LINKIN PARK?

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Sep 032010
 

Linkin Park has a new album on the way. Due on September 14, it’s called A Thousand Suns. They’re giving away the song “Wretches and Kings” to people who pre-order the album at www.linkinpark.com.

You can listen to “Wretches and Kings” by pressing play:

Yeah, we’re just fuckin’ wit choo. Truth is, we’re late finishing today’s real post and thought we’d put this thing up until it’s done, just to make you say, “What the fuck?”

The new song is aptly titled, because Linkin Park are still kind-of pop music royalty, but the music has become wretched. Your NCS collaborators all used to like the band — back when Hybrid Theory came out and sounded fresh, back when Chester Bennington still shrieked his guts out, back before we got bored shitless with nu-metal. Maybe we were stupid to like the band even then, but we’re just being brutally honest (go ahead, say it with us, “because that’s the only kind of honest we know how to be here at NCS”).

The new song is heavy on the electro-bass, heavy on Mike Shinoda‘s lame rap, but at least Chester’s vocals aren’t completely clean. But really, this is just filler, not killer. Come back in an hour or two and we’ll have something better up here for your amusement.

BURNING GHATS: FOOL’S GOLD

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 022010
 

(Thinking out loud, which is how we do our best thinking. And possibly our only thinking.) Ah, what have we hear? Why, it’s new metal! Should we listen? Let’s weigh the pro’s and con’s.

On the plus side: It’s an EP from Burning Ghats. We sure liked the last thing from them we heard (see our review here). Maybe this will be good, too. They also have another cool album cover to go with the music. We like pretty album covers. We especially like the big crab. Lots of times, eye-catching album covers mean good music.

Also, we can download the EP from our favorite online distribution platform, Bandcamp. And Burning Ghats have set up the download with one of those pay-whatever-you-like choices. Awesome!

Now, what about the con’s? Fuck, we can only think of one negative — we don’t have enough fucking time to listen to all the fucking music we want to hear! Even though we’ve shoved all music other than extreme metal out of our lives, there’s still not enough fucking time! If we listen to this, it means we won’t be listening to something else today.

Well, that’s a pretty piss-poor reason not to hear this EP. We can carve out more time today by ignoring our friends more than usual, going to the bathroom less, and cutting back (more) on sleep. Besides, there’s always tomorrow to listen to other music, right? We won’t die in our sleep or get cut down crossing the street, most likely. So there — problem solved!  (more after the jump, of course . . .) Continue reading »

IT’S BEAUTIFUL — AND IT SUCKS

 Metal News  5 Responses »
Sep 022010
 

Sometimes you can admire the idea of beauty from afar, even when you have no chance of experiencing it for yourself. It’s a melancholy kind of fantasy. It’s sublime, and it’s wistful at the same time. It makes you wish, for a moment and maybe longer, that you were someone else, in some different place.

We had that moment today. We have that moment almost every day, prompted by one thing or another. But it passes, as it must, because life must go on, and no good comes from pining too long over what might have been.

Today’s moment was provoked by finding out, finally, about where the following metal tour would be stopping in North America. It will be called THE DECIBEL DEFIANCE TOUR 2010. It is a thing of immense and terrible beauty. It features these bands:

SUFFOCATION
THE FACELESS
THROUGH THE EYES OF THE DEAD
DECREPIT BIRTH
FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE

The thought of this tour transports us into flights of ecstasy, as if soaring high above the earth with all of creation spread before us for the taking. In other words, for our tastes, it’s the most fucking skull-rattling, ass-kicking, intestinally perforating tour of the fall.

It’s also a very melancholy discovery. For all the flights of mental fancy, it brings us very low. At the end, it’s an excrutiacingly suck-tastic discovery. Can you guess why?  (more whining after the jump, of course . . .) Continue reading »

NAME THAT BURGER!

 Off Topic  16 Responses »
Sep 012010
 

International cooperation is a great thing, particularly when it involves coma-inducing food.

Last weekend, I got into a discussion on this site with Niek, the lead perpetrator of Death Metal Baboon – he’s all the way over in The Netherlands – about burgers (a subject near and dear to his heart). A post we put up at NCS featuring Goatwhore got Niek all steamed up for the stuff and in the comments on that post, he shared a recipe for richly topped burgers, including pineapple, bacon, Gouda cheese, and cheese-onion buns.

Niek went on to create the stuff, and he put up links to burger photos in his NCS comments. Well, that pushed me over the edge — those babies looked so fucking good that I had to follow suit.  I hunted down almost all the required ingredients, including the Grolsch beer that Niek included in his burger photographs, and I and 3 other ravenous gluttons made those burgers and wolfed them down for dinner. (I wrote about the whole experience here.) So far so good (and man, those burgers were awesomely good).

But then, the food coma hit with a vengeance, and it sounds like Niek got overwhelmed by one, too. Metal food is — well, it’s metal! But it’s tasty. So, Niek and I thought about naming the thick bastards — a name that ideally pays tribute both to the burger’s heaviness and its tastfulness. But we had a better idea. Niek and I decided we would let you do it!   (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

ACACIA STRAIN: THE HILLS HAVE EYES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Sep 012010
 


THE ACACIA STRAIN – THE HILLS HAVE EYES

THE ACACIA STRAIN (WORMWOOD IN STORES NOW!) | MySpace Music Videos

Who needs fancy production values, special effects, acting, arty story lines, animation, serious themes, or hot models pretending to be the vocalist’s girlfriend?

Yeah, just fuck all that shit. When three of the four members already look like they belong in prison, you just set the thing in what looks like a dusty prison yard, dress up some dudes to look like guards and give ’em shotguns, figure out which of your friends will play the prison bitch, throw in a big cucumber and some fence-pissing, and have a riot.

Helps to have a heavy-ass deathcore song from a heavy-ass band like Acacia Strain to provide the soundtrack. The song is off their new album, Wormwood.  Yuck it up.

K-K-K-KATAKLYSM!

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Sep 012010
 

Anyone who’s listened to metal for very long has a mental list of bands whose new albums they’ll buy sound unheard. For us, Montreal’s Kataklysm is one of those bands. They’ve also been putting out albums for almost 20 years, which means that most diehard metalheads already know whether Kataklysm is their thing or not. But honestly, it’s hard for us to imagine any fan of extreme metal not liking the band’s latest release, Heaven’s Venom. It’s a fucking barn-burner.

It doesn’t represent any kind of seismic shift in Kataklysm’s brand of death metal, but that’s part of the band’s appeal. They have a distinct sound that they’ve stuck with and honed over time like the veteran pro’s they are, and their albums also reliably include a few songs that step outside the band’s dominant territory to keep things interesting. In other words, you know what you’re going to get, and when it’s as good as the franchise Kataklysm has built, that’s just fine.

Everything on Heaven’s Venom is big and powerful: Big-assed, sawing riffs that generate industrial-strength, nail-driving rhythms; those “northern hyperblasts” shot from the drumkit like a cloud of angry hornets; dramatic melodies; and Maurizio Iacono‘s distinctive, passionate, grizzly-bear roars giving voice to powerful lyrics that you can actually hear.

Once again, Kataklysm has produced an irresistible onslaught of powerful grooves and dark melody, fist-pumping anthems and mosh-pit missiles, and enough variability in the pacing and instrumentation to make Heaven’s Venom an album worth hearing from start to finish.  (more after the jump, including a track to hear . . .) Continue reading »

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