This morning brought news of two brand new videos that hit the silver screens overnight, and neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night will stay us in the swift completion of our appointed rounds in delivering them to you. Both songs are amazing. Both videos are beautifully made. In other words, these are must-see offerings.

Two weeks ago we posted a feature on the very impressive new EP by Atlanta’s From Exile — a compilation of four covers from the extravagant songbook of Nine Inch Nails under the title Just Like You Imagined. The band have now released a video for one of those songs, the ephemeral, otherworldly “A Warm Place”. Of the four excellent songs on the EP, that purely instrumental piece made the deepest impression on us.

As we said in our review: “From Exile’s take on the song magnifies the rush and power of the sound, and a more flowing, reverberating guitar lead/solo by Emil Werstler (Daath) replaces the isolated keyboard notes of the original. Werstler’s contribution is a superb and all-too-brief piece of instrumental extravagance, thankfully reprised again near the song’s end.” The simplicity of the video suits the song — Werstler standing in an empty upper floor of a church, doing his thing, illuminated by the natural light filtering softly through stain-glassed windows.

The seventh full length album from Sweden’s Shining is called VII / Född Förlorare”, which in English means “Born Loser”. It was released this month on the band’s new label Spinefarm Records, and includes guest appearances from Erik Danielsson of Watain, Chris Amott of Arch Enemy, Peter Bjärgö of Arcana, and Nordman, who is one of Sweden’s biggest pop stars. Shining have now released an official video for the song called “Förtvivlan, Min Arvedel” — which is the first video the band have ever released in their 15-year history. The video is expertly filmed and edited, and it’s powerful. And the song — the song is simply fantastic. (more after the jump . . .)

Perpetually behind as we are, we still haven’t gotten around to hearing Shining’s new album — this video was our first introduction to the album’s music. Based on Google Translate, the Swedish song title means “Despair, My Inheritance”. It’s almost two songs in one — a galvanizing charge of groove-inscribed black-metal catharsis and a haunting melody carried by acoustic guitar and clean singing. Yet those two creations are twined together, the one flowing seamlessly into the other and back again in a way that makes perfect sense.

As noted, the video is superbly made, interspersing scenes of the band performing the song and episodes of drug use and self-mutilation. The lyrics are in Swedish, but if the subject matter of the video is faithful to the lyrical content, the song deals with addiction. I don’t see it as any kind of glorification of drug use, nor do I think the scenes of self-mutilation are gratuitous; they’re in the video for a reason.

I suppose some people could criticize the content. At least Shining suspects that will happen: “We know we are going to get heavily criticised for some of the scenes” commented front man and founder Niklas Kvarforth, “but it’s nothing more than you will see as soon as you switch on a television or watch a move, or walk down a city street come to that.  But we’re SHINING and it’s always open season on SHINING when it comes to people who have neither understood, nor taken the time to try and understand, where the band is coming from”.

The video comes in a censored and an uncensored version. We’ll put both of them in this post because, YouTube being YouTube, I suppose there’s always a chance someone will get their panties in a bunch and make YouTube take down the uncensored one. Below, the uncensored on appears first.

Okay, we’ll have an end to the words now. Hope you enjoy these two vidz, and the music, as much as I did.

From Exile’s new EP is available for free download at this location.

Wasn’t so long ago that we had a pair of posts about cover songs (Andy’s special Synn Report on covers and my musings about the pros and cons of covers, prompted by Anachronaeon‘s cover of Iron Maiden). We followed that in short order with news of an awesome-looking cover album by Dying Fetus (here). Seems to be the season for covers, because late yesterday we got word about an EP by Atlanta’s From Exile that we’ve been waiting for, which is devoted to covers of four songs by Nine Inch Nails. It’s called Just Like You Imagined and it’s now available for free download in mp3 or FLAC. We wasted no time listening last night.

