumental metal day at NCS. Following our review of the new album by Odyssey, TheMadIsraeli provides some thoughts about the sophomore effort from another NCS favorite, Animals As Leaders.)

Animals as Leaders, and more importantly Tosin Abasi, proved themselves to be quite the anomaly when they released their self-titled debut in 2009. The trio’s combo of instrumental djent, jazz and electronic music in tandem with Abasi’s top-notch proficiency in the shred department created a sound completely unique at the time. Now we have Animals As Leaders (or AAL from here on) laying on us a new album of musical mindfuckery by the name of Weightless, and I’m telling you now, this album is a trip.

Weightless takes the formula established on AAL’s debut and ratchets everything up to 11 — not doing anything dramatically new, but making a tried-and-true sound even better than it was originally. This enhancement is instantly apparent in opener “An Infinite Regression”. After an eerie, tapping intro, AAL blasts open the door with cacophonous drumming and noisy, low-end, 8-string tapping, and the stage is set for the song’s main melody, a quite apprehensive and dark one at that.

Throughout the elaborate melodic layers of Weightless, there is a pronounced feel of a dreamlike state, but it all comes with an overhanging sense of tension. Songs like “Earth Departure” demonstrate this perfectly, whereas other pieces like “Odessa” simply step into the brain with the kind of twistingly atonal-and-then-melodic back-and-forth that only the best of jazz fusion usually musters. Other songs such as “Do Not Go Gently” prove AAL’s ability to convey a mood and tell a story by the cadence of the song alone, the melodies and rhythms both contemplative in their nature but otherwise functioning as quite separate entities, like two streams of thought meeting and becoming one.

September is behind us. Here in Seattle, it was such a beautiful month that it seemed like nature’s compensation for how late the summer started. Unfortunately, with September’s end, we’re on a short track to the onset of winter, which means about six months of short, cold, grey, ceaselessly wet days. Ain’t that just fuckin’ great?

Well, bitchin’ about the winter ahead won’t change one fucking thing. I prefer to think instead about the deluge of new metal that’s headed our way and try (momentarily) to forget about the deluge of rain on the horizon. Which brings us to the latest monthly edition of METAL IN THE FORGE.

You know the drill:  In these posts, we collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last month about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including occasional updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know their music yet. In this series, we cut and paste those announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

Remember — this isn’t a cumulative list. If we found out about a new album before August, we wrote about it in previous installments of this series. So, be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported earlier. This month’s list begins right after the jump. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones. As usual, also feel free to tell us about how we fucked up by omitting releases that you’re stoked about.

Today seems to be a day for song and video debuts from bands we like here at NCS. As long as they continue rolling out, we’ll continue putting them up.

The most recent advent comes from those brilliant instrumentalists in Animals As Leaders, whose sophomore album Weightless is coming our way in November via Prosthetic Records. The song that debuted in full today is called “Isolated Incidents”, and it’s a blast to hear.

The song begins with an inventive but almost placid passage, which is hardly preparation for the sledgehammer blows that follow it as the song kicks into high gear. Tosin Abasi is in fine, fine form, mixing a host of different guitar instrumental styles as the song weaves its way through the maze of its progressions, and his compatriots Navene Koperweis and Javier Reyes stay right with him. Coolness. Listen after the jump.

June is behind us, July lies ahead. Here in the U.S., we’re about to start the long weekend leading up to Independence Day, when Americans celebrate the birth of the nation by buying explosive ordinance wherever fine explosive ordinance is sold and lighting up the night sky (in addition to blowing the shit out of objects and sometimes themselves). People will also be exposing unsightly parts of their bodies wherever sun can be found and eating large quantities of health food prepared on outdoor grills. Our Founding Fathers would be proud of what they wrought!

Because the last month has ended, that means it’s time for another installment of METAL IN THE FORGE, in which we collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last month about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including occasional updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know their music yet. In this series, we cut and paste those announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

Remember — this isn’t a cumulative list. If we found out about a new album during May or preceding months, we wrote about them in previous installments of this series. So, be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported earlier. This month’s list begins right after the jump. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones. And feel free to tell us about how we fucked up by omitting releases that we overlooked.

I just saw an announcement this morning that riveted my attention. I hadn’t heard any previous buzz about this, and it’s an amazing surprise. There will certainly be tremendous buzz ahead.

The announcement is about a new “supergroup” called T.R.A.M., which I’m guessing is an acronym for the band’s members. Check this out:

Adrian Terrazas (The Mars Volta) on saxophone, flute, bass clarinet and percussion.

Javier Reyes (Animals As Leaders) on guitars.

Tosin Abasi (Animals As Leaders) on guitars.

Eric Moore (Suicidal Tendencies) on drums.

