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

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.

Long-time readers of NCS will know that we’re drawn to bands from countries that aren’t known for their metal scenes. We know how fucking difficult it is to make a career in an extreme metal band anywhere, but it seems to us that in some places, the hurdles must be even higher than in others.

The Republic of the Maldives must be one of those high-hurdle places. It’s an island nation in the Indian Ocean consisting of over 1,000 islets, about 200 of which are inhabited, spread over 90,000 square kilometers of ocean. The most populous of those islets, Malé (pictured to the right), has only about 100,000 people.

By total population, the country is the smallest in Asia, and with an average ground level of about 5 feet (1.5 metres) above sea level, it’s the lowest-lying country on the planet. According to The Font of All Human Knowledge, the highest point of land in the Maldives is only 7′ 7″ (2.3 metres) above sea level — which makes the islands especially vulnerable to tsunamis, and to anything else that causes the ocean to rise.

Rising ocean levels associated with global warming threaten one day to completely submerge the country. In fact, the current national government has set in motion plans to buy land in India, Sri Lanka, and/or Australia as the site for a new homeland. As President Mohamed Nasheed said, “”We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades.”

We’ve got an old friend who actually managed to visit the Maldives (it’s a serious hike to get there from the U.S.) and came back raving about its beauty and the friendliness of the people. It certainly seems to be an unusual place in many respects — but we would guess it’s not exactly the best launching pad for an extreme metal band.

Somehow, Nothnegal have succeeded in achieving lift-off.

Apparently, the band started off as an Arch Enemy and Children of Bodom cover act, and then started creating their own songs, which resulted in the Antidote of Realism EP. That EP featured Risto Ruuth from Finland’s Eternal Tears of Sorrow doing a guitar solo on “Web of Deceit” and the aforementioned Marco Sneck providing keyboards on the EP’s title track. And it was produced by Anssi Kippo, who has previously worked with Children of Bodom and Norther, among others.

You can hear the influence of all those Finns on the EP, with more than a passing resemblance to Children of Bodom. The songs feature supercharged convulsive riffing, blistering guitar solos, merciless blast beats and double-bass fills, and keyboard melodies that alternately arc over the mayhem of the other instruments and join with them in a dizzying race around the track.

The vocals on the EP add a blackened element to the style by serving up Nordic-style, acid etched viciousness, and the collective result is a powerhouse rampage filled with memorable melodies and deep, rhythmic grooves.

All the technical acrobatics wouldn’t have carried Nothnegal beyond the sinking shores of the Maldives without a talent for harnessing all that technical skill to distinctive songs, but they’ve got that, too. All four songs on Antidote are strong, marred only slightly by abrupt endings on a couple of them, and it’s not all thrash and burn.  There’s an interesting Celtic-influenced folk melody that appears via the keyboards on “Temptress of Shadows” and a repeated refrain of clean singing at the end of “Now I’ve Waken” that’s carried aloft by an anthemic melody that stuck in our heads long after the song ended.

Someone, somewhere, will probably complain that on Antidote, Nothnegal gets carried away with its stylistic homage to Finnish/Swedish MDM, to the point of mimicry. We don’t feel that way, but the band itself may. We saw this on the band’s MySpace blog, commenting on the new album that’s in the works:

We focused mostly on creating a more unique sound which differentiates us more and the result turned out to be almost something completely different from what we had with “Antidote of Realism EP” but we still managed to keep the melodic keyboard elements intact while getting them to sound darker and [more] epic than before.

We have 9 songs completed for the album and they have some really heavy/thrashy/groovy riffs, with Kevin keeping the  drums aggressive and technical while Marco have the keyboards dark and yet melodic. We are very excited about everything and impressed with outcome of the combined effort from our new lineup and the material we are coming up with this time. The songs contain a little bit of everything from thrash metal, groove metal, death metal to black metal and doom so we believe that the material is quite diverse as well. Apart from that, we have also incorporated some atmospheric ambient sounds/noises in the songs which are unique to the Maldivian environment.

We would have been quite happy with more music like what’s on Antidote, but at the same time we’re interested to see how this band continues to grow. We do have a sign of what’s to come — a single from the forthcoming album that’s available for free download from the band’s official web site. It’s called “Absolute Blood Unification”, and it does reveal some changes in the sound, though we’d call them subtle instead of dramatic.

The keyboards are still in evidence and contribute significantly to the song, but they’re less prominent in the mix than on Antidote. There’s still plenty of speed, power, and technical proficiency — and the chorus is just as infectious as the hooks on the EP. Perhaps it has something to do with Kevin Talley’s presence (whose drumwork is as physically jolting as you would expect), but this song reminds us of Dååth — and that ain’t a bad thing at all, in our book.

For comparison purposes, here’s one of the tracks from Antidote of Realism, and then after that you can hear the new song:

Nothnegal: Web of Deceit

And now here’s “Absolute Blood Unification”. If you like what you hear, we’ve put up a link below the player that will allow you to download the song for keeps.

You can download “Absolute Blood Unification” by jumping to this location.

UPDATE: Nothnegal has just created a ReverbNation page, which means we can now grab a widget that should allow you to stream all 4 songs from the EP — which is very cool, because we had a helluva time picking just one for you to hear.  Voila:

TOUR INFO

As we mentioned earlier, Nothnegal is scheduled to support Arch Enemy on their first-ever performance in the Maldives on July 23, and Kevin Tally and Marco Sneck will be performing for the first time in the band’s lineup for that show.

We also mentioned that Nothnegal will be joining a totally ass-kicking European tour this fall with their new label-mates Rotting Christ, Samael, Metsatöll, and Finntroll. If we weren’t so fucking far away, we’d be there in a heartbeat. Here are the tour dates:

26.11.2010 BE – Vosselaar, Biebob
27.11.2010 DE – Essen, Turock
28.11.2010 NL – Leuwaarden, Romein Popodium
29.11.2010 DE – Hamburg, Markthalle
30.11.2010 DE – Braunschweig, Meier Music Hall
01.12.2010 DE – Ludwigsburg, Rockfabrik
02.12.2010 DE – Berlin, K17
03.12.2010 DE – Leipzig, Hellraiser
04.12.2010 DE – Lichtenfels, Metal Meeting
05.12.2010 CZ – Zlin, Masters of Rock Cafe
06.12.2010 HU – Budapest, Wigwam
07.12.2010 SI – Ljubljana, Kino Siska
08.12.2010 IT – Milan, Generali Magazzini
09.12.2010 AT – Wien, Szene
10.12.2010 DE – Munich, Backstage
11.12.2010 AT – Kufstein, Kulturfabrik
12.12.2010 CH – Pratteln, Z7
13.12.2010 FR – Lyon, Ninkasi Kao
14.12.2010 ES – Barcelona, Salamandra
15.12.2010 ES – Madrid, Heineken
16.12.2010 FR – Toulouse, Phare
17.12.2010 FR – Limoges, CC John Lennon
18.12.2010 NL – Eindhoven, Eindhoven Metal Meeting
19.12.2010 DE – Frankfurt, Batschkapp

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.

What do the following people all have in common?

* Gene Hoglan (FEAR FACTORY, DETHKLOK, DEATH, DARK ANGEL) – Drums
* Kevin Talley (DAATH, CHIMAIRA, MISERY INDEX) – Drums
* Larry Tarnowski (ICED EARTH) – Lead Guitar
* Brendon Small (DETHKLOK, “Metalocalypse”) – Lead Guitar
* Andy LaRocque (KING DIAMOND, DEATH) – Lead Guitar
* Michael Angelo Batio (MAB, NITRO) – Lead Guitar
* Roland Grapow (HELLOWEEN, MASTERPLAN) – Lead Guitar
* The Heathen (ZIMMERS HOLE) – Vocals
* Bill Hudson (CELLADOR, POWER QUEST) – Lead Guitar
* Emil Werstler (DAATH) – Lead Guitar
* Rob Caggiano (ANTHRAX) – Lead Guitar
* “Metal” Mike Chlasciak (HALFORD, SEBASTIAN BACH, PAINMUSEUM) – Lead Guitar
* Steve DiGiorgio (SADUS, DEATH, TESTAMENT, ICED EARTH) – Bass
* Alexei Rodriguez (PRONG, 3 INCHES OF BLOOD, WALLS OF JERICHO) – Drums
* Eyal Levi (DAATH) – Lead Guitar
* Sean Reinert (CYNIC, AEON SPOKE, DEATH) – Drums

The answer is:  All these people will be making guest appearances on the forthcoming debut album by a relatively unknown, unsigned, two-man band from Chicago called Asylum.  Even Slash couldn’t line up talent like this for his upcoming solo album (not that we give a crap what Slash does, just sayin’). How in the world did this come about?  Read on after the jump . . .

OK, we tricked you. The answer is, we have no fucking idea how these two dudes pulled this off. But we’re guessing that shitloads of partially formed, unsigned bands would love to find out. We’ll tell you what we do know, based on the band’s blog and some other info scrounged off the interwebs.

Asylum currently consists of Markus Johansson (vocals and lead guitar, pictured to the right) and Johnny Rox (bass, pictured below). Their MySpace page describes the music as “thrash/metal/rock,” which is about right. They have four songs available for streaming there. The band has been recording songs for their debut album (to be called A Lethal Dose of Truth) since May 2006. Not quite as long as Chinese Democracy, but still.

Asylum‘s MySpace blog includes answers to a list of Frequently Asked Questions [posted in April '09], one of which addresses this point:

“What is taking you guys so long to finish this album?” We are creeping up on the three year anniversary since we started tracking. That being said, we have not been in recording studios everyday, for the last 1,095 days. In fact, our total amount of studio time is probably under 90 days. Also, we are funding this entirely on our own. We’ve had no label support, nor have we had any financial backers. If our timeline is frustrating you, we will gladly accept donations!

Guess that answers that. Except, we’re now creeping up on the four-year anniversary.

