I’ve been catching up on metal news today and came across news of three upcoming U.S. tours that are . . . newsworthy, to say the least.

I’m guessing this first one will be old news to many of you, since it surfaced on Friday, but it has sure produced some tumescence in your humble editor’s loins today. Behemoth, Watain, The Devil’s Blood, and In Solitude will be hitting the road for The Decibel Magazine Tour, a 26-date trail of wreckage across the U.S. starting in April. It will be the first Behemoth tour for Nergal since being diagnosed with and beating leukemia. That’s a cool tour flyer by Justin Bartlett up there, too.

More details, including tour dates, venues and ticket info, will be announced at www.decibelmagazinetour.com on January 24th.

But that’s just for starters. Mastodon’s Troy Sanders recently confirmed that his band plus Opeth and Ghost will be embarking on a North American tour of their own. During a recent interview at a Belgian radio station, Sanders stated: “We go to Australia to take part in the Soundwave Festival, which is going to be lovely, take a short break. Do a North American tour with Opeth and Ghost. And then take another break and come back over here for the European festival season.”

I have a feeling a few people will buy tickets for that tour. No further details are available at this time. (found this news via Loudwire)

And that’s not all. Would you believe a 30-date tour of the U.S. this summer by Agalloch?!?

(Andy Synn provides an unexpected SYNN REPORT, seizing upon the imminent calendar change to discuss the re-recording of 12 songs by 12 tremendous bands — and of course we’re including the music, which means 24 tracks. Fuck, this would be a mixtape that KILLS.)

So here it is, a surprise Synn Report to finish off the year. Arbitrary though the distinction may well be, the end of the year provides a perfect excuse to attend to a similar theme, the transition from the old to the new – re-workings and re-recordings.

Are they better? That’s an argument for the ages? Are they necessary? Hell, that’s probably an even worse argument to start up…

Primarily, re-recordings serve a twofold purpose – 1. to reinvigorate songs that might otherwise not be getting the set-time they deserve, and 2. – to royally piss off a band’s fan-base. Although there’s a chance that the second isn’t entirely intentional. Still, the re-recorded album courts controversy like almost no other, whether it’s a varied collection of songs that are chosen to receive the treatment, or a full re-recording of an entire album.

The full re-recording of an entire album is clearly the most contentious option, while single track re-recordings are often a much more successful and welcome proposition, most often appearing as b-sides and bonus tracks for the avid collector. The full-album re-recording, however, remains exceptionally and unequivocally divisive, alienating as many old fans as it attracts new ones.

So here’s a list of some of those renewed tracks that I think definitely have something to offer the listener, both old and new. I’m sure I’ll have to turn in my kvlt card after this, for promoting something so new and shiny, but ah well…

Behemoth’s video for the song “Lucifer” from the Evangelion album debuted yesterday, in both censored and uncensored versions, and it’s a beautifully made, visually striking piece of work. The song itself is dramatic, potent, massive, and the imagery of the video suits the music.

As far as I can tell, the lyrics to “Lucifer” are the lines from a poem by Tadeusz Micinski. The poem is in Polish, but I found a literary (ie, not entirely literal) translation – which tells me that the imagery in the video has very little to do with the lyrics. And the imagery itself, though highly symbolic, is open to interpretation.

It seems to depict a hospitalized girl in the last minutes of a fatal illness or injury, with a priest in the room calling for divine intercession and a red-eyed black unicorn (perhaps symbolizing death) making his steady approach. And from there, I lose the thread of the visuals. They’re arresting to see, but what they are intended to mean I’m unsure, though I’m still thinking about it. I suppose the fact that I’m still thinking about it is a sign that it’s waaaay above average, as metal videos go.

After the jump is the uncensored version of the video (female nudity, of course) plus the translation of the lyrics to “Lucifer”. If you’ve got ideas about what the video means, or at least how you choose to interpret it, please leave us a Comment.

Here at NCS, we avoid the daily news like the plague (unless it involves metal), because it offers constant reminders that human beings are fucking nuts, and not in a good way. For every small step of advancement toward civilization, there seem to be about 10 steps in regression as the self-centered and the arrogant persist in reenacting acts of gob-smacking idiocy that have been a feature of the human landscape for millenia and inflicting their prejudices on people who don’t think or act as they do.

But there are just enough, just barely enough, episodes of rationality to keep hope alive that a day will come when most people will act like the higher-order creatures they are supposed to be, instead of just bigger-brained versions of water buffalo and warthogs.

This week we had news about the lifting of legal clouds in two criminal cases that most metalheads have come to know quite well — the murder case against the West Memphis 3 in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and the prosecution of Adam Darski (a/k/a Nergal) of Behemoth for giving offense to religion in Poland.

According to this story, a Polish judge found Nergal innocent of offending religious feeling when he ripped up a Bible during a 2007 Behemoth concert, called the Bible “a deceitful book”, and branded the church a “criminal sect.” The judge held that Nergal’s actions were “a form of artistic expression consistent with the style of his band.” Duh. He added that the court had no intention of limiting freedom of expression or the right to criticize religion. That’s an encouraging pronouncement.

Nergal can now go about the business of continuing to recover from leukemia and practicing for Behemoth’s next live performances this fall. No doubt, his detractors in Poland are seething over this turn of events, still stubbornly refusing to understand that trying to jail people who speak ill of churches, no matter how “offensively,” or who tear up “holy books,” won’t silence criticism of churches or religion. If people aren’t secure enough in their own faith to ignore what people like Nergal do in performances for their own fans, then enforcing laws against religious offense won’t save them. (more after the jump . . .)

Like all good Behemoth slaves, I followed frontman Nergal’s battle with leukemia with a shifting feeling of dismay, dread, sorrow, hope, and eventually a sympathetic feeling of victory. Today I saw news of yet another milestone in Nergal and Behemoth’s comeback that I thought was worth sharing: For the first time in over a year, Behemoth is back in their rehearsal space rehearsing both old and new songs, and we’ve got pictures to prove it. Nergal issued this statement:

“Sooo, first rehearsals after the transplant are under our belts! I didn’t want to get overexcited at first, just wanted to see how things would go, but I have to tell you…the second rehearsal we fuckin’ nailed “Ov Fire And The Void”, “Lucifer”, “Conquer All” or “Antichristian Phenomenon” flawlessly! One of us even asked: ‘Did we really take a year off from each other?’ Ha ha… it was good times in great company! But the biggest surprise were the songs we NEVER played live ever and planning to do on the upcoming “Phoenix Rising Tour”. I won’t reveal any names yet, let it be a mystery til we hit the stage, all right?”

“In other news, I started jamming out some NEW shit too…too early to give any further comments but it sounds VERY disturbing and eerie. Can’t fuckin wait to unleash those ideas to my friends…”

I don’t know about you, but this gave my day a boost. In these photos, Nergal looks like he’s been through a fucking meat-grinder, physically, but he’s on two feet with axe in hand. Hails and horns, man. More photos after the jump.

Give up? The answer is: They’re all bands who are signed to Metal Blade, they all have new releases on the horizon, and they all have new songs that Metal Blade has packaged together in a digital stream emanating from SoundCloud.

Here’s the line-up of music:

Black Dahlia Murder: “Moonlight Equilibirum” (album: Ritual)
Job For A Cowboy: “Misery Reformatory” (album: Gloom)
Behemoth: “Slaves Shall Serve” (album: Abyssus Abyssum Invocat)
Barn Burner: “Keg Stand and Deliver” (album: Bangers II: Scum of the Earth)
Sister: “Hated” (album: Hated)
Faloner: “Svarta Ankan” (album: Armod)
Gentlemans Pistols: “I Wouldn’t Let You” (album: At Her Majesty’s Pleasure)

All of these albums are scheduled for release on June 7, except the first and last ones, which will be released June 21.

There is good news and bad news here. The good news is that we can listen to these 7 songs right here, right now. The bad news is that these are the only songs from the albums that we’ll be able to hear, because the Rapture is coming on May 21.  (more after the jump . . . including breaking news about the end of the world)

What the hell is that big yellow thing up in the sky? It looks vaguely familiar, but it’s appeared so rarely here in The Emerald City over the last six months that we’re having trouble placing the name. Well, maybe the name will come to us. The great wheel of the seasons surely must continue to turn someplace, but in Seattle it seems to have been stuck on Winter since, like, forever. In some parts of the world, April showers bring May flowers, but here, April showers will probably bring . . . May showers.

