Double Penetration

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Jun 082010
 

I know, I know, I have been absent from No Clean Singing for quite a while now but what do you want from me? I am in college after all. I have many important things that occupy my time like girls, sleep, cookies, movies, shooting the shit with friends, cookies, (mmmm cooooookies) and did I mention girls? Oh and there is that foreign entity called homework…wait; fuck homework. Anyway, all that being said, I have been brought out of hibernation by the multitude of new releases today and I am here to tell you about two of them that will fuck your ears repeatedly until you beg for mercy. (more after the jump, including songs…) Continue reading »

BLITZKRIEG!

 Metal News  No Responses »
Jun 082010
 

Hey, are you like us? Do you maintain good personal hygiene by bathing and changing your underwear once a week, whether you need to or not, and religiously clipping your toenails in every month that begins with an F? Do you maintain a daily exercise regimen by walking briskly to the bathroom (even when your bladder isn’t about to explode) and carrying those six-packs in from the car by yourself?

Do you limit your TV-viewing and game play to no more than 8 hours a day? Do you stay current on world events by reading Blabbermouth? If you have pets, do you care enough to feed and water them even before they start howling in misery?

In other words, do you do those little things we do to here at NCS to prove to the world that you weren’t raised in some godforsaken, no-neck trailer park, even if you really were?

Well, brothers and sisters, it’s time to change your fucking priorities, at least temporarily.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

ENTHRONED

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Jun 082010
 

I’ve confessed before that I’m a relative newcomer to the charms of black metal, though I’ve found a lot to like and we’ve written about black-metal releases pretty frequently at this site. When I received a copy of the new release by Enthroned, I decided I really needed to listen to it carefully.

Why? Partly because (with some lineup changes) this Belgian band has been around for 17 years and partly because Enthroned has announced their first U.S. tour in almost a decade — and one of the stops is at our home base of Seattle. (We’ve got the full list of tour dates after the jump.)

So, I’ve been listening to Pentagrammaton — the band’s ninth studio album — and it continues to reverberate in my head even when I’m not consciously thinking about it.  It has become one of my favorite black-metal releases of the year.  I’ll try to explain why, and maybe that will help you decide whether it’s worth checking out.

The first thing that struck me was the production style. Now, to put this in context, lately I’ve been listening to a lot of death metal with “modern” production values — sharp, clear, and with an emphasis in the mix on a powerful low-end, with prominent drums, bass, and hammering rhythm guitar riffage.

Pentagrammaton is a different breed of cat. The production yields a fusion of the instruments in a shifting wall of sound, with a deemphasis on the low end of the register. The bass segment of the sonic spectrum is almost non-existent in every respect. Even in the drumming — which by the way is insanely pyrotechical — the heavy sound of the kick drums and toms are dialed into the background of the mix. Most of the time they sound like the muffled thunder of a distant storm.  (more after the jump, including a song to hear . . .) Continue reading »

NEWZ

 Metal News  7 Responses »
Jun 072010
 

We do our best to keep up with news in the world of extreme metal. We read a few web sites every day that collect news items, we get press releases via e-mail, and we get alerts about MySpace and Facebook posts by bands we’re following. Put it all together, and it’s a daily flood of words — almost all of which are just completely forgettable, or worse. Usually, we find items that are either intentionally or (more often) unintentionally funny. Rarely, we find something we think is worth writing about on this site.

We’re kinda behind on putting together reviews of new music we’ve been cranking, and that may have lowered our newsworthiness threshold today, but whatever. Today, we’re just gonna dump a bunch of news on you that we read over the weekend, including one of those funny items and one new video that put us in a party mood. Not a lot of rhyme or reason to our choices, but there’s not much rhyme or reason to anything we do, so what the fuck?

Our topics? They involve Heaven Shall Burn, Hour of Penance, French Bat-Shit Grindcore, All Shall Perish, and The Ghost Inside.

