OBSERVATIONS OF THE DAY: GORGUTS, SHINING, MALIGNANT MONSTER, AND TALANAS

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Feb 052013
 

Allow me to share with you a collection of findings that I happened upon over the last 24 hours, most of it breaking news, some of it new music I think is worth spreading around like life-giving manure, and some of it videographic in nature. News first:

GORGUTS

Thanks to a tip from Vonlughlio, I discovered that Gorguts have signed with Season of Mist and will be releasing their extremely long-awaited fifth studio album later this year. Guitarist/vocalist Luc Lemay is quoted in a press release we received as follows:

“Everything from writing these new songs, traveling to NYC for rehearsals, developing a new friendship with John, Kevin and Colin, three of the most talented people I ever jammed with…everything from this project was beyond stimulating artistically.

From this experience was born a new GORGUTS record, a concept record which is going to last over an hour. An hour of epic, ambient, dark music which doesn’t compromise its Death Metal roots. As a composer, by exploring different kind of music, it was always my goal to integrate the same writing tools in Death Metal as if I would be writing a piece of chamber music for instance.

Well, I’m really eager to share this new record with you!” Continue reading »

VOIGHT KAMPFF: “MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Feb 052013
 

(Named for the polygraph-like test that Blade Runners use to determine whether a subject is a replicant, Voight Kampff are a French metal band who released their debut album late last year. In this post TheMadIsraeli gives it a brief review.)

I figured it was time to start digging into the depths of the internet and find really obscure shit.  Voight Kampff certainly caught me with the stupid, almost borderline shitty cover art you see above, labeling their music as “Progressive death/thrash metal” and boasting Blade Runner references out the ass.  To say the least, I was intrigued.

Contrary to the feeble but futuristic cover art, this album is a surprising old school kick in the teeth.  Voight Kampff are an odd band, playing a style that never hit it off with many people at its time, with a production that sounds straight out of the early 90’s or late 80’s.

You see, Voight Kampff appear to be huge fans of that really awkward phase around the 80’s going into the 90’s when thrash metal and death metal were coming to be almost the same thing.  You had the technicality of death metal, and that genre’s vocal stylings as well, but the speed and composition sense of thrash metal.  We saw this with bands like Pestilence on Testimony of the Ancients, Coroner on Mind Vortex, or Death on Human. Continue reading »

HOWLING: “A BEAST CONCEIVED”

 Album Reviews  11 Responses »
Feb 052013
 

I hear someone’s voice, sometimes I get a vivid mental picture of what they look like. I hear Vanessa Nocera’s vocals on the debut album by Howling, I see her clearly:  two stories tall, covered in dense black fur matted with blood, teeth made for tearing and chewing, claws made for gutting, blood-red eyes like windows into Hell.

I could be wrong. She might only be one story tall. But I’m pretty confident about the rest of it, at least when there’s a full moon.

Of course, there’s more to A Beast Conceived than Ms. Nocera’s inhuman vocals. She’s joined in Howling by Tony Proffer (Beyond Hell) on guitar and bass, and by drummer Elektrokutioner (Scaremaker, Wooden Stake, Beyond Hell, Encoffination, Father Befouled, etc.). Together, this trio are about as locked in to a shared vision of their music as you could possibly ask for. Together, they kick up a mad, thrashing, garage-band racket that pulls from more diverse genres than you might guess from what I’ve written so far — and what they’ve cooked up is fuckin’ brilliant.

Vanessa Nocera’s vocals require that the prefix “death” be added to any attempt at a genre description for A Beast Conceived. The word “horror” could be added because of the lyrical themes (not to mention the album art). But despite these markers, the music isn’t down-tuned, distortion-pedaled old-school death metal, or corpse-ridden death/doom, or goregrind, or even crusty d-beat. What it is, is something quite refreshing and insanely addictive. Continue reading »

REMNANTS OF 2012 THAT I HEARD IN 2013: HIVESMASHER, PERHAPS, DISKORD, II II II

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Free Shit  7 Responses »
Feb 052013
 

(Welcome back Louisville-based music writer Austin Weber with some thoughts about a diverse array of artists and albums from 2012 that he missed in his year-end list for NCS. Might be some new discoveries in here for you, too.)

Last year there were a few bands who released absolutely stunning albums that even I forgot about….until now.

Hivesmasher– Gutter Choir

Pig Destroyer’s Book Burner was rightly hyped as grind album of the year, and while I loved the hell out of it, Hivesmasher does something very different for me. Theirs is a grimey, nastier kind of grind, similar to the utterly hopeless filth Crowpath used to conjure up.

This is on a whole other level, better written and better played than most who reside within the hyper-focus on speed and punk atittude to cover up weak songwriting and poor instrumental capability. The tropes that now consume the genre have led me to try and find those groups who are trying to elevate grindcore instead of just being a barrage of (albeit awesome) sound.

Hivesmasher knocked me on my ass from the first track, which made abundantly clear how good these guys are. Continue reading »

MESHUGGAH: “PITCH BLACK” IS NOW OUT!

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  10 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

Last week when I caught wind that Scion AV would be releasing something new from Meshuggah tomorrow, I ventured a guess that it would be a new Meshuggah song, perhaps as part of a two-track EP, maybe with a live track included along with the new song. Well, it turns out I was right.

Yes, Pitch Black is a two-song release with a previously unreleased studio recording from 2003 — “Pitch Black” — and a live track. The second track is a previously unreleased, live version of “Dancers To A Discordant System” from obZen. Both songs are very much worth hearing and having.

