THE ALGORITHM: “TR0JANS”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 062012
 

(As you may have noticed, DemiGodRaven has gone on a reviewing spree, and this is his latest, with thoughts about the new EP from The Algorithm.)

Can I feasibly post about an album on NoCleanSinging if it contains NoSinging at all? Is it even an album if the whole thing is just a three-song EP with only one really new song on it?

For those of you who don’t know about The Algorithm, a quick intro. The Algorithm is a one-man electronica project (Frenchman Rémi Gallego) whose mastermind uses a variety of elements of heavy metal as part of it. The whole thing is a wildly spastic experiment. One second he could be using something that has been characterized as djent-step, and another second continually hammering on a bass drum sample over and over. The result is something that The Algorithm has, perhaps a bit self-indulgently, begun referring to as ‘mindfuck’.

While I’m not sure about the shelf-life of that label, I do think that almost everything The Algorithm has done has been absolutely amazing. He recently signed with Basick Records and soon after released a quick EP known as Tr0Jans. It contains one new song, which is the aforementioned title track, and then two songs that were previously attached to other releases and then reworked for this one. Basick Records have been asking for 2.49 in British funny money, which calculates to around four or five bucks in American dollars for the three songs. Continue reading »

WHAT MADNESS ARE SYLOSIS UP TO?

 Metal News  2 Responses »
Apr 062012
 

(I am so fucking slow on the uptake sometimes. DemiGodRaven sent me the post below, and despite the fact that it belonged in the “breaking news” category, I had a brain fart and didn’t pounce on it. So, the news is now less breaking than it was, but still worth writing about.)

Just recently (as in, March 31st — I’m working midnight’s, so I’m falling behind the times rapidly), Sylosis uploaded a video to their Youtube account called “Sylosis – III”. There’s no description as to what it is, but it consists of a bunch of footage of the band in the studio.

They seem to have been spending time there lately. They found enough time to record a new song for the people who donated to their pledge drive to help them out in the US last year, and that one has finally begun making its way around the net.

As for III, does this mean we’re going to see some new Sylosis material already? I know there was a pretty sizable gap between Conclusion of an Age and Edge Of The Earth, but the band put so much goddamn material on Edge Of The Earth that it practically seemed like too much at times. Especially when you add in the newer song, there has been quite a lot of Sylosis in the past year. I personally, cannot get enough of it, as I love this band and think they should definitely be talked about more. Continue reading »

KICKSTART THESE BANDS: DREAMING DEAD AND GIZMACHI

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 062012
 

Money don’t grow on trees. If you’re not born with it, you have to work for it . . . or wait for an African widow to drop it in your lap before she dies of cancer or her dead husband’s greedy relatives steal it. And when you’ve got a bit of money, you need to save it for life’s essentials, like buying CDs, vinyl, and band merch. So when a band asks for financial help, we know that’s a tough thing for most metalheads to honor. But when the donation is really just a down-payment on killer music, the decision becomes a little easier.

Lots of bands without label backing are now using Kickstarter to help finance their activities. Here are two who deserve your support: Dreaming Dead and Gizmachi.

DREAMING DEAD

This story just blows my feeble mind. In February I decided to catch up with LA’s Dreaming Dead in a post called “Lapse”, whining about the loooong wait for their Midnightmares album, which the band had been keeping to themselves for almost a year and a half while searching for a label.  Three days later, they announced that the album would be released on April 20, apparently without label support. And then about 10 days ago, thanks to an e-mail from NCS reader Talvalin, I found out that the band had started begging for money on Kickstarter.

I really do not get it. This band’s 2009 debut album (on Ibex Moon records), Within One, was excellent. The songs from Midnightmares that they premiered over the course of that long label hunt were even better. And they have a photogenic frontwoman (Elizabeth Schall) who can both kick out nasty harsh vocals and shred the guitar like nobody’s business. This is NOT a band who should find themselves in this position.

But here they are . . . trying to raise $5,000 so they can put Midnightmares on CDs and vinyl and sell it themselves. I don’t understand how this could be, but then again, I don’t understand how penguins can fly either. Continue reading »

ACEPHALIX: “DEATHLESS MASTER”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Apr 062012
 

Deathless Master, the titanic new album by San Francisco’s Acephalix, is the best blast of old-school death metal that 2012 has yet delivered, and it’s difficult to conceive of anything else topping it by year end.

