Some news about this tour has already trickled out, but I’ve now received an official announcement:  Meshuggah will be following up on the March 27 North American release of Koloss by launching a 19-city NorthAm tour — THE OPHIDIAN TREK 2012. It will begin on April 29 in Houston and conclude on May 23 in New York City.

And as strong as a Meshuggah tour will undoubtedly be, it’s stronger still because Poland’s Decapitated will be the opening act each night, and Baroness will also be in the line-up.

My own feelings were succinctly captured by this quote from Decapitated’s guitarist and founder Vogg: “FUCK YEAH! DECAPITATED with MESHUGGAH! We’re so proud and happy to be part of this amazing tour! It will be a huge honor to share one stage with such a great fuckin’ band! Cannot wait!”

The schedule for the tour is after the jump.

This is Part 7 of our list of the most infectious extreme metal songs released this year. Each day until the list is finished, I’m posting two songs that made the cut. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the Introduction via this link. To see the selections that preceded this one, click the Category link on the right side of the page called MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011.

DECAPITATED

Carnival Is Forever wowed a lot of the folks whose year-end lists we’ve published at NCS. The Demonstealer (Demonic Resurrection) wrote: “The album is brilliant, the guitar playing is phenomenal, and so is the drumming. For me this album sets the benchmark for audio production, it is brutal as fuck but yet so organic.” Exo (Noctem) called it “the result of a brutal procreation between old Decapitated and Meshuggah.” Tamás Kátai (Thy Catafalque) ranked it No. 6 on his list, finding it much better than the band’s older work.

Our own Andy Synn named it one of the year’s Great Albums and rated it No. 5 on his Critical Top 10, writing that it “stands as one of the finest and most intriguing experiences I have had with modern death metal in a long time.” The album also made TheMadIsraeli’s Top 15 for the year and he summed it up this way in his NCS review: “This kicks ass. This destroys universes. This is the purest, blackest, weightiest form of sonic nihilism laid to audio I’ve heard all year.”

The album is indeed deserving of all the praise it’s received here and elsewhere. It’s technical, progressive, brutal, and heavy-grooved all at once. It includes two songs that I put on my “master list” of possibilities for this MOST INFECTIOUS series — “United” and “404″.

(Tamás Kátai is the man behind a Hungarian band called Thy Catafalque, whose fifth album Rengeteg is one of my favorite recordings of the year,  for reasons I’ll be explaining in a forthcoming review. Also, a song from that album will appear soon on our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. So of course, as part of our Listmania series, I asked Tamás to contribute his list of the year’s best albums — and here we have it.)

10. Baaba Kulka – Baaba Kulka

A Polish band with early Iron Maiden covers up to Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son album. Why it’s interesting and worthy of note is that they handle the task with exceptional freedom and taste. My faves are the trip-hopish “Aces High” and the beautifully low-key “Flight Of Icarus”. True Warriors Of Heavy Metal keep out!

(This is the fourth in Andy Synn’s week-long series of posts looking back at albums released this year. Andy previously provided his lists of the year’s Great albums, the Good ones, and the most Disappointing ones, and tomorrow we’ll have his Personal Top 10. Today, we have his list of “The Critical Top 10″. For more explanation of what all this means, plus Andy’s picks for the year’s best EPs, visit this location.)

So here’s the penultimate list of the week, the first of two ranked top-tens. This list will include the albums that I think are the very best of the best, the ones that best combine creativity, artistic ambition, song-writing, and performance. Regardless of my personal feelings and preferences, these are the albums that I think are critically superior to others. Though the ranking of them was difficult (as it always is when trying to compare artists and albums across metallic sub-genres), I’ve tried my best to give a sense about the critical and objective factors that led to each record earning its respective position on this list.

Although the potential candidates for the list were unavoidably influenced by my own listening tastes — I do, after all, only really tend to select the albums that I feel best qualified and most inspired to review – I have done my best to keep personal preference as far away from these judgements as possible, something that I hope will become clear when you see tomorrow how different the list of my top ten “favourite” albums of the year is from today’s list.

So here are the ten releases I think best represent the year critically. The ten that, ultimately, would be my choices to represent the year in metal music for posterity. Some of them have appeared quite commonly on other lists, albeit perhaps weighted differently, while others have largely been ignored by other sources thus far. Enjoy . . .

Because of work-related travel and longer hours than usual this week, I didn’t have time for my usual daily interhole browsing for metal news and new music. So I did that this morning, while listening to the last piece of music in this post. I found a half-dozen items that I thought were well worth sharing, and they’re collected in this post. Almost all of them are new videos, and there’s tremendous diversity in the music. The subjects are Vallenfyre, King Conquer, Devin Townsend (with a new song), Shining, Decapitated, and finally, William Basinski.

And yeah, the meerkats are still secretly controlling the world, according to the NCS lorises. They think they’ve identified the kingpin. I don’t buy this nonsense for a minute, of course, because, really, this one looks way too young to be the kingpin.

VALLENFYRE

In our continuing coverage of Vallenfyre (UK) and their forthcoming album, The Fragile King (due for release on Oct 31 in Europe and Nov 1 in North America), I found a video preview that surfaced yesterday on Metal Injection. It was filmed during the making of a music video for a song from the album called “Cathedrals of Dread” and features comments from each of the band’s members about how this “supergroup” came together and about the genesis of the music. It also includes snippets of the song, which provide further confirmation (though none is needed here) that this album will be a must-hear release.

