BLOOD MERIDIAN: ELEMENTS OF BRUTALITY

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Feb 072011
 

(NCS contributor Siddharth Darbha returns with his review of a debut EP from India’s Blood Meridian)

Just around two years and a few shows old, Blood Meridian are the new kids on the block. They’ve got things to prove and stereotypes to shed. Elements Of Brutality is their first offering. I’ve always been a fan of anything related to words, and I fell in love with their band name despite what some would call a childish EP title. Initially, they gigged with a drum machine and a stand-in bassist, only completing their line-up much later and starting work on the EP in August 2010.

A first listen introduces you to a technical death metal outfit, quite a good one at that. The drummer, Pushkar Joshi, springs forth in the mix. He seems like he knows what he’s doing and he’s doing it good. The vocalist is a weird one — as in one would either like his vocals or hate them. Bhaskar Baruah, on the mike, tries very hard to cover a spectrum of low growls and high squeals, and though he pulls them off decently, there is a certain thrust lacking in his emissions. After multiple run-throughs of the EP, however, one would get quite comfortable with the vocals, too.

Aurko Mukhopadhyay and Anuj Gupta on guitars gel well and come up with quite a set of sweet riffs. Nile, Decapitated and some more bands influencing them, they sound good as long as one doesn’t concede to tagging them ‘confused’. The tones are rawer than one would expect in today’s times — the mixing is not up to the mark. The guitars are quite subdued and should have been, in amateur terms, louder. The bass, as fingered by Ashwin Shriyan, seems to have been almost irrelevant in the mind of the mixer, Arun Iyer (Devoid). Overall, it is evident that finding a signature sound for the band was a very involved effort. No lasting harm done, yet no cookies in place for the production either.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MISCELLANY NO. 23

 MISCELLANY  No Responses »
Feb 062011
 

Well, I thought I’d be able to get up another MISCELLANY post during the past week to help myself catch up, but that obviously didn’t happen. (Yesterday’s MISCELLANY post was a hybrid, since I already knew two of the bands, so that didn’t really count.) At least this time I didn’t let two or three weeks go by before readying another installment.

This time I visited four more bands whose music I’d never heard, and it turned out to be an unusually diverse listening experience — and in one case pretty far outside the usual bedlam of the NCS asylum. Per the usual MISCELLANY rules, I randomly picked these bands off our running list of music to check out and tried to limit myself to one song per band (and failed). After the jump you’ll get the chance to hear the music for yourselves if the write-ups get you interested enough.

Today’s picks are Shroud Eater (U.S.), Eschaton (Austria), and The Omega Experiment (U.S.) — and in a late addition, The Villain Avian Symphony (Canada). If nothing else, these bands have a knack for picking good names, don’t you think? And, as a bonus, it turns out that almost all the music is free.

(Yes, this is a lengthy installment, but for fuck’s sake, it’s Sunday. What else have you got to do? Oh wait — it’s Super Bowl Sunday. Well, fuck me, maybe people outside the U.S. will wade through this . . .) Continue reading »

ANOTHER FINLAND METAL WEEK!

 Metal News  3 Responses »
Feb 052011
 

Our metallic blog sister from New Zealand, Steff Metal, is just finishing a Finnish Metal Week tribute on her site that I’ve been enjoying day by day as it has unfolded. The posts have been fun and informative, including a “Heavy Metal Travel Guide to Finland“, which I hope someday I’ll get to use. Two of her posts will be of extra-special interest to aficionados of Finnish metal:

Kimmo Kuusniemi of ground-breaking Finnish heavy-metal band Sarcofagus (which, btw, is still up and running) and his wife Tanja returned to Finland from where they now make their home in England to film a documentary about Finnish metal called Promised Land of Heavy Metal. According to Steff’s posts, one of which is an extensive interview with Kimmo and Tanja, they interviewed hundreds of metal musicians across diverse genres, metal fans, and music professionals about the scene, both past and present — including an interview of Finland’s president, Tarja Halonen!

The documentary is now available on DVD, and international distribution is just starting. Based on Steff’s interview and her separate review of the film, I’m stoked to see this thing. Steff’s posts about the film include instructions on how to order directly from Kimmo (which NCS has already done) — so if you’re a fan of Finnish metal (and who isn’t?), go check out Steff’s interview and review and the rest of her posts on Finnish metal here.

MISCELLANY NO. 22 (CYCLONE EMPIRE EDITION)

 MISCELLANY  4 Responses »
Feb 052011
 

Just in case you didn’t get enough of a beat-down from that new Deicide track we debuted yesterday, this post ought to finish off the job of putting you in the hospital (or an asylum).

Early yesterday morning we received three e-mails in a row from a most excellent German label called Cyclone Empire. This label has got a kick-ass roster of artists and provides distribution for many more, and those three e-mails were about bands that have really peaked our interest.

This isn’t really a typical MISCELLANY post, because we knew something about the music of two of these bands before we started, but at least we hadn’t heard the precise songs we’re featuring here today. So, it’s kind of a hybrid MISCELLANY post.

Here’s what we’ve got: Another hell-on-wheels song off the debut album by Sweden’s Puteraeon, which was just released in Europe late last month; two new songs from Finland’s Before the Dawn that appear on Cyclone Empire’s European release of a special CD/DVD combo called Decade of Darkness; and a track from a brain-scrambling French band called Sideblast off their just-released second album, Cocoon.

Get a good daily fix of mayhem and melody to start your weekend off right . . . after the jump.  And tomorrow, we’ll have a proper MISCELLANY post with music from an international line-up of bands we really had never heard before. Continue reading »

GAS UP THE CHAINSAWS! (NEW VIDZ FROM THE CROWN AND PUTERAEON)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Feb 042011
 

All death metal, all the time — at least for today. We started with Deicide, and now we’ve just seen two new death-metal videos from the other side of the Atlantic. We can take the hint: The metal gods have commanded that we give equal time to the Swedish school of cranial carving.

Our first offering is from The Crown — a band whose 2010 Century Media release, Doomsday King, made a big impression on us and found a place on lots of the Best of 2010 lists we published at this site. The new video is for a song called “Falling ‘Neath the Heaven’s Sea”, which appeared on a 4-song bonus CD that came with the digipack version of Doomsday King. It’s a surprise compared to the songs on the album proper — but a nice one — and the video is an engaging montage of tour photos.

Our second offering is from another Swedish band called Puteraeon, whose debut album The Esoteric Order was released in Europe not long ago on German label Cyclone Empire. We have Johan Huldtgren (Obitus) to thank for turning us on to this band in one of his comments to an earlier post. We’re still waiting for our copy of the CD to arrive, but this new official video for the song “Coma” is proof that the wait will be worth it.  (We were saving this video for a special edition of MISCELLANY tomorrow, but we’ll find something else juicy from Puteraeon for that post.)

Both these bands carry the banner of Swedish death metal proudly, and the songs featured in these videos are excellent. Watch ’em after the jump. Continue reading »

AN EXCLUSIVE NCS PREMIERE: DEICIDE’S “HOW CAN YOU CALL YOURSELF A GOD?”

 Metal News, Premieres, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Feb 042011
 

On February 15, the infernal majesty of DEICIDE will unleash hellfire on our fragile world with Century Media’s release of the tenth album in their storied career, To Hell With God. Today, we are proud (and duly humbled) to provide the exclusive premiere of the closing track from the new album, called “How Can You Call Yourself A God?”

As we wrote yesterday, this is a red-letter day for us. Not only is this our first world premiere of a song, it’s a song by one of death metal’s true icons — a band whose name every devoted deathmetalhead knows, a band who helped brick and mortar the foundations of a genre on which so many other bands have built their own work.

Deicide put the “fuck” in “I don’t give a fuck”. They put the “bad” in “bad-ass”. They may have put the “ass” in “bad-ass”, too. They represent all that is unclean about NO CLEAN SINGING. In a nutshell, for us, getting to premiere a Deicide song is like a fever-fueled, ringing-wet, nightmarishly horrific dream come true.

In debuting a track from the new album, we’re joining MetalSucks, who premiered “Hang In Agony Until You’re Dead”, and Invisible Oranges, who premiered “Into the Darkness You Go”, in helping to introduce the new album to all of you. We have a few words about the song itself — plus the fucking song — right after the jump. Continue reading »

TOMORROW IS A RED-LETTER DAY

 Metal News  23 Responses »
Feb 032011
 

Yes, tomorrow is a red-letter day here at NCS.

And the red letter is “D”.

We have been given the chance to exclusively premiere a track from a forthcoming new album by a band that every true metalhead will know immediately, and it happens to be one that is near and dear to our nasty, black NCS hearts.

We don’t know what we did to deserve this. It certainly wasn’t the result of clean living and good works. Maybe all those weekly animal sacrifices finally paid off. Anyway, we’re humbled, honored, and highly excited about tomorrow. Since we really have all you readers to thank for giving us this chance, we hope you’ll get something radical out of it, too, just as we have.

So, don’t forget to stumble by NCS tomorrow for some good ear-shredding and brain-scrambling as we deliver the world premiere of an ass-burning song by a legendary band. And, in honor of the occasion, feel free to etch that letter “D” into your forehead with a rusty, blood-caked razor-blade, just like your friends at NCS have done!

A BRIEF BURST OF UNCONTAINABLE ENTHUSIASM

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Feb 032011
 

I can justly be accused of being enthusiastic about almost everything. That may not be the most metal of outlooks, especially when my enthusiasm turns out to be misplaced, or cools after a little calm reflection; I do lose my bearings sometimes.

But, with all those caveats out of the way, I have to tell you, right now, about a song I just heard.

On the way to my fucking day job this morning, I started listening to the brand new album from Finland’s Alghazanth, which is called Vinum Intus. I wasn’t familiar with this band until we started that Finland Tribute Week thing, and one of our readers (CarlSK) recommended them in a comment, noting that the band’s vocalist is Mikko Kotamäki, who also fronts Swallow the Sun and Barren Earth.

I only got two songs into this new album and then stopped and started replaying that second song. The way I feel right now, this beautiful song is blowing out of the water almost all the other new black metal releases I’ve yet heard in 2011.  (more after the jump . . . including the song) Continue reading »

THE FAMINE

 Album Reviews  10 Responses »
Feb 032011
 

Join us once again in our continuing quest for new ways to describe music in mere words. This review will be filled with metaphors and similes (necessarily pathetic ones because we are writing them ourselves) because The Famine‘s new album, Architects of Guilt, demands more than usual review verbiage is capable of expressing.

Imagine this: You come across a big nest of dormant, Texas-sized red wasps, and you drop it gently into a big bag. Carefully, you walk over and stand on an electrified floor, you shake the bag vigorously until all the wasps are awake and really pissed off, then you stick your head in the bag while big pulses of electric current shoot up through the soles of your feet in a syncopated rhythm — and a welterweight boxer uses your kidneys as a punching bag.

And for good measure, your friend the welder periodically applies a burst of acetylene flame to the base of your neck, without so much as a reach-around.

There you have it: That pretty much describes what we felt when listening to The Famine‘s new album, Architects of Guilt. We could just stop there, but we get paid by the word here at NCS, so there’s more to come!  (after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

HELP BRING IHSAHN TO THE U.S.

 Metal News  2 Responses »
Feb 022011
 

Lots of you thought Ihsahn‘s 2010 solo album After was one of the best albums of last year, and of course all of you are huge Opeth fans. Aren’t you?  Yes, of course you are. We know these things.

If advance press reports are correct, Opeth entered Atlantis studios in Stockholm on Monday of this week to begin recording their tenth album for a fall 2011 release on Roadrunner Records, with the engineering work to be handled by Jens Bogren (Soilwork, Katatonia, Paradise Lost, Bloodbath).

Now, it stands to reason that Opeth will tour the world in support of that album, and the world includes the U.S., which means Opeth will come here to play for us. How does Ihsahn fit into this story? Well, our metallic brother BadWolf brought to our attention that a petition has been started on Facebook to convince Opeth to bring Ihsahn with them in support of that tour — which would be Ihsahn’s first U.S. tour if that were to happen.

That sounds like a damned fine idea. Maybe if enough of us on Facebook “like” that petition page, someone might be convinced to actually make it happen, someday, some way. Certainly can’t hurt, can it? To support that petition, here’s the link.

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