AN NCS INTERVIEW: UNEVEN STRUCTURE

 Interviews  2 Responses »
Nov 262011
 

(Not long ago, TheMadIsraeli gave us a glowing review of Februus, the new album on Basick Records from French/Swedish band Uneven Structure.  He now follows that with this interview of Uneven Structure’s Igor Omodei.)

So let’s cut right to the chase.  “Februus” is the fucking shit.  Why?

Because of way too much spare time and a slight pinch of monomania. Nah really, is it this worthy?

The album was quite an ambitious undertaking.  What made you all decide to write what is essentially a 55 minute epic of a song?  Was it intentional or did it simply happen that way?

We’ve always loved concept albums! The way you can push a mood into these can be much stronger than in regular albums. So yes, it was intentional. We wanted this kind of feeling that you’re into one piece, each track relating to each other with that latent tension building up through the whole album.

What caused your immense shift in sound from the “8” EP?  A very Meshuggah-ish sound to ambidjent is quite a leap.

At the time “8” was released,  we already had a first version of “Februus” written but it was not up to our expectations. We needed much more time to deal with the relationship between rhythm and ambiences to make it work the way we wanted it to work. So we decided to take a couple of riffs and songs out of it, craft it in a Meshuggah-ish way of doing things and released it that way. It was more of a test to see if our writing tools actually worked on a finished song.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

WILD//TRIBE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Nov 262011
 

I grew up in Texas, I used to work there, and I still go back to the state for work. I’ve been to Ft. Worth a handful of times in the last 10 years. It’s in the North Central part of the state, a region that gets attacked by tornadoes, especially in the late spring and early summer of each year. It’s part of a broad north-south belt, extending as far north as Minnesota, that’s called Tornado Alley.

I was in an office building in downtown Ft. Worth during tornado season one year when an announcement came over the PA system in the building telling everyone to move away from the windows and into the building’s interior, because a tornado was headed toward downtown. Of course, the first thing I did was run to the windows to see if I could spot it. It was doubly stupid because, walking to that job, I had seen windows in high-rise office buildings throughout downtown boarded up with plywood because of damage caused by the last twister.

Looking out, I saw a massive wall of black that extended from the horizon up into a rank of equally black clouds, and I could actually see that wall moving — quickly — toward the downtown area. As it turned out, the tornado veered away from the area where I was and ripped the hell out of other buildings and homes. It still scared the living shit out of me.

Wild//Tribe is from Ft. Worth. Maybe Ft. Worth’s violent weather has something to do with the music that Wild//Tribe plays, because they’re like a sonic Tornado Alley, a fast-moving wall of black, a roaring, out-of-control, violent, whipping storm of hardcore Texas punk noise. Continue reading »

“BEARDING THE UK”: TOUR DIARY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 252011
 

(In late October, Becoming the Archetype and Bloodguard embarked on an NCS co-sponsored mini-tour of England called BEARDING THE UK.  Bloodguard’s Andy Synn recorded portions of the tour for posterity, and we’ve got his tour video after the jump, along with this diary of the experience.)

Well, the short tour with Becoming The Archetype (plus one extra date with Abgott, just for some drastic contrast) was both remarkably eventful and extremely good fun.

We knew it would be a good time when, having collected our awesome van (christened the Guard-Van for the duration of the tour) from Cambridge we realised, approximately 20 minutes down the road, that we had in fact accepted the keys and driven away with the vehicle without actually… paying for it. It’s always good to start a tour with a bit of accidental automotive theft!

Anyway, we did eventually organise leaving the necessary hire fee for the van, precluding the involvement of the police, and Ed and I set out to collect BTA from Liverpool airport. Simple enough right?

Well after almost an hour of waiting after their flight had landed and disembarked there was still no sign of the band. But then I received a phone call… from the immigration authorities. Who were refusing to let the band enter the country in the fear that they’d be taking hard-earned cash from the pockets of good British metal bands. However, some quick talking by yours truly, coupled with a very pleasant and helpful representative on the other end of the line, saw the band released and allowed to enter their ancestral homeland. Continue reading »

AN EVENING WITH DIMMU BORGIR – NOTTINGHAM RESCUE ROOMS, Nov. 24, 2011

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 252011
 

(Stop the presses!  Andy Synn attended Dimmu Borgir’s performance in Nottingham last night and he’s already delivered this concert review, plus two videos he filmed of the show.  Further proof that, like killer whales during their first month of life, Andy does not sleep.)

“An Evening With Dimmu Borgir”, as this occasion was billed, saw the band performing two sets during the course of the evening. The first featured Enthrone Darkness Triumphant performed in its entirety, while the second, subsequent set, saw the group concentrate on its most recent quartet of albums for a more dynamically varied mix of material.

For the first two songs, “Mourning Palace” and “Spellbound (By The Devil)”, the guitars were annoyingly muted, resulting in a mix of heaving bass lines and rumbling drums which, although powerful, lacked much of the clarity and sharpened melody which the songs require to truly breathe their morbid magic.

Thankfully, the sound picked up just near the end of the second song, allowing “In Death’s Embrace” to spread its blackened wings with malevolent grace and majestic glory. With the sound levels thus balanced out and the guitars now slicing through the mix like razor-edged scalpels, the song provided an early high-point to the evening, the 6 members performing as one blasphemously tight unit to produce glorious swathes of blackened riffage and sweeping, evocative keyboard lines. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 47)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  13 Responses »
Nov 252011
 

What do you do when you see shit that makes you think, “Fuck, that’s metal!”, even though it’s not music? What I do is save it up and then periodically throw it your way in this series, which focuses mainly on videos, photos, and news items.

This is an all-video installment of THAT’S METAL! It’s going to be a slow build from the first one to the last one. I don’t really have a choice, because the last one is so fucking ridiculous that everything else would seem pretty meh by comparison if I ran it first. So, here’s what lies ahead: a very weird cloud phenomenon; a flamboyant cuttlefish; yet another emissary of Cthulhu entering our dimension; brick carrying like you won’t believe; and that last one . . . which is just lights-out nuts.

ITEM ONE

It’s no secret: I like clouds. Cumulonimbus clouds are those big, white fluffy ones that look like giant cotton balls. They can store up huge amounts of electric energy, which sometimes results in lightning strikes. Those clouds also contain ice crystals that themselves can hold static electric charges. The ice crystals, particularly needle-shaped crystal, tend to become aligned with the electric fields within the clouds.

When something happens to the field, such as a lightning discharge, the field re-forms and the crystals realign. When the sun is reflecting off a sheet of ice crystals in a cloud when they realign, the change is visible — and it’s fucking metal to see it happen, which is what’s shown on the first video after the jump. Continue reading »

V-DAY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Nov 242011
 

I bet all of the non-U.S. readers of NCS and other U.S.-based metal blogs are getting sick of reading about Thanksgiving and turkey. Don’t worry, because by nightfall, many of your U.S. compatriots will be sick, too, having stuffed themselves with too much traditional grub and fallen into tryptophan comas, unable to rouse themselves even to go to the bathroom, and therefore wallowing in their own waste. Wallowing in my own waste is actually one of the highlights of Thanksgiving Day for me, but I realize that it’s uncomfortable for other people.

Where was I? Oh yeah. V-Day. “V” is for Vektor and Vildhjarta. “V” is also for “Vhat the vuck? Vhy did I eat so much vucking turkey? Vould someone kill me now?”

Vektor and Vildhjarta have new albums. They are both veddy good. Ve vill have re-Views soonish. But for now, ve have streams of both albums. So, U.S. readers will have good music to ease the pain emanating from their distended abdomens. And non-U.S. readers will have good music to ease their other pains, because life is inherently painful, and therefore we all have pain of one kind or another (except for me, because I will soon be happily wallowing in my own waste). This is actually the true meaning of Thanksgiving: what Americans are really doing today is expressing thanks for not being in more pain than they are already in.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Vektor and Vildhjarta. Go HERE to stream Vektor’s Outer Isolation and go HERE to stream Vildhjarta’s Måsstaden. And in other news, someone finally uploaded Vildhjarta’s “Dagger” video to YouTube so we no longer have to experience frustration trying to play the thing from Metal Hammer’s wonky player. That video is after the jump.

Also after the jump: two Vektor songs from Outer Isolation that you can stream right here in case you missed them earlier, and a collection of older Vildhjarta stuff for streaming right here, too. Continue reading »

D-FE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
Nov 242011
 

D-Fe was a band who had an 11-year run from June 1997 to October 2008. As far as I can tell from what little English-language writing is available, they were based in Paris. They created a kind of metal unlike anything else I’ve heard, fusing together Afro-Caribbean rhythms with extreme metal and adding stylistic elements from lots of other genres besides. Sometimes the music has a nu-metal vibe, but much of it sounds like a tribal form of death metal and grindcore.

The lyrics are apparently a kind of Caribbean dialect spoken on the island of Guadalupe, plus an African dialect spoken in Cameroon, plus French, plus who knows what else. I have no idea what the words mean, but the band’s now-dormant MySpace page (here) says “D-Fe was nervous and violent (and sometimes dark), because the band wanted to sensitize the public about different problems of the African continent and its Diaspora.”

As you can see from the photo above, they wore masks or African tribal paint and dressed in an assortment of styles, both urban and somewhat more traditionally African. They also had an exotic-looking female singer who shared vocal duties before the band ended their run. I got intrigued about this band as much by the visuals as by the music, and the two come together in a video you can see right after the jump. Don’t be misled by the music in the first minute and a half; the shit does get heavy and crazy after that intro. Continue reading »

TURKEY AND BUG STUFFING: BLOTTED SCIENCE HELPS YOU WORK UP AN APPETITE FOR THANKSGIVING

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Nov 232011
 

In October, then first-time NCS guest contributor The Baby Killer gave us his review of the new album by the wonderfully inventive and technically mesmerizing Blotted Science. The album is called The Animation of Entomology, and the songs were recorded as soundtracks for movie clips featuring . . . bugs. We previously posted the first of those movie clips — an excerpt from the 2005 remake of King Kong set to the sounds of a Blotted Science song called “Cretaceous Chasm”. One of the best music videos of the year, imho.

Now we have two more of these bug-filled Blotted Science clips — just in time for Turkey Day! To quote the band’s introduction to the most recent clip: “With everyone sitting down to eat their Thanksgiving turkey tomorrow, I can’t think of anything better to go with the stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, dinner rolls, and pumpkin pie, than a swarm of roaches…” Well now, I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

The most recent video offering is a song called “Ingesting Blattaria”, which accompanies a clip from that moving 1982 art film, Creepshow. In case you were wondering, “blattaria” is the scientific name for the order that includes the 4,500 known species of cockroaches. The second video is a clip from Slither (2006), with a Blotted Science song called “Vermicular Asphyxiation” as the musical score.

In both cases, the music syncs perfectly (and ingeniously) with what’s on-screen. The alien slugs slither in Slither, and so does the music. The roaches hungrily scamper and swarm in Creepshow, and so does the Blotted Science score. This shit is fucking great! Watch both of the new vidz after the jump. Bon appetit! Continue reading »

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US

 Welcome  49 Responses »
Nov 232011
 

Here at NCS, we have an uncomfortable habit of forgetting our friends’ birthdays. But hey, we forget our own birthdays, too. So there’s that.

For example, we overlooked the fact (for the second year in a row), that November 21 was the anniversary of the first post at NO CLEAN SINGING. We are now two years and two days old. Still not potty-trained, but old enough to have discovered the fascination of our own genitals. So there’s that.

Our credibility as arbiters of taste and intelligent assessment of music is still highly suspect. However, this hasn’t stopped bands from asking us to listen to their music or prevented most metal labels from sending us albums to review. And over the last 30 days we’ve had 57,808 page views and 32,475 unique visitors from 131 different countries (only about half of whom are trying to interest us in receiving large cash transfers from the estates of dead Africans in exchange for our personal details). So there’s that.

Since our launch, we’ve published 1,498 posts (including this one) and received 14,406 comments (only about half of which are my own). We haven’t missed a day, publishing at least one post every day since we started, even on those many days (including today) when I was viciously hungover.

We’ve remained reasonably true to our founding principles: We still don’t run ads; we still don’t spend much time slagging bad bands or posting negative reviews (preferring to concentrate our time on music we can honestly recommend and not writing about the music that doesn’t impress us); and our news reporting has also been reasonably true. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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