NEW ATHEIST MUSIC: SECOND TO SUN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Oct 082010
 

Earlier today, Atheist put up the first song for streaming from their forthcoming album Jupiter. If our math is correct, Jupiter will be the first Atheist studio album in 17 years.

Some bands who’ve produced no new music in 17 years should just stay dead.  But this is Atheist, one of the true progenitors of tech-death and experimental metal. We relish the idea of a new album. We relish the thought even more after listening to the new song, “Second To Sun”. It’s a mighty fine piece of ear candy. Hear it for yourself:

DYNABYTE

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Oct 082010
 

I think I’m in love.

Okay, maybe I’m not really in love. Maybe I’m just in lust. Not with a person, but with a voice. With the voice on DyNAbyte‘s new album 2KX. Which will be released on Sunday — two days from now.

You might think Sunday is an odd day for an album release, but only until you realize what Sunday is. It’s 10-10-10. There’s probably a name for dates like that, but I’m too lazy to track down what it is. We’ll have two more like it in the next two years (11-11-11 and 12-12-12) and then we’ll have to wait until 2101 for the next one. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be here to see that one.

Fuck, come to think of it, I may not be here to see the one next year either.

There’s probably some Mayan astrologer who predicted the world would end on 10-10-10. I doubt that will happen, but we’re not there yet, so who knows? It’s safer to just blow it all out for the next two days. That’s my plan, at any rate. Better to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission.

Where was I? Oh yeah — the new album by DyNAbyte. They’re from Italy. They’re also giving a big Italian “fuck you” to all the usual distribution channels for music (at least for now). They’re releasing their album exclusively on a USB key, which you can order only from them.

Why bother?, you may ask. Well, that’s the point of this post, idn’t it? To tell you why to bother. Because you should. Because of that voice (among other things).  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

SLOW, THEN FAST

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Oct 072010
 

Time is fleeting. You can’t stop it. You can’t bank it up and then make withdrawals when you need more. It passes by at an unalterable clip. The sun rises, the sun sets, another day is gone, and however much time you have left on earth is that much shorter.

This somewhat depressing fact of life leads some Type A personalities to search for ways of doing more with the hours allotted to us in each day. They try to speed things up in order to achieve the effect of slowing time down. This has been going on for a long — time. The result is that the pace of life all around us often seems frenzied.

Sometimes, the enveloping frenzy of our environment makes us think life is passing us by. It can create anxiety. It can lead even Type B or C personalities to accelerate the pace of their daily activities, to pack more into the hours they have before time, for them, runs out.

You might think listening to music is one of those activities that can’t be speeded up. Music unfolds at its own pace, at the tempo and for the duration set by its creators. Sure, you can always cut short your listening, but you’ve done nothing to the music. It is what it is, and all you’ve done is tune out of the flow.

That’s what I used to think, but I’m wrong (as I am about so many fucking things). In fact, you can speed up the pace at which music unfolds when you hear it. Yes, if you do that, you’ll be changing the music into something different, and in most cases the result will be garbled and degraded. But not always.  (see what we mean, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MISCELLANY (NO. 13)

 MISCELLANY  5 Responses »
Oct 072010
 

I didn’t have time last weekend to make my usual weekly exploration of new music for our MISCELLANY series, and so my list of un-heard bands grew. I’m now trying to catch up a bit with a mid-week installment, and with any luck, I’ll do another one this weekend.

I’m sure our previous readers are sick of me explaining what they already know, but our audience still seems to be growing, and so just in case someone’s reading this MISCELLANY thing for the first time, I feel like it’s only fair to give them the usual warning:

MISCELLANY is an unfiltered stumbling around in search of new music (and by “new”, I mean bands I haven’t previously heard, even if the rest of the fucking world knows them like the back of their hand). I keep a running list of bands that look interesting for some reason — sometimes for no better reason than they have an interesting name or cool album art — and then I randomly choose names off the list and go listen to what they’ve got to offer on MySpace or elsewhere.

What I hear, I stick into these MISCELLANY posts, regardless of whether I thought the music was worth a shit. More often than not, we’ve had good luck with the choices, but you never know. That’s part of the cringing fun of doing this.

For today’s installment, I listened to The Burning (Denmark), Caliber 666 (Sweden), and Sacred Oath (U.S.). And here’s a hint — I unintentionally hit a trifecta: All killer, and no filler. And although the styles of music are different, all three have returned to the earthy roots of older genres in a very appealing way.   (more after the jump, including your chance to stream the same songs I heard . . .) Continue reading »

ALL THAT REMAINS

 Album Reviews  17 Responses »
Oct 062010
 

My comrades and I started this site in part as a protest against the watering down of metal, and metalcore in particular, by the infusion of  indie/pop-style clean singing. We wanted to focus on extreme metal. As we said in our description of the music we’d be covering here: “Mostly, we like it fast, punishing, cathartic.  Purely instrumental metal, if done right, fits the NCS bill.  But if someone opens his or her mouth in a song, what comes out better be growling, screaming, or squealing.”