Our most recent previous posts about Vallenfyre can be found here and here. The video preview is right after the jump.

I just saw the news about a new tour beginning at the end of September, and I was so excited it nearly gave me heart failure. Our friends at MetalSucks are sponsoring the 2011 CARNIVAL IS FOREVER NORTH AMERICAN TOUR, headlined by Decapitated and including Decrepit Birth, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Rings of Saturn, and The Haarp Machine.

For my tastes, that is just a stupendously strong line-up. Though I haven’t yet heard The Haarp Machine, I will now hunt down their music with interest, and as for the rest of the bands, well I’m not going to make reference to boners or cum because that would be inconsistent with my previously expressed opinions on the use of such words in metal writing. I will just say that something wet has happened and I am unable to stand up.

After the jump you can see the schedule. I believe it is a fine schedule, because it includes a stop in Seattle.

(This seems to be album-review day at NCS. Following our Byfrost review, NCS writer TheMadIsraeli now assesses the new album from Poland’s Decapitated.)

Yeah. It’s that time. You’ve been looking forward to this, I have, we all have, so now you’re wondering what do I, the most boss of all metal-loving Jews, have to say about it? For all you know, I could just be wanting to rub it in the faces of all of you that I have this album (which I do) and you don’t, but well… how do I put this…

This kicks ass. This destroys universes. This is the purest, blackest, weightiest form of sonic nihilism laid to audio I’ve heard all year. And you know what the sad part is? People are gonna hate this because it isn’t “true”, or “kvlt”, or what-the-fucking-ever, whose-it’s, what’s-it’s the elitists like to spout nowadays. Why is this though? That’s simple.  Carnival Is Forever rules because it isn’t old Decapitated. This is a rejuvenated band, with a new sound, new look, new attitude, and new sense of purpose who’ve abandoned their tech death past to go into a much more modern sound. I can just see the elitists complaining because what is it that this album has which makes it so, like, good? Well, we have groove, lots of groove, we got djent, we got progressive song structures, we got clean sections, we have Divine Heresy-machine-precision-like chugging, we have blast-beat frenzies, we have shredding solos — this album has everything.

So where do I start in actually reviewing this and stopping the proverbial salivation over it? Three bands immediately come to mind in describing this album: Divine Heresy, Meshuggah, and Nevermore. If you’re complaining already, I highly suggest you order your whamburgers and french cries pronto. This album has no time for your tom-foolery. (more after the jump . . .)

Seems to be one of those days when everywhere I turn, I see a new song release that perks me right up. This time, the band is Poland’s almighty Decapitated, and the new song is called “Homo Sum”. Before the trollers start in with moronic jokes, that’s Latin for “I am a man”, as in this line from the Roman playwright Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto (“I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.”)

The song comes from Decapitated’s next album, Carnival Is Forever, which will be released in NorthAm by Nuclear Blast on July 12 and in Europe on July 15. Guitar World is exclusively premiering the song today, and even though I have the album, I won’t fuck with the label’s marketing plans by streaming it here. To hear it, use this link (and on that same page you’ll see an interesting interview with Waclaw “Vogg” Kieltyka, who possibly may be getting tired answering questions about the death of his brother Vitek).

And yes, the song is worth hearing (as is the entire album). It’s got a very cool intro, all jabbing riffs and tinkling cymbals, followed by a ramp-up in the intensity level. It’s Decapitated, so you can guess that’s it’s fast and technical, but the song also includes an extended, melodic, reverberating guitar solo that drifts almost dreamily above the rhythmic flash attack underneath. I really like this song. Go check it out.

Poland’s Decapitated have a new album scheduled for release via Nuclear Blast on July 12 in North America and July 15 in Europe. Entitled Carnival Is Forever, it’s been on our “most anticipated” list since the beginning of the year. We’ve been greedily tracking the news, with our last update about the album here (focusing on the cover art and the title). Now we’ve got more exciting news to report.

Nuclear Blast has uploaded a sampler consisting of excerpts from the album. It gives you enough of a taste of the music to form some impressions. For example, I’m hearing a lot of djenty riffs in these songs, plus lots of crushing groove, squalling guitar solos, off-kilter rhythms, and technically interesting rhythmic counterpoint going on.

But the dominant impression I’m getting is that this is going to be an absolutely killer slab of extreme metal that justifies all our high expectations. Why I haven’t already listened to the copy I’ve got is a mystery. Well, actually, it’s not such a mystery. I’m just a fucking moron, and that’s all there is to it.

Go past the jump and listen to that sampler. You’ll be glad you did.  (credit to Heavy Blog Is Heavy for alerting me to this sampler)

Damn, I’m finally able to go outside without shivering and being beaten about the head and shoulders with high winds and rain blowing sideways. That must mean it’s June in Seattle!  And so it is. A largely dismal May is behind us, the Seattle Mariners are astonishingly only a game and a half out of first place in their division (that’s baseball for you outlanders), and the summer lies ahead.

What else lies ahead? A bunch of new metal, of course. And because it’s the beginning of a new month, we’re bringing you 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 April 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.