INFERNO FESTIVAL 2012 – DAY 3 – DECAPITATED, THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT, WITCHERY, ARCTURUS

 Concert Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 132012
 

(If this stuff weren’t so much fun to read, I’d be murderously jealous. Here’s Andy Synn’s review of the last day at Oslo’s Inferno Festival last weekend. His review of Day 1 is here and the Day 2 review is here. Okay, to be brutally honest, I’m still murderously jealous.)

So here we are at the final entry of my Oslo odyssey.  We spent the last day of our time in Norway exploring Oslo a little more, sampling its fine foods, visiting the art museum, tracking down the infamous Neseblod Record Store (grabbing myself an Antestor EP and two hard to find Urgehal albums in the process) and generally enjoying the fine weather and the experience of being in a foreign city (albeit one which I’ve now visited numerous times). But all good things must come to an end, and thankfully the festival had another stunning night of music left to send us off in good cheer (and with aching necks to boot!).

The rebirth of Decapitated has been one of metal’s most stirring tales of perseverance, returning from the depths of tragedy with a revamped line-up and a sound that builds even further on the group’s base template. Like an armoured tank, they roll unstoppably onwards, stoically bearing the brunt of what life throws at them.

Vogg’s riff-writing and playing style remains utterly unique, his squealing leads careening like a freight train up and down the fretboard, while angular mechanical chugging rhythms pound a cybernetic war drum into your brain. Songs like “404” see the man almost literally torturing his guitar, bleeding bone-scraping noises from his instrument like some demented guitar-wielding surgeon, while a track like “Homo Sum” allows him to flex his more melodically-inclined muscles, eking out eerie lead parts and swirling dis-harmonies amongst the pneumatic, drum-driven carnage.

Talking of drums, there are times tonight when Krimh’s inhuman technique and stamina seem right on the verge of spontaneous combustion, so unnerving is it to hear a single human being produce such an industrial cacophony of noise – people might speak mostly of his impressive ability to handle older material like “Day 69” (including its now infamous mid-song drum-solo) at a standard to match his predecessor, but it’s his work on the newer material that shows just how his style differs, and just what new avenues that will open up for the group in the future. Continue reading »

IMAGINARY FLYING MACHINES – PRINCESS GHIBLI II

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Apr 132012
 

(I got this post by e-mail from DemiGodRaven, with this message from him: “I’m going to post about heavy metal Japanese movie theme songs. Let’s see how NCS readers handle that. Come at me, bro.” So go ahead, come at him . . .)

Holy crap, they made another one of these.

That’s literally the only way I can describe my sense of somewhat wild bewilderment at the fact that there’s another Princess Ghibli disc after the last one. Princess Ghibli is a project by Imaginary Flying Machines, a moniker taken up by a bunch of different groups in order to release a compilation of metal versions of various Studio Ghibli movie theme songs.

Studio Ghibli is a legendary animation house over in Japan. They’ve made some incredibly beautiful and incredibly popular movies over the years. In some senses they’re a cultural landmark in the same way something like Disney is over here. I studied Japanese for three years in High School (I remember fuck all, don’t ask) and that is where I was exposed to a large chunk of these songs and films.

Given Japanese artists’ usage of hair-metal and glam-metal styled music to open their various anime programs, the concept of something like this isn’t too far of a stretch. Then you actually listen to the first release and you realize the whole “this” is off-the-wall nuts. None of the groups really change their style in order to match the songs; instead, the songs are filtered through each specific band. Thus, you wind up with stuff like Claudio from Disarmonia Mundi screaming a bunch of Japanese at the top of his lungs and having at best, a very rough idea of anything that he is saying. When I interviewed him for TNOTB, he admitted to this, saying the whole project was crazy. That is why I am somewhat shocked that there is another one. Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL 2012 – DAY 2 – AGALLOCH, TSJUDER, ABSU, SOLSTAFIR, AUTOPSY

 Concert Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 122012
 

(Here’s Andy Synn’s review of performances at the second day of Oslo’s Inferno Festival. For his review of the first day’s inferno, go here.)

Day 2, and far more refreshed after a night’s proper sleep, we turned up at the venue a little before Agalloch’s set, allowing us to wander round the various stalls, tattoo showcases, and other assorted gubbins that act as an annex to the main festival. Highlights included some impressive tattoo work, a random assortment of rare/hilarious special editions (including a hugely over-priced and hugely amusing mega-box edition of the new and deplorable Morbid Angel album), and the none-more-metal selection offered by the infamous Neseblod Records stand. To top it all off we were even offered the opportunity to buy some of ICS Vortex’s old leathers. Truly the stuff legends are made of. But all these wonders were mere distractions set against the night’s impressive musical line-up.

Right from the start, Agalloch set out to reclaim and redefine the term “epic” with their tense and scintillating sound, expanding to fill the massive venue with a wall of sonic majesty, roots and branches reaching up to the heavens and penetrating deep into the loam of the earth. Cherry-picking the best tracks from The Mantle, Ashes Against The Grain, and Marrow Of The Spirit, the quartet painted the venue with sound and light, washing over the audience in tidal waves of lush, transcendent noise and focussed power – in particular, “In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion” was both utterly haunting and emotionally exhausting. Even some temporary technical problems were dealt with in an almost seamless manner, the rest of the band maintaining the pulsating heartbeat of ethereal ambience while frontman John Haughm dealt with his misbehaving guitar.

If you’ve never seen Agalloch live, I implore you to do so at any costs; they conjure an atmosphere as intense as any band I have seen (equaling, though not competing with, that of Triptykon on the previous night), but in a manner wholly unique to themselves. It’s the music of nature and nurture, layers and layers of melody and complexity that subtly, and unexpectedly, combine into something overwhelmingly heavy yet effortlessly organic. Continue reading »

IN MOURNING: “THE WEIGHT OF OCEANS”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Apr 122012
 

(Yesterday, Sweden’s In Mourning began a limited-time streaming of their new album. Today, TheMadIsraeli has a review.)

Fuck me for forgetting about this.

It seems even when sick, there is to be no rest for me.  I completely forgot that the new opus of melodic death doom metal masters In Mourning, The Weight Of Oceans, was to be out soon.  As you can imagine, when they started streaming this album yesterday I immediately had to get on that shit.  It’s a vital part of the new movement of melodic death metal that mixes powerful melodies, pedal-point riffing, and drama with doom metal’s macabre melancholy and profound slower tempos.

In Mourning made quite a splash with their debut, Shrouded Divine, an album I love to this day.  Their second release, Monolith, was a good album, but they tried to go for a more energetic approach that, both in tempo and in melody, had fewer connections to doom.  Something about it just didn’t sit right with me; it just didn’t feel like In Mourning to me.  Thankfully, The Weight Of Oceans is a return to In Mourning’s doom-intertwined roots.

In Mourning, for the uninitiated, incorporates the typical influences of this new style of melodic death metal at their core, essentially combining the slow tempos and proggy song structuring of old school Opeth with Insomnium’s poignant, to-the-point melancholic melodies and sense of melodrama and dignity.  The band are also obviously influenced by the spearheads of this new style of melodeath, Daylight Dies.

In Mourning definitely have their own sound though.  Their attack is precise and intricate, and their sense of melody focuses less on complex transitions and more on straight-forward, mournful melodic progressions.  The complexity of the composition is more in the realm of how the guitars play with one another, creating some quite dazzling walls of melody.  Björn Pettersson and Tim Nedergård are one of my favorite current guitar duos in metal right now.  Their sense of compositional teamwork is absolutely astounding, acting as one in generating an intricately woven overcast of despair and agony that just consumes the listener. Continue reading »

MUMAKIL GOING SILENT FOR A COUPLE OF WEEKS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Apr 122012
 

(DemiGodRaven reports some unfortunate news . . .)

Considering that they are one of the loudest and most blast-reliant grind bands out there, the announcement that Mumakil are going to be silent for the next few weeks comes as a bit of a shocker. This is due in part to their drummer developing Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, which makes drumming outright impossible. He showed signs of it recently, and after a visit to the doctor the band was forced to silence their new album recording as well as their upcoming tour. I’ve personally suffered through that right-wrist pain in a very light instance and stopped drumming for about two months. Believe me, the sheer act of attempting to hold a stick during that time frame was torture.

This news sucks, as Mumakil are fucking intense and one of my surface-level grind favorites. They’re obnoxious as all hell. I found them via the Misery Index split they did a few years back and enjoyed the hell out of their 2009 release, Behold The Failure. The song “Barbecue In Bhopal” is a solid forty seconds of ass-whooping before it ends. Actually, the first five or so tracks blur into each other before you see your first real break for all of about . . . five seconds . . . before you’re back into a whirlwind of guitars and screaming.

The band’s official statement was posted on their facebook: Continue reading »

MISERY

 Off Topic  71 Responses »
Apr 122012
 

I’m getting a slow start on today’s NCS posts. We had to put our cat down yesterday, a couple of weeks after his 18th birthday.

He had gone downhill fast. He stopped eating about 5 days ago, stopped cleaning himself, and was having trouble walking. He didn’t seem to be in pain, yet, but he seemed miserable. The vet said he was most likely experiencing kidney failure, which she said is the most common cause of death in old cats. She said he could last a few more days on his own, or conceivably a few more weeks, even without eating. She said she could do some things to prolong his life, but that his time had come. She said it would be appropriate in her opinion to euthanize him.

My wife and I agonized about that for 24 hours, but we couldn’t stand to see him in the condition he was in. So late yesterday, the vet gave him an injection of something that rendered him unconscious in about 5 minutes. His eyes slowly closed and his small, dark head drooped onto his chest. She then put an IV in a vein and used it to inject something else that stopped his heart in seconds.

I’ve been in bad shape since then. Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL 2012 – DAY 1 – ANAAL NATHRAKH, THE KONSORTIUM, 1349, TRIPTYKON, BORKNAGAR

 Concert Reviews  9 Responses »
Apr 112012
 

(Our man Andy Synn attended the INFERNO FESTIVAL in Oslo, Norway, on April 4-7, 2012, and here’s his review of the first day’s inferno.)

Running a little late, the first band of Inferno Festival 2012 for me was, somewhat ironically, a band from just down the road from my own home. Anaal Nathrakh were, as always, a nasty proposition in the flesh, delivering some seriously abusive blasting accented by Dave Hunt’s tormented screams and regal singing voice. Definite highlights were the annihilating (and deceptively melodic) “Satanarchist” and the unforgiving mindfuck of “Pandemonic Hyperblast”, the band seemingly focusing on their more unrelenting material this time out.

Tonight’s show was noticeably (and unusually) sloppier than I’m used to, with a few obvious errors in timing and tightness evident to the familiar listener. This was all explained though, with Dave Hunt educating the crowd on the shittiness of US border control who had failed to allow his cohort Mick Kenney over to Oslo for the show, leaving them to conscript a last minute stand-in guitarist, whom the extreme pressure understandably left ill at ease.

Even more pissed off than usual, at one point the band’s ever-volatile frontman, responding to an ill-advised heckle from the crowd, verbally confronted his abuser, saying that although he didn’t “want to sound like Phil Anselmo”, he was in no mood to take shit from anyone after the band put all the effort into pulling together and making it over to Inferno despite these last minute setbacks. Despite its problems, this set proved that nothing short of total global extinction can stop the march of Anaal Nathrakh. Continue reading »

IN MOURNING: FULL ALBUM STREAM

 Metal News  5 Responses »
Apr 112012
 

You remember that album cover, don’t you? Sure you do. How could you forget it? It’s the Necrolord cover for The Weight of Oceans, the third album by Sweden’s In Mourning, which will be released by Spinefarm Records on April 18. It’s what we call a “highly anticipated” release here at NCS.

And beginning today, everyone can hear the entire album. It will be streaming between now and that April 18 release date at the Kaaoszine web site, which you can reach via this link.

I’ve only had time to listen to the first three tracks, but they justify our eagerness for the album. The lengthy album opener, in particular, warrants the over-used term “epic”. It’s called “Colossus”, and if you don’t have time for anything else, check that one out — it took me back to memories of Opeth’s Blackwater Park.

Of course, please come back here and let us know what you think.

SHOW REPORT AND INTERVIEW: GOATWHORE – LIVE AT RAMALAMA RECORDS, TOLEDO, OHIO 3/7/12

 Concert Reviews, Interviews  6 Responses »
Apr 112012
 

(BadWolf and friends attended a special performance by Goatwhore in Toledo on March 7. This is his review, plus his on-site interview of Ben Falgoust and Sammy Duet. All photos accompanying this post were taken for NCS by Nicholas Vechery.)

I’ve had the most rotten luck with local shows lately. That awesome Black Dahlia Murder/Skeletonwitch/Nile tour was supposed to come through my hometown, as was the Faceless/Dying Fetus/Goatwhore tour. Both of those were cancelled. In fairness, the Black Dahlia Murder decided to headline a huge local metalcore festival—the Jamboree—instead, but I’m no huge proponent of skinny-jean deathcore. Thank god (or satan or wotan or whatever) for Goatwhore, who decided to play Toledo anyway—for free.

Ramalama Records

Goatwhore picked the perfect venue: Toledo’s finest record store, Ramalama Records. I have a long history with the establishment; it’s fair to say I would not be a metalhead were it not for the owner, Rob, and his clerk, Nick. A story within a story:

I rode into the store on bicycle on a Saturday afternoon at the age of 15. I was dressed in black jeans and a Master of Puppets tee-shirt—Nick said I was the first cool-looking guy to enter the store all day, and as such if I bought a record the second would be half off. A sick deal, but I had no idea what to get, so I just pointed at my tee shirt and said “Stuff like this.”

Nick picked out Municipal Waste’s Hazardous Mutation record. “What’s that sound like?” Nick threw it on the stereo.

“The good old days,” he said. Twenty seconds into ‘Unleash the Bastards’, I said he had himself a deal.

For my second buy I took a gander at the new releases shelf, and a  record cover caught my eye—some really great art of a ship being sunk by a whale. The band was called Mastodon. The album, obviously, was Leviathan. Nick let me listen to “Blood and Thunder”, and that was the end of normalcy in my life. $20 or so later, I was in metal for life. Continue reading »

ALL OVER THE PLACE: REVERENCE, ZATOKREV, AND THE KOREA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 112012
 

We’ve got some show reviews and an interview coming up today that you won’t want to miss, but I thought I’d start off our Wednesday with an assortment of metal that I discovered yesterday while browsing the interhole. The first two items are from bands whose music I’d never heard before: Reverence (France) and Zatokrev (Switzerland). Both have been signed by Candlelight Records, and the songs I heard are new. The Reverence track comes packaged with an official video that’s a real eye-catcher. The third item is a new video from a Russian band we’ve featured here before — The Korea.

Stylistically, the music is all over the place — as diverse as the bands’ locations. As you’ll see, my reasons for picking each of these items are also all over the place. Here we go:

REVERENCE

This French band had their genesis in 1998. After assorted demos and splits (including one with Blut Aus Nord in 2003), they released their first album in 2005. Two more followed that one, and in 2010 the band signed up with Candlelight. Their fourth album and first Candlelight release, The Asthenic Ascension, hit the streets in Europe on April 9 and is being sold as a CD here.

To launch the new album, the band released a music video for “Earth”, the new album’s opening track. Although I’ve seen Reverence described as industrial black metal, “Earth” begins with a slow, lush, orchestral introduction, and when the metal starts, that symphonic air remains. The music swells with keyboard grandeur and heavy riffs and includes a mix of clean and harsh vocals.

“Industrial” this is not; it has more in common with Dimmu Borgir than Blut Aus Nord. Though I enjoyed the song, it’s not enough on its own to make me rush out and get the album. It’s the combination of the music and the video that landed “Earth” in this post. Continue reading »

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