MAMMOTH GRINDER

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Apr 062010
 

In “Leviathan,” the philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that the life of man is “nasty, brutish, and short.” And that pretty much sums up the new LP from Austin’s Mammoth Grinder. Extinction of Humanity is 21 minutes of  distorted, stripped-down, feedback-accented, in-your-face, slash-and-sludge mayhem.

If you knew nothing about the band other than its name and that awesome, smoking, skull-faced, album cover above, you’d prudently prepare yourself for some ass-kicking, and you’d be right. Mammoth Grinder has thrown an unusual grab-bag of ingredients into the blender — garage-punk drum rhythms, a mash-up of grindcore pacing and sludgy trudging, harsh vocals somewhere between a hardcore howl and a death-metal growl, and a smorgasboard of heavy, fuzzed-out guitar stylings.

The resulting concoction is massively intoxicating. If you could really drink this venomous brew, it would lead you on the kind of romping binge that leaves you wondering at daylight what the hell you’d done the night before and where all that blood on your hands came from.

To find an analogue to what Extinction of Humanity delivers, scroll back through your catalogue and listen to Wolverine Blues (1993) from Entombed or (not quite as close a fit) Dismember‘s Like An Ever Flowing Stream (1991). Extinction is not strictly old-school death metal, but more like old-school, Swedish-style death ‘n’ roll — except maybe even more visceral in its appeal.  (read more after the jump, and listen to a song . . .) Continue reading »

HELLS BELLS, IT’S OPENING DAY!

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Apr 052010
 

In varying degrees of intensity, your three NCS Co-Authors are all baseball fans. And for baseball fans, today is a magical day, just as it is every year, because today is Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season. (Yeah, we know the fucking Yankees played the fucking Red Sox last night — and they’re welcome to each other — but that didn’t make yesterday “Opening Day”).

The slate of the preceding season is wiped clean, all things are new, and all things are possible. Of course, none of that is really true, but it’s the fate of diehard baseball fans to get their hopes up as Opening Day approaches, even when the rational part of their brains tells them to wise-the-fuck-up.

And so it goes here in Seattle. Our beloved but hapless Mariners had an unexpectedly improved season in 2009, the team was upgraded (at least on paper) in the off-season, and we’re hoping for bigger and better things this year (while trying to ignore the truly sucky offensive showing in spring training).

Off the top of our heads, we don’t know of any extreme metal songs about baseball to commemorate this occasion. Do you? But one association between baseball and metal does come to mind, so we’ll go with that. (see what we mean, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

HOUR OF PENANCE: PARADOGMA

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Apr 042010
 

Rome’s Hour of Penance have just released their fourth album. Entitled Paradogma, it’s a worthy follow-up to this collective’s widely praised third offering, The Vile Conception.

The band’s modus operandi on Paradogma is straight-forward, but no less compelling for its simplicity: Play blackened death metal, play it really fast, and make the music vicious. Which is not to say that the album falls prey to monotony — far from it. The songs most assuredly do not all sound alike. They are creatively structured to feed your need for brutality while striking that primordial chord in your brain stem that makes you want to jump and move.

Paradogma swallows you up in a miasma of dark fury that seethes in its intensity, yet infects you with hooks and melodies that will cause the songs to re-play in your head long after the music stops. It’s simply one of the best modern death-metal albums we’ve heard so far this year.  (read on after the jump, and hear a massively infectious track from the album . . .) Continue reading »

I DIVINE

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Apr 032010
 

This week we received a message from a band in Hungary called I Divine, inviting us to check out their new music. They described it as experimental black metal featuring a trombone.

If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you know how many of our buttons that little message pushed. We’re suckers for upstart bands from places not known here in the U.S. for their metal scenes. We’re also increasingly becoming suckers for black metal. And anything that calls itself “experimental” appeals to our hunger for outside-the-box music. But what cinched the deal, of course, was the trombone.

So we reacted to that message like Pavlov’s dog at the dinner bell, and hustled over to I Divine‘s MySpace page for a listen. Only two songs are currently streaming there (and we’ll show you how to download them), but those two are definitely worth a listen.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

WE’LL SEE YOUR KIVIMETSAN DRUIDI AND RAISE YOU A FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE

 IQ Subtraction  No Responses »
Apr 022010
 

This morning, our she-friends at Reign in Blonde posted the Kivimetsan Druidi album cover above with a one-word review of the cover: “SRSLY”

By coincidence, when going to the log-in page for our MySpace home this morning, this lovely photo greeted our eyes (along with all sorts of other promotional crap foisted on us by MySpace):

Maybe she brought the flowers to get the duck in the right mood, but it looks like she’s starting to lose her patience. Feel free to insert your own funny photo caption.

Don’t know what you would have done, but we couldn’t resist clicking on this thing to see what the hell it was about.  Could it be a new PETA ad? Nah. Turns out, this is the front-woman (the one in the dress) for a non-metal band called Florence and the Machine. And here’s the cover of their new album, which we think gives that Kivimetsan Druidi cover a run for its money.  (you’ll have to click past the jump to see it . . .) Continue reading »

SOREPTION: DETERIORATION OF MINDS

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 022010
 

Here at NCS, little whispery things nag at the back of our diseased brains. We’re not talking about the transmissions from space — that’s another story. We’re talking about things we’re supposed to remember. Like paying some fucking bill, or feeding the cat, or checking in with the parole officer, or seeing if some new album we wanted to hear has finally been released (because we’re not hot-shit enough for labels to send us advance review copies of everything we’re interested in).

Half the time we don’t remember stuff like this until it’s too late. But sometimes the truly important items break through the cranial fog. Case in point: Soreption. We wrote here about Soreption’s ass-kicking 2008 EP Illuminate the Excessive. And then we wrote two more updates here and here about the band’s progress on their debut album. Guess it’s evident we’re a tad obsessive about this band.

And so earlier this week we remembered that Soreption was supposed to release their debut album in March. We checked, and sure enough — it’s now available (iTunes and Amazon MP3). And now we’ve heard it.

A few days ago, we got immersed in exotically melodic new metal from Romania’s Negura Bunget, and we waxed rhapsodic about its powerful allure. But Soreption’s new album, Deterioration of Minds, isn’t about melody. It’s all about the rhythm. Therefore, we need to change our vocabulary to talk about this carnivorous beast of technical death metal. How about this:

It. Fucking. Rules.

(more after the jump, including a song to stream . . .) Continue reading »

DUBIOUS HONOR

 Off Topic  1 Response »
Apr 012010
 

Reign in Blonde is a wonderful metal blog produced by two women (Elise and Julia), with assistance from a more-or-less regular guest contributor (Angela). I’ve been visiting that site every day for most of the last year. Along with Metal Sucks, it was the blog that inspired us to start our own. If perchance you’ve never visited RiB, quit fucking around and do it.

At the beginning of this year, RiB started a new tradition called “Panty Raid!” They issued an open invitation to people with testicles to submit metal-related guest posts, and they’ve picked one each month to feature and praise on their WALL OF PAIN. Because I like RiB, because I’m a  compulsive, Type-A, competitive asshole, and because I have testicles, I fell for it.

So, beginning a couple months ago I started writing a few words here and there when I had nothing more pressing or interesting to do (i.e., most days). I pretended I was a psychoanalyst, trying to infer stuff about the 3 contributors to RiB based exclusively on what they wrote there. And as the months passed, the thing grew and grew, like a bad case of crotch-rot. I finally decided to stop, because the piece had gotten completely out of hand. (read on, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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