Jan 212015
 


Brothers of the Sonic Cloth

 

I’ve commented before about the enormous flood of stream premieres, new album announcements, label signings, and other metal news that has been unleashed since the beginning of the year. But yesterday may have reached new heights of ridiculousness in terms of the number of noteworthy things I saw in a single day.

In fact, yesterday brought so damned much cool stuff that I’d either have to write a half-dozen posts or do what I’m doing here instead — just funneling streams, links, artwork, and news blurbs your way with a minimum of commentary. The bands are presented in alphabetical order — all 18 of them. In most cases, you can enlarge the cover art and photos by clicking on the images in this post. Continue reading »

Mar 182012
 

(Phro saves the day!  Correctly guessing that your humble editor would roll out of bed this morning hung over and without anything to post at NCS, he wrote this and left it waiting in my e-mail in-box . . .)

How’s the hangovers, motherfuckers???

Islander seemed like he wasn’t expecting to be fully operational today, what with his liquid cephalic medicinal procedure expecting to go all night.  (Although, inquiring minds would still like to know how a headless Glorious Leader from 2199 is able to both survive without a steady supply of monkey blood AND run the greatest, most amazingest, mindblowingly stupendous blog in the universe.  The official Phro guess is anabolic steroids and coffee.)

Anyway, I thought I’d write up a quick list of videos I found this morning.

First, DEAtHtUNE (the holy-fuck-his-beard-is-more-awesome-than-ZZ-Top-in-a-headlock-by-a-70s-porn-star Iranian band featured before on NCS, such as here, has a new video.  It is bassy as fuck.  It’s like Jupiter just strolled over and sat down next to you and crushed you with it’s massive fucking gravity.  If your testicles/ovaries don’t swell with excitement, you’re clearly dead and should see a doctor about that.  But maybe listen to the song one more time before you go, just to make sure that you were listening properly. Continue reading »

Jan 202012
 

(TheMadIsraeli’s former boss at The Metal Register, Kyle Brady, requested that he write a piece on Middle Eastern metal, and here we have it. We’ve spotlighted bands from that region in previous writing at NCS, and I’ll add some further examples at the end of this post.)

When I say “Middle East”, what comes to mind?  War?  Brutal weather conditions?  The desolation of endless expanse of desert?  Regardless of what you think of, it’s probably not a region you’d immediately associate with metal, but with the evolution of the internet and the advent of file-sharing, becoming a successful band over there is slowly but surely becoming more of an option as we speak.  As a result, over the last four so years, a rash of bands have cropped up who are proving they’re already prepared to take the world by storm.

Consider this a sort of primer, or introduction to bands from the Middle East, with a mix of older and newer. Without further delay let’s begin doing a little analysis of the kind of shit we got going on over there.


Continue reading »

Jun 142011
 

In this post, I’m collecting a handful of new songs and videos that made a deep impression on me as I listened/watched over the last couple of days. I’m talking about the kind of impression that a stout piece of lumber would make on the back of your head if swung vigorously. What makes this collection of metal interesting to me, apart from the skull-scouring nature of the music, is the diversity of places from which the music originated.

The first band is called DEAtHtUNE (though from here on, I’m typing it as Deathtune to keep my fingers from cramping up on the keyboard). They’re from Iran. Just a wild guess, but I don’t think Iran is the most hospitable place for a death-metal band. But I’ll tell you what, these guys are really fucken good. The video for their song “No War” gives you the chance to see the band in addition to hearing them — and I think you’ll want to hear them over and over again.

The second band is from Australia. They call themselves The Schoenberg Automaton. Musically, they’re making some freaked-out shit that I think is very cool. Norway is home to the third band whose music we’re featuring in this post — Wrath Passion. They’ve just put up two new songs for free download that are killing me. Knowing they’re from Norway, you get one guess about the style of music they’re pumping out.

Last, we have a “band” from Japan and a song in a style of music called Zeuhl. If you know what Zeuhl is, you get a big cookie. If you’ve heard of Kōenji Hyakkei (a/k/a koenjihyakkei) you get two big cookies. If you make it all the way through the song I’ve got for you, you’ll need those cookies to use in place of your brain, which will have liquified and poured out your nose.  (stay with us after the jump . . .) Continue reading »