So, let’s first review what we discussed in those previous posts and in the accompanying comments about covers: (1) they fail more often than they succeed; (2) there’s no terribly good reason to listen to a cover if it’s just a re-tread of the original, except perhaps for a novelty factor when the normal musical styles of the original and the cover band are poles apart; and (3) the best covers turn the original songs into something new and different, re-sculpting them into new works that stand on their own through variation of the original — but without completely losing connection with the source.

All four of From Exile’s covers succeed, in spades. In both subtle and dramatic ways, depending on the song, they’ve creatively re-shaped the NIN songs, producing music that’s more guitar-driven and more metal. They’ve preserved the spirit of the originals, yet succeeded in adding something of their own, and the results are wonderfully appealing. After the jump, we’ll explore the changes in a bit more detail and juxtapose the originals and the covers for your listening pleasure.

We latched onto From Exile more than a year ago when they debuted their first, self-released album, Monolith. We wrote one of the more glowing reviews we’ve ever published at NCS (here), calling it “a 32-minute treatise on guitar metal.” And then we posted about them again last November. Even if we weren’t already high on From Exile, we would have listened to this EP anyway just because of the cover art by Jorden Haley.

The band is joined once again by Kevin Talley, the very talented drummer from Daath, and one of Daath’s resident guitar wizards, Emil Werstler, also contributes a guest solo that’s mind-blowing.

For this new EP, From Exile picked four songs from NIN’s extensive discography. The original version of the first song, “The Great Below”, is a moody and sometimes uncomfortable piece of music that builds like a threatening storm — but it’s a storm that never fully breaks. For their largely faithful cover, From Exile has trimmed the length of the song and made the guitar parts more active, while vocally matching Trent Reznor’s three-octave climb in intensity. (Speaking of the vocals on this EP, they’re uniformly fantastic.)

In the original, “Ruiner” merges a dance-beat with scratching, pulses of electronic noise, and emphatic melodic keyboards. Reznor’s vocals shift from subdued clean song to distorted shrieking and back to clean vocals in a higher register. The song collapses in the middle, the pace down-shifted and the melody executed by a spastic, distorted guitar lead, and that’s followed by a chunky industrial march and strung-out synthesizer craziness.

In their cover, From Exile preserves the beat and the vocal stylings of the original, but again employ the guitars to drive the melody in place of synthesizers. In that collapsed mid-section, the band features a duet between the bass and a layered, psychedelic guitar. The result is less industrial, less weird, but just as intense.

NIN’s rendition of “Sin” jumps and jerks with a pneumatic beat, Reznor’s snarling vocals only barely humanizing the mechanical precision of the instrumental tracks.  It’s a classic piece of dance-floor industrial rock. What has From Exile done with this one? Their version again reduces the presence of inhuman synthesizers and substitutes hammering riffage and Kevin Talley’s rock-style drumming in its place. The cover also injects a squalling, screaming, multi-tracked guitar solo that’s hotter than molten steel.

Instrumental track “A Warm Place”, in the original, is otherworldly, ephemeral, beautiful, anchored only by the low, muffled thrum of the bass line, the keys rising and falling, isolated notes revealing a haunting melody. It’s a mesmerizing, dreamlike song.

From Exile’s take on the song magnifies the rush and power of the sound, and a more flowing, reverberating guitar lead/solo by Emil Werstler replaces the isolated keyboard notes of the original. Werstler’s contribution is a superb and all-too-brief piece of instrumental extravagance, thankfully reprised again near the song’s end. Of all the tracks on the EP, this one made the deepest impression. On this song, the cover exceeds the original.

This widget will allow you to stream all four tracks on the EP. But if you’ve got the time, we’ve got another way to listen to these songs further below.

Just Like You Imagined by From Exile

Whenever you’re ready to download Just Like You Imagined, THIS is the link that will take you to the From Exile page where you can get that done. Unfortunately, if you’re a CD-hound like me, the only way you can get a hard copy of the record is by attending the band’s CD release show at 9 pm on May 14th at the Earl in Atlanta, Georgia. You pay your $8 to get in, and you get the CD free at the door.

One more piece of From Exile news: They’ve finished filming a video for their magnificent version of “A Warm Place”; those photos up above are stills from the video.

Now, if you’re ready to invest some more time in this covers phenomenon — and you may especially appreciate this if you’re a Nine Inch Nails fan — here’s what we’re gonna do: Down below we’re going through the EP track by track, and preceding each track we’ll have the original NIN song, followed by the From Exile cover. It will give you an even more precise appreciation for what From Exile has done with the songs.

THE GREAT BELOW

NIN

FROM EXILE

RUINER

NIN

FROM EXILE

SIN

NIN

FROM EXILE

A WARM PLACE

NIN

FROM EXILE

While I was away on vacation I didn’t completely neglect what was happening in the world of metal, but I confess I didn’t spend the kind of time I usually spend keeping up on current developments. So over the weekend I did my best to catch up. It was kind of like swimming against a flood tide. It’s amazing how much happens on a daily basis. Of course, I find that a lot of the bulletins, press releases, and blurbs that fill up the likes of Blabbermouth and band pages on Facebook and MySpace are pretty uninteresting.

But even ignoring the boring and utterly useless streams of bullshit that pass for metal news much of the time, I still found all sorts of happenings over the last 12 days that were quite interesting, and even exciting — the kind of occurrences we would have written about on this site if we’d been able to stay on top of our game. The downside of writing about them now is that for many of you, it will be old news. But what the fuck. We’re going to write about some of those items anyway, stale though they may be. Some things still taste pretty good even when they’re beyond their sell-by date. And besides, maybe some of you missed them, just like I did while I was off staring at clouds.

It may take a couple or three posts to catch up, but there’s no time like the present to get started. So today we’ve got a collection of items about Animals As Leaders, From Exile, After the Burial, and I Declare War. That’s what you’ll find after the jump, along with some music videos . . .

ANIMALS AS LEADERS

We won’t slobber too much about this band today — mainly because we’ve generated enough slobber about them in the past to fill a bucket. Your three NCS collaborators have seen them twice in Seattle since this time last year, and while I was off on vacation, AAL came through town yet again, as part of an odd-ball touring line-up that included Circa Survive, Codeseven, and Dredg. The last time they passed through, they were part of the SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour, with a bunch of badass metal acts. These dudes will clearly tour with anyone — and no doubt they’ve massively increased their fan base by doing that.

My co-founder Alexis and some friends went to see them as part of that Circa Survive tour while I was gone. Of course, given the rest of the line-up, she left not long after AAL played their set, and of course she reported to me that they were — yet again — awesome. I’m consoling myself with the knowledge that, come February, they’ll be passing through Seattle for a fourth time in just the last 12 months. That next tour will be with Underoath, Thursday, and A Skylit Drive. We’ll probably be leaving that show early, too.

Apart from missing AAL’s most recent Seattle stop, I also missed the band’s release — finally — of their first official music video. It’s for the most excellent song, “CAFO”. I watched the video multiple times over the weekend, and it’s almost as excellent as the song. It comes close to capturing what’s so mesmerizing about the band’s live performance, and the assorted visual effects are mostly very cool, too — though I have no idea what that creepy, pulsating, alien thing has to do with the music.

The video was directed and edited by Scott Hansen, and Jay Wynne provided the visual effects. If you haven’t seen it yet, well now you can — and you should:

FROM EXILE

From Exile is an Atlanta-based band that we discovered and praised to the skies in a post last March. A few days ago, I re-read that review of their album Monolith, and realized that we’ve rarely been that effusive about a band’s music — which is saying something, given that we generally don’t review albums we don’t like. Back then, From Exile was really just two dudes — Eric Guenther and Ben Wetzelberger (with some assists on the album from Kevin Talley, Eyal Levi, and Emil Werstler (all from Daath)). Since then, Eric and Ben have fleshed out the band, at least for live-performance purposes — because while I was on vacation, they’ve put up some videos of a show they did on October 23.

