Aug 162013
 

(DGR brings you a new live video by Norway’s Shining, plus an amusing history lesson about the Grünerløkka district of Oslo, the accuracy of which is probably somewhere around the median accuracy of all history.)

Pleasant surprises abounded this morning when I discovered that blackjazz group (and pretty much shoe-in’s for one of our “most infectious song” titles) Shining had recorded a live video and put in a hell of a high-energy performance of the song “I Won’t Forget” for a news station out in Norway.

The way they did it is actually really cool — setting up in an empty alleyway/blank plot where a former building was located, and then just playing to the crowd of about fifteen to twenty people who had gathered to see what the heck was going on. Some folks seem morbidly curious about the display of musical madness going on and other folks are clearly digging it. I like it because it’s probably the most raw performance footage you can catch of these guys, even when compared to the Live Blackjazz DVD. I’ve watched this clip a couple of times and I enjoy the sort of improvisational aspect of not really having a stage and watching Munkeby just wander around screaming at the camera while playing.

This clip was recorded in a district in Oslo, Norway, known as Grünerløkka – which, as soon as I can uncramp my fingers from the keyboard voodoo required to get the umlaut and crazy strikethrough letter O, I will share some fun facts about, because we here at NCS believe in educating readers and providing folks something to gaze at while they’re trapped in their nine-to-five (or in my case, four to 12:30). Plus, we don’t really have to worry about offending any actual Norwegians because Norwegians as a whole are a learned people with a high literacy rate (up in the high 90% areas!) and many of them have learned second languages. Reading NoCleanSinging would just be a waste of time for them, so we can be sure that none of them is actually here! Continue reading »

Aug 082013
 

Here’s the promised second part of today’s effort to catch up on noteworthy new things from the last several days.

SHINING

Sweden’s Shining announced a while back that their next album, 8 ½ – Feberdrömmar I Vaket Tillstånd (scheduled for release by Dark Essence on Sept 23), would feature many guest vocalists, in addition to frontman Niklas Kvarforth of course. As of today, we know who they are, and it’s an interesting list that includes more than a few black metal luminaries:

1. “Terres Des Anonymes” featuring FAMINE of PESTE NOIRE
2. “Szabadulj Meg Önmagadtól” featuring ATTILA CSIHAR of MAYHEM, TORMENTOR
3. “Ett Liv Utan Mening” featuring PEHR LARSSON of ALFAHANNE
4. “Selvdestruktivitetens Emissarie” featuring GAAHL of GOD SEED, WARDRUNA, ex-GORGOROTH
5. “Black Industrial Misery” featuring MANIAC of SKITLIV, ex-MAYHEM
6. “Through Corridors Of Oppression” featuring KVARFORTH

The songs themselves date back to an earlier era in Shining’s life. Original pre-production tracks of the songs were used as the foundation, with the addition of newly recorded bass and guitars as well as keyboards performed by Lars Fredrik Fröslie (Angst Skvadron, Wobbler, Asmegin). Should be worth checking out when it arrives. Continue reading »

May 212013
 

(In this post DGR reviews the new album by Shining.)

Heads up folks: If the blindingly orange cover art didn’t tip you off, we’re discussing Shining (Norway), not Shining (Sweden), whose latest album Andy actually reviewed here in December of last year. Also, this review is written from a really weird perspective of someone who is not really able to be neutral, but instead really worshipped Blackjazz – thus I found myself drawing quite a few comparisons between these two very different discs. Just a fair warning.

I think listening to Shining is one of the things I do when I want to pretend I am smarter than I actually am, the other being attempting to occasionally put up a coherent couple of paragraphs here at NCS. It’s an intellectual exercise designed to prove that I’m not just some drooling idiot, though trying to string together some sort of descriptor of what these guys do and why it appeals to me feels like a futile effort because, frankly, almost everyone in Shining is highly intelligent and qualified on their instruments and I am as dumb as a rock.

As one of the people who absolutely fell in love with their Blackjazz release – I have a very layman’s understanding of how these guys meld jazz song structures and musical theory with heavy metal and the occasional prog flourish. I just can’t explain exactly what is going on and I think that, even in the group’s uglier moments when what they are doing seemingly makes no sense, that is what draws me to them. It was the humongous challenge of trying to understand the cacophony of Blackjazz that had me constantly coming back to it, so the prospect of seeing what the band would do next, either expounding upon their initial construction or changing it up with One One One, was exciting as all hell.

If there is one charge that you could never level against Shining, for sure it would be that they are resting on their laurels, because One One One is a very different album from Blackjazz. Continue reading »

Apr 082013
 

In this post are three new things I found yesterday and this morning that I found interesting. The first is a brand new video by Norway’s Shining and the next two are new tracks released as teasers for new albums by Aborym (Italy/Norway) and Zolle (Italy).

SHINING

Shining’s new album One One One is out today in Norway and will be released in North America and Europe in late May or early June, but will be available digitally beginning April 23. Today also saw the premiere of the band’s official video for “I Won’t Forget”. The sharp-edged, industrial-tinged song rocks really fuckin’ hard, and of course it includes a 21st century schizoid sax solo.

The video is also fantastic. The colors, the lighting, the editing, the headbanging, the boobs, they’re all just excellent. Watch it right after the jump. Continue reading »

Mar 082013
 

(Here we have the latest installment of Andy Synn’s lists of favorite things that come in fives.)

One thing that metal does very well (compared at least to pop, hip-hop, and even most rock music) is the long-form song. Heck, I imagine if I were to calculate the “average” run time of a song from amongst my vast collection, it would definitely come out somewhere between 5-6 minutes. A “short” metal song is often one that goes up to about 4 minutes after all (in contrast to the fact that this would be considered longer than average in the other genres I’ve mentioned).

One reason for this is that metal often needs room to breathe, to develop its melodic (or dissonant) themes properly. Metal revels in space, stretching itself, filling up the space with noise and sound, light and vision. It’s also a genre often synonymous with story-telling, and one which – largely free from the external constraints enforced upon the 3-minute pop song – contends to offer a deeper and more rewarding (and as such, longer lasting) emotional experience for the listener.

Then of course there’s Napalm Death… so, ok, metal isn’t ALL about length and depth (short, sharp impact is certainly a common trade-mark too) but it DOES tend to do long songs very well.

So I’ve chosen five of my absolute favourites, presented in order from shortest to longest. And there’s not a single Opeth song among them. Continue reading »

Feb 162013
 

Here are a few of the things I saw and heard yesterday and today that I thought were worth spotlighting. There will be a few more such things tomorrow.

ELIRAN KANTOR (and SATAN)

If there is a better metal artist working today than Eliran Kantor, I don’t know who it is — which explains why, every time I see one of his new creations, I’m prone to stick it up on this site post haste.

His latest work is the cover of an album by a UK band named Satan that Listenable Records plans to release on April 29 in Europe and sometime in May in the U.S. I didn’t know much about this band before seeing the stunning, metal-as-fuck album cover, though I surmised that they must have started eons ago to nail down “Satan” as a band name. And so they did: The new album, Life Sentence, is appearing on the 30th anniversary of their first album, Court in the Act.

If the music is half as good as the cover art, the new album will be worth hearing. Continue reading »

Feb 052013
 

Allow me to share with you a collection of findings that I happened upon over the last 24 hours, most of it breaking news, some of it new music I think is worth spreading around like life-giving manure, and some of it videographic in nature. News first:

GORGUTS

Thanks to a tip from Vonlughlio, I discovered that Gorguts have signed with Season of Mist and will be releasing their extremely long-awaited fifth studio album later this year. Guitarist/vocalist Luc Lemay is quoted in a press release we received as follows:

“Everything from writing these new songs, traveling to NYC for rehearsals, developing a new friendship with John, Kevin and Colin, three of the most talented people I ever jammed with…everything from this project was beyond stimulating artistically.

From this experience was born a new GORGUTS record, a concept record which is going to last over an hour. An hour of epic, ambient, dark music which doesn’t compromise its Death Metal roots. As a composer, by exploring different kind of music, it was always my goal to integrate the same writing tools in Death Metal as if I would be writing a piece of chamber music for instance.

Well, I’m really eager to share this new record with you!” Continue reading »

Dec 032012
 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Sweden’s Shining, which is out now on the Spinefarm Records label.)

The more things change, the more they stay the same…

(yes, I know I’ve used that before, but it was good then, and it’s still good now, alright?).

Shining’s eighth full-length album, the evocatively titled Redefining Darkness, certainly seems (on the surface at least) to signal a new era for the band. Everything about the record, from its stark cover to its brilliantly direct title, leads you to expect the band to have made potentially drastic changes to their sound, their musical identity, their direction. So could this this really be the same Shining we’ve all come to know and “love”?

Well it seems like the Swedish tricksters have made fools of us all once again. Continue reading »

Sep 032012
 

Here’s another daily round-up of metal things I saw and heard this morning that I thought were worth sharing. Fair warning: there is clean singing in the first two items, but it’s counter-balanced by harsh vocals and an overlay of darkness.

HELLWELL

I came to metal relatively late in life. I’ve devoted a lot of effort catching up on what I missed in the decades preceding my initiation. One of the bands I missed was Wichita-based Manila Road, though judging from the enthusiasm that greeted our report about the band’s scheduled appearance at MARYLAND DEATHFEST 2013, it seems many of our readers are quite familiar with them.

This item, however, is not about Manila Road. It’s about a side project created by Manila Road’s Mark “The Shark” Shelton. The band is called Hellwell, the album is named Beyond the Boundaries of Sin, and it will be released this month by High Roller Records and Shadow Kingdom Records — though it’s already up on Bandcamp. Shelton describes it as “like Manilla Road’s evil twin”, with a sound that resembles “a cross between Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, early Metallica and Manilla Road.”

The band is named after Ernest “Ernie” Cunningham Hellwell, who Shelton says is a writer of horror-themed fiction and plays keyboards, synthesizers, and bass on Hellwell’s debut album. I am somewhat skeptical about whether Hellwell is a real person as opposed to the alter ego of someone else, because I can find nothing about him in my net sleuthing, either as a writer or as a musician.

In any event, I was attracted to the music by the awesome cover art (above) by Alexander von Wieding, and this morning I listened to about half of the album on Bandcamp. Continue reading »

Aug 252012
 

The ol’ fucking day job has had its claws in my viscera the last couple of days, and I haven’t been able to focus my bloodshot eyes on happenings in the metal world as keenly as I’d like. But that vice-like grip has eased somewhat, so it’s time to begin catching up. Here are some items of interest I saw and heard yesterday.

ITEM ONE: INCANTATION

I saw the news that Incantation (pictured above) is at work on their eighth album, to be entitled Vanquish in Vengeance, which is projected for a November release on Listenable Records. I saw this statement by John McAfee:

“The title track is about the massacre of Saxons in the town of Verdun in 782, called on by order of King Charlemagne. As an album title it has a different meaning to me. Vanquish in Vengeance symbolizes the long history of the band. We have fought many battles over the years to keep things going. We have always stayed true to our original vision and have never caved into trends. After a long wait between albums we are back with a vengeance with some of our darkest and heaviest material to date.” 

“Darkest and heaviest material to date”? That would take some doing.  “We have always stayed true to our original vision and have never caved into trends”? True dat. I’m ready for new Incantation.

ITEM TWO: SHINING

I like the music of Sweden’s Shining. I saw that Shining have a new album coming. Instead of persisting with the Roman numerals as on previous albums, this eighth one has a name: Redefining Darkness.

I also saw that Shining’s main man Niklas Kvarforth recorded two teaser videos for the album. In one, he’s having a rub-a-dub-in-the-tub using the favored lubricant of all trve black metallists. He’s also licking something that looks vaguely familiar. I’d say this one is not safe for work, but you’re not working now, are you? In the second video he multitasks, explaining Shining’s self-mutilating mission while taking a shit. Continue reading »