Anyway, to continue with the info we found: It appears that the awseome drummer for Daath, Kevin Talley (ex-Chimaira, Dying Fetus, Misery Index, and others) and second lead guitarist Larry Tarnowski (Iced Earth) will be playing on 12 of the tracks on A Lethal Dose of Truth.

In addition to those tracks, the album will include a cover of of Van Halen‘s “Get Up”. Drummer extraordinaire Gene Hoglan recorded the drumwork for that track back in October 2006, and his Dethklok comrade (and “Metalocalypse” mastermind) Brendon Small has contributed a guitar solo to the track as well. The band has lined up Zimmers Hole vocalist “The Heathen” to record guest vocals on the song.

The rest of the star-studded guest list will be contributing ONE solo each on the album.

You think that’s not enough? Try this on for size:  Vocals on the album were produced by Fear Factory guitarist Christian Olde Wolbers, the album is being engineered by Grammy nominee Bob ‘Doc’ Pucci and Wes “Waxley” Seidman (Green Day), and it’s going to be mixed by Grammy nominee Ulrich Wild (Dethklok, White Zombie, Pantera) and mastered by Maor Appelbaum (Halford, Yngwie Malmsteen).

To repeat, how did all this come about? Is it the awesomeness of Asylum‘s music that has attracted these luminaries like moths to a candle flame? Well, based on the four songs available on the band’s MySpace page (and we assume Talley and Tarnowski are playing on those tracks), we can say this:

The songs are melodic, thrash-paced, and competently performed, with some good single- and dual-guitar solos, and Johansson has got a decent voice — though it’s almost all clean singing, which means it’s not really our thing. So, someone who’s more into hard rock than we are, listen to this and tell us whether it’s so awesome that it would attract the kind of talent that’s lining up to contribute to A Lethal Dose of Truth.

Maybe Markus and Johnny have got photos of all these people having sex with live boys or dead girls. We know there’s a story here. We just don’t know what it is. If we find out, we’ll tell you. If you find out, please tell us.

Here at NCS, we’re putting a different spin on year-end listmania. Ours isn’t a list of the best metal full-lengths of the year. It’s not even necessarily our list of the best individual extreme metal songs of the year. Ours is a list of the most infectious extreme metal songs we’ve heard this year. We’re talking about songs that produce involuntary physical movement and worm their way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get ‘em out (and wouldn’t want to).

We’re not ranking our list from #10 to #1 because that would be too much fucking work (and your co-Authors would still be arguing about it this time next year). So, our list is in no particular order. We’re also dribbling the songs out one at a time because your lazy Authors are still debating what belongs in the remaining slots. (Yes, still.) Our list heretofore:

1.  Asphyx:  Sorbutics

2.  Mastodon:  Crack the Skye

3.  Amorphis:  Silver Bride

4.  Goatwhore: Apocalyptic Havoc

5.  August Burns Red:  Meridian

6.  Pelican:  Ephemeral

7.  Scale the Summit: Age of the Tide

And to see our eighth entry on the list, continue reading after the jump.

Our last two entries to the Most Infectious list were a pair of progressive-metal instrumentals played by two bands with amazing technical chops. Today’s entry is also from a group of dudes with top-shelf technical skills, but with a very different sound.

Someone is going to have to come up with a new sub-genre category for Daath. None of the existing labels really fit to a tee. Their 2009 release, The Concealers, is recognizably death metal, but though it’s heavy as shit, it’s groove-oriented, packed with pyrotechnical guitar work from Eyal Levi and Emil Werstler, melodic in just the right places, and feverishly infectious from start to finish. Sean Z’s scorching vocals and the instrumental work of Levi, Werstler, drummer Kevin Talley, and bassist Jeremy Creamer are completely integrated into achieving a well-planned design for each song.  As we said, very heavy, but very catchy from beginning to end.  Daath is on the road to defining a unique sound that is distinctively its own. Daath Metal? Daathcore? Whatever the label, it’s death metal you gotta move to.

There’s nothing bland on The Concealers — every song is distinctive, and every track is capable of worming its way into your brain and making a home there. But there’s one song we come back to again and again. It’s probably not the best, most fully realized song on the album — but shit, is it catchy!

“Wilting On the Vine” establishes itself with an epic riff, plays around with variations on that riff (augmented by Sean Z’s syncopated vocals), then drops into a lower gear to launch a shredtastic guitar solo by Werstler, which accelerates back up to the original tempo where the earlier infectious riff makes a triumphant return. Unadulterated, headbanging fun. (And speaking of guitar god Emil Werstler, if you didn’t catch the series of jaw-dropping videos posted last month by Metal Sucks, definitely watch them here.)

There you have it. The eighth entry on our Most Infectious list is “Wilting On the Vine” by Daath. Have a listen:

Wilting on the Vine

And as a bonus, here’s some vid of Daath performing “Wilting on the Vine” in Paris two months ago. The audio is not the best (listen to the audio stream above to really hear the song), but the video quality is decent and it’s fun to watch the guys rip into this song: