PROTEST THE HERO: SCURRILOUS

 Album Reviews  16 Responses »
Mar 242011
 

Our own midwestern metalhead, BadWolf, delivers a review of Protest the Hero‘s new album, Scurrilous.

Perhaps you have been in a committed, long-term relationship with someone. Man, woman, transgender, it makes no difference because there are things within people that are universal, the same. There was, perhaps, a moment in that relationship when you realized that the primary devices of that person’s personality were no longer a mystery. You realized that, in all likelihood, that person would never provide you with a major surprise ever again. You may still love them, but that love will never again be a grand adventure: If you can live with that, it’s a good relationship. If not, it is time to end it.

Scurrilous is that moment in my relationship with Protest the Hero. I still love them, but they will never again give me a complete, breathtaking system shock – what their first two records both were, in different ways.

Perhaps the best compliment I could possibly give the young prodigies in PtH is that more than any other band they remind me of Queensryche—supremely talented and openly cheesy, highly conceptual and supremely catchy at the same time. Both bands use calculator riffs to deliver pop hooks, and use the songwriting techniques of their lesser peers so well that it redeems and damns their parent genres (metalcore and hair metal, respectively) all at once.

So if Fortress was their Operation: Mindcrime, Scurillous is their Empire. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

THE HAUNTED: UNSEEN

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Mar 232011
 

Our UK contributor Andy Synn joins us for the second day in a row, this time with his review of “Unseen” — the latest album by The Haunted, which was released to the masses in NorthAm yesterday.

I’ve sat with this album for quite a while now. My initial response to an early stream of the album was cautiously guarded, almost negative even, as I felt that although I enjoyed many of the songs, certain elements (particularly Peter Dolving‘s voice) seemed far more disjointed and separate from the tracks as a whole than ever before. All this quickly changed when I got my own copy of the album on cd and dedicated some real time to getting to know the album in depth. I loved it. Yet again I refrained from writing about it at the time, wanting to see if these initial feelings were themselves merely a response to my original disappointment or a symptom of my general worship of Dolving-era Haunted.

In the end I’ve found that the album is incredibly strong, although in many ways a true “grower” of a record, although not without its flaws. The early disparate comparisons (Tool, Korn, In Flames, Corrosion Of Conformity) prove themselves to be premature, as listening to the record  in full provides a much better picture of a singular and united piece of work that is consistently The Haunted, but works to naturally expand the remit of their sound. It reminds me in spirit, if not entirely in sound, of Vision Of Disorder‘s misconstrued masterpiece “From Bliss To Devastation”, wallowing in a similar mire of depravity and dysfunction that makes it just as heavy, but in a way totally different from their past work in general.

If you want me to give a simple summing up of the record, then I would say that it’s not quite as brilliant as The Dead Eye and stands perhaps on a par with (or perhaps just superior to) rEvolvEr, a record which has higher “highs” than this album, but also a greater incidence of filler. If nothing else, it’s a huge improvement on the inconsistent mess of often ill-judged experimentation that was Versus – I’d go so far as to pull out the old cliché about this record being the album Versus should have been, just as experimental but with more focus and overall better song-writing. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MYSTERIES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  20 Responses »
Mar 232011
 

I decided to fuck with you a little bit today. Not in the carnal sense, of course. I mean fuck with your minds.

Below are two songs I discovered yesterday and am diggin’ mightily. I not telling you what they are. The first one is by a band I bet you haven’t heard of. The second one is by a band you’ve definitely heard of, but unless you’re one of the few people who have already heard the song, I bet you won’t be able to guess who it is, because the song doesn’t sound quite like anything they’ve done before.

If I lose either of these bets, I will send you $100.

Wait, that was ridiculous. Let me amend my offer. If I lose the bet, I will send you a picture of $100, plus a picture of a cookie.  If I win the bet, you send me an actual $100. I’m relying on the honor system here. The mysteries will be revealed after the jump — but don’t jump until you’ve listened.

MYSTERY NO. 1:

Mystery No 1

[audio:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3595267/Mystery%20No%201.mp3|titles=Mystery No 1]

MYSTERY NO. 2:

Mystery No 2

[audio:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3595267/Mystery%20No%202.mp3|titles=Mystery No 2]
Continue reading »

WAR MUSIC?

