TUESDAY VIDEOGRAPHY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

This morning I woke up, dressed hurriedly, slugged caffeine, drove a friend to the airport, and drove back — by which time it was 4 a.m. I feel like a reanimated corpse, but only partially reanimated. The only upside to this agony is that it gave me time to snoop around in search of new music, which I found in the form of videos from De Lirium’s Order (Finland), Job For A Cowboy (U.S.), and Horseback (U.S.).

DE LIRIUM’S ORDER

I came across this band because their drummer, Ukri Suvilehto, is also the live session drummer for Before the Dawn, which is one of our favorite bands. Also, they are from Finland, and you know what that means.

WIthin the last couple of days, De Lirium’s Order debuted a video for a song called “Autistic Savant”. It’s the opening track from their latest album (their third), Veniversum, which is being officially released today. According to the band, “the video was shot in freezing conditions, minus 30 degrees Celcius, in an abandoned factory located in Joensuu, Finland.” This may explain why they’re playing so fast.

Whatever the reason, the song is very cool and so is the video. The music is a proggy, techy take on melodic death metal, with lots of spidery picking and hammering percussion, a resonant melody, and in the mid-section, a soft piano bridge leading to attention-grabbing solo’s by both of the band’s guitarists and a bass solo! I think this is a band we need to know better. Continue reading »

GUILTY PLEASURES: OCEANO’S “DEPTHS”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

(TheMadIsraeli is no fan of deathcore in general, but in this post he confesses and attempts to explain his love for Oceano’s 2009 debut.)

I know what a lot of you must be thinking.  Is he fucking shitting me?  No, I am not.

Anyone who keeps himself or herself apprised of metal should know who this band is, because they are one of the first stars of the second wave of deathcore along with bands such as Suicide Silence and The Acacia Strain.  You and I do not need to rehearse the beef with deathcore by metalheads of a more purist sort.  For the most part and in the case of most bands, I agree that it’s shallow, insipid, immature, half-assed death metal.  But I believe Oceano, on this album in particular mind you, had something going for them. I honestly don’t know if I can define it, but of course I will try.

Depths has a very strange character.  Its mix matches its title perfectly, with a very open yet hollow shape to the sound and an odd echo surrounding all of the instruments and the vocals.  It sounds like a recording engineered inside an ancient underwater cave infested by demon-spawned sirens.  This is one of the elements that gives Depths its weight and a mood that other deathcore records simply don’t have.  It’s distinctive for this reason alone.  The important part, though, must of course be what lies at the core — the music itself.  What to say about that? Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: GODS OF EDEN

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Mar 202012
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the debut EP by an Australian band named Gods of Eden.)

Alright, so . . . here we’ve got a band who combine aspects of thrash metal, death metal, prog metal, and grindcore.

Do what?

Yes.  Really.

Gods Of Eden are quite intriguing, to say the least.  Their debut self-titled EP, only four songs, has provided me with a suitable mind-fuck likely to last all year.  To say I want to see a full-length would be a massive understatement.  You have blazing, technical, off-the-wall riffing full of thrash blood, tech-death bones, grindcore sinew, and power metal/prog metal synapse connections.  The vocals equally span the range on that spectrum.  They move from thrash, to power metal falsetto’s, to a very nasty grindcore tone.

Plus, the music includes black-metal-tinged symphonic elements; actually, the second song “Shiva’s Dream” is very black metal as a whole in it’s character. Continue reading »

THE WRETCHED END: “DEATH BY NATURE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 202012
 

It seems to be the day for new videos — Wretched new videos. First we had the new video from North Carolina’s Wretched. Now we move across the Atlantic for a new video by a Norway-based band called The Wretched End.

This band started in 2008 as a collaboration between Emperor guitarist Samoth and Mindgrinder bassist Cosmo — both of whom played together in Zyklon — joined by Swedish drummer Nils Fjellström of Dark Funeral. Their debut album Ominous made NCS writer Andy Synn’s list of 2010’s greatest albums, and it was one of my personal favorites, too.

Naturally, we’re really looking forward to the April 23 release of the band’s second effort, Inroads, which will be distributed by Nocturnal Art Productions and Candlelight Records. Today we got our first taste of the music with the debut of an official video for the album’s third track, “Death By Nature”.

Ominous was a hell-ripping dose of blackened death-thrash, and “Death By Nature” punctures the same vein, but if anything it’s even darker. The pneumatic riffs in this song will kick your body into movement while the ominous melody thunders like a breaking storm. And when the gang vocals hit the chorus, you WILL want to sing along with an evil snarl. The video is worth seeing, too. Continue reading »

SECRETS OF THE MOON: “SEVEN BELLS”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Mar 202012
 

(NCS scribe Andy Synn reviews the new album by Germany’s Secrets of the Moon, which was released on March 16 by Prophecy Productions.)

Perfect pitch black majesty. That pretty much sums this album up.

Yet at only seven songs, each of an extensive length and ambitious, demanding structure, Seven Bells is not designed as an album that is easy to listen to. It is a record that demands the listener’s full attention, one which creates and destroys in equal measure, tearing down preconceptions  while conjuring a massive and relentless groove that brooks no argument or resistance. Artful masters of their Machiavellian craft, the group play with the subtleties of light and shade, dominating heaviness and devastating metallic fury matched with a use of disarming melody and seductive beauty.

Theirs is the way of the serpent and the apple, whispered sedition and howling damnation, luring the unwary in with promises of knowledge and power, corrupting and turning them to the dark side without ever blinking a single, serpentine eye. Continue reading »

GOD FORBID THAT WE BE WRETCHED AND RUINED

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Mar 202012
 

Three videos from yesterday, packaged together for your viewing pleasure.

The first is the official video from God Forbid and Victory Records for the song “Where We Come From” off the band’s sixth album, Equilibrium, which is going to drop on March 26. This is the second track released from the album so far, the first being “Don’t Tell Me What To Dream”, which we featured in an earlier post (here). Both songs are strong. Although I thought the first one incorporated some “modernizing” elements, this new one sounds more like what I expected from these metalcore heavyweights. It’s immediately infectious and of course it brings the groove. It’s a fun video, too, transitioning from day-job clips to a live performance at a joint called Dingbatz on February 24.

God Forbid’s North Carolina label mates Wretched also premiered a new video yesterday. Victory seems to be staging the ramp-up to both bands’ albums in tandem (Wretched’s Son of Perdition is due for release on March 27). We included the first track from Wretched’s album in that same previous post that featured “Where We Come From”, because they premiered on the same day, too. The new song is called “Dilated Disappointment”, and it’s a heavy metal blizzard. In fact, it appears to have ionized the atmosphere where the video was shot, leading to an electric storm that matches the conflagration of the music.

The third video is one I discovered thanks to an e-mail tip from Ben C. (Church of the Riff). It’s a visually arresting CGI animated short called Ruin. It depicts airborne mechanized hunters chasing a human (who doesn’t seem to be entirely human) through a post-apocalyptic city. Fortunately, the prey has a Yamaha MT-01 in damned good running order, so he has a fighting chance. I’m not a gamer, so the level of visual detail and realism achieved in the video may be old hat, but it sure wowed me. It was created by Wes Ball and Oddball Animation.

All three videos come right after the jump. Continue reading »

OPERA IX: “STRIX MALEDICTAE IN AETERNUM”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Mar 202012
 

(An old friend of the site, ElvisShotJFK, makes a guest appearance with this review of the first album in seven years from Italy’s Opera IX.)

Italy is home to a lot of great things – art, literature, food, and architecture are among the things worth checking out, as is Italy’s metal scene.  The boot-shaped country is quite strong in the ways of power and progressive metal, but death and black metal bands can also be found. While they weren’t the first metal band to have a female singer, Opera IX were still one of the early bands to do so in the 90’s, forming before the likes of Nightwish, Theatre Of Tragedy, or Lacuna Coil. Unfortunately, Opera IX didn’t get the same kind of attention as their female-fronted peers. It’s not that Opera IX were too “brutal” to get noticed, but Cadaveria’s vocals probably made it hard for some people to get into when they could have the operatic vocals of Tarja or Liv or the soft, sometimes sweet voice of Cristina. That and the fact that Cadaveria also employs a raspy sort of growl, switching between the two in a song (although nowhere as extreme as Karyn Crisis’ bipolar voice).

A change in a band’s lineup is hardly a new thing, and bands can successfully transition from one singer to another, but few bands have actually gone from one gender to another; Arch Enemy, Dark Moor, and Cerebral Bore come to mind as ones who’ve undergone a vocal sex change, each with varying results. When Cadaveria left after The Black Opera (along with Flegias) to form her eponymous band (and later adding DyNAbyte to her musical résumé), Opera IX turned to M the Bard to take over vocals for the first entry of their witchcraft trilogy, Maleventum.  Like his predecessor, the Bard also employs clean singing to complement his raspy vocals.  Also like her, his cleans aren’t the highlight of his performance, while Cadaveria’s cleanly sung vocals seem to have gotten better over time, based on what I’ve heard from her.  Fortunately, he’s in his better vocal element most of the time, which works for Opera IX’s musical direction. Continue reading »

CANNIBAL CORPSE: “TORTURE”

 Album Reviews  13 Responses »
Mar 192012
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the latest onslaught by Cannibal Corpse.)

PAIN!  DEATH!  FLESH,BLOOD AND BONES EVERYWHERE!  EAT EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE!  REDUCE DIET TO NOTHING BUT HUMAN BRAIN MATTER!

Cannibal fucking Corpse man.

Heretical-metal-fact-about-Israel time: I never really listened to Cannibal Corpse.

I know.  I know.  I cried, too, once I realized my heresy, my crime against the metal lords and masters.  The hype ramping up to their new album Torture caused me to go back and truly explore the band.  I listened to the entire discography back to front, and realized . . .

WHAT HAVE I BEEN FUCKING MISSING!?

Torture is the latest crusade in Cannibal Corpse’s tyrannical campaign to rule over everyone and everything with audio carnage so visceral that simply listening creates a serious risk of blood-vomiting convulsions.  But Torture?  Torture is officially the best album of the Corpsegrinder era yet.

By using the rewind button a bit and revisiting roots that had been missing from the band’s sound since Corspegrinder’s introduction, Cannibal Corpse have succeeded in producing the finest slab of savagery in their latter period. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC FROM ARSIS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 192012
 

You know a band is close-knit when they share the experience of man-sized bowel movements. But can they rock as well as they can roll?

It’s been a little more than two years since Arsis released Starve For the Devil. Since then, the band have undergone some changes. Bass player Noah Martin re-joined the band, and less than two weeks ago, it was revealed that guitarist Nick Cordle had departed to replace Christopher Amott in Arch Enemy.  James Malone was forced to sit out the band’s “Frets of Fury” tour last fall “due to professional and personal commitments” — but Malone is back in harness, and Arsis are working on a new album for release either late this year or early 2013.

As proof that Arsis are still rocking on despite the line-up upheavals, today Guitar World premiered a pre-production demo of a new song called “Choking On Sand”.

I don’t think fans of Starve For the Devil will be disappointed.  Continuing the trend on the last album, this song is more melodic death metal than tech-death. Malone’s blackened rasp will be familiar, as will the Gothenburg-style riffs, and the song includes a shrieking melodic solo as well as healthy doses of double-bass pummeling. Check it out following the jump. Continue reading »

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