PRISTINA

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 172010
 

Pristina‘s first full-length album, The Drought (Ov Salt and Sorrow), is fascinating in its diversity. It crushes like a slab of granite dropped from a high place, and it’s also searing in its unbridled, hardcore ferocity. It’s salted with unnerving vocal samples and electronic noise, and it also delivers galvanizing riffs. It grinds like a lumbering, blood-drenched tank through a landscape of sludge, and it erupts like an out-of-control flamethrower.

The Drought is raw and uncompromising, and it’s one of the most riveting collections of music we’ve heard this year.

The album consists of only five songs. Four of them range in length from about 3 1/2 minutes to about 8 1/2 — and then there’s the closing title track. It’s a 23-minute piece of mind-bending inventiveness that overcame our instinctive trepidation about songs of that length: It neither drones nor drags nor bloats its length with instrumental wankery. It is instead an ingenious, multi-phased beast that’s worth every minute of attention it demands.

The opening track, “Moonshiner”, begins with an extended sample from one of Henry Rollins’ spoken word albums, accompanied by the repetition of crushing chords and a methodical drum rhythm. Following that bruising yet hypnotic intro, Pristina erupts with Brendan Duff’s acidic screams and shuddering jackhammer riffs. The crusty sludge of those opening minutes and the more febrile blasts that replaced it then alternate, with brief interludes of acoustic guitar sandwiched in between.

That opening track sets the stage for what follows. It’s drenched in fuzzed out distortion, anchored by a dominant rhythm section, and propelled by remarkably inventive, expertly executed drumming.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

THE SECRETS OF GROWLING AND SHRIEKING REVEALED!

 IQ Subtraction, Metal News  8 Responses »
Aug 162010
 

You learn something new every day. You may not think you do, but you do.

Like on Friday, I learned that the German word for emptiness is “leere”. On Saturday, I learned that if you live in the Pacific Northwest and forgetfully leave your car window down overnight, spiders will move in and later drop on your arm while you’re driving, causing unexpected vehicular fun ‘n games. And yesterday, I learned the secrets of how extreme metal vocalists can shriek and growl really low without requiring hospitalization.

I’ve always wondered, and finally, after years of listening to non-clean singing, it now all becomes clear to me. It’s like some trade secret that finally leaked. And it turns out to be something that is easily duplicated. It just takes the right preparation and the right record producer (like Chris “Zeuss” Harris).

I’m not making this up. I learned it from a dude who ought to know — Adam Warren, who happens to be the frontman for deathcore heavyweights Oceano. It’s all in that video at the top of this post. It just takes sleeping ’til noon, some microwaved elixir, a little Lion King chord-stretching, and someone who can tell you which buttons to push.

Go ahead, see for yourself. The secrets are out. We won’t even charge you to watch. In the video, you can also see some spirited debate over whether “Contagion” is the kind of album title people will have to look up, as compared to a common street-word like, uh, “harbinger”.

Truly, Adam Warren is an engaging dude, and we can pretty much guarantee this thing will make you smile, even if you’re not an Oceano fan.  And while we’re on the subject of deathcore, word of a Whitechapel–Impending Doom–Miss May I–Oceano–I Declare War tour has leaked out. Details about that breaking news, plus an Oceano video, follow after the jump. Wonder what I’ll learn today? Continue reading »

THORNGOTH

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Aug 152010
 

With their just-released third album, entitled Leere, Germany’s Thorngoth has created an opus of searingly intense but hauntingly beautiful black music.

In English, the German word “leere” means emptiness, and in assorted German-language interviews the band’s principal creative force, Sorath, has explained that the album is intended to reflect aspects of our current time — in which much of human society experiences emotional emptiness in their daily lives and a depressive hollowness, devoid of meaning.

As a reflection of that concept, Leere is indeed filled with melancholy. The music creates an atmosphere that’s dark and brooding. Yet it’s also piercing and impassioned, charged with hammering rhythms and attention-grabbing bursts of technicality. Regardless of the underlying concept, the music itself is anything but empty. Listening to the whole album in a single sitting is a completely enveloping experience that’s both dreamlike and headbangingly intense.

With the exception of a short instrumental track, called “In der leere” (into the void), the songs on the album have no titles other than Roman numerals — “Leere I” through “Leere VIII”. So the titles don’t give many clues about the songs’ meaning. In addition, Thorngoth’s vocalist, Akhorahil, sings in German, and we’re not sure we could make out all the words even if he were singing in English.

But those Sorath interviews do give more clues to what’s going on lyrically.  (more after the jump, including a song to hear . . . ) Continue reading »

MISCELLANY (NO. 6)

 MISCELLANY  2 Responses »
Aug 142010
 

With apologies for the delay in finishing this post and getting it up on the site, here’s another installment of MISCELLANY. If this happens to be your first visit to NCS, here’s what MISCELLANY is:

About once a week I browse around the webz checking out music from metal bands I’ve not heard before. Picking them is mainly a random process, based on things like news items we’ve seen or e-mails we’ve received or MySpace friend requests that come our way or promos that show up in the mail. And in these MISCELLANY posts, I just describe what I heard and/or what I saw, pretty much as it happened, and provide the music or the videos for you to check out, just as I did.

Because I haven’t heard the music of the bands when I start browsing, I have no certain idea whether it will turn out to be good or just a waste of time. So, no guarantees for me — or for you. But most of the time, it turns out these explorations reveal at least a few gems. And that certainly happened today. Today’s finds, which once again have an international flavor: Canopy (Sweden), Purified in Blood (Norway), Man-Eating Tree (Finland), and Pristina (U.S.).

CANOPY

My first stop of the day was a Swedish band called Canopy (that’s their photo at the top of this post). Something of a convoluted story about how this band hit our radar screen: Earlier this week, we posted our review of the debut album by a kick-ass Montreal band called Incarnia. That album was released by a Montreal label called Panoptic. Panoptic and a sister label called Disconcert Music are run by a dude named Stéphane Paré (former vocalist for a Montreal melodic tech-death band called Quo Vadis).

I got an e-mail from M. Paré that led me to Disconcert’s web site, and there I found Canopy — and man, was that a good find.  (much more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

RUNNING LATE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Aug 142010
 

We don’t exactly run like a well-oiled machine here at NO CLEAN SINGING. We run more like a three-legged mule.  But today we’re running particularly late.

We do have a post in the works, but it won’t be finished for a couple hours. We just didn’t want you to think we had finally failed to live up to the commitment we made when we started this site — that we would have something new for you every day.

To tide you over, here’s a video from a Swedish band called Canopy — about which we’ll have more to say in today’s main post when we get the fucking thing finished. This song is called “For the Sickened Voice to Hear”, and it’s from the band’s 2009 album, Will and Perception. This song is very cool. And this is just the tip of the Canopy iceberg . . . .

(Thanks to ElvisShotJFK for tipping us off to this video.)

FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE UPDATE

 Metal News  12 Responses »
Aug 132010
 

Italy’s Fleshgod Apocalypse is one of those bands (and there aren’t many) for which we have this presumption: They can do no wrong. Perhaps someday they will, but until that day, we will willingly listen to whatever music they create.

We reviewed Mafia — their most recent installment of obliteratingly good music — on June 2 (here).

Various things have happened since then. For one thing, we learned the stupendously good news that Fleshgod Apocalypse will be touring the U.S. this fall with this lineup of bands:

SUFFOCATION
THE FACELESS
THROUGH THE EYES OF THE DEAD
DECREPIT BIRTH

Is this the best tour of the year? If it’s not, it’s very fucking close. We don’t have dates or places yet, but you can be damned sure we’ll tell you when we do.

For another thing, FA’s bassist/vocalist Paolo Rossi gave an extended interview with an Italian metal site called Metal Italia, which was published yesterday, that included some interesting tidbits of information.

Do any of us here at NCS speak Italian? Well, fuck no! We can barely speak English! But we do know how to copy Italian text on a web site and paste it into Google Translate.

Did we get nice, smooth, intelligible English results when we did that? Fuck no! We got half-wit, idjit, gibberish English. Fortunately, to use a baseball metaphor, half-wit, idjit, gibberish English is right in our wheelhouse, because that’s mainly what we speak. So we feel pretty confident we can give you the substance of the news revealed in that interview.  (after the jump, of course, along with a widget that will allow you to stream FA songs . . .) Continue reading »

INCARNIA SWEEPSTAKES RESULTS

 Album Reviews  10 Responses »
Aug 132010
 

Earlier this week we posted our laudatory review of a debut album called Proclamation by a Montreal melodic death metal band called Incarnia. In the review, we featured a song called “Yersinia Pestis”, which in addition to being the name of the song is also the name of the bacterium that causes the black plague. That song got stuck in our heads, and so we tried to decipher the lyrics by listening to the song repeatedly — because we didn’t have a physical copy of the CD with the lyrics and couldn’t find them posted anywhere on the netz.

We did our best, but we couldn’t make out all the words just from listening. And then we got the hare-brained idea to run a little contest. We invited our readers to e-mail us their guesses about the missing words, or to correct the words we deciphered if people thought we got them wrong. As a reward, we promised to send a copy of the Proclamation CD to everyone who submitted a correct guess.

We got what, for us, was a flood of hits on the Incarnia review, but we didn’t get many entrants in our lyrics sweepstakes. Possible explanations:

(a)  Our readers are very shy.

(b)  Unlike us, most of our readers aren’t obsessive enough to listen to the same song over and over and over again in an attempt to decipher a few missing words.

