CLEAN SINGING (THAT RAWKS): NEW VIDEOS FROM MAMMOTH MAMMOTH, BEASTWARS, AND THE SORROW

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 262012
 

I’m drowning in new videos. Beginning late yesterday, this is the third in a row of posts I’ve written for the site that consist of nothing but videos. But as much as I’d like to finish other things I’m working on, I continue to be distracted by the moving pictures and the quality sounds.

This post is full of Exceptions to the Rule around here, because all three of the new vidz collected in this post include (to varying extents) clean vocals. But all three songs have grabbed me, and I hope they’ll grab you, too. The first two are from down-under bands we’ve previously covered at NCS — Mammoth Mammoth (Australia) and Beastwars (New Zealand) — and the third is from a band I don’t think we’ve ever mentioned before, The Sorrow (Austria).

MAMMOTH MAMMOTH

I first came across Mammoth Mammoth back in May when they released their last video, which was for the title track to their third album Hell’s Likely (featured here). Since then, Napalm Records have picked up the album and will be releasing it on November 23 worldwide (order here).

I’m enjoying the album cover. I’m also enjoying the new video for “GO”, which includes a nice tip of the hat at the video’s beginning to Gojira’s “Vacuity” video and also features the same delectable woman who graces the album cover in her birthday suit (though she’s somewhat more clothed in the video). Continue reading »

MORE NEW VIDEOS: PIG DESTROYER’S “THE DIPLOMAT” AND FEAR FACTORY’S “THE INDUSTRIALIST”, PLUS “MR. FROSTY MAN” AND “THE ORIGIN OF CREATURES”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 262012
 

Yesterday we devoted our last post to videos, and now two more new ones have premiered, one from Pig Destroyer and one from Fear Factory. One is “The Diplomat”, one is “The Industrialist”. Plus we have a fantastic Evil-Dead-goes-claymation video (“Mr. Frosty Man”) and a brilliant animation from The Netherlands (“The Origin of Creatures”) that puts a post-apocalyptic spin on the Tower of Babel parable. The music for these two isn’t metal, but the videos sure as fuck are.

PIG DESTROYER

Book Burner, the latest album from the almighty Pig Destroyer, came out in North America via Relapse on Monday of this week. Today saw the premiere of a new music video for one of the longer songs from the album, “The Diplomat”.

When this song had its debut in September, lyricist/vocalist JR Hayes said (here) it was “about the origins of human conflict and how if you look back through history, we’ve never really gotten along.” He explained: “You’re always wrapped up in the time that you’re living in, and right now there’s war and suffering and despair and economies collapsing, but if you look back in history, that’s the way it’s always been.” Can’t really argue with that, can you?

As for the sound of the song, Scott Hull used an opening riff that he had originally written for his other band Agoraphobic Nosebleed five or six years ago, and as he has noted, “The pace of the riff informs the tone and the tempo of the whole song.”

As for the “squawkier” and “angular” riffs toward the end? He was listening to a lot of Gorguts.

The song itself is excellent — and so is the new video. It was directed by Phil Mucci from Doomsday Entertainment, who also directed High On Fire’s killer “Fertile Green” video, as well as many others. It’s an allegorical tale that puts a different spin on the opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a gray-suited, arms-dealing motherfucker in place of the monolith. The colors are amazing, by the way. Watch it right after the jump. Continue reading »

ON THE TOPIC OF GORY METAL VIDEOS

 Mosh Pit  19 Responses »
Oct 262012
 

(It didn’t take long to get our first guest post in response to our solicitation of two days ago, and even though I hadn’t planned to start rolling out our guest series until Nov 5, I’m going with this one now. Please welcome Tyler Lowery.)

Since the birth of extreme metal, there has always been gore in one sense or another. Be it lyrical content, album covers, stage performance, or music videos, metal heads love to see blood and guts. It’s engrained into the very nature of the music. That being said, there can only be so many decapitated bodies floundering around while a band screams about it in the background, right?

As I’m sure we’re all aware, Cattle Decapitation recently released an extremely gory video for their song “Forced Gender Reassignment”. The video displays sexual assault, rape, and the mutilation of human flesh. With the sophistication in special effects, prosthetics, and computer-generated graphics, making the filthiest video possible is now easier than ever! And because of this, the question has been raised about the feasibility of excessive gore in music videos.

