Feb 092014
 

We present Part 24 of our list of 2013′s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the three songs I’m announcing today, click here.

I’ve grouped the following trio of songs for two reasons, despite the fact that they span different metal genres: First, they share a certain predatory vocal viciousness. Second, they all feature at key moments a kind of very cool swirling sound that I assume is produced by guitar finger-tapping (or maybe keyboards in the last song) — though I’m not a musician, so what do I know?

VERMINOUS

The first song in this collection is a rarity: It comes from an album by this Swedish band that we never mentioned in any of our regular features during 2013, much less reviewed. Professor D. Grover the XIIIth named the album (The Unholy Communion) to his NCS list of the year’s Top 40 albums, and the album also appeared on several year-end lists posted by our readers. But I didn’t get around to exploring it until early 2014. Continue reading »

Jan 222013
 

Today has brought us new official videos from two infernally good bands: Canada’s Weapon and L.A.’s Lightning Swords of Death.

Weapon’s video is for the title track to their excellent 2012 album Embers and Revelations, a seething but quite memorable fusion of black metal and death metal. The LSOD video is also for a title track, in this case the band’s third album Baphometic Chaosium, which was released today by Metal Blade. To learn more about that album, check out Andy Synn’s detailed review, which we posted earlier today at this location.

Given the subject matter and the genres in which the two bands toil, it’s not terribly surprising that both videos are built around Satanic rituals. Both also briefly include nudity, so be forewarned if you plan to watch these in a public setting. Also, goats, skulls, and the quaffing of unseemly fluids. Continue reading »

Jan 222013
 

(In this post Andy Synn reviews the new album by L.A.’s Lightning Swords of Death. At the end of the post you’ll also see the band’s official music video for the album’s title track, which premiered today.)

Where exactly to start with this one? While LSOD have been pillaging the American underground for years now, their exposure to a wider audience has been relatively/extremely limited (depending on your perspective). They’ve been on major metal tours with the likes of Behemoth and Danzig, they’ve supplied songs for computer games and movies, yet all in all they’re more likely to be the sort of band you’ve probably heard before, but never realised it.

Part of that is the name – unwieldy, and more than a little hokey to some – and part of that is the band’s steadfast commitment to the underground aesthetic. They’ll do these things, they’ll play ball with the mainstream, but they’ll do so on their own terms.

They’re a band who put the emphasis on the METAL part of Black Metal, heavy, aggressive, and uncompromising, drawing elements liberally from across the Thrash, Death, and Traditional spectrum, without upsetting that careful balance between occult glamour and oily grime that Black Metal thrives on. More than anything they’re an unrepentantly dark and blasphemous band, a band whose sound touches on something nameless and forgotten, an atmosphere, an aura, of something not quite human, not quite alive, permeating every note and every aspect of their music. Continue reading »

Dec 202012
 

Dozens of metal bands have been releasing new music this week as if the world were going to end tomorrow.

What’s that?  You say the world IS going to end tomorrow?  I think you’ve got your facts wrong.  Darkthrone, Devourment, and Lightning Swords of Death are planning to release new albums AFTER tomorrow, and if the world were going to end, surely they would know, because they’re all capable of bringing the world to a fitting end if they so desired. So I’m not buying it.

In addition to giving you some details about those forthcoming albums, I’ve collected in this post some new musical sounds from the last two of these bands. So, continue reading (and listening) as you breathe sighs of relief.

DARKTHRONE

As we previously reported, this iconic and musically ever-moving Norwegian duo have completed work on their new album The Underground Resistance, and it’s now set for release via Peaceville Records on February 25. This morning I was blessed to receive the eye-catching cover art for the album created by Jim Fitzpatrick, which you can gaze upon above. In addition, the press release I received provided this teaser of a description about the music: Continue reading »

Jan 212010
 

Tuesday, January 19, 2010. This is how the day began over Puget Sound (honest to God — I really saw this and really took this photo):

And this is how it ended at El Corazon in Seattle:

After starting off the New Year of live music last week with an ass-kicking show by DevilDriver, Suffocation, Goatwhore, and Thy Will Be Done (see our review here), your three NCS Authors took in the Evangelia Amerika tour two nights ago in Seattle — and the ass-kicking continued as Behemoth, Septicflesh, Lightning Swords of Death, and Those Who Lie Beneath took the stage at El Corazon.  For our report, and a lot more of our amateurish concert photos like the one above, continue reading after the jump. Continue reading »

Jan 192010
 

Every now and then we’ve told you about a word or phrase we’ve stumbled upon that has nothing to do with metal, but sounds exactly like it oughta be the name of an extreme metal band. We’ve stuck those posts under the category of “Band Name Fodder.” Now we’ve stumbled across something new: words and phrases that have nothing to do with metal but sound like they could be the names of brutal songs.

You know the kind of song titles we’re talking about — the kind that at first blush (and sometimes second and third blushes) make no sense, but just sound really evil, uncompromising, and vicious.  Songs like:

“Carrion Sculpted Entity” (Cannibal Corpse), “Megacosm of the Aquaphobics” (Cephalic Carnage), “Postmortal Coprophagia” (Devourment), “Prosthetic Erection” (Annotations of An Autopsy), “Diaboloical Submergence of Rebirth” (Goatwhore), “Intestinal Putrefaction” (Abominable Putridity), “Pestiferous Subterfuge” (Aborted), “Gestation of Malevolence” (Abysmal Torment), “Cyclopian Scape” (High On Fire), “Ceremonian Disembowelment” (Impetuous Ritual), “Gestated Human Slurry” (Infected Disarray), “Damnation Pentastrike” (Lightning Swords of Death), “Into the Qliphot of Golachab” (Malfeitor), “Fermented Offal Discharge” (Necrophagist), “Postmortem Dissection” (The Pathology), “Cataclysmic Purification” (Suffocation), “Contemporary Perception Narcotics” (Trigger the Bloodshed), “Cranial Media Parasite” (Magrudergrind). And so on.

Well, just in case the well runs dry for bands like these (or they lose their thesaurus), we’ve found a gold mine of source material. (see what we’ve discovered after the jump . . .) Continue reading »