HEAVEN SHALL BURN

Last Friday, German death metal and hardcore fusionists Heaven Shall Burn announced that their new album Invictus, which has already been released in Europe and will be released in North America tomorrow, landed on the official chart in Germany at position No. 9. According to the announcement, this marks Heaven Shall Burn’s and Century Media Records‘ first-ever Top 10 release in Germany.

The press release included this comment from guitarist Maik Weichert: “Top Ten! This is insane! It is a dream come true and we thank everybody who had something to do with it! Everything will be awesome! However, when the police stopped my car yesterday they were still quite unpleasant to deal with, so I am assuming they hadn’t heard the news yet . . .”  (lots more after the jump — stay with us . . .) Continue reading »

SURVIVORS ZERO

 Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Jun 062010
 

This is kind of a “six degrees of separation” story. Last December, we heard about The Finnish Metal Tour, which was scheduled to roll through North America in April, with a stop in in our home base of Seattle. The line-up included three bands we would have killed relatives to see — Finntroll, Swallow the Sun, and Moonsorrow — plus a band we hadn’t heard of — Survivors Zero.

We scarfed up tickets but didn’t immediately investigate Survivors Zero. And then in late March, we saw an announcement that Survivors Zero ran into some kind of problem getting a visa to enter the U.S. and had to cancel out of the entire tour. We had a shitload of fun seeing those other three bands (you can see our review and photos here) but kinda lost our motivation for checking out Survivors Zero.

Fast forward to mid-May. We check out an album from yet another Finnish band called Sotajumala and decide we ought to write about them — which we did (here). And in sniffing around the web in an effort to learn more about that band, we discovered that Cobra Records had released a “split DVD” called Slaughter at Lutakko, which for a brief time occupied the No. 1 spot on the official Finnish music video charts. That DVD featured live performances by Sotajumala and — guess who — Survivors Zero.

So, we thought it was time to take the cosmic hint and track down Survivors Zero’s September ’09 debut album, CMXCIX. We shouldn’t have waited so fucking long, because it’s an ass-kicking delight.  (more after the jump, including a song and a video . . .) Continue reading »

E-FORCE

 Metal News  1 Response »
Jun 052010
 

In their heyday, Voivod put out some strikingly original music and influenced a shit-ton of other bands. Eric Forrest (whose nickname is E-Force) was the bassist and vocalist for the band from about 1994 to 2001, and recorded two albums with them (Negatron and Phobos).

E-Force is also the name of a band that Forrest started a few years after his stint with Voivod ended. Season of Mist released the E-Force debut, Evil Forces, in 2003. Almost five years passed before the second album was released (Modified Poison on France’s Thundering Records).

Earlier this week we saw a news release that Forrest was reviving E-Force with a drummer named Krof and lead guitarist Jerome Point (pictured above), that the band would be playing live shows again for the first time in 5 years, and that they would be entering the studio in August to record a new album.

We’d never listened to E-Force before reading that release, and probably wouldn’t have paid a lot of attention to it — except for what it said about the name of the new album and about the concept behind it. And (drumroll, please) the album will be called Curse of the Cunt.  (more after the jump, including some E-Force music . . .) Continue reading »

STRAYS

 Metal News  1 Response »
Jun 042010
 

I’ve been thinking. If I were in an extreme metal band and I were in charge of picking the name for our new album, would I choose “Curse of the Cunt”? Would you? Well, the subject of tomorrow’s post did (and it wasn’t Fred Estby, the dude pictured above). So, continue to meditate about that question between now and then, won’t you?

The theme of today’s post is not curses or cunts, but strays. We’re not talking about cats and dogs, just stray music that got under our feet and tripped us up as we were trying to go about our daily business. These strays have got our attention now, but we still haven’t made up our minds about whether we’ll feed ’em and let ’em come inside for a longer visit.

If you already know about either of the following bands that contributed this stray music, raise your hand:  Necronaut, Cyphosis.

Ah, fuck. We can’t see your hands. Guess we’ll just have to assume you didn’t raise them, and carry on.