Okay, enough whining. At least we don’t get tornados dropping from the sky like atom bombs and wiping whole towns off the map. And even though the weather hasn’t been our friend, we have metal to make up for the cold shoulder — and there’s a bunch of new metal headed our way.

What we do with these installments of METAL IN THE FORGE is collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last month about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know them yet. And in this post, we cut and paste the announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

This isn’t a cumulative list, so be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported in previous installments. This month’s list begins right after the jump. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones.

In sporadically sampled reviews of previous releases by Poland’s Nomad, the phrase “brutal death metal” appeared often (along with words like “evil”, “blackened”, and “satanic”). Four years have passed since the band’s last release (The Independence of Observation Choice). In that time, perhaps their musical interests have evolved, because that “brutal death” label doesn’t fit Nomad’s forthcoming album, Transmigration of Consciousness.

What label does fit? Must we afix a label? No, we don’t. Gazing at the stupendous album cover by Michael “Xaay” Loranc, we can instead think of the music that paces the stroke of oarsmen on a giant longship plowing the waves of interstellar gas, emerging from a galactic vortex to carry cities and citadels into an ominous void where no humans have gone before.

Or, to be more prosaic, we could tell you that Transmigration of Consciousness is a kind of death-metal rave, a seamless flow of syncopated rhythms and synth-driven interludes that effectively combines elements of melodic black metal, industrial metal, and tyrannical death.

Or we could just tell you that we’ve near-destroyed our neck muscles repeatedly snapping our rattled heads to this album.  (more after the jump . . .)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the debut of a new column which Islander has kindly allowed me to write and display here at NoCleanSinging.

Each week (ok, whenever I get round to it, they may not be weekly – or they may be more frequent, we’ll see) I’m going to be providing an introduction, a retrospective, or simply a re-consideration of  a band which I feel merits the treatment. Certain bands will be more well known than others, and primarily these bands will be part of THE SYNN REPORT simply because I feel that with all the bullshit media hype in the world, the band in question has been perhaps judged unfairly due to the influence of matters non-musical. Certain bands, however, you may not have heard of before at all, as although I do not consider myself a paragon of underground taste, there is only so much time each of us can devote to finding new music and really exploring it. Hopefully this column will help a little!

Each column will deal with a single musical entity, considering their works and progression in turn. Certain columns will be dedicated perhaps simply to eras in a band’s career and progression, considering and evaluating changes in style and direction with the benefit of hindsight and (hopefully) critical objectivity. Although that probably won’t last very long!

Anyway, for my first column I would like to introduce you to the Greek band ASTARTE.  (more after the jump, including sample songs from the band’s discography . . .)

The last couple of days my day job has had my head in a fucking vise. I’ve barely had time to create posts for this site, but haven’t had much time to browse other metal sites I usually frequent in order to keep up with what’s happening in the metal cosmos. I did a little catching up last night, and found two stupendous videos that have just been released over the last 48 hours.

Because I’m a little slow to find them, you may have seen the videos already, but I’ve got to put them up anyway because they’re both so cool — in very different ways. Both of them made me exclaim “Holy Fuck!” (hence, the really imaginative title of this post).

The first one is a video of “Alas, Lord Is Upon Me” from Behemoth’s most recent album, Evangelion. I saw a censored version of this video on a couple of other metal sites, but this morning I found an uncensored version that’s now out. The only difference from the censored version is that there are a couple of flashes of nudity (as a priest in his vestments has sex with a naked woman in a church). The images in this slick video (even when they don’t involve nudity) are striking.

The second video is a live pro-shot performance by the reconstituted Polish death-metal band Decapitated. I got excited about this one mainly because Decapitated’s heavy-grooved, technical music is just so damned awesome, and this performance appears to be the first since the awful 2007 van accident that killed the band’s drummer and left its vocalist in a coma.

In fact, the only original member of the band still left is guitarist Wacław “Vogg” Kiełtyka. But based on the evidence of this video, Decapitated can still kick your ass into the stratosphere.  (both videos are after the jump . . .)