(c)  Other people who listened to the song had just as much trouble as we did figuring out what the vocalist was singing.

But although we didn’t get a lot of submissions in our Incarnia sweepstakes, we do have two winners. After the jump, we’ll reveal their names, along with the correct lyrics to the song, which we got from the band. And because we think Proclamation is such hot shit, we’ll provide one more song from the album for you to stream. Continue reading »

WELL, HOLY FUCK

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Aug 132010
 

The last couple of days my day job has had my head in a fucking vise. I’ve barely had time to create posts for this site, but haven’t had much time to browse other metal sites I usually frequent in order to keep up with what’s happening in the metal cosmos. I did a little catching up last night, and found two stupendous videos that have just been released over the last 48 hours.

Because I’m a little slow to find them, you may have seen the videos already, but I’ve got to put them up anyway because they’re both so cool — in very different ways. Both of them made me exclaim “Holy Fuck!” (hence, the really imaginative title of this post).

The first one is a video of “Alas, Lord Is Upon Me” from Behemoth’s most recent album, Evangelion. I saw a censored version of this video on a couple of other metal sites, but this morning I found an uncensored version that’s now out. The only difference from the censored version is that there are a couple of flashes of nudity (as a priest in his vestments has sex with a naked woman in a church). The images in this slick video (even when they don’t involve nudity) are striking.

The second video is a live pro-shot performance by the reconstituted Polish death-metal band Decapitated. I got excited about this one mainly because Decapitated’s heavy-grooved, technical music is just so damned awesome, and this performance appears to be the first since the awful 2007 van accident that killed the band’s drummer and left its vocalist in a coma.

In fact, the only original member of the band still left is guitarist Wacław “Vogg” Kiełtyka. But based on the evidence of this video, Decapitated can still kick your ass into the stratosphere.  (both videos are after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

FATHER BEFOULED

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 122010
 

In one of yesterday’s posts, we briefly mentioned a band called Father Befouled. We wrote that we’d have more to say — and so we do.

Relapse Records announced earlier this week that it had signed the band for release of their new album, which is the second full-length, following 2008’s Obscurus Nex Cultus. In between, the band released a couple of EPs and appeared on a couple of splits, and suffered the suicide of their drummer (Antichristus). The new album — Morbid Destitution of Covenant — will be released September 14 on CD, but it’s already available digitally on iTunes (as is the first album) and elsewhere.

The band appears to be composed of people who now live in Chicago and in Georgia. In an interesting interview that pre-dated completion of the album (here), Father Defouled’s guitarist/vocalist Ghoat identified Incantation and Immolation as the band’s principal influences. If you’re familiar with the work of those bands, they will certainly spring to mind if you listen to Morbid Destitution, and seeing those names will give you an idea what the music sounds like.

Let me try to give you a further idea by stringing together a whole bunch of adjectives instead of using them in separate sentences. The music is:

Oppressive, bleak, doomed, ominous, claustrophobic, jagged, intense, hopeless, grinding, serpentine, ponderous, funereal, black, crushing, and ugly.

At times, it’s also: Furious, razor-edged, insectile, shrill, vicious, harrowing, paranoid, and explosive.

(more after the jump, including a track to hear . . .) Continue reading »

WE MAY HAVE TO STOP MAKING FUN OF 70,000 TONS OF METAL

 Metal News  8 Responses »
Aug 112010
 

When we first heard about The 70,000 TONS OF METAL cruise way back in February, all we could think about was what could go comically wrong. Really, just think about the concept: 40 metal bands and 2,000 metalheads sailing around the Caribbean with non-stop performances, bars that stay open all night, and a stop at the Mexican island of Cozumel, where the tequila flows like water.

So of course, assholes that we are, we immediately started making fun of the idea — imagining in detail all the ass-ripping things that could go wrong. That was the subject of our first post about the cruise (here). That was in February, when only six bands had signed up to play for this floating festival.

We wrote an update post about this thing in late May, still sorta making fun, but also starting to imagine the things about this idea that could — we emphasize could — turn out to be awesome.  By that point, 18 bands had signed on to play.

Well, this morning we got a press release from the organizers announcing the latest edition to the line-up — the 22nd band, to be precise. And the new addition is none other than Sweden’s Marduk. Now, we’re really going to have to start thinking about taking this cruise seriously. Marduk is the first black-metal addition to the line-up. We figured there was no way the organizers could convince a top-flight, no-bullshit, black-metal band to jump on this thing.

A grymm cruise? Fans in corpsepaint and spikes mingling with beardos mingling with thrashers mingling with fans quaffing their brew out of drinking horns, and so on. Boggles the mind. For the current line-up of 22 bands, continue after the jump. Now we’re really getting interested in seeing who the next 18 bands will be. Continue reading »

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