 Metal News  9 Responses »
Mar 222011
 

There is apparently a video game called Homefront. I know nothing about it, except this:

The creators of Homefront have produced a compilation album that they bill as a soundtrack for the game. It’s available for free download — IF you’re one of the first 25,000 people to hit their site and download it. You have to give an e-mail address with a mailbox you can actually then go check for a download code.

This thing just went up not long ago, so they can’t possibly have hit 25,000 yet, or anywhere close to it. At least they weren’t at the limit when I downloaded my copy before writing this post.  What? You think I should have written the post and then downloaded my copy? Hey, it doesn’t mean I don’t love you, but a guy’s gotta have his priorities, amirite?

The comp includes war-oriented cover songs by a bunch of mostly good bands, including As I Lay Dying, The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Acacia Strain, The Ghost Inside, Misery Signals, and Veil of Maya.  After the jump, check out the track list and get the link for the web page where you can do the download. Continue reading »

A TRIO OF SONGS FROM SUIDAKRA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 222011
 

We first discovered German’s SuidAkrA (damn, that’s hard to type) with the release of their 2009 album, Crógacht. Their blend of melodeath and Celtic-flavored folk metal proved to be appealing, and we went backward and became even bigger fans of Caledonia (2006) and Command To Charge (2005). Of course, that doesn’t exhaust SuidAkrA’s discography, since six more albums preceded Command To Charge.

The band’s tenth album of original music — Book of Dowth — is on its way, scheduled for release on March 25 via AFM Records. Within the last day, the band have made a total of three songs from the album available for streaming on their Facebook page, but we also have them for you here, in addition to the album’s eye-catching cover art up above. Belgian graphic artist Kris Verwimp created the cover, and is also credited with developing the album’s lyrical concept.

Speaking of that, the band has explained that the concept of Book Of Dowth “chronicles the mythology of a mysterious race of demonic beings known as the ‘Fomor.’ Starting with the discovery of an ancient book at the excavation of Dowth (a Neolithic passage tomb in the Boyne Valley, Ireland), it unveils the yet untold story of the rise and fall of the Fomorian horde throughout history and far, far beyond . . . .”

Man, yet another race of demonic beings we hadn’t heard of! Demonic beings must breed and inter-breed like rabbits, yet they seem to keep to themselves. However well-hidden, this race now has an album to memorialize their perfidity. After the jump, you can check out the new tracks and our take on them, plus a video of one of them, if you haven’t already seen it. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT, PART 9: OCEANS OF SADNESS

 Album Reviews, THE SYNN REPORT  1 Response »
Mar 222011
 

NCS contributor Andy Synn returns with yet another retrospective. This time the subject is Oceans of Sadness from Belgium.

Unfortunately, this edition of The Synn Report is a posthumous one, as Oceans Of Sadness recently announced their split. I had originally intended to write something about this band at a later date, hoping that they would have a new release by then as their last album (their sixth) was released way back in 2008.

Sadly, these Belgian visionaries have made the decision to part ways, leaving behind them six full-length albums of darkly romantic, proggy metal whose lack of boundaries makes their sound both fascinating and at the same time difficult to classify in its entirety. As such I’m giving each album its own recommendation separately this time around. Quick warning: the band relies primarily on clean vocals accented by some death metal growls and black metal shrieks, not the other way around!

To my mind there are (broadly speaking) two forms of progressive music, linear progressive music and spherical progressive music. The former usually involves bands moving in a linear direction away from their original forms, growing and evolving along the way, often to a point where their sound and style are totally different from that of their earliest releases. The latter involves a band carving out a sound with a large potential scope based on a central point of consistency – this allows the band to experiment within this sphere (which varies in size and scope depending upon genre limitations, technical and compositional skills, etc) whilst maintaining a core sound.

Neither of these forms is entirely mutually exclusive, as bands who have mined their sonic sphere of all possibilities can be seen to break out onto a linear path in response, just as bands who have made a career out of linear growth can eventually find a sphere to inhabit in which they are most happy to exist. (more after the jump, including songs . . .) Continue reading »

SET THE VOLUME TO “KILL”: ANAAL NATHRAKH STRIKES AGAIN

 Metal News  20 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

Four days ago we featured a new Anaal Nathrakh song called “Volenti Non Fit Iniuria” from their next album, Passion, which will drop on May 23. To use a phrase that only highly trained metal journalists such as those employed by NCS are sophisticated enough to use, it’s a fuckin’ destroyer.

We’re not even finished reeling from that first song, and lo and behold there’s another one out today. This one’s called “Paragon Pariah”. It’s streaming at the DECIBEL magazine web site. It comes with these instructions from vocalist Dave Hunt: “Set volume to ‘kill’ and press ‘blast’.”

Those instructions are just barely simple enough for me to follow, so I did that — and I’m still picking up my teeth off the floor. Fuck . . . . I didn’t even mind the clean singing.

I’m such a selfish asshole that I’d really like to embed the song right here for you, but I can’t do it yet. So I will grudgingly give you this link.

EXPERIMENTATION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

We are consumed, body and mind, in a never-ending search for ways of improving the NCS experience for you, our beloved readers, who thankfully have way too much time on your hands.

Actually, to be brutally honest, which is the only kind of honest we know how to be at this site, we don’t think much about improving anything around here because that would involve . . . well . . . it would involve thinking. Which is why almost nothing has changed since we started NCS, except on those rare occasions when someone else has basically done all the thinking for us, like when groverXIII (TNOTB) just up and re-designed our site banner out of the goodness of his black heart.

Well, recently we found out that some of you have been experiencing delays in streaming or downloading song files when we include a song-link in our posts instead of an embedded audio player. This could be explained by network congestion or your own bandwidth limitations, but I suppose it could have something to do with our file-hosting service. 

So, we decided to experiment and see what happens when we use a different service. We randomly picked two songs as the guinea pigs. Can you guess which album one of them came from? (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

NORTHER UPDATE

 Metal News  7 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

This kind of slipped up on me: There are now published release dates for Norther‘s new album, Circle Regenerated, plus the cool cover art has been revealed (chosen through a fan contest), plus pre-order options are now available for those of you who would be consumed by wracking guilt over the thought of an illegal download. Plus, there’s a tracklist which includes three bonus songs that come with the digipack. It includes a cover of a song by a band I’ve never heard of (which of course means absolutely nothing).

As aficionados of Finnish metal already know, this will be the first Norther album that doesn’t feature vocalist/guitarist Petri Lindroos. Instead, we will have former Imperanon frontman Aleksi Sihvonen, as well as Naildown guitarist Daniel Freyburg. Norther purists are undoubtedly still trying to adjust to the change in vocalists. We are not pure in any respect here at NCS, so we have already adjusted and will be looking forward to the album, regardless.

If you haven’t yet caught up to this song, here’s a track from the forthcoming album.  The release dates, track-list, and pre-order links are after the jump.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/10871071″] Continue reading »

MONDAY METAL: MALFEITOR, MACHINAE SUPREMACY, AND MARGIN OF ERROR

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

When things come together in a way that makes an an alliterative post title possible, it’s just awesome, don’t you think?

In the course of catching up on metal news over the weekend, we came across three items that caught our bloodshot eyes. Apart from the fact that they all concerned bands whose names begin with “M”, the music has nothing in common.

ITEM ONE: The first item concerned a band from Sweden called Malfeitor. There’s a black metal band from Italy with the same name, and a couple of long-defunct bands from Norway and the U.S. that liked the name, too — but this ain’t any of them. This band had its genesis in Sweden back in the early 90’s and then dissolved in 1994. But it’s become apparent that Swedish death-metal bands are like vampires – they never die.

In 2007, two of the band member — Benny Moberg and Mattias Parkkila — started another death metal band called Blood Mortized (along with ex-Amon Amarth guitarist Anders “Hansson” Biazzi), which put out a debut album in 2009 and is about to release a 3-song EP on cassette. Last year Moberg left Blood Mortized to resuscitate Malfeitor, and he has now been joined by Parkkila and drummer Janne (Rudberg) Björkenfjäll.

Malfeitor have recently started streaming their first new song in 17 years, plus they’ve got a teaser track that includes instrumental snippets from five songs on an album they plan to release in 2011 (the vocals haven’t yet been recorded for those songs). After the jump, we’ve got the new song and that teaser.

ITEM TWO: The second item concerns another band from Sweden — Machinae Supremacy — but they’re pretty far over toward the other end of the metal spectrum from Malfeitor. What grabbed our attention about these dudes is the fact that they’re one of the three support acts for Children of Bodom‘s “Ugly World Tour”, which began this past weekend — the other two being Amon Amarth and Ensiferum.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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