In addition to releasing those live-performance videos while I was missing in action, they also released an acoustic demo of a new tune that will later become a full-band arrangement on their next album. The new song is called ”Everyone Wants to Seem Evil”. Yes, it’s just an acoustic arrangement, and it’s fairly short, but any taste of new From Exile music is very welcome to our pointy ears. Plus, in this next video, you can see the guys tracking the music. And on top of that, they’ve made the song available as a free download on their Bandcamp site — which is here.

Here’s what Eric said about this acoustic sample: “Basically, we have a lot of musical ideas floating around since Monolith was written over 3 years ago now. The acoustic guitar has always been a central part of my writing process… I tend to write most of our music with it, at least in the first stages, and we have done an acoustic show before, which we thought went really well, so we want to do it again. The plan with this first song is to re-record it later as a full band/song arrangement for our next full-length. But since we also want to play an acoustic show occasionally as well as have an acoustic release further down the line, it made a lot of sense to give this music a middle checkpoint; something so that people can actually see a bit of how an idea progresses. The final version, both when we play this at an acoustic show, and the band version on record, will have vocals and everything else fleshed out. In fact, many of the guitar harmonies will be vocal lines.”

Here’s the video of that acoustic demo:

And now here’s one of the performance videos we mentioned earlier — with all the power turned on. It’s a song called “Exhumed”, from the Monolith album. Both the video and the audio are above-average quality, and the song is just sick — even though it features clean singing.  :)

Monolith is still available as a digital download from the From Exile Bandcamp page via the link we provided above. Soooo good.

AFTER THE BURIAL

Most metal bloggers with any sense aren’t going to finish off their “Best of 2010″ lists until they hear the new album from After the Burial. Even our very own guest contributor The Artist Formerly Known As Dan — who jumped the gun with his “Best of” list for the sake of generating discussion — put the album on his Honorable Mention list, even though he hasn’t heard it yet. He may have to revise his “Best of” list after he’s heard it.

We haven’t heard it yet either, but even though there’s a big stack of recent releases already waiting in our to-be-heard In Box, we’re going to move it up to the top. In the meantime, our taste has been whetted by a sample from a new song embedded in a short promo video that the band released while I was on vacation. It started the salivary glands working when I watched it — even more saliva than happens when I watch the lorises chow down on a big handful of grubs, if you can imagine that.

The album In Dreams, is scheduled for release on November 23. Holy shit!  That’s today! (But here’s a hint — one of our increasingly regular guest contributors has listened carefully to the new album, and he is majorly disappointed, as you’ll see when his review goes up on our site tomorrow.)

I DECLARE WAR

This is a Seattle deathcore/death-metal band we’ve been following since we saw one of their very first live performances a couple years ago. 2010 has been a break-out year for IDW. In March, they announced their signing to the Artery Recordings label, they then released their label debut Malevolence, and they’ve been touring the nation like crazy since then. Nor surprisingly to us, they’ve already built a massive nationwide following.

The only fly in the ointment was the news in July that their talented vocalist Jonathan Huber had left the band in the middle of a tour — for reasons that are still obscure. At that time, Nick Arthur of tour-mates Molotov Solution began filling in for Huber on IDW’s live shows, and after that tour finished, Jamie Hanks stepped up to do the vocal duties on subsequent tours. Jamie Hanks is also an awesome vocalist, and is (was) the frontman for Portland’s Those Who Lie Beneath.  We wrote some glowing words about that band’s debut album, An Awakening, last December.

Well, while I was away on vacation, we got an e-mail from I Declare War’s guitarist Evan Hughes telling us about a press release the band had just issued, announcing that Jamie Hanks will now be IDW’s permanent vocalist.  According to the press piece, IDW will be re-recording a track from Malevolence to feature Hanks’ vocals. They tell us that “Putrification of the Population” will be available for streaming by early next year via the band’s MySpace page.

As far as we’re concerned, and as much as we liked Huber’s vocals and stage presence, Hanks is a hot-shit addition to a band whose work-ethic and music we admire. Onward and upward!

Btw, Evan Hughes is a bright guy and a good writer (we had lots of fun reading his studio blogs while the band was recording Malevolence), and we’re hoping he’ll be convinced to send us a guest blog whenever he can catch his breath from touring.

********

That’s it for this installment of Catching Up. Hope at least some of it was news to you (albeit somewhat dated). Have a nice fucking day. (As I write this, it’s fucking snowing in Seattle. Shit.)

Cerebral Metalhead is a blog we like to visit because it often turns us on to new music we don’t encounter elsewhere and because the album reviews are so well-written. On our latest visit, we read a glowing review of a self-released album called Monolith by an unsigned Atlanta prog-metal band named From Exile. So we quickly got the album, and we gotta agree — this is an amazing piece of work, and we feel compelled to help spread the word.

At its core, From Exile are two very talented guitarists — Eric Guenther and Ben Wetzelberger. On Monolith, they are joined on drums by the ever-awesome Kevin Talley from Daath. And the Daath connection doesn’t stop there. Eyal Levi co-produced the album with Guenther, handled the mixing chores, and provided a guest guitar solo on a song called “In the Faded Silence.” And the Daath connection still doesn’t stop there: Guitarist extraordinaire Emil Werstler added another guest guitar solo on “Apparition.”

Basically, with magnificent help from Talley’s accomplished drumwork, Monolith is a 32-minute treatise on guitar metal. If you found yourself on Pandora with nothing but an electric guitar and you were trying to explain it to one of those blue Na’vi, we imagine the conversation would go something like this: “Yeah, that neural thing you got on the end of your braid is pretty cool, but this thing is a fuckin’ electric guitar, and if you wanna know all the sounds it can make, slot your braid into my iPod and listen to Monolith.” (read more after the jump, and listen to a track . . .)

That may be a slight exaggeration, but only a sight one. The album threads together arena-rock riffs, sublimely beautiful meditations, heavy-as-shit headbanging chuggery, blistering solos, and soaring anthems — among other things. Sometimes one guitar, sometimes two playing in harmony or at counterpoint, this is a work created by people who love the instrument and damn-well know how to use it, and the songs are intelligently constructed to make full use of that knowledge.

A few of the songs include electronically altered vocals, but this is really one long instrumental work, with each song bleeding seamlessly and without pause into the next. As the songs shift in tempo and texture, they evoke a range of feelings and beautiful images. We think of it as the sonic equivalent of those time-lapse films of massive open skies that rapidly display dramatic changes in the weather and the light over the space of a single day. Every time I listen to it, a goofy grin comes over my face. (Correction: a goofier than usual grin.)

Two years in the making, Monolith is quite evidently the product of a shitload of thought, work, and attention to detail. Among other things, the album includes judicious use of various electronic effects, classical acoustic guitar interludes, piano outros, and strings — but nothing happens that isn’t intelligently calculated to contribute meaningfully and effectively to the whole listening experience. And it all works.

It’s evident that we’re completely bowled over by this album. Monolith is the kind of music that appeals to both the right and the left sides of the brain — plus the reptile part that produces convulsive headbanging.

Picking any one song as a sample of the whole is hard, particularly because each one is simply a movement in a well-constructed symphony, but here you go. Have a listen to the first track on Monolith — and if you like what you hear, the whole album is available for immediate download (at a reasonable price) at From Exile’s website.

From Exile: Arrival

P.S.  Attention record label geniuses:  Someone go sign Eric and Ben so they can afford to fill out the line-up for a touring band and come play for us in Seattle.