AMERICAN DEFLORATION TOUR DEFLOWERS SEATTLE

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 112010
 

It’s not uncommon that when we see a national tour on its Seattle stop, there’s one or two bands that caused us to shell out for the tickets and one or two that we can pretty much take or leave — or worse yet, that we simply have to endure, as part of the price paid to see who we really want to see.

But that sure as hell wasn’t our reaction when we first heard about The American Defloration Tour. Black Dahlia Murder, Obscura, Augury, and HateSphere. We would have paid to see any one of those bands. To see them all on the same bill was just a fucking bonanza!

So when that stellar line-up took the stage at El Corazon on the night of March 9, all three of your NCS Co-Authors and our entourage were there to bear witness to the awesomeness, and we now file this report, along with a few photos (for which we apologize, because we forgot to bring the good camera and used a borrowed camera that hadn’t been charged and ran out of juice and, well, shit happens).  (read on after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

NO CLEAN CHICKS SINGING

 Steff's Posts  No Responses »
Mar 102010
 

[Today, we’re pleased to feature a post from our occasional guest contributor from the Antipodes, Steff Metal (whose usual site you can find here). We wish we had at least thought up the wicked title to this post, but that was hers, too. And the rest of post is also pretty damned wicked. Prepare yourself to be entertained, and to discover some new music in the process.]

I went to a Cripple Mr. Onion gig. During setup I was nursing my bourbon and cola at the bar when I overheard a couple of dudes discussing Arch Enemy.

“She’s alright to look at,” one said, “but she can’t growl for shit.”

“Yeah,” his friend agreed. “Chicks can’t do extreme metal. Every extreme metal band with a chick vocalist is crap.” Therein followed a heated discussion of what chicks should be doing instead of playing extreme metal, which I’ve omitted due to the rules of common decency.

Resisting the urge to punch them both in the face, I drained my glass and wondered if I could prove his claim false. Surely there must be extreme metal bands with decent female vocals?

It’s a long-held belief among metalheads that girls can’t do extreme metal. Extreme Metal is probably the most aggressive, angry, violent form of music there is, and every study ascertains its audience as overwhelmingly male. There’s a kind of “lost boys club” surrounding extreme metal, a sort of grymm forest treehouse with a badly handwritten sign on the door: NO GIRLS ALLOWED.

I think the lack of decent female extreme metal musicians has more to do with simple maths. Hardly any girls listen to extreme metal, and of those that do, hardly any play instruments. There are hundreds of thousands of men playing in metal bands and about twenty-two girls (seriously, I counted), and if 80% of all metal is crap, then that’s only … 4.2 decent female extreme metal musicians.

No I just have to find them.  (and find them she did — read on after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

FROM EXILE

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 092010
 

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 . . .) Continue reading »

BLACK METAL MONDAY

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 082010
 

I’ve been a latecomer to black metal, but it’s been growing on me, sorta like rash that just spreads the more I scratch it. I’ve been trying to further my black-metal education (though still, I haven’t read Hideous Gnosis) while at the same time trying to keep up with interesting new releases across many extreme metal genres — which hasn’t been easy. Only so many hours in the day, unfortunately.

Basically, when it comes to black metal, I feel like a small child. In black diapers. Actually, I gave up the black diapers last week.  Figured it was time.  Because they weren’t black when I started wearing them.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to get educated. One thing I’ve learned is that the term “black metal,” standing alone, really doesn’t tell you very much. Bands that work under that banner can sound remarkably different from each other. I suppose I still associate that genre label with tremolo picking, blast beats, and evil-sounding shrieking in the vocals — but I’m discovering that’s a gross generalization that fails to capture the musical variety of “black metal.”

For example, I’ve listened to three new/forthcoming releases in the last couple weeks that are all classifiable as “black metal” but that sound dramatically different from each other — one from a legendary Norwegian band whose members are pictured above and whose name will be found in every history of the genre that has been or will be written — Darkthrone — and one from a band that is painfully obscure outside their home country (and maybe even within their home country) — Nydvind.

