INTERLUDE: FALLEN JOY, FROM ASHES RISE, AND THROWERS

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 242012
 

We started this day with doom (mixed with stoner) in a review of the debut EP by France’s Mudbath. We’ll be going back to doom in the next post (and I’m talkin’ about seriously catastrophic doom), but just to prevent things from getting too abysmal around here, this post includes two videos and a song that I saw and heard yesterday that get the blood pumping (instead of freezing it into a viscous sludge). And the bands are: Fallen Joy (France), From Ashes Rise (U.S. – Portland), and Throwers (Germany) — clicking on their names will take you to their Facebook pages for more info.

FALLEN JOY

Fallen Joy have a debut album coming soon called Inner Supremacy. The artwork for the cover and the CD booklet can be seen above, created by the very talented Strychneen Studio; in fact, I discovered this band through Strychneen’s posting of the album art on their Facebook page.

So far, the band have released one song from the new album for streaming on SoundCloud (here), and now they’ve released a music video for the same song: “Hymn To Silent Soldiers”. Whoever those silent soldiers may be, the song is also a hymn to bands such as At the Gates, but with some blackening in this canticle and an air of modernity in the riffing and soloing. The song is a blood-pumping, jolting gallop with riffs that blister and a nice blend of black- and death-metal vocals. Check out the video right after the jump. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET (AND FREE): MUDBATH – “RED DESERT ORGY”

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 242012
 

Go low, go slow, and crush all hope of life into the muck. That’s the plan of attack for Mudbath, a band from Avignon, France, who have just self-released their debut EP, Red Desert Orgy.  The spiritual offspring of bands such as Sleep, Electric Wizard, and Eyehategod, Mudbath deliver a heavyweight narcotic concoction of black doom and sludge-filled stoner metal that’s definitely worth spreading around.

“Loserwood” hooked me in the first 30 seconds with a disease-ridden lead guitar riff and a brutal bass line, both of which have the distortion dialed to the point that they’ll jar fillings loose in your teeth. A dual-tracked, downtuned guitar solo dumps a heaping bucket of filth all over the proceedings, and the song also includes a screaming psychedelic solo. To top it off, Mudbath’s vocalist sounds like Eyehategod’s Mike Williams, which is to say that the skrieks are enough to wake the dead.

Getting comfortable with the music isn’t an option, and I’m sure that’s not Mudbath’s goal either. But the fat, dissonant riffs in “Mudjahideen” are pretty infectious nonetheless. Yet the lumbering stomp of the music is still bereft of hope or light, and this time the burning-lung vocals are joined by a braying yell, though it sounds no more sane. The last third of the song briefly shifts into a higher gear as the guitars skitter about crazily, but that’s just a prelude to another warbling solo that’s awful damned sweet (and awful damned ill). Continue reading »

BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME: THE “TELOS” VIDEO

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jul 232012
 

Between the Buried and Me have a new album coming. Its title is Parallax II: Future Sequence, it will be released on October 9, and it’s already available for pre-order from Metal Blade HERE and from this site, which is offering some nice bundles (including a spacesuit!). Today we also have a new official video for “Telos”, a song from the album that has made the rounds in a few fan-filmed videos of recent BTBAM shows.

The video is mainly a series of fade-in, fade-out ads for the release with a couple of excellent pieces of album art interspersed. The main benefit of the video is the the song, straight from the album. It’s a neuron-twister of a tech-death workout spliced into an ethereal space-swimming, time-traveling segment, which is part jazz fusion, part prog exploration.

I’m tolerating the clean vocals in the cosmic-drift part of the song, but confess that I’m much higher on the harsh, tech-death mind-fuckery, which is really excellent.

Check out the video after the jump. Continue reading »

AEGAEON: “BEING”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jul 232012
 

(TheMadIsraeli returns to NCS after a hiatus with this review of the new EP by Indiana’s Aegaeon. The EP is available digitally on iTunes and Amazon and physically from the band’s BigCartel page.)

Aegaeon’s new release is proof not only that deathcore has life left in it, but also that they’re definitely at the forefront of the bands I’d call truly legit.  They’ve released a killer debut Dissension and now this EP, Being, on a totally independent basis, funded straight out of their own pockets — merch and all.  They don’t seem to be at all concerned with finding a label, which gives the band a sort of hard-edged DIY ethic that comes through in their already cathartic brutality.

They play a style of deathcore that is not only absolutely unrelenting in its brutality, it also comes with a very morose sense of ambience and atmosphere.  Dare I say Insomnium-ish, in a way?  A lot of this EP has a rather doomy characteristic to it as well, which gives the music a real sense of heft and also helps establish a standout identity for Aegaeon, one that was already pretty well-cemented based solely on vocalist/living-Cthulu Jim Martin.

Being is only 6 songs long, but it’s an ethereal yet pulverizing journey.  It seems obvious to me it’s meant to be listened to that way, from start through to finish, because all of the songs bleed into each other.  The inside of the digipack case I have before me even states in big font, “Being is best experienced from beginning to end with no breaks”.  I agree. Continue reading »

ZATOKREV’S “GODDAMN LIGHTS” IS A GODDAMN EPIC HEADBANG

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jul 232012
 

I find it occasionally amusing and more often annoying to see how often male metal fanboys and even metal bloggers describe their enthusiasm for music by referring in graphic (but presumably figurative) terms to having explosive orgasms. I took a personal vow that I would never resort to anything so stupid and juvenile in my writing for NCS. And then this morning I saw Zatokrev’s official music video for a new song called “Goddamn Lights”.

I came so hard that I punched a gaping hole in the wall with my cum. I splooged so voluminously that I’ll be scrubbing my computer screen with industrial-strength solvent for the rest of the week. Both of my heads exploded with the force of my money shot like the second coming (cumming) of Krakatoa. My shorts are in tatters.

I also took a personal vow that I would try to hold my use of the term “epic” to a bare minimum (having failed in my vow never to use the word at all). But “Goddamn Lights” is just fucking epic — not only to hear, but also to watch. It’s a hybrid of Agalloch-ian melodic black metal and dramatic progressive metal, with undertones of stoner metal and psychedelic rock. It’s a guaranteed headbang trigger. It’s both scarifying and beautiful. It gets this work week off to an awesome start.

And the video is beautifully made (credit to Lionel Weitnauer for the awesomeness), the band drenched in hot colors, with the shadows filled by images of nature. Continue reading »

DIOCLETIAN / WEREGOAT: “DISCIPLES OF WAR”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jul 232012
 

At least some of you who are on Facebook and who have liked the NCS Facebook page saw this album art when I posted it late yesterday. Based on how many people saw that FB post, it seems like the artwork has generated a lot of interest. So I thought I ought to explain what it is in more detail.

It’s the cover of a forthcoming split by Diocletian from New Zealand and Weregoat from Portland, Oregon. The title of the split is Disciples of War. It will be released on 12″ vinyl by Parasitic Records and on CD by Dark Descent. I don’t have a release date yet and pre-orders haven’t started. Once I get more info, I’ll add an update.

The complex, hand-drawn album art is, as you can see, amazing, and amazingly vile. It was created by Daniel “Desecrator” Corcuera, a 27 year-old artist who lives in Chile. Based on a brief bio I found on a site that was describing an exhibition of his work in Portland (here), it appears he is entirely self-taught and spends his time as a tattoo artist, illustrator, and vocalist/bassist for a band called Slaughtbbath.

Desecrator has created album art and logos for bands such as Bestial Mockery, Sathanas, Vomitor, Suicidal Winds, Dead Congregation, Hooded Menace, Thornspawn, Satanic Warmaster, and more. A listing of many bands for whom he has created artwork can be found here. And via this link, you can find an interview with him and more of his artwork.

As for the music on the split, I expect it will be utterly savage. We’ve written about Diocletian multiple times, most recently here. Their most recent releases are a May 2012 7″ EP entitled European Annihilation, produced for their European tour earlier this year, and a June 2012 hour-long compilation of the songs from their first four recordings between 2005 and 2008 by the name of Annihilation Rituals. The word “annihilation” appears in these titles for a reason. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 57)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  24 Responses »
Jul 232012
 

Happy Fucking Monday to one and all. Yes, it’s time for another edition of “THAT’S METAL!”, in which we collect pics, videos, and news items that we think are metal, even though they’re not music. We have a fuckload of items for this installment, so I’m gonna cut short the normal long-winded intro and get right to it.

ITEM ONE

Look, I know that other Europeans are just as capable as the Finns of ingesting mass quantities of hooch without losing their shit, so don’t scorch my ass in the comments, please. I just thought that pic up there was funnier than an echidna’s penis. Also, I have this pic of what happens to Finns when they die, displaying the natural embalming effects of a lifetime of “next bottle, please”. The Finn is on the left. Or the right.

I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking about an echidna’s penis. Continue reading »

WOLVES AND WORMS FOR THE WIN (AND CEREBRAL BORE, TOO)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 222012
 

I saw two of these live videos yesterday and one this morning. They involve three of my favorite bands. They are all from S Nations — Sweden, Singapore, and Scotland. I feel compelled to share them.

In the first one, Sweden’s Wolfbrigade throws down hard at the D.I.Y. Fest in Gdynia, Poland, on July 14, 2012. These dudes have been crushing skulls and kicking asses since the mid-90’s (with a break-up in 2004, followed by a revival in 2007), and it’s clear that they still know how to bring it on stage. Their new album, Damned (on the Southern Lord label), is one of my 2012 favorites (reviewed here). To quote myself (always the right way to go), it’s “a boiling stew of d-beat drums, swarming chainsaw guitars, slamming rhythms, and molten guitar solo’s that come for you like grasping alien face-huggers that are a shitload stronger than you are.”

Apparently, one of the factors leading to the band’s dissolution in 2004 was the fact that frontman Micke needed surgery for vocal chord problems and couldn’t sing for at least a year after that. I’d say he’s fully recovered. The sound quality on the new fan-filmed video isn’t pro-quality, but you don’t need that to feel the power of this performance.

The second video is Singapore’s awesome Wormrot performing at the Obscene Extreme Fest in the Czech Republic, also in mid-July (Wolfbrigade performed there, too). This video captures the band’s entire 30-minute set. It will grind your pointy heads down to a nub.

And finally, I have a last-minute addition to the post: video of Scotland’s Cerebral Bore playing at the first show of SUMMER SLAUGHTER 2013 at L.A.’s House of Blues on Friday night. Vocals by Som, always surprising. Continue reading »

ENTOMBED COVERS KING DIAMOND: “WELCOME HOME”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Jul 222012
 

Back in June I saw the news that Screaming Records was going to release a limited 7″ vinyl single by Sweden’s legendary Entombed. I’ve been waiting hungrily since then for the music to hit the web, and yesterday some of it did.

This new single is called When In Sodom Revisited and it includes three songs: a remixed and remastered version of the original “When In Sodom” track, which originally appeared on the band’s 2006 EP by the same name; an alternate version of the song composed, performed, and recorded by a Danish artist and sound designer named Klaus “Q” Hedegaard Nielsen (Beta Satan, The Malpractice), and a new studio recording by Entombed of the King Diamond song “Welcome Home”.

This single is the second Entombed release for 2012, the first being a digital release of a variant version of the song “Amok”, which we previously featured here. The recording of “Welcome Home”, however, is the first release by the current Entombed lineup — with Victor Brandt (TOTALT JÄVLA MÖRKER, AEON, SATYRICON) and second guitarist Nico Elgstrand (who previously played bass for the group) joining L-G Petrov, Alex Hellid, and Olle Dahlstedt.

For those of you who remember the post we ran on the 20th anniversary of King Diamond’s Abigail album (here), it will come as no surprise to learn that I prefer this Entombed cover to the original — mainly because I’ll take L-G’s vocals over King’s. The cover is a cool song. Continue reading »

PERCUSSION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, That's Music -- But It's Not Metal  20 Responses »
Jul 222012
 

Percussion is an important part of almost all forms of music. Of course, it’s vital to metal, and it’s not limited to the drums. I may be stretching the dictionary definition of the word percussion, but I’d go so far as to say that in genres of extreme metal that use distorted down-tuned guitars and bass, those instruments are used more for percussion and rhythm than for creating melodies.

The presence of percussion instruments in all the world’s cultures stretching back many thousands of years suggests there’s something about the appeal of beat and rhythm, the patterns of sounds and silences, that’s innate in human beings, something we’re born with rather than something we’re taught. Maybe it comes from the beat of the heart we heard in the womb, or maybe it’s a puzzling product of natural selection, but whatever the explanation, the human affinity for rhythm — and especially for percussion — seems like an essential part of who we are (even for spastic white-bread dudes who can’t dance to save their lives).

In this post I’ve gather some fascinating videos of some fascinating people doing fascinating things with percussion, and what they have in common is that they’re using their hands and fingers to strike a variety of different instruments (and machines) directly. The music isn’t metal, but it’s metal, if you know what I mean.

EFRAIN TORO

I learned about Efrain Toro because my wife and I had the pleasure of meeting and spending a little time with his daughter and her new husband on their honeymoon last spring while we were on vacation. Efrain Toro is a Puerto Rican percussionist and music teacher who has some interesting ideas about rhythm. Much of what I’ve read about his theories is over my head and I suspect would mean a lot more to people who, unlike myself, have some actual musical training. But from what I’ve read about him, he seems to be regarded as one of the best percussionists in the world, across a wide range of musical styles and types of drums. Continue reading »

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