(The Indian metal scene is vibrant, multi-faceted, and loaded with talented bands waiting to be discovered on the international stage.  In the vanguard of the movement are Demonic Resurrection and their frontman The Demonstealer.  As a songwriter, a musician, the manager of Demonstealer Records, the host of a heavy metal cooking show, and much else besides, he’s a busy dude, but he made time to answer our request for a list of his favorite albums from 2011.)

Considering I haven’t heard much music this year it was very hard putting this list together. Had I heard a lot of the other albums released this year I might have had a different list. Either way, given a choice, this list would be in no particular order, but since we do this thing, here is my list in order.

1. Fleshgod Apocalypse – Agony – Oh my god this was my surprise discovery for 2011. I found it thanks to SickDrummer.com where there was a drum cam video of Francesco Paoli playing the song ‘The Violation”, after which I saw the music video and had my nuts blown off!! I immediately got the album and it’s been in my player ever since.

It was a good morning on our metallic island. The day here in the Pacific Northwest is dry and bright, I enjoyed BadWolf’s immensely entertaining interview with Arthur Von Nagel (Cormorant), and I’ve been filling my head non-stop with good metal — some cathartic black death from A Hill To Die Upon, a sampling of grindviolence courtesy of Alex Layzell, and a few head-wrecking tracks from Condemned.

I thought briefly about continuing my painful efforts to whittle down the list of most-infectious-song candidates into something less than 100 songs, but decided to put that off a while longer (“Procrastination” being one of my middle names) and instead check out news from the 5,000 bands I follow on Facebook. Turned out to be a wise decision, because in doing that I discovered some extremely high-quality concert video of the mighty Demonic Resurrection performing at the 26th annual Independence Rock festival in Mumbai, India, on November 26.

And by high-quality, I mean (a) it was filmed with about 100 cameras from about 100 different angles (including, like, just underneath the hand of DR’s keyboardist so you get a close-up of his fingers in motion), and (b) it sounds fucking awesome. Also, the stage is festooned with color and smoke and lights and looks killer.

As for the music, it’s over the top. Despite the fact that “Apocalyptic Dawn” is a single song, it almost sounds like a medley (even more so than on DR’s 2005 album, A Darkness Descends), with elements of symphonic black metal, death metal, power metal, and folk metal all effectively fused together — plus a heavy dose of hardcore vocal violence added by guest singer Sunneith Revankar of another Indian band we love around here, Bhayanak Maut.

On Friday night (Oct. 28), Metallica was scheduled to play a concert in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi in India. It was to have been the first stop in Metallica’s first tour of the sub-continent. Tickets to the show were priced between the equivalent of $34 and $57, and the concert had drawn fans from cities across India as well as countries such as Bangladesh, China, Nepal, Indonesia and Singapore. Unfortunately, it never happened.

After more than 20,000 fans waited for more than 3 hours at the venue (including a two-hour delay in being allowed inside), an announcement was made that the show would be postponed to the following night due to “technical difficulties”. News reports indicate that Metallica (or their representatives) were unhappy with the audio systems and the adequacy of the security barricade that would separate fans from the stage. It also turns out that the tour organizers (from an outfit called DNA Entertainment) had over-sold the 25,000-person capacity of the venue.

Many of the fans didn’t take the postyponement news very well, particularly when it was learned that Metallica was taking part in a press conference at the same time. Although most left the venue calmly when asked to do so, others rushed the stage, damaged equipment, and some even attempted to set fire to banners. And that led the organizers and Metallica to cancel the Gurgaon show altogether.

Early Saturday, police arrested the “operational head” of DNA Entertainment and three other company employees, charging them with fraud and cheating. (more after the jump, including video . . .)

One week ago, we posted a piece by NCS contributor Siddharth Darbha introducing us (and many of you) to an Indian metal band called Scribe. You can read Siddharth’s article here. Siddharth noted that Scribe’s 2010 album, Mark of Teja, had been nominated for Best Album at the 2010 edition of The Jack Daniel’s Rock Awards.

By way of background, this is the sixth year for those awards, which are organized in association with Rolling Stone (India) magazine. This year, 280 entries were submitted for the 16 award categories, including Song of the Year, Band of the Year, and Album of the Year. The editors of Rolling Stone whittled the list down to five nominees in each category, and those were then presented to a nine-member jury of judges. The award winners were decided by a combination of weighted jury votes and popular votes on a specially created web site. Bear in mind that the nominees for each award came from a range of genres — not limited, for example, to extreme metal.

Last night, the awards were announced at a live event at The Hard Rock Cafe in Mumbai. And guess what? Scribe pretty much ran the table, winning the Popular Choice awards for Song of the Year (“1234 Dracula”) and Album of the Year, as well as the Critics’ Choice Awards for Song of the Year and Band of the Year. Scribe’s Srinivas Sunderrajan also won the Bassist of the Year award. For all the results, go here.

Congratulations to Scribe for carrying the flag of Indian metal to the top of the heap — and congrats also to Demonic Resurrection for winning the Popular Choice award for Band of the Year. Pretty damn cool to see two metal bands like this being named Band of the Year against competitors from “more accessible” genres.

And along the same lines, did you know that on Monday of this week none other than Watain‘s album Lawless Darkness won the Swedish version of the Grammy award for “Best Hard Rock” Album of the Year? It did. “Hard rock” clearly means something different in Sweden than it does in the U.S. Holy shit.

As of yesterday, we’d finished rolling out, in no particular order, the first 10 entries on our list of 2010′s most infectious extreme songs. (For a full explanation of what we mean by “most infectious”, read this.) So far, here’s what we’ve got:

Byfrost: “Desire”
Evocation: “Sweet Obsession”
Keep of Kalessin: “Dragon iconography”
Living Sacrifice: “Rules of Engagement”
Kataklysm: “Suicide River”
Kalmah: “Bullets Are Blind”
Finntroll: “Solsagan”
Eluveitie: “Thousandfold”
Coliseum: “Blind In One Eye”
Kvelertak: “Blodtørst”

Today, we’re starting on the next 10. Does that mean we’re stopping at 20? Not necessarily. We’re still futzing with our list. If we had to place a bet today, we’d bet the final list will be closer to 30. Just depends on whether our naturally lazy natures succeed in stopping us from trying to shave the list down to something shorter.

Today’s additions to the list begin to draw us into black-metal territory — but trust us, they’re damned infectious.  Stay with us after the jump as we roll out songs by Demonic Resurrection and Sargeist.

More than two months ago we stumbled across a band from Mumbai, India, called Demonic Resurrection whose music hit us upside our blunt foreheads like a stout, low-hanging limb. We can’t remember what snagged our attention, though it may have been the news that Candlelight Records had agreed to handle the worldwide release of their third album, The Return to Darkness, which the band had originally self-released in January.

Whatever the reason, we were quite taken by a song from the album called “The Unrelenting Surge of Vengeance”, which the band had featured in a music video, and we wrote about it here. Eventually, we tracked down a copy of The Return to Darkness, and it blew us away.

We acknowledged back then that we were probably late-comers in our admiration for DR, and now we’ve got proof — because over the last week they’ve won a couple of notable awards, signifying that lots of other people paid attention long before we did. And we’re pretty fucking happy for them, and for the many metalheads who’ve been devoted fans of DR for a lot longer than we’ve been. So, we’re here today saying congratz to Demonic Ressurection.

And by sheer coincidence, we also just learned that another band we’ve been hot about — Shining — have won a righteous award of their own. So this post is a congratz to them, too.

And, last but not least, we want to say congratz to some other Indian bands we’ve admired from afar — Infernal Wrath and Bhayanak Maut — who also won recognition at one of the ceremonies that handed out awards to DR.

And because all these bands are on our minds, we’re going to remind you about them by serving up a collection of songs for you to hear, just in case you weren’t hanging around this site back when we first got up off our lazy asses and took notice of them.  (all that shit is after the jump, of course . . .)

We’ve got so damn much new music to hear, it’s ridiculous (and so much of it is ridiculously good). At the same time, we’re also trying to explore new metal horizons — and in doing that, we continue to discover that extreme metal is truly a burgeoning global phenomenon. A case in point: Metal from India.

Not so long ago we stumbled across a couple of really good bands based in Mumbai called Demonic Resurrection and Bhayanak Maut, and wrote about them here and here. In response to those posts, we received lots of comments and e-mails from NCS readers in India, not only praising those bands but also recommending others. We’re still working our way through those recommendations as time permits — and we definitely need more fucking time!

One name popped up continually in the tips we received — Infernal Wrath — and once we hit that music on the list of bands to check out, it brought us to a full stop. And we went back and listened again. And again. And again.

Their 2009 album Inside of Me is a remarkable blend of musical styles and traditions that’s a real attention-grabber. It’s a serious, meticulously planned and superbly played work that by turns is exotic, beautiful, headbangingly compulsive, and brutally heavy. Trust us on this — it’s definitely worth your time.  (more after the jump, including a song to hear . . .)

As regular readers know, we’re suckers for extreme music from far-away places that aren’t particularly well-known in the U.S. for their metal scenes.  (Though we like American bands, too!) Mumbai, India, qualifies. It’s far away. It’s not known here in the U.S. for its extreme metal scene. And it has produced a band called Demonic Resurrection that turns out to be worth some close attention.

Some of you guys probably already know of this band, but they’re a discovery for us. But what you probably don’t know is this breaking news from Mumbai: Demonic Resurrection have signed a deal with Candlelight Records for the worldwide release of their latest album, The Return To Darkness, which the band self-released in January. We now know that The Return to Darkness is the band’s third album, and the completion of a conceptual trilogy.

If we had seen Global Metal, the documentary film by Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen, we would have known about these Mumbai metallers before now, because they’re apparently featured in that film, along with bands from other exotic locales such as China, Iran, Indonesia, and Israel. (We’ve really got to watch that film.)

(more after the jump, including the band’s latest music video . . .)