I really like both releases, though they sound nothing alike. Collecting some thoughts about each of them in this roundup and allowing you to stream some excerpts is as good a way as any to illustrate the variety in black metal, even as it’s being practiced today. (read on, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

CATZ

 Mosh Pit, That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  12 Responses »
Mar 072010
 

I try to stay grymm. This is an extreme metal blog, after all. Brooding and scowling are the order of the day, except when we take a break for attempts at humor — which necessarily have to be tasteless or sarcastic. Problem is, I have a weakness for cats. I have a cat — or to be more accurate, I share a cat. He’s about 17 years old and a big part of my day. That makes me a little insecure, because as pets go, I have this nagging worry that cats aren’t considered metal, not like a Doberman or a pit bull or a wolfhound.

I got a little bit of an ego boost when I read Issue #62 (Dec 2009) of Decibel. It included an article called “The Cutest Kitties in Metal.” The article consisted of seven pages of dudes from metal bands with their cats, with photos and affectionate commentary from the dudes about their cats. That made me feel a little more metal about my own cat thing.

But that was a couple months ago, and I’ve started feeling insecure again about my metalness. Like when I saw the photo above and started laughing. I don’t even know why I’m making that confession.  Lolcats are not metal. I know that. I don’t even know why I’m putting this post together. Trying to justify my cat weakness I guess, at the risk that you readers will think this post is a complete, bullshit waste of space and time.

But fuck it, the die is cast. In for a dime, in for a dollar. Tomorrow we’ll have a post ready on some divergently awesome new music, but today, I’m afraid it’s all catz.

So, the cat above isn’t metal.  But what about this?  (after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

ABR

 Metal News  No Responses »
Mar 062010
 

The three of us who collaborate on this site don’t always agree in our estimation of metal bands, but all of us are big fans of August Burns Red. They’re not as heavy as most bands we write about here, but they’re smart, creative songwriters, they play with passion, and their musical output shows they’re not standing still. Oh yeah, their songs are also distinctive and really memorable — so much so that we named ABR’s song “Meridian” (from the Constellations album) to our list of The Ten Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs of 2009.

On Friday of last week, ABR posted a six-and-a-half minute video look-back of their 2009 year on the road — mostly behind-the-scenes footage, with some slo-mo performance shots. I didn’t see anything from their September show in Seattle (with The Acacia Strain, My Children My Bride, and Impending Doom), but we don’t need a video reminder. That was one epic set that will stick in our memories for a while. They’re coming back to Seattle in late April, and you can bet your ass we’ll be there — even though we’ll have to pay the price of enduring some other, much less talented, barely metal bands on the bill (who shall remain nameless).

The video is kind of random in its selection of subject matter, and certainly won’t change your life, but these are likable guys and it shows.  And the video is worth watching if for no reason other than the fact that ABR chose “Meridian” as the musical accompaniment for about the last five minutes of the clip (not sure what song is rolling at the start, but it’s not metal).

PIRATE METAL ROUNDUP

 Steff's Posts  No Responses »
Mar 062010
 

One of our favorite metal bloggers, whose base of operations happens to be in New Zealand, is Steff Metal. Every week we find unusual stuff on her site that we don’t come across anywhere else. This week she decided to create a mix-tape of her favorite pirate metal (and non-metal pirate) songs, most with video accompaniment and each with her own witty introduction.

A lot of extreme metal is angry, grim, violent, and cathartic — which is exactly why we eat it up here at NCS. Doesn’t mean it can’t be fun at the same time. In fact, we think most of the angry, grim, violent, and cathartic metal is also shitloads of fun.