They’ve been signed by Sumerian Records, and their debut album, Lingua Franca, is scheduled for a May release. There’s no music to hear yet, but a new song is supposed to appear soon. The band is supposed to perform their first show ever at SXSW as part of NJ’s WSOU 89.5FM’s showcase on Thursday, March 17th in Austin. I have no idea what this music will be like, or if it will even be metal, but in light of who’s in this band, I will sure as fuck listen to it at the first opportunity. We will keep you updated, and if you want to follow developments on your own, T.R.A.M.’s new Facebook page is here.

While I was away on vacation I didn’t completely neglect what was happening in the world of metal, but I confess I didn’t spend the kind of time I usually spend keeping up on current developments. So over the weekend I did my best to catch up. It was kind of like swimming against a flood tide. It’s amazing how much happens on a daily basis. Of course, I find that a lot of the bulletins, press releases, and blurbs that fill up the likes of Blabbermouth and band pages on Facebook and MySpace are pretty uninteresting.

But even ignoring the boring and utterly useless streams of bullshit that pass for metal news much of the time, I still found all sorts of happenings over the last 12 days that were quite interesting, and even exciting — the kind of occurrences we would have written about on this site if we’d been able to stay on top of our game. The downside of writing about them now is that for many of you, it will be old news. But what the fuck. We’re going to write about some of those items anyway, stale though they may be. Some things still taste pretty good even when they’re beyond their sell-by date. And besides, maybe some of you missed them, just like I did while I was off staring at clouds.

It may take a couple or three posts to catch up, but there’s no time like the present to get started. So today we’ve got a collection of items about Animals As Leaders, From Exile, After the Burial, and I Declare War. That’s what you’ll find after the jump, along with some music videos . . .

Yesterday we tossed up a teaser on this site, just a single song for you to hear with no information about the band (other than the mp3 tag that I didn’t know how to eliminate from the file). We did promise to reveal more about the music today, and we don’t lie.

The song we featured yesterday is called “The Discovery”. It’s the seventh track on a debut album that’s also called The Discovery. It was released in July 2008 by a “band” called Cloudkicker, which turns out not to be a band at all.

Cloudkicker came to my attention via a message from my occasional NCS collaborator IntoTheDarkness, which was worded as follows: “Ok, so I know ur not much for instrumental stuff, but i’ve been listening to a lot lately and you need to check these guys out. They are called Cloudkicker and they are hands down the best instrumental band I have ever heard next to AAL. Especially check out the song ‘the discovery.’ Fucking incredible.”

So that certainly got my attention, particularly because “AAL” is Animals As Leaders, and I’ve made quite plain my slavish devotion to that band. I tracked down the song, listened to it, and quickly decided that yes, it is indeed fucking incredible. And it turns out that Cloudkicker has generated a lot more music that’s equally awesome.  (more after the jump . . .)

Not long ago, we posted a video retrospective of the meteoric career of multi-instrumentalist Navene Koperweis. When we did that, we had trouble finding a decent performance video of Animals As Leaders — the band in which Koperweis plays drums with the godlike Tosin Abasi on guitar. Now, METAL INJECTION has remedied that problem.

They were on hand when AAL played the Sonar in Baltimore on the SUMMER SLAUGHTER 2010 tour and filmed some of the band’s performance using multiple cameras. The video quality and the sound quality are both far superior to any other videos currently available of AAL playing live.

The one at the top of this post is the song “Tempting Time”, and after the jump, we’ve got a second METAL INJECTION video of “Wave of Babies”. If this doesn’t make you come, then it’s possible you were neutered in your sleep last night.  Plus, when’s the last time you saw a metal guitarist playing in a polo shirt and white shorts?

We’ve splashed our admiration for Navene Koperweis across these pages enough times that it’s verging on stalkerish. If somehow you missed one of our many posts in which we dropped his name, he’s a self-taught drummer from California who’s also strikingly adept at playing all sorts of other instruments, too.

He used to blast the skins for deathcore band Animosity. Now, he plays with Tosin Abasi in the stunningly good Animals As Leaders, and he’s the creative and instrumental force behind Fleshwrought (with Job For A Cowboy’s Jonny Davy on vocals).

It’s not like we think about him all the time, which would be kind of creepy. But a few days ago, we saw a Facebook post by one of the dudes in FXZero that linked to a four-year old video of an Animosity song called “The Black Page” that we’d never seen.

And there was Navene Koperweis, pummeling the crap out of his drums and looking much younger than when we saw him with AAL on the SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour a few weeks ago (see our photo above).

So, we thought, what the fuck — let’s put together a little audio-video montage of this dude, then and now. You can see how he’s grown in his playing and his musical interests, and all the songs happen to be fucking great, too.  (after the jump . . .)