But we also conceded that there would be Exceptions to the Rule — bands we liked despite, and even sometimes because, they punctuate their music with occasional clean singing. We listed Opeth and Mastodon as examples, but we could have included others, like Katatonia, Amorphis, and Soilwork.

Once upon a time, we would have included All That Remains. But the release of 2008’s Overcome was a disappointment to us. From Behind Silence and Solitude to This Darkened Heart to The Fall of Ideals, the band moved from a predominantly melodeath sound into metalcore, with increasing use of clean singing. Still, despite that progression, we were still big fans of The Fall of Ideals. On the other hand, Overcome crossed the line.

The aggressive instrumental backdrop was still there, and Phil Labonte still made use of growly howls and piercing shrieks, but the overall tone of the album was more radio-friendly than the band’s preceding releases, and the single “Two Weeks” seemed overtly calculated to achieve crossover success. With nothing but clean singing in that song, it actually broke into stratospheric territory on the mainstream rock charts and helped land Overcome at No. 16 on the Billboard 200 list with sales ultimately topping 240,000 copies. Given our peculiar tastes, however, for us the band’s trajectory was headed in the wrong direction.

And yet, when Razor & Tie offered us the chance for an advance listen to the band’s forthcoming fifth album, For We Are Many (scheduled for release on October 12), we couldn’t resist. Old loyalties die hard, and besides, Phil Labonte had been quoted as saying that the album would include “new twists and turns,” and we were curious. Would the strong taste of success lead the band further along its progression toward the forbidden lands of hard rock, or would we see a course change?   (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

BLOWS HARD

 IQ Subtraction, Off Topic  18 Responses »
Oct 052010
 

[EDITOR’S PREFACE: We don’t usually publish band press releases on this site. We leave that kind of thing to Blabbermouth. But today we’re making an exception. We’ll explain why at the end of the release.]

Legendary thrash-polka-disco masters Blows Hard have reunited after a 15-year absence from the scene, to the delight of their legions of die-hard fans.

Originally formed in 1991, Blows Hard revolutionized the thrash-metal genre with their pioneering use of the accordion, castanets, old-school polka rhythms, and disco beats. The underground scene in Kenosha, Wisconsin was never the same again.

After honing their craft through four long years of tireless practice, in which the band members taught themselves to play all the instruments, except for the disco backing tracks, Blows Hard self-released their ground-breaking debut album, Corpse Insemination.

Since the original release of that acclaimed 1995 debut, all the band members have successfully pursued accomplished careers in the automotive repair, septic-tank pumping, yard maintenance, flea-market, and prison craft industries.

The group, whose line-up once again includes all five original members, including currently imprisoned bassist Cyrus “Cretin Bob” Menzes, plans to begin recording new material in the near future.

Not all the band’s original members chased their dreams exclusively outside the music industry after the release of Corpse Insemination. Robert “Connie” Slickshute, one of the world’s finest and most renowned transgendered vocalists, first released a solo record (as a Blows Hard side project) under the stage name “Butch Hardcock” entitled Assless Pants in 1993 and then another solo record as “Queen Freedom” titled Strapless Gowns in 1996.

Commented Blows Hard guitarist/castanetist “B.O. Bob” Shrake, “We’re stoked to see what we can do now as a sort-of-female-fronted band. As a result of the medical procedures, Queen can really hit the high notes, but she can still hit those gravelly lows as only a woman who was born as a man can do. It should be fucking rad.”  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

GOBLIN METAL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
Oct 042010
 

We’re rapidly approaching one of our favorite calendar dates of the year — Halloween. It’s a night when our most frightening superstitions are given free reign, when evil and mischief frolic hand-in-hand through the night, when goblins emerge from their hiding places to create all manner of chaos.

It’s also a night when people dress up in ridiculous costumes, masquerading as cowboys, or nurses, or Lady Gaga. That shit don’t count. That’s not Halloween. Halloween is a night of menace and mayhem, ov fire and the void (yeah, I stole that phrase from somewhere), of phantoms and freaks.

And in celebration of the imminent arrival of All Hallow’s Eve, it’s only fitting that we feature some metal that’s played by, for, and about goblins. What? You didn’t know goblins played metal? Well what else would they play?

