A month ago I posted a news item about Finntroll that intrigued me: In conjunction with the launch of a European tour called Heidenfest (which is still going on), they released a “tour edition” of their excellent 2010 album Nifelvind that included covers of three songs that I had a tough time imagining them playing: “Insect” by Oingo Boingo, “Can You Forgive Her?” by The Pet Shop Boys, and “The God That Failed” by Metallica. This last Finntroll cover was previously included in a 20th anniversary tribute to The Black Album that Metal Hammer compiled and released this past summer, but the song included on the tour edition has an alternate ending.
Of course, as a died-in-the-wool Finntroll fan, I had to get this tour edition, (a) because as cool as I wish I were, in reality I’m just an embarrassingly obsessive metal nerd, and (b) because I’m a died-in-the-wool Finntroll fan. It arrived in the mail on Friday. It features new artwork by the band’s guitarist Skrymer (which you can see above) and an extra CD that included those three cover songs. It’s being sold at CMDistro. If you’ve already got Nifelvind, you’d really have to fall into Category (a) or (b) like me to get this, because all you’ll be getting for the money that you don’t already have is the nice new digipack cover art and those three songs.
To help you make up your mind, I’m going to stream all three of the covers after the jump. My favorite is the Metallica cover, maybe because it was a metal song to begin with, but the other two are more appealing than I thought they’d be. As I should have known from listening to Nifelvind and Nattfödd, this band is capable of performing well in a wide variety of musical styles, and as groverXIII pointed out in a comment on the earlier post, I should have been able to imagine the Pet Shop Boys cover from listening to “Hel Vete” on the Trollhammaren EP (2004).
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.
I doubt I’ll be able to continue doing this on a regular basis, but for the third day in a row, here’s a round-up of news I saw and music I heard today that I thought were worth sharing.
KRISIUN
It’s been three years since Krisiun released Southern Storm, and that’s far too long to wait for another slab of death metal bestiality from these Brazilian kings of the genre. Today’s wonderful news is that Krisiun will be releasing their eighth studio album, The Great Execution, on October 31 in Europe and November 1 in North America via Century Media Records.
A press release explains that the album “musically expands Krisiun’s trademark high-speed death metal violence with a heavily increased amount of diversity ranging from extreme tempo variations over distinct rhythm patterns to clean guitars and even Flamenco parts!” In addition, “Krisiun only used analog gear and instruments this time to avoid the compressed sound that so many musicians produce today. This wise decision resulted in a more organic sound, with the songs on The Great Execution possessing both warmth and rawness, which are so often lost through digital production. The low end is deeper, with drums that pound instead of bounce and guitar tones that sear rather than hiss.”
That just sounds fuckin’ peachy, don’t it? And what about that album art up above, by by Japanese artist Toshihiro Egawa (Suicide Silence, Heaven Shall Burn, Devourment, Dying Fetus)? Metal As Fuck. (more 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.
No, we’re not re-starting our seemingly endless series on Finnish metal. This is just a heads-up that the second installment of THE FINNISH METAL TOUR is on the horizon. The first installment last year was one of the best shows we saw in 2010, and the next one is already causing near-sexual forms of arousal here at NCS.
Okay, maybe that was too much information. Let’s just say we’re looking forward to the new tour and leave it at that.
Here’s the arousing line-up: Finntroll, Ensiferum, Barren Earth, and Rotten Sound.
Up above is a video trailer for the tour hosted by keyboardist Kasper Mårtenson (ex-Amorphis) and guitarist Sami Yli-Sirniö (Kreator) of Barren Earth. And in case your eyes cross as you try to read the dates and places as they scroll across the bottom of the video, we’ve got the full schedule after the jump.
Be still my beating . . . heart.
Another day, and two more entries on our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For a full explanation of what we mean by “most infectious”, read this. And to see the songs we’ve named so far, click the Category link over on the right called MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2010.
In a nutshell, what we’re doing is listing, in no particular order, the catchiest songs from a wide range of extreme metal sub-genres — not necessarily the best metal of the year (though lots of these songs would qualify for that kind of list), but the ones that most effectively got our heads and other parts of our bodies moving, and then continued to ring in our tiny brains even after they ended.
We ended Part 3 of this series with a band from Finland — Kalmah — and we’re starting Part 4 with another unique Finnish juggernaut: Finntroll. And then, in keeping with the folk-metallish theme of today’s entry, we’re following that up with a song from Switzerland’s Eluveitie.
Times like this, I wish I had really long hair, because these songs make me want to whip it around in a big fucking windmill. On the other hand, with my luck it would be caught in an air intake vent and be torn out by the roots. Or the cat would freak out and leap for my head with claws bared. So, maybe it’s just as well.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Two more songs! (read on, and listen, after the jump . . .)
Let’s pause for a moment and take stock of what we’ve done with this tribute series so far: We’ve covered a pretty wide range of melodic death-metal bands, both globally known names and newcomers. We’ve featured some purveyors of funeral doom. We’ve written about some of the biggest names in Finnish black metal. What are we still missing?