But when it comes to fun, pirate metal may take the cake — as Steff Metal’s audio-video montage proves quite nicely. She’s obviously more a student of pirate metal than we are, and her collection includes some bands we’ve never heard of — but they can sure swash their buckles and haul their keels. (read on after the jump, mateys . . .) Continue reading »

DEMON HUNTER

 Metal News  1 Response »
Mar 052010
 

We’ve had a weakness for Seattle’s own Demon Hunter since, well, forever. We can hear you saying, “What the fuck? Weren’t these NCS whackjobs gushing about Rotting Christ just a couple days ago? And isn’t this site called NO CLEAN SINGING?”

Yes and yes, guilty as charged. And to pick a few more polar opposites, we’ve also written about how much we like Living Sacrifice and Gaza. When it comes to metal, we don’t have an ideological litmus test. We listen, and we like or we don’t like. And while we mostly can’t stand clean singing, we’ve said from the beginning that we make allowances for Exceptions to the Rule.

We might be guilty of some local prejudice in Demon Hunter’s case (you can barely make out Puget Sound in the background of that photo above). We might also be influenced by the fact that although Demon Hunter almost never tours, they do play in Seattle from time to time and we’ve seen them on stage a couple times — and they know how to put on a kick-ass live show.

Yes, it’s true that on most Demon Hunter songs, vocalist Ryan Clark mixes clean singing along with harsh, hardcore vocals. But DH’s songs are so damned infectious that we can’t help but be seduced by the music despite the clean singing.

Having said that, what’s got us particularly interested in the band’s forthcoming (March 9) release of its new album, The World Is A Thorn, are a few songs from the new album that have been streaming on the band’s MySpace site that are heavy as shit. (more after the jump, including a brand new video of a particularly infectious new Demon Hunter song . . .) Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (No. 5)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  No Responses »
Mar 042010
 

People with manners don’t make fun of tragic deaths. We’re not those kind of people. Here’s how we think about it:

(a)  Dead people are — well, they’re dead. So they sure as hell won’t mind if we have some fun at their expense.
(b) Their relatives and friends might be offended, but they’re never going to see this post. And if they do, well, sorry for your loss, and all that shit.
(c) And as for you readers, if you’re the kind of person who gets all weepy over the tragic death of someone you don’t know, you probably don’t listen to extreme metal and you sure as hell don’t spend your time at this site.

So, with that bullshit out of the way, it’s time for another installment of “That’s Metal” — But It’s Not Music. And today’s topic is people who have recently died in ways that are metal. 

Not all manners of death are metal. For example, dying in your sleep, having a fatal heart attack while jogging, choking to death on a chicken bone, or bleeding out your bunghole from rectal cancer — those aren’t metal ways to die. But over the last couple weeks, we’ve come across some news reports of tragic deaths that are definitely metal.  (to see what we mean, read on after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

ROTTING CHRIST: AEALO

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Mar 032010
 

Aealo, the 10th full-length offering from Greek extreme metal band Rotting Christ, is by far the most interesting listening experience we’ve encountered to date in 2010. It’s a coherent compilation of lush, passionate, densely layered songs that establishes a new milepost in Rotting Christ’s fascinating musical evolution. When the year ends, something tells us this album will still be in the forefront of our memory.

Thematically, Aealo is organized around concepts of battle, destruction, death, and mourning. And in exploring those subjects, songwriter (and vocalist/guitarist) Sakis Tolis has tapped into ancient Hellenic culture and events. More than any other Rotting Christ production, Aealo incorporates the sounds, rich musical traditions, and mythic history of the band’s homeland.

It accomplishes this feat in part by the use of guest artists, including a female choir from Ipiros called Pilades, Greek-American performance artist Diamanda Galas, and musicians from Greek pagan folk band Daemonia Nymphe. But while incorporating the sounds and ancient musical traditions of their homeland, Rotting Christ have not forsaken the powerful, signature style of their previous discography. Aealo is an intensely emotional and wholly remarkable blend of traditions, and we venture to say the result is like nothing else you will hear this year.  (read more after the jump, and listen to a track from Aealo . . .) Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries