SLOWDOWN AHEAD (WITH NEW MUSIC FROM AKERCOCKE, SKINEATER, AND GRAVDAL)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jun 142017
 

 

Happy Wednesday. As I have mentioned before, No Clean Singing is one of the co-presenters and organizers of the first Northwest Terror Fest, which begins tomorrow and runs for three days in Seattle. As a result of my responsibilities in putting on the fest, I will have little time to devote to NCS until Monday.

I’m not sure whether our other writers will be contributing anything during my absence, but I still plan to post at least one new thing (and probably only one) both tomorrow and Friday. Not sure about the weekend. But before running off to take care of today’s festival-related tasks, I wanted to recommend some really good new metal I heard last night or this morning.

AKERCOCKE

Not long ago at the 2017 edition of Maryland Deathfest I had the pleasure of seeing Akercocke perform, and was especially taken by a new song they played. I didn’t know its name, but now I do — because it debuted today. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: MANTAR, GERM, GRAVDAL, NOX FORMULAE, KASSAD, DISSVARTH

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  5 Responses »
Feb 152016
 

Mantar-Ode To the Flame

 

I had originally planned to post this yesterday, to make the Sabbath blacker, but didn’t quite get it finished. I’ve collected five new songs from forthcoming albums and a brief review of an EP released last month. The songs are stylistically diverse — in fact, this is one of those installments of this column where not all of the music is even going to fit the broadest definitions of black metal — yet there is a shared “depressive” quality among many of the songs (and I use the term in a genre sense). And of course I found everything very good and very memorable and hope you’ll enjoy it, too.

MANTAR

As I’ve previously written, Mantar’s new album Ode To the Flame is one of my most eagerly anticipated releases of 2016, both because I thoroughly enjoyed their debut album Death By Burning and because I was so blown away by their live performance at last year’s Maryland Deathfest. A few days ago we got our first full glimpse of the new album via the premiere of a song called “Era Borealis“. Continue reading »