The formula for the album’s success is relatively simple to state, but if translating the formula into reality were easy, the album wouldn’t be such a noteworthy addition to the year’s phalanx of new metal:

  • write songs that grab the listener by the back of the neck and slam heads into hard surfaces without any possibility of resistance
  • tune the guitars and the bass so low that they’re communing with the core of the earth
  • max out the distortion to the point where guts churn with cancerous tumors and listeners can smell the suffocating fumes of that giant chainsaw sound so vividly that their nose hairs burn
  • step up the gain and raise the tuning to produce guitar solos that ignite like phosphorous bombs in a black night
  • shift all the sound with a reverb effect so that it echoes like the inside of a tomb
  • configure the drum patterns into a mix of d-beats, blast-beats, and straight rock rhythms that carry you back to the genesis of Swe-death circa 1991 (and throw in some cowbell for good measure)
  • add vocals . . . add vocals like . . .well, fuck, damned few people can sing like Dan . . .

Continue reading »

EMANCIPATE THESE RIFFS: ARGHOSLENT

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  55 Responses »
Apr 062012
 

(After a little hiatus, BadWolf rejoins us with a thought-provoking piece and lots of sick music [double entendre intended].)

None of us are angels. In fact, most people commit evil on a daily basis (more often if you’re a politician in America). As Anaal Nathrakh said: hell is empty, and the devils are all here.

I’m willing to forgive most people their sins. In fact, most acts considered ‘wrong” or ‘immoral’ are deemed as such based on the value judgments of hypocritical organizations (what up, Catholic church? Yeah. I went to one of your middle schools. What about it!?). It’s value-judgments all the way down my friends, and as such I’m reluctant to cry (bad)wolf at most people.

Racists are an exception to that rule. I never understood judging people based on race when other factors like economic status factor so heavily into racially charged situations. I mean, which of these makes more sense:

A) some dude robbed you because he is starving, unemployed and addicted to hard drugs from birth

or

B) some dude robbed you because his skin cells produce more melanin.

…I know, right!? Continue reading »

A PACKAGE DEAL

 Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Apr 052012
 

I thought I’d wrap up the posting day with a random assortment of goodies I found today. Nothing ties these three items together except that I found them all entertaining, in a slightly unhinged way. The first two would have made more sense in an installment of THAT’s METAL!, but I’m too impatient to wait for that. The third one is actually music, which is why there’s an album cover up above.

ITEM ONE

The BBC will screen remarkable footage of penguins flying as part of its new natural history series, Miracles of Evolution. That’s right, flying. Camera crews discovered this phenomenon while filming a colony of Adélie penguins on King George Island, some 750 miles south of the Falkland Islands.

The program is being presented by ex-Monty Python star Terry Jones, who said: “We’d been watching the penguins and filming them for days, without a hint of what was to come.

“But then the weather took a turn for the worse. It was quite amazing. Rather than getting together in a huddle to protect themselves from the cold, they did something quite unexpected, that no other penguins can do.” Watch what they did after the jump. Continue reading »

DIRGE WITHIN: “THERE WILL BE BLOOD”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 052012
 

 

(DemiGodRaven has turned into a reviewing machine. I want whatever he’s on. Here’s his third review in as many days — and the subject is the forthcoming release from Dirge Within.)

Dirge Within are one of those bands whose rise is seemingly unexplainable. Any question of where these Chicago-based metalcore warriors came from is met entirely with a response of, “Uh…well…uhm”, and then nothing. They just seemed to appear one day and had an AWESOME VIDEO FILLED WITH SAWDUST, SAND, AND EXPLOSIONS, and then there was silence. The group’s previous release, Force Fed Lies, did them well enough to justify a second disc, but the main thing that’s difficult to understand is the overarching question of…why?

Since I have buried myself in all things -core lately, I figured I’d give these guys another shot, and boy, let me tell you. If you thought Silent Civilian’s second album Ghost Stories was a disappointment, then what you need to do is take this disc and pretend that it’s the followup to Silent Civilian’s first release. For those not in the know, Silent Civilian was a metalcore offshoot of Spineshank, with the lead singer on guitar and vocals, and I came to find out that their debut was actually pretty goddamn solid. The only problem was that their followup was like their debut again, and they quickly fell to the wayside in favor of a reunited Spineshank.

