WHERE AM I?

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Oct 202012
 

I think I’m back home after a week of being here, there, and everywhere. I woke up disoriented, jet-lagged, and thinking about the lyrics to “Once In A Lifetime” (Talking Heads). Was that my beautiful wife in bed next to me? Is this my beautiful house I’m in? Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground. Into the blue again . . .

I’ll get my shit together before the day is out, but at the moment the shit is kind of scattered and incoherent. After a week of having not much time to call my own, I’m also way fuckin’ behind on the metal. A lot of catching up to do, a lot of new music to hear, a lot of gibberish to write. But I ought to make a start right now, shouldn’t I?

For example: Yesterday our friends at The Monolith turned on the site and made it go live. If you haven’t checked out that site, you should give it a whirl. A couple of very good dudes who’ve been slumming here at NCS after The Number of the Blog shut down — groverXIII and DGR — will be writing over there now, as will a bunch of other folks from other blogs who we’ve gotten to know and admire since we started NCS. We wish all of them much success with the new venture.

I also heard some new tracks that I thought you might enjoy, from ILSA, Devolved, and Rage Nucleaire.

To begin, I saw that CVLT Nation has started streaming a new ILSA track from their new album Intoxicantations (to be released by Baltimore’s A389 Recordings on Nov 23). I fuckin’ love the artwork for the album, which was created by ILSA’s drummer, Joshy: Continue reading »

A FRIDAY FLOOD OF NEWS AND MUSIC: MORS PRINCIPIUM EST, BLUT AUS NORD, SOREPTION, XENOCIDE, THE FEVERED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 192012
 

For me, where I’m currently located, Friday has barely begun, but it has already brought a flood tide of news and music that I think are worth sharing. So much, in fact, that the only way I can squeeze it all into a single post is to cut my own verbosity to a trickle. This is painful, of course, because it goes against the grain. But I will do my best to be brief.

MORS PRINCIPIUM EST

In late July, I posted a bunch of news about this excellent Finnish band, which included the fact that they were finally recording a new album after many long years following the release of 2007′s Liberation = Termination. And then in August, I learned the album’s title (…And Death Said Live), I found out it would be released this December (on AFM Records), I found the cover art (which you can see above), and I posted about all that news.

At that point I also learned from the band that the album will include guest appearances from shredders Ryan Knight of The Black Dahlia Murder and Jona Weinhofen of Bring Me the Horizon and I Killed the Prom Queen.

And today, finally, we have music from the album. Or to be more precise, Metal Injection has music from the album — a song named “Destroyer of All”. The song kills. Go HERE to listen, and then please come back and give us your reactions. Continue reading »

NOTHNEGAL VIDEO: “SINS OF OUR CREATION”

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 192012
 

July 4, 2010. That was the day I first wrote about Nothnegal. Looking back at that post I realize how damned wordy I was. And you know that as long-winded as I am, when I say something is wordy, I mean it goes on and on and on.  And on.

I was really pumped up about that band, in part because they were from The Republic of the Maldives and in part because the music on their debut EP (Antidote of Realism) was so fuckin’ good.  Since then, they recorded a debut album (Decadence), which was released by Season of Mist in January 2012. That album featured drums by Kevin Talley (Dååth) and keyboards by Marco Sneck (Kalmah).

Decadence took me somewhat by surprise, given what I was expecting after Antidote. The album is primarily mid-paced, heavy-chugging melodic death metal with significant use of Sneck’s keyboards to lend the whole affair a sci-fi aura. The biggest surprises were two tracks near the end of the album — “Sins of Creation” and “Singularity” — which replaced the raspy growls that accompanied the rest of the music with strong clean vocals (by Affan) that would have been right at home in a power metal band.

Today, the band released an official video for “Sins of Creation”. It’s animated, it’s science fiction, and I thought it was a blast to watch. And it reminded me that “Sins of Creation” is really not a bad song, and that because of my prejudices about vocals I didn’t really give it a fair chance when I heard the album the first time. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: INCANTATION, SLIDHR, AND DEER CROSSINGS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 182012
 

I’m a little off my game at the moment, out of town and with not much time to call my own, so our posts will be a little more sporadic than usual this week. But I wanted to throw a few items your way before the day ended, and they are as follows:

A calamitous new track from Incantation (U.S.), two intriguing new songs from Slidhr (Ireland), and your wtf? moment for the day straight from Fargo, North Dakota.

INCANTATION

I assume this band need no introduction, and therefore none will be provided. Their ninth studio album, Vanquish In Vengeance, is due for release on November 26 by Listenable Records. About 10 days ago I found out that the band had recorded a song for DECIBEL’s Flexi-Disc series and included that exciting news in a post despite the fact that the song hadn’t yet been released for streaming. Well, as of today, we can now hear it.

The song is ”Degeneration,” which originally appeared on the self-titled 1989 demo of John McEntee’s pre-Incantation band, Revenant. Incantation’s dynamic version of the track is completely devastating — disemboweling guitar grinding, ghoulish vocals, skull-smashing percussion, and a couple of guitar solos that are the equivalent of throwing open the door to a blast furnace. In other words, everything a death metal fanatic could want. Continue reading »

DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT: “WIDOWMAKER”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Oct 182012
 

Even after my first listen to Widowmaker all the way through — and it must be heard in that way — I began giving it my own subtitle: “The Descent of Man”. Charles Darwin may have claimed the title as his own 131 years ago, but the new concept album by Dragged Into Sunlight isn’t about the evolution of human mental faculties to a higher state. It’s more the reverse — an inexorable degradation into misery, and ultimately savagery.

For those of you who are familiar with the band’s debut album Hatred for Mankind (reviewed here), listening to Widowmaker is in most ways a very different experience. Though its release follows Hatred, it was recorded in three separate sessions between 2010 and 2012, with the band consciously creating a different kind of soundscape than the cataclysmic, corrosive, chaotic cacophony that suffused the debut release.

Though there are three long tracks on Widowmaker, they are numbered and nameless. Think of them as three sections of a single song, or perhaps as three movements in a symphony of doom. No one will jail you for listening to these tracks separately, but it’s clear that this gradual descent into the abyss was meant to be experienced as a unified whole, lasting more than 40 minutes. Continue reading »

INFANT ANNIHILATOR ANNIHILATES INFANTS, GANGNAM STYLE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 182012
 

Back in August I was roughly the 63 millionth person to jump on the “Gangnam Style” bandwagon by posting PSY’s video for the song here at our metal site, undoubtedly provoking a bunch of disgusted noises from the more KVLT readers in the audience.

More recently, I got on another bandwagon just as it was beginning to roll by featuring the ridiculously insane and ridiculously funny new video for “Decapitation Fornication” by a multinational collective who call themselves Infant Annihilator, undoubtedly provoking a bunch of new disgusted noises from the more KVLT readers in the audience.

And what should I see this morning but a YouTube clip of Infant Annihilator’s metal remix of “Gangnam Style”. I ask you, how could I resist? The answer is, I could not.

There have been other metal covers and remixes of this song; I included one of them in the original post about the song. But this one is my favorite. I mean, if you’re going to metallicize the song you might as well repeatedly fuck it really hard and throw in some explosive breakdowns, too.  Continue reading »

SIGHT UNSEEN: ENSLAVED, THE FAT DUKES OF FUCK, CASTLE, AND DEATH GRIPS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Oct 172012
 

Okay, I fuckin’ give up. I wasn’t bullshitting when I wrote in today’s first post that I was having to get on an airplane again. I also wasn’t bullshitting when I said that airports and airplanes make me cranky. That may seem spoiled, since lots of people have never see the inside of an airplane, or only rarely. But it’s just a fact: I have to fly a lot for my fuckin’ day job, and it’s not a thrill.

I do it so much that whenever I’m on a jet with wi-fi, I pay the freight for that, mainly so I can still pay attention to what’s happening in metal and keep NCS current. Which is what I did today. Only problem is that this is a long flight that passes over a whole lotta fuckin’ nothing, and the wi-fi is (a) intermittent, (b) slow, and (c) really fuckin’ slow. Which means it’s good enough that I can read things but not good enough for me to stream audio or video without constant stops and freezes.

I’ve been trying for the last hour to watch three brand new videos, with no luck. The flight has been really turbulent, too, and I feel like I’m gonna barf at any moment.

So I’m just going to assume these videos are good. Also, as you’ll see, there are reasons to believe they ARE good. But I’m mainly just takin’ that on faith and putting them on the site, sight unseen. Hope you like them. The music is from Enslaved, The Fat Dukes of Fuck, Castle, and Death Grips.

Also, I wanted to alert you to the fact that Wintersun’s forthcoming album Time I, is streaming in full HERE (thank you Fersas). Continue reading »

FIVE OF MY FAVOURITE . . .UNEXPECTED COVERS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Oct 172012
 

(UK-based NCS scribe Andy Synn makes an appearance with another five-fold list of “favourite” things.  Such wasteful use of vowels.)

I realise I’ve been off the grid for a bit now (though I am working on some reviews, a 30th edition of The Synn Report, and an awesome interview) so in between balancing all that, work pressures, and 2 bands, I thought I’d drop you another irreverent column on five of my favourite things.

 

BEFORE THE DAWN – BITTER END (PLACEBO COVER)

Such an odd choice, but one which works perfectly, taking the darkly gothic atmosphere of the original and replacing its more pop orientation with some heavy metal riffage and a meaty drumming backbone. The vocal interplay is also sublime, the predominant clean croons matched with a bullish, anguished growl from Tuomas Saukkonen. Continue reading »

DIE ANTWOORD, VOMITOR, AND GIVE ZOMBIES THE VOTE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  16 Responses »
Oct 172012
 

Hey dudes and dudettes, what up this fine morning? I’ll tell you what’s up with me: I’m fuckin’ groggy and worn out from jetting around the damn country for my fuckin’ day job over the last three days, and I’m about to go back out to the goddamn airport AGAIN after one night sleeping in my own bed.

I’m tired of standing in lines. I’m tired of the TSA workers sticking their fingers in my bunghole and giving me the shit eye, as if they knew I was a coke mule, which of course they don’t because they’re not gettin’ far enough up my asshole to know the truth. I’m tired of the screaming brats who seem drawn to my part of the fuckin’ planes like it was a big magnetic nursing tit. I’m tired of other people poaching on my personal blogging time like they expect me to actually work for my pay (what a fuckin’ quaint idea).

And mainly I’m just tired. Lack of sleep compounded by airport and airplane fuckery makes me grumpy, as you might have noticed. But at the moment I’m experiencing a rare moment of cheeriness because of the three items in this post. It will pass, and I’ll become a shitty presence for all the poor motherfuckers I encounter again today, but for now I’m passing on the cheer: A new music video from Die Antwoord (South Africa); new songs from Vomitor (Australia); and yet another new-ish video from Give Zombies the Vote (Zombieland).

DIE ANTWOORD

No, they’re not a metal band, but they’re zef. I don’t know exactly what zef means, but I think it means metal. They released a new music video yesterday for “Fatty Boom Boom” from their album TEN$ION on ZEF RECORDZ. I don’t even particularly enjoy rap music, but this video gave me some big smiles. And if you don’t like it, you can SUIG MY FOKKEN PIEL! Hier kom ek weer, like a lekker smack in da face, right after the jump. Vagina prawn. Continue reading »

“THE ONLY GOOD TORY”: AN UPDATE

 Metal News  13 Responses »
Oct 162012
 

Just over one week ago we released our first album of music in cooperation with GRIND TO DEATH. Entitled The Only Good Tory, it’s a compilation of 46 songs from 46 bands, focused on UK grind, powerviolence, harsh crust, and fastcore, and it showcases a tremendous array of head-wrecking talent.

Our goal for this release was and is solely to spread the music. Each of the bands agreed to contribute their tracks to this effort, and we in turn have made it available on the NCS Bandcamp page as a free download (along with accompanying tracklist and booklet of artwork for each song by Kex Whelan). In the 9 days since the Bandcamp page went live, we’ve had almost 5,000 song plays and nearly 500 downloads of the album.

We’re also having a limited edition run of cassette tapes made by the awesome DIY Noise, but we’re going to be giving those tapes away, too. Here at NCS, we’ll have a tapes to give away through a contest designed and judged by Special NCS Contest Consultant, Phro. More details about that will be forthcoming.

We’re also in discussions with a label who is interested in releasing the comp as a CD. Of course, we won’t do that without the consent of all bands, and in any case, no profit from any CD sales will go to us.

And last, but certainly not least, we have this one further update: We’ve added a bonus track to the Bandcamp album. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries