ANOTHER NEW SPAWN OF POSSESSION SONG

 Metal News  29 Responses »
Feb 132012
 

Sorry for the brevity and lack of originality in this post. My fucking day job is being a jealous mistress of my time. Therefore, I am just pasting in this piece of exciting news:

“Bodiless Sleeper”, a brand new song from Swedish tech-death assassins SPAWN OF POSSESSION, can be streamed at  GuitarWorld.com. The track comes off the band’s third full-length album,“Incurso”, which will be released in North America on March 13 via Relapse Records. The CD, which will contain nine tracks plus an instrumental intro, was recorded at Pama Studios in Kristianopel, Sweden with engineer Magnus “Mankan” Sedenberg.

I’m not even able to listen to this song.  So, please go listen to it, and then tell me about the explosive orgasm I’m not having. Thank you for your assistance.

THEMADISRAELI’S TOP 15 OF 2011: “CARNIVAL IS FOREVER”, “WELCOME TO THE MORBID REICH”, AND “AGONY”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Feb 132012
 

(TheMadIsraeli forges ahead with his mission of reviewing or re-reviewing the albums on his personal list of 2011’s 15 best releases.)

I’m departing from my originally planned two-at-a-time format because grouping these three together seems appropriate to me.

Decapitated went through some hard times.  A van accident ended in the death of one of the most skilled drummers metal has ever seen and left their newly recruited vocalist in a coma (from which, to my knowledge, he still hasn’t recovered), and the remaining members seemingly left Vogg behind.

Who knows what caused Vogg to resist pronouncing the death of the band even though there was virtual silence from them for some time. But the even greater wonder is that Vogg was inspired to get back on the horse after not just being thrown off, but also being run over by a freight train along with the horse.  Was it his way of coping?  Was it just all he knew to do?  Regardless of the answer, it seems that out of a morbid tragedy laden with death and destruction, Decapitated has finally come to form.

Sure, the old shit was good — even great at times — but I would still classify the music as high-caliber standard death metal.  That was until Organic Hallucinosis came out.  It turned Decapitated’s sound upside down and right-side up again and produced a unique take on death metal — more groove-heavy, more experimental, and most importantly, not afraid to take note of modern convention. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: TORTURE DIVISION – “SATAN, SPRIT OCH VÅLD””

 Album Reviews  14 Responses »
Feb 132012
 

You gotta love the badassery on display in this photo.

A big thank-you to byrd36 (Death Metal Baboon) for his recent NCS comment reminding me to check in with Sweden’s Torture Division, because they have recently released yet another very fine — and very free — demo (or you could call it an EP, if you prefer).

byrd36’s comment was in the context of a post discussing the relative merits and demerits of EPs and full-length albums and the strategy of releasing more frequent but shorter collections of music rather than more widely-spaced album-length collections. Torture Division’s practice is to release short demos and give them away for free. In fact, they have no plans to record an album — ever.

However, every time they finish releasing a group of three demo’s, they’ve been giving labels permission to package them up and sell them as compilation CDs. So far, this has happened twice (two CDs have been released, each collecting three demo’s). The demo that they’ve just released is the second in the current run of three. So, presumably after they release the third demo, we’ll see yet another compilation CD.

Here’s the answer they give on their web site to the question “What’s the goal with this?” Continue reading »

FILLER

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  25 Responses »
Feb 132012
 

Hey, I gotta be brutally honest with you, which is the only kind of honest we know how to be at NCS.

Long story short, I had to work for my day job yesterday and I ran out of island time last night. In fact, it’s last night as I write this, and I’m out of time. I’m dead tired, my judgment is impaired, and I don’t feel up to finishing the post I was writing for tomorrow, which is this morning where I am as you see this. So, I’m resorting to what we highly trained metal bloggers call filler. Just something to have up on the site until I wake up tomorrow, which is today, and finish what I am working on as I write this, or was working on last night, as you read this. Shit, this is kinda like time travel.

For this filler, I basically just grabbed the first thing I saw, which was The Commander-In-Chief. I mean, I didn’t actually grab her. I just grabbed the idea for this filler.

She’s a 22-year old Norwegian living in London. She plays some kind of a prototype 7-string Ibanez guitar. She also writes her songs and sings. She has a four-song EP called Evolution coming out on February 15. It was recorded and produced by veteran Sterling Winfield (Pantera, Hatebreed, Hellyeah) who has touted the fact that the vocals and instrumental performances on the EP haven’t been manipulated or enhanced in any way by software.

There’s a recent teaser reel for the EP after the jump, and then a somewhat older “official trailer”, plus more photos. Amuse yourselves, and be sure to salute. I’m going to bed. Continue reading »

INVISIUS: “CHANGES”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Feb 122012
 

 

(DemiGodRaven weighs in with a review of Changes, the new album from Denmark’s Invisius.)

I think I may be writing this review out of a subconscious desire to put a picture of a dude’s ass on the front page.

Invisius and I have history. They were one of the first bands whose music I ever reviewed when I started writing, and my review of their album The Spawn Of Condemnation was, for all intents and purposes, a way for me to practice writing an ‘okay’ album review. Anyone who has been writing reviews for a while will tell you that the two easiest things in the world to do are to (a) say an album sucks, and (b) say an album is awesome. It is more difficult to cover that in-between area without sounding too overtly negative or too positive, giving no real reason why you are still giving the disc a 3/5.

The band themselves are a couple of young Danish upstarts whose previous release I thought held potential for something greater, so long as they took the time to really hammer out their sound. The Spawn Of Condemnation sounded like a hybrid of modern day melo-death worship by way of Unearth’s lead vocalist, and at times the band gave in to the occasional metalcore trope. This had the effect of making the album fairly heavy and interesting and at other times overtly bland. It was those heavy parts that led me to adopt an encouraging sort of tone when I wrote my review of Spawn.

However, just because I could encourage them to continue did not mean I could steer them in the direction I wanted them to follow. Among other reasons, I can’t write out a plan for the band to improve, by my lights, because my opinion may not be shared by their more supportive fans. And so, seeing potential in something and attempting to say that I liked the melo-death worship segments better than the metalcore segments didn’t quite work out.

And so we wound up with their new album, Changes. Continue reading »

NIHILANTH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Feb 122012
 

Nihil: a Latin word meaning “nothing”

Anth: a Sanskrit word for “end”

Nihilanth: a band from Mumbai, India, who have released a grand total of two songs for public consumption. One (just uploaded in the last day) is called “Macabre Existence”, and the other is called “Dimensional Domination”. Both songs are cwaaaazy.

This is death metal viciously struggling to come apart at the seams and engulf the listener in its radioactive fallout. Paying homage to the likes of Necrophagist, Psycroptic, Decapitated, and The Faceless, Nihilanth skillfully whip up a whirlwind of percussion and razor-sharp notes that’s authentically menacing.

With this kind of music, there is indeed a fine line between mindless wankery (yes, there’s that phrase again which has been cropping up in recent NCS posts and comments) and true high-speed death metal that happens to mount its attack through the calculated deployment of precision munitions. I guess it’s obvious that I think Nihilanth stay on the right side of the line. Continue reading »

SCOTS WHA HAE (PART 2)

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  16 Responses »
Feb 122012
 

Calling this “Part 2” may imply that I intended to spend this weekend listening to music from Scottish bands, but instead, I’m just being my usual impulsive self. Yesterday, I combined music from four Scottish bands (and one South African one) in a post labeled with the unofficial Scottish national anthem penned by Robert Burns. Via our Facebook page and comments on that post, we got recommendations for other Scottish metal bands to check out. So I thought, what the hell, go for it!

Unlike yesterday’s post, where I featured bands I know and like, this one is more like what we publish in the MISCELLANY series — spotlighting bands whose music we’ve never heard before, not knowing what they will sound like or whether we’ll enjoy what they’re doing.

The bands I picked from yesterday’s recommendations are (in no particular order) Scordatura (Glasgow), Sufferinfuck (Livingston/West Lothian), Co-Exist (Glasgow), Threshold Sicks (Perth), and Zombie Militia (Inverness). I’ll tell you up-front that this is a divergent mix of metal, and it is all GOOD. So prepare for an underground roller-coaster ride.

SCORDATURA

I checked out this band (pictured above) based on a suggestion from Lisa Coverdale on our Facebook page. Scordatura have their own Facebook page here. They released a six-song debut EP in 2009 called Open Skies as well as a 2010 pre-production demo. When I visited their Facebook page, I discovered that they’re working on songs for a new album and released two of them last year in a promo that’s available for free download on Bandcamp. So I downloaded it (HERE) and listened. Continue reading »

HEIDEVOLK: “BATAVI”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Feb 122012
 

(NCS and ALSO, WOLVES are co-publishing this review by AW creator and NCS supporter Trollfiend. The album is the new one by the Dutch band Heidevolk, who we previously featured at NCS here, on Trollfiend’s recommendation.)

 

I think it’s safe to say that folk metal (or pagan metal, if you prefer) doesn’t have the same massive following here in North America that it does in Europe.  Not to say there aren’t tons of folk metal fans in the colonies; I’ve proven (in this post) that pretty much anyone who likes metal likes folk metal to some degree whether they care to admit it or not.

But the fact is, we just don’t live in our history in the same way native Europeans do.  We are divorced from our past and our mythology, and while we have carved ourselves a home out of these conquered lands, we’ve really only been here for a few hundred years.  Compare that to the fact of many European countries having been settled since the Neolithic (and before) and it’s easy to see why we don’t have the same attachment to traditions, other than the ones we’ve made for ourselves.  Like, say, nude pudding wrestling.  Or midget porn.

I had a point . . . oh yeah.  So part of the reason I first gravitated toward Dutch metal-mongers Heidevolk was because of this idea of living in one’s history.  Much as I love Viking metal, Vikings are not directly part of my past, so there is a certain disconnect there. Now I myself am not Dutch, but my family on my mother’s side is from the Netherlands.  That’s really my only connection to Heidevolk, but it was enough to get me to give this band a listen. Also, pancakes. Continue reading »

SCOTS WHA HAE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  32 Responses »
Feb 112012
 

A video I saw about some difficulties Apple is experiencing with its Siri speech-recognition software gave me the idea for this post. It don’t seem to do too well with the Scots dialect (or at least the Glaswegian variant of it). I wonder how it would do with lyric recognition when voiced by Scottish extreme metal bands. Probably not to fukkin well. And running some bagpipe metal through the thing would probably cause it to melt down.

First, here’s the video. HIGH-larious. (And to see a translation of what’s being said, along with an explanation by the creator of the video, go here.)

As for Scottish (and Scottish-themed) metal, the line-up after the jump is a mix of new, newish, and older music from three Glasgow bands (Man Must Die, Cerebral Bore, and Achren), one from Edinburgh (Zillah),  and Haggis and Bong (okay, they’re from South Africa, but how can we write about Scottish metal without including some new bagpipe shred?). Continue reading »

DOES LENGTH MATTER?

 Mosh Pit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  50 Responses »
Feb 112012
 

No, no, no.  This post isn’t about dicks.

Wait!  Where are you going?  Hang on for a minute and let me explain.  This may be interesting even if it’s not about penises, difficult as that may be to believe.

The subject of this post is one I’ve thought about before and discussed with others outside these pages. Here’s what finally prompted me to throw it open for NCS discussion — this Facebook status by Sweden’s Mordbrand, whose killer 2011 EP Necropsychotic we reviewed here and whose November 2011 split with their fellow Swedes in Bombs of Hades we featured here:

“It looks like MORDBRAND’s discography will mostly consist of EP’s and splits at the moment. We’re excited about all suggestions, proposals and offers we have in front of us. But here’s a question to YOU: If a band produces enough material on small releases – is a full-length then necessary? The way we see it: If we record a handful of songs, we can really focus on them and make them turn great. If we record full-lengths, we’ll have less time working on each track. This calls for an interesting discussion!”

Yes, it does call for discussion. As a fan, what would you rather see from the bands you like — shorter but more frequent releases or full-length albums that are more spaced out, e.g., a new one every couple of years? Do you tend to take a band more seriously, particularly a new band, if they release album-length material instead of EPs? Is it the meat or the motion? Continue reading »

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