HUMPPA METAL! Yes, in response to overwhelming popular demand, today we’re shining the spotlight on two bands who have incorporated traditional Finnish humppa into their metal in quite different ways. You could also think of this post as a dip into the waters of Finnish folk-metal, though in our opinion that isn’t really a fair characterization of one of these bands.
What, you may ask is humppa? Let’s see what The Font Of All Human Knowledge has to say on the subject:
Humppa is a type of music from Finland. It is related to jazz and very fast foxtrot, played two beats to a bar (2/4 or 2/2). Typical speed is about 220 to 260 beats per minute. Humppa is also the name of a few social dances danced to humppa music. All dances involve bounce that follows the strong bass of the music. . . . The name humppa was invented by Antero Alpola for a radio show in the 1950s. He picked it up from German Oktoberfest where the locals used the word to describe the playing of the band. The band probably used a tuba, as the sound of tuba on the first beat is like hump, the second beat coming as a pa. (The related German style is known as oompah.)
As far as we can tell from afar, humppa isn’t the sort of music that many people in Finland buy for their listening pleasure. Instead, it’s music that people dance to, and it’s played in dance halls in cities large and small. As we’ll see, it has also been incorporated into metal by two bands whose fame has spread well beyond their home country — Finntroll and Korpiklaani. (more after the jump, including tracks to hear . . .)
Fair warning: This will be one extended session of spittle-flecked frothing at the mouth, because we haven’t been this blown away since stumbling into a full-fledged Seattle windstorm last winter. So get the safety glasses on and strap on sanitary masks if you got ‘em.
The subject of our enthusiasm is Nothnegal. They’re a band from The Republic of the Maldives that now includes two non-Maldivian heavyweights — drummer Kevin Talley from Dååth and keyboardist Marco Sneck from those Finnish swamplords Kalmah. They’ve got a four-song EP to their credit called Antidote of Realism and they’ve just signed with Season of Mist for the release of their debut album early next year.
Oh yeah, they’re also playing with Arch Enemy this month and touring Europe in the fall with the likes of Rotting Christ, Samael, and Finntroll.
And we’d wager that most of you have never heard of them. Until earlier this week, we hadn’t either. But this band shows all the seismic signs of an impending Vesuvius-sized eruption onto the scene — and based on the band’s output to date, it would be well-deserved.
If you like technically immaculate, headbangingly compulsive, Scandinavian-style melodic death metal played at autobahn speed, stay with us after the jump. Among other things, we’ll stream all four tracks from that EP and we’ll show you how to download a cut from Nothnegal’s forthcoming debut album.
More than a month has passed since we posted our last update about the 70,000 Tons of Metal Cruise, and we figured it was time to check in again.
Since our last update, Exodus, Forbidden, and Testament have signed on. That’s a heavyweight injection of Bay Area thrash into this floating festival (we’ll give you the complete current line-up of 18 bands after the jump). Plus, in related news, the Swedes have gotten in on the act by putting together their own metal cruise (more on that after the jump too).
If you don’t know what this cruise is, we’ll fill you in: The organizers have chartered a cruise ship (Royal Caribbean’s “Majesty of the Seas”) capable of carrying 40 metal bands (which means they’re still targeting 22 more bands to fill out the line-up) and 2,000 fans, departing Miami on January 24, 2011 for a 5-day, 4-night cruise in the Caribbean, including a stop at the Mexican island of Cozumel.
The 70,000 Tons of Metal cruise has got great potential — both good and bad. It could be a truly awesome experience. It could also be a clusterfuck of cosmic proportions. And there’s no way to know which it will be until that cruise ship limps back into port, probably on fire, at the end of the voyage.
We’ve got some thoughts about what could make it orgasmically good, and what could make it suck big-time. But we’d bet the farm that unless Royal Caribbean is run by metalheads (not likely), they have no fucking idea what they’re about to get themselves into, and that increases the risk of suckage. (more thoughts, and other related stuff, after the jump . . .)
On the night of April 21, The Finnish Metal Tour 2010 played Seattle’s El Corazon, and two of your NCS Co-Authors were there to bear witness and file this report — along with a big batch of our amateurish photos.
With the likes of Finntroll, Moonsorrow, and Swallow the Sun on the bill, we expected nothing less than excellence on stage, and that’s what we got. Which brings to mind a question we’ve had before:
How does a country with only 5.4 million people produce so many awesome metal bands? We still don’t know the answer. But whatever the explanation, here’s hoping it doesn’t stop. Judging by the reaction of the full house at El Corazon, we’re not alone in feeling that way.
Before the procession of Finns took the stage, two local bands got the growing crowd nice and warmed up.
BLOOD AND THUNDER
This five-piece Seattle band plays Gothenburg-flavored, melodic death metal, driven at a galloping pace by some flashy keyboard and guitar work. They’ve got some good song-writing chops, too. The songs were memorable, and we’ve been drawn to the band’s MySpace page to listen again.
They’re one of those rare bands whose lead vocalist is the guy behind the drum kit, and his evil, death-metal vocals make a nice contrast with the memorable melodies. We were told that the band has finished tracking a debut album, to follow an EP released last year. We definitely want to hear it. A strong start to the night! (our concert notes continue after the jump, plus lots of photos at the end . . .)