NECRONAUT

It was the pedigree of this stray that caught our attention. We’ll just throw out some associated names and see if you have a similar reaction: Dismember, Carnage, Autopsy, Nifelheim, Disfear, Entombed. So, did that get you interested? (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

SOTAJUMALA

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jun 032010
 

“Death metal. That’s what’s on the menu today. In fact, that’s all we’ve got on the menu today. No fancy sauces, no creative side dishes, just a big slab of red meat, charred on the outside and bloody on the inside. But it’s Grade A prime, and it do taste good!”

OK, those words are the notes I made to myself as I listened to the first 4 songs on the new album from a Finnish band called Sotajumala (which in English means “Wargod”). And what I wrote to myself continued to hold true until I reached the 8th and final song on the album — the title track, called “Kuolemanpalvelus”.  (Unless you’re Finnish, don’t try to say that out loud because you’ll hurt yourself.)

And that song fucked up my nice, neat encapsulation of this album. Why? Well, I’ll get to that.

On Tuesday, we promised that in the next two days we’d tell you about two new albums that would make your heads explode. Yesterday, it was MAFIA by Fleshgod Apocalypse. If you’re reading this post today, it means that some part of your head is still intact. Today ought to Finnish the job.  (more after the jump, including a track for you to sample, and a new video . . .) Continue reading »

FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE: MAFIA

 Album Reviews  11 Responses »
Jun 022010
 

A few short weeks ago, we mourned the apparent demise of Hour of Penance, a fantastic band from Rome that a well-known metal blogger characterized in an e-mail to us as “the Italian Behemoth.” (The most recent NCS post about HOP can be found here.) Our one consolation was the knowledge that the other band featuring the multi-talented HOP vocalist Francesco Paoli — Fleshgod Apocalypse — was still alive and well, and had a new album on the way.

Our advance copy of that album (which is really an EP) arrived a few days ago, and we tore into it like a pack of ravenous wolves. It’s called MAFIA, and that is indeed what it’s about. This statement from the band appears in the CD insert:

MAFIA is dedicated to all those who shed their own blood to fight the neverending curse of racketeering. We do support the war against those animals.

La Cosa Nostra is certainly not the typical subject matter of extreme metal songs, and we have more to say about the concept behind this album and the small and large ways in which that concept works its way through the music.

But to cut to the chase about the music, MAFIA will explode your head. If you liked this band’s debut album, Oracles, you will be mighty pleased by the new one. And if you haven’t yet checked out Fleshgod Apocalypse, don’t put it off any longer.  They’re putting out music that’s not quite like anything else you’ve heard. (more after the jump, including our favorite track from MAFIA . . .) Continue reading »

A MILESTONE (And Some Words of Thanks)

 Welcome  12 Responses »
Jun 012010
 

We’re taking a little break from our usual posts today to celebrate a milestone (although below this post, we did put up our monthly update on forthcoming new releases). Tomorrow and the next day: Reviews of some new albums that will make your heads explode.

Not too long ago, we passed a milestone here at NO CLEAN SINGING. On May 21, 2010, we hit the six-month anniversary of this site. Six months ago, we put up our first half-baked post. We had 9 visits for that ugly little baby, including the 3 of us who collaborate in putting this thing together. Shit, most of our friends weren’t even interested.

How things have changed! In the six months since we gave birth to this monster, after a slow ramp-up, we’ve had more than 21,000 unique visitors from 122 different countries. The posts we’ve written have drawn more than 35,000 page views, and the number of unique visitors is now over 500 per day — with the trend continuing to climb. (How do we know all this? For you non-bloggers out there who may not understand, stay with us, and we’ll eventually get to that below).

We’re not quoting all these stats to slap ourselves on the back — even with the growth of our audience, the traffic we get here at NCS is a drop in the bucket compared to some other metal blogs that you probably also read. And the truth is, we’re kinda bewildered by the attention.

At the same time, we’re also pathetically grateful — and we owe some thank-you’s to people who’ve helped us get noticed: to bands, fellow metal bloggers, and NCS readers. So, bear with us while (once again) we wear our hearts on our sleeves.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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