What do these songs bring? Here’s a partial list: brute, bruising, chugs with that reliable Meshuggah tone; spacey cosmic ambience; near-spoken-word vocals, some of it positively robotic; a fidgety, squirming guitar solo in the title track; and funky bass lines as the foundation for what sure as fuck sound like sax solos (or a guitar tuned to sound identical to one) on both songs. Continue reading »

TOURISM: GHOST, IDES OF GEMINI, INTER ARMA, AND MUTILATION RITES

 Metal News  6 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

The purpose of this post is to provide info about two tours announced today. The first is Haze Over North America, headlined by the mysterious Swedes in Ghost, with support from a west coast trio known as Ides of Gemini. The month-long run will commence on April 18 in Denver and continue through May 18 in Pittsburgh.

I know all I need to know about Ghost. Though not an immediate fan, I grew to become one on the strength of two live shows I saw in Seattle. Yessir, I will definitely line up to see these guys again. I’m less sure about Ides of Gemini. They released a well-reviewed album of “ethereal doom” last year named Constantinople. I’m going to stream a Scion A/V-sponsored video after the jump and come back and watch it a bit later.

The second tour is certainly more clearly in my own personal wheelhouse. It’s a spring U.S. tour by Virginia’s Inter Arma (whose new album was the subject of an NCS feature just this past weekend) and NY-based Mutilation Rites — and I dig them, too..

I’m very happy to report that both tours will stop in Seattle. I know you were extremely curious about that since it’s an issue that directly affects my own happiness. Both schedules are after the jump . . . along with that video from the Constantinople album. Continue reading »

ABRIOSIS: “VESSEL”

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

(Below, TheMadIsraeli provides a review of the 2012 EP Vessel by Vancouver’s Abriosis.)

If I told you we had a band on our hands here who brought to the table the genre-bending, fusing duality of Revocation, the noisy, unorthodox, massive dissonance of Gojira, and a take on composition that is very Martyr-esque, I bet you’d shit yourself. In case no one paid attention to them when Islander mentioned them back in his “girl growlers” series (here), Abriosis is that band.

This EP, Vessel, chews up and spits out anything lesser in its path in its short 20-minute run time. Abriosis bring chaos with a contradictory sense of pin-point accuracy and focus that, quite frankly, blows a lot of their current peers out of the water. This is envelope-pushing stuff, even if the territory explored here is nothing terribly new, just an exciting combination of more modern approaches to brutality.

I highly recommend checking this out, and picking it up, whatever you need to do — and it’s easy since the band have just made the EP available for free download via this link. Continue reading »

INFECTIOUS SONGS OF 2008

 Exceptions to the Rule, Listmania  4 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

(In this post, Colorado-based writer and guest NCS contributor Mike Yost (whose own blog is here) shares a duo of infectious songs from 2008.)

I have a mind that refuses to be linear.  My spasmodic thoughts love to jump around from past to future to present.  I wanted to contribute to the blog on the most infectious songs of the year, but my head has recently been stuck in 2008.  So, I shall share with the throng of NoCleanSinging readers some of my favorite, most infectious metal songs of that year.  These pandemic tunes are sure to burrow themselves into your brain and inject slimy pulsating egg sacks which hatch a multitude of ravenous squirming larva that devour your mind from the inside out, eventually crawling out of your blood-soaked ears.

This is not an exhaustive list of contagious canticles, so stay tuned for more (as soon as my brain jumps to another year).  And be sure to turn those speakers up.  If the music isn’t knocking over skyscrapers, mountains, or deities, then it’s not loud enough.

____________________________________________________________________________

Continue reading »

OAK PANTHEON: “TOGETHER WE RIDE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

Holy hell, get a load of that badass artwork, would you? It’s by Wes Talbott and it accompanies a brand new free single from Minnesota-based Oak Pantheon that just premiered: “Together We Ride”.

Now, if you know the music of Oak Pantheon — and you damned well should — this track will throw you for a loop. It’s a medley of instrumental music that originally appeared in various installments of the Fire Emblem video game series and it was apparently also the series theme in Super Smash Bros. Melee. Not being a gamer, I had to look this up . . . and needless to say, I’d never heard the music before. I just took the Oak Pantheon version as it came.

As the name implies, it’s one hell of a galloping, trampling, epic romp. Yeah, all the cheese will immediately raise your cholesterol level, but I’m going back for seconds and thirds, mainly because I’m hooked on the guitar lead in this baby. And the galloping. I like the galloping, because music like this is as close as I’ll ever get to being on a charging horse with a pennant in one hand, a sword in the other, and the reins between my fuckin’ teeth. Continue reading »

THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT: A “TETRAGRAMMATON” PREVIEW

 Metal News  10 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

One of our number has heard The Monolith Deathcult’s new album, Tetragrammaton. Not wanting to say too much at this early stage of the ramp-up to its release, we present only this brief diagnostic analysis:

As food for the brain, The Monolith Deathcult’s new album Tetragrammaton is a well-balanced diet.

Most immediately noticeable, it includes a super-sized helping of nutrition for the cerebellum and the brain stem, those parts of the organ responsible for motor control and involuntary physical activity such as headbanging and fist-pumping. It’s loaded with industrial strength pneumatic grooves. It also includes breakdowns. We think they threw in the kitchen sink, too.

Tetragrammaton also feeds the deep limbic system, which plays a vital role in setting a person’s emotional state. The album contains moments of high drama and even darkness. It also provokes impulses of aggression, as in the desire to tear shit up. And it also tickles the funny bone.  That’s in the brain, isn’t it?  Two words: Optimus Prime. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries