After a short hiatus, I’m back, and I’ve decided to bring you all a list of the most brutal countries in the world. I am going to split this piece into five parts, each of which will cover a different country in no particular order, because the amount of fearless, ear crushingly orgasmic brutality these five countries bring cannot possibly be contained within one article. Today, I begin with Germany.
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 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 to be one of the most infectious songs of the year, it’s got to be something that worms its way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get it out (and wouldn’t want to) — you mentally replay it at unexpected times and you go back to the song repeatedly. You know, when the shit is sick. When it infects you like a disease that you don’t want to cure.
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 dribbling the songs out one at a time. Why? Because your lazy Authors still haven’t yet figured out the whole list. We’re making it up as we go along. And we could still use help, so feel free to chime in. Our list heretofore:
1. Asphyx: Sorbutics
2. Mastodon: Crack the Skye
And for our third entry on the list, continue reading after the jump. Continue reading »
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 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 to be one of the most infectious songs of the year, it’s got to be something that worms its way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get it out (and wouldn’t want to) — you mentally replay it at unexpected times and you go back to the song repeatedly. You know, when the shit is sick. When it infects you like a disease with no available cure. Again, not necessarily the best of the year, but the most infectious.
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 dribbling the songs out one at a time. Why? Because your lazy Authors still haven’t yet figured out the whole list. We’re making it up as we go along. And we could still use help, so feel free to chime in.
Our first entry on the list was Scorbutics by Dutch death metal band Asphyx. And now, after the jump, we present our second entry: Continue reading »
NCS favorites Dark Tranquillity have just posted a new song from their forthcoming album We Are the Void. It’s called “Dream Oblivion” and it’s fantastic. If you like Swedish melodic death metal, you’ll want to give this a listen. Check it out here.
We’ve been writing about Living Sacrifice quite a lot recently, but that’s because there’s been a lot of Living Sacrifice news recently. Oh yeah, and they’re also a killer band. And we’re writing about them again today because, why? Well, because there’s more (good) news of course.
Living Sacrifice and War of Ages will be co-headlining “The Abominable Snowtour” during the month of February, with Shai Hulud, Lionheart, and The Great Commission rounding out the line-up. There will be 21 shows in 23 days. No stops in the Pacific Northwest, or West of Texas for that matter, but we will be patient. All good things come to those who wait. On the other hand, good things sometimes also come to those who push and whine and nag the shit out of everybody.
Now, where was I? Oh yeah, the “Abominable Snowtour.” You can get all the scheduled dates and places after the jump. Continue reading »
It’s the time of year when “Best of 2009” lists are popping up everywhere. As we’ve observed before, one worthwhile reason for reading these lists (and maybe the only worthwhile reason) is to discover good metal releases you might have missed — and with about 5,000 new metal full-lengths appearing annually, it’s easy to miss shit that you might really like.
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 our list of the best individual extreme metal songs of the year. That would tax our brains way too much work, and frankly this is the time of year when devoting serious effort to anything is just fucking difficult.
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. Even on a crowded bus, subway, or ferry, your head starts banging, your fingers start tapping, your foot starts thumping, your legs start twitching — different people have got different body parts that start convulsing when they hear something that’s got a groove to it.
And to be one of the most infectious songs of the year, it’s got to be something that worms its way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get it out (and wouldn’t want to) — you mentally replay it at unexpected times and you go back to the song repeatedly. You know, when the shit is sick. When it infects you like a disease with no available cure. Again, not necessarily the best of the year, but the most infectious. (And because this is NO CLEAN SINGING, it’s got to be NCS Metal or an “Exception to the Rule” to make our list.) (Read more following the jump and see our first entry on the list . . .) Continue reading »
Metal Sucks is currently streaming the debut release from New Jersey’s Binary Code. But they say they’re only doing it for 24 hours — and they started streaming yesterday. So time is flying. Which is why this post is so short. We wanted to help get the word out before the freebie disappears and you actually have to spend a little money to listen. And why do we care? Because we’ve listened to that stream, and this shit is amazing. Technical death metal that will knock your socks off. And because we’ll get the chance to see these dudes live in Seattle on Jan 26 (check out our NW Metal Calendar).
Do it! Go here now! You won’t be sorry.
Your NCS Authors are big Unearth fans, and fans of Pantera too. You may have heard that to commemorate the 5th anniversary of Dime’s death, Metal Hammer magazine brought together a group of well-known artists to record covers of Pantera songs for a CD that ships with the mag. Unearth was enlisted to cover “Sandblasted Skin,” and the band has just now put that song up on their MySpace site for public consumption. “Sandblasted Skin” captures a lot of what Pantera was all about, and Unearth’s cover does it complete justice. Don’t know about the rest of the covers on the Metal Hammer collection, but this one slays.
So, down below, after the photo of Dime, check out a 1996 live Pantera performance of “Sandblasted Skin” and then run over to Unearth’s site and listen to what they do with the song.
I don’t read The New York Times regularly. I’ll make a wild guess: I bet most visitors to this site don’t read it either. If you do, you need to rearrange your priorities. There are only so many hours in the day, and you’d be happier if you spent more time here at NO CLEAN SINGING, or any of the linked sites over to the right, and less on The New York Times. But though I don’t read that paper regularly, I’ve got friends who do, and three of them e-mailed me about an article that appeared there today entitled “Thank You Professor, That Was Putrid.”
The word that first came to mind after I read it was “bizarre.” The second word was “fucking pretentious.” The article describes a six-hour symposium on black metal held last Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nigthtclub in Brooklyn. The symposium, called “Hideous Gnosis,” was attended by an odd combination of pointy-headed academics (including two who traveled from England for the event), music critics, and at least one actual black metal musician, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the frontman and guitarist from Liturgy. (That can’t possibly be his real name, can it? Gotta be a black metal stage-name.)
The academics presented papers with such mouth-watering titles as “The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances,” “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya,” and “Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration.” I can sum up my reaction like this: “Reading About Hideous Gnosis: Regurgitating in My Lap.” Continue reading »
Tonight: Long miserable day at work ends. I trudge homeward in the dark under a leaking sky. I fire up the computer and check the news headlines, just to see if something really earthshaking has happened while I was being miserable at work — you know, like if the U.S. got into another war, or swine flu has really turned out to be the no-shit, unstoppable killer we were told it would be, or my utility rates are going up again. Fortunately, none of these things has happened. All I see on a quick look is this:
Twenty-two million missing Bush White House e-mails found (what a shock), Obama begs top banks to start lending money again (that’s probably not going to work), new computer modeling shows that Arctic ice cap may completely vanish by 2014 (we’ve got plenty of polar bears in zoos anyway, right?), Italian prime minister Berlusconi hospitalized in Milan after man hits him in the face with a souvenir statue (I was wondering when someone was going to hit that disgusting fucker in the face with a souvenir statue).
I finish reading the headlines and I breathe a big sigh of relief: as they say in the Army, Situation Normal (All Fucked Up).
I turn to the real news of the day: metal news! And what do I see almost immediately? Living Sacrifice has put up yet another new song on their MySpace page. We here at NCS had barely finished drooling over the band’s new single “Rules of Engagement” and now we’ve got yet another teaser for their forthcoming full-length, The Infinite Order (scheduled for a Jan 26 release). I check out the new song — and damn! It’s even more hot shit than “Rules”! Continue reading »