As the post here pointed out, Travis Ryan made the following statement about that video: “It seems nowadays you have to be over the top in your presentation to get anyone to think about anything anymore.” This reminds me of the recent comment made by Ann Coulter about the presidential debates in which she called Barack Obama a “retard”. Whatever point that bat shit crazy nutbag was trying to make was immediately lost under the reckless comment she made. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: ANTROPOMORPHIA, RED FANG, AND MONSTER ROLL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Oct 252012
 

Would you like some quality video entertainment? You would? Well, then, you’ve come to the right place, because I happen to have three clips right here that I think you’ll enjoy.

ANTROPOMORPHIA

Antropomorphia are a Dutch band whose new Metal Blade release, Evangelivm Nekromantia, really snuck up on me. The clues were there, as was a promo sitting in my in-box, and I just missed all of it until last night, when I watched the band’s recent official video for a track from the album named “Psuchagogia”.

The song burrowed under my skin immediately. It’s an occult-flavored form of death metal, reminiscent at times of Behemoth, with heavy use of tremolo guitar, demonic vocals, and a thundering beat. Halfway through, there’s a slow, very cool instrumental break with the bass taking the lead, and in the video, a ritual then reaches its defining moment in the drinking of blood from a skull, with relish.

Though “psuchagogia” doesn’t appear to be a word found in the dictionary, “psychogogia” is a Greek word meaning the leading of the soul and was used in its original context to describe a ritual of raising souls from the dead. Just so you know.

One word about the album art before we turn to the killer video itself: If those three skeletons in red and the shrouded figure in purple ring any bells, it’s because the band wanted to pay homage to the cover of Death’s Scream Bloody Gore. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: BISONHAMMER III

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Oct 252012
 

Let’s begin with the most immediately apparent accolade for the new EP by Bisonhammer (which is entitled Bisonhammer III): The cover art rules. In fact, I recommend that you click on the image above in order to see a larger version of the art, which was created by Loren Fetterman. I’ll wait.

Okay, now let’s move on to the music: It’s awfully impressive, too.

Bisonhammer are from Manchester, England, and Bisonhammer III is (duh) the third EP they’ve created so far. All three are available for streaming and download on Bandcamp (with the first two available for free or pay-what-you-want).

The new one consists of four songs, and they run roughshod through your cranium in a tidy 16 minutes total. However, they resist tidy genre classification. The music is part thrash, part raunchy death metal, part sludgy Southern rock, part groove metal, part stoner. What pulls all of these influences together is the band’s knack for writing some big-ass riffs and loading up the songs with some mighty sharp hooks. Continue reading »

HELP A BROTHER OUT?

 Metal News  70 Responses »
Oct 242012
 


We’re getting awfully damned close to November (when we will turn 3 years old!), and November usually begins three traditions here at NCS that together take us on out to the end of the year and into the beginning of the next one.

The first is my long annual vacation, which cuts down on my blogging time and therefore leads me to beg for guest submissions so that our small cadre of regular writers don’t have to pick up the load all by themselves. The second, which usually begins by early December, is our series of year-end lists for best albums and short recordings. And the third is the daily rollout of my choices for the Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs of the year.

This year, unfortunately, I won’t be having a long vacation, or much of any vacation. A combination of family and work demands means I won’t be able to get away from Seattle in November like I usually do. BUT I’m going to solicit guest posts anyway. I’ve really enjoyed all the guest submissions we’ve gotten in previous years since starting this tradition, and I don’t see any reason to stop now just because I may not need them as desperately as I have in the past.

Besides, even though I won’t be fucking off someplace warm and sunny with beautiful clouds and turquoise water, your submissions WILL allow me to fuck off right here in Seattle, and that’s a plus.

So here’s the deal: If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of writing something for publication at NCS or some other metal blog, now’s a good time to give it a shot. Or maybe you’ve been generous enough to submit guest posts here in the past and might be willing to do it again. Or maybe you’re already writing for another blog and you’re willing to upgrade the content quality at NCS (good luck with that).

Regardless of your situation, we want your writing! Details after the jump . . .

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HELLISH OUTCAST, BLASPHEMOPHAGHER, RWAKE, MOMENTUM

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Oct 242012
 

Here’s another round-up of things I saw and heard over the last 24 hours that I didn’t have room to include in yesterday afternoon’s post (the one that included new offerings from Aeon, Tardive Dyskinesia, and Zubrowska): New videos from Hellish Outcast (Norway) and Rwake (U.S.), new Paolo Girardi artwork and bittersweet news about Blasphemophagher (Italy), and a new song from Momentum (Iceland).

HELLISH OUTCAST

Please tell me you already know about this band.  If you can’t tell me that, then please read Andy Synn’s review of their 2012 album, Your God Will Bleed. It included such gems as this:

“Not only do Hellish Outcast not do black metal, they also don’t do nice. Or comfortable. Or anything less aggressive than a rabid pit-bull that’s been force-fed a diet of sand and barbed wire. In fact, this album is so damned aggressive, so utterly hate-filled, that it should come with a warning label along the lines of:

Danger – the levels of testosterone and aggression on this album could cause permanent damage to your underlying genetic structure.”

Or maybe you read Andy’s review and skipped the music because you wished to preserve your current genetic structure. If so, then you’ll probably want to skip Hellish Outcast’s brand new official video for “Djinn”. Since I already have a mutated genetic structure, I dived right in.

Fuckin’ love this song, from the skin-flaying death/thrash start straight through to the infernal melodic slow-down at the end. Video accompaniment is live performance footage from the Inferno Fest, edited by the band’s vocalist Thebon (Keep of Kalessin).  Prepare to be mutated. Continue reading »

RAGE NUCLÉAIRE: “UNRELENTING FUCKING HATRED”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Oct 242012
 

(In this post, TheMadIsraeli reviews the unrelenting fucking hatred unleashed by the debut album from Canada’s Rage Nucléaire.)

Getting sonically fucked up is about the only way any true, sane metalhead finds any peace in this life full of shit.  What better possible recipe for achieving this catharsis than a furious combination of black metal and grindcore?

What if said blackened grind mixture was fronted by the almighty Lord Worm, one of the most brutal vocalists and most eloquent poets to exist in metal’s history?

What if I told you it’s fucking awesome?  Cause it is.

Rage Nucléaire’s debut Unrelenting Fucking Hatred is about as close to channeling its own title as you’re ever going to get.  It has all the makings of a great extreme metal album.  It’s fast as fuck; it’s atonal yet also brings epic melodies to bear when needed; it sounds like total fucking shit in the most legit badass kvlt way possible; and it makes me feel like my jaw bone is being disassembled with a hammer.

Also, it feels like my flesh is being filleted, like I’m being prepared for an exquisite meal; an exquisite meal with a side of curb-stomping, eye-gouging ear rape. Continue reading »

AEON, TARDIVE DYSKINESIA, AND ZUBROWSKA

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Oct 232012
 

I found many new metallic abominations to like over the last 24 hours, too many to shoehorn into a single post. So I’ll make a start with this batch of sharp spiky European offerings from Aeon (Sweden), Tardive Dyskinesia (Greece), and Zubrowska (France). Don’t touch, now, or you may draw back a bleeding stump.

AEON

Still loving the fantastic album art up above, by  Kristian “Necrolord” Wåhlin. It’s for Aeons Black, the fourth album from Sweden’s Aeon, which Metal Blade will release on Nov 19 in Europe and Nov 20 everywhere else. As previously reported, the title track is available for free download here. You can also catch an official lyric video for the same song at the end of KevinP’s recent NCS interview of the band’s founding guitarist Zeb Nilsson at this location.

Today’s news is that another song from Aeons Black premiered today. It’s streaming at Metal Hammer’s web site. The song is the album’s first track, “Still They Pray”. It’s lacerating, the kind of death metal that leaves skin in tatters. Go here to listen, and then come back and thank us for pointing you in that direction. Continue reading »

DARKCORPSE

 Album Reviews, Phro's Posts, SHORT BUT SWEET  16 Responses »
Oct 232012
 

(In this post, Phro provides an introduction to the music of Japan-based Darkcorpse.  It has something to do with a wolverine’s urethra.)

Hey. I’m Phro. It’s been a while, but your asses are still surely elastic. So stretch ’em out and get ready for some really gritty black metal.

Darkcorpse is a band. They make music that sounds like someone injecting gravel into a wolverine’s urethra via a sandblaster. They have two demos, and you will love them (demo 2, in particular). That’s not a prophesy or a request or even a demand. It is a fact of life in the same way it is a fact that life isn’t worth living if you can’t go out to clubs, meet nice strangers, bring them home, cut large holes in their stomachs, shove in some rabid rodents, and then sew them up and watch the fun on an ultrasound.

Their Bandcamp page informs me “Darkcorpse play a no-frills crust inflected brand of Black Thrash with a touch of doom.” I, literally, have no fucking clue what that means. I mean, I recognize the words, but when it’s all together in sentence form, it kind of makes my brain feel like a cum-sandwich smoothy bubbling up from beneath my eyeballs and rolling down my cheeks. (“My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.”)

However, if we look at the individual pieces of the sentence, it all makes sense. The vocals, in their crusty/black/trashiness, sound more than anything like the aforementioned wolverine howling in furious anger (not in pain though, that little fuck is more annoyed than anything) just before it rips free from it’s steel bindings and bites clean through your genitals. Continue reading »

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