I know this sounds like one hell of a wild-ass tangent, but just bear with me here, because I will be goddamned if Dirge Within’s There Will Be Blood doesn’t sound like, and is on par with, Silent Civilian’s debut release — a solid if not guilty-pleasure piece of metalcore. Continue reading »

BLOODBEAST: “BLOODLUST”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 052012
 

In a year that has already delivered enough superb tech-death releases to give frenetic-metal addicts a month’s worth of wet dreams, we now have one more from a remote locale: South Africa. But the debut album by Bloodbeast is not the precision music of accelerated, machine-like aliens. It has no avant-garde injections of jazz fusion. It isn’t the musical equivalent of a chalkboard crammed with the formulas of quantum mechanics.

No, Bloodlust is the maniacal fever dream of ghouls, a canvas sprayed with blood splatter, a landscape decimated by a lurching horde of the electrified undead. It’s a technically masterful fusion of death, grind, and thrash that takes no prisoners and wants to drink your spinal fluid. I was fortunate to get an advance listen to the music, but thankfully, the album has now become available for everyone on Bandcamp.

Bloodbeast is a new band, but its members are veterans of the S.A. metal underground. The band’s leader, Van Zyl Alberts (aka Van666), was also the guitarist and co-vocalist of Architecture of Aggression, a long-running progressive death metal band we’ve written about several times at this site (e.g., here). The other members have paid their dues in outfits such as Bile of Man, Fuck the Corpses, and Demented Martyr. Joining together in Bloodbeast, they’ve clearly found a musical vehicle that suits their interests and successfully integrates their talents. Continue reading »

NEWS FROM THE DARKEST PITS OF HELL: ANAAL NATHRAKH AND DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT

 Metal News  9 Responses »
Apr 052012
 

I apologize to the people of England. Your country is not the darkest pit of hell. It just seems that way sometimes. After all, it is home to Anaal Nathrakh and Dragged Into Sunlight.

These bands are not for the weak of spirit, nor do they appeal to people with mushy-brained, whitebread, mainstream-metal tastes. Instead, they appeal to people like me who enjoy metal that makes them feel as if they’ve been gutted with icepicks, sucked dry by leeches, and infested with burrowing maggots. Anaal Nathrakh give you a nightmarish rocket-ride into the abyss, and Dragged Into Sunlight trap you there in a vat of acid sludge that slowly liquifies your flesh.

Okay, maybe I’m getting carried away, but there’s no denying that these bands make seriously fucked up music for seriously fucked up people. Naturally, I love both of them! And I have some news about both of them.

ANAAL NATHRAKH

AN were putting the finishing touches on their new album in January, and not long ago they added a note on their FB page promising an album teaser in the near future. Today, they unveiled a new shirt design created by Ryan Kasparian (whose web site is here). You can see it up top. It is so fucking cool that I had to post about it. I also had to pre-order it. You can pre-order it, too, via this link. I would like to make a polite suggestion to AN: GET RYAN FUCKING KASPARIAN TO DESIGN THE NEW ALBUM COVER!

You can be sure that we will post the album teaser as soon as it’s ready. And now, on to DIS . . . Continue reading »

KEYBOARD WARRIORS: ANGRY METAL GUY & STEEL DRUHM

 Interviews  14 Responses »
Apr 052012
 

(Rev. Will returns to NCS with another installment in his Keyboard Warriors series. Today’s subjects are the creator of the Angry Metal Guy blog and his collaborator Steel Druhm.)

I. ANGRY METAL GUY IS THY WORD. THY WORD IS ANGRY METAL GUY.

II. THOU SHALT NOT BE HIPPIE IN THE PRESENCE OF ANGRY METAL GUY.

III. REMEMBER: TWELVE MUSCLES THEE USETH TO SMILE, ELEVEN MUSCLES THEE USETH TO FROWN.

IV. HONOR THY DIGNITY AND INTEGRITY.

V. THOU SHALT NOT KISS ASS.

VI. THOU SHALT NOT ADVERTISE.

VII. THOU SHALT NOT SOLICIT MATERIAL TO REVIEW, MATERIAL TO REVIEW SOLICIT THOU.

VIII. THOU SHALT INTERVIEW ONLY IF SUBJECT GIVES THEE A MUSICAL BONER.

IX. THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S WORLDWIDE SONG PREMIERE.

X. THOU SHALT NOT PARTAKE IN CELEBRITY GOSSIP.

XI. EMBRACE THY ELITIST SIDE AND HATH CYNICAL WORLDVIEW.

XII. MASTER THY HOLY PATH OF KEYBOARD WARRIOR. Continue reading »

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