NEKROGOBLIKON

Our first example of the goblin-metal sub-genre comes to us via a band with the truly awesome name of Nekrogoblikon that hails from the bleak, dark, dank, craggy fastness that is,  uh,  Santa Barbara, California. Okay, maybe this nearly perfect stretch of SoCal’s coast isn’t the first place you’d think of as a spawning ground for goblin metal, but it just goes to show you how deviously clever goblins are in picking their hiding places. When NCS commentator ElvisShotJFK turned us on to Nekrogoblikon in an e-mail, he wrote this:

“Trolls aren’t the only ones that can play metal. Goblins can kick ass too! Some clean vocals do make their way into some of the material, a bit of keyboard cheese and a touch of light neo-classical. But it all works, because it’s so fucking fun.  And it’s heavy metal goblins, for cube’s sake!”

(more after the jump, including music for your pointy ears . . .)

Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (No. 16): THE SPERM AND SPACE EDITION

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  15 Responses »
Oct 032010
 

We’re in a bit of a hurry this morning, so we’ve only got two stories for you in this installment of THAT’S METAL!, but they’re doozies.

By now, you know the drill: We periodically leave the world of metal to see what’s happening in what some misguided souls call “the real world” — that is, the fucked-up world that surrounds us but that we here at NCS do our best to ignore most of the time. We look for news items that cause us to exclaim, “Fuck! That’s metal!” — even though it’s not music.

Our two stories for this installment of the series are connected (or at least in our cross-eyed view of things, they seem connected). You’ll see why we think that. Also, they allowed us to continue using alliteration in our post sub-titles for this series, and that makes us happy. So does pulling the wings off flies.

As usual, we’ll include our own ignorantly juvenile and utterly tasteless commentary along with the news reports themselves.

ITEM ONE

This first piece of attention-grabbing news was brought to our attention by the sharp-eyed ElvisShotJFK, one of our regular commentators here at NCS. The original story seems to have broken much earlier in the year, but it’s just too damned juicy to pass up. With a headline like this, how could we possibly ignore it?

Oral Sex, a Knife Fight and Then Sperm Still Impregnated Girl

(more after the jump . . . and you know you can’t resist reading more) Continue reading »

THE BRUTAL TRUTH IS . . . INEXPLICABLE

 Metal News  15 Responses »
Oct 022010
 

I had a difficult experience last night. The evening started with tequila shots and continued with margaritas. The excuse to get soaked in the juice of the agave was an annual get-together of all the people I work with, which usually turns into a blow-out. Last night was no exception. The only difference is that this time, I didn’t require hospitalization by the end of the night. This morning is a different story. I’ll be calling 911 as soon as I get this post finished.

Before I reached the point of no return and was still able to carry on a conversation (otherwise known as “authentic frontier gibberish”), I started talking about music with someone I’ve known since the last geologic epoch. He’s never listened to extreme metal, and his mental image of metal appears to have stopped evolving somewhere around the high point of Def Leppard’s career.

I’m not sure he and I have ever talked about music, but in any case, he didn’t know about my addiction to the kind of music we cover on this site. He asked me to name a few bands, and I tried to come up with some of the most popular ones, hoping one would ring a bell (I mentioned Slayer, Lamb of God, and Mastodon), but the names meant nothing to him. He persisted — he was genuinely interested in trying to understand what the music sounds like and why I like it.

Now put yourselves in my shoes and imagine the challenge of trying to answer that question. I assume it’s akin to explaining “blue” to a person who’s been blind from birth, or maybe trying to explain Brutal Truth to a metalhead who doesn’t get the attraction of grind — and attempting to do those things while being about two and a half  sheets to the wind.   (more after the jump, including a new Brutal Truth video . . .) Continue reading »

IMMERSED

 Album Reviews  18 Responses »
Oct 012010
 

Immersed.

Does that name sound familiar? If so, it might be because we included them in a post we did about a month ago (here). They were part of our sequential treatment for the Saturday morning blahs. Back then, we had two songs available from a an album-to-be. We wrote this about them:

“The music reminds us of the almighty Fleshgod Apocalypse and the equally almighty Decapitated. It’s faster than a cheetah at dinnertime. It leaps like a hare with its ass on fire. If it don’t wake you the fuck up, then it’s time to call the morgue.”

That was then. Now we have the entire new album by Immersed, called The Ire of Creation. We have eight songs instead of two. We have similar impressions — but more so.

Imagine that you’re a stalk of wheat, in a field of wheat stretching as far as the eye can see.  Imagine that a threshing machine is harvesting the field, except it’s running at the speed of a Formula One machine, cutting a broad swath through the waves of grain as if the stalks were ephemeral, the tops flying like the scattering of sunlight on a surging stream, the machine moving as if nothing but Armageddon could stop it.

Now you have an idea of what Immersed inflicts. It’s consuming and cathartic and it leaves little room for breath.  (more after the jump , including an Immersed song. . .) Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries