EYE OF SOLITUDE: “THE DECEIT”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, SHORT BUT SWEET  7 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

It’s not often that you get the chance to spend your money on solid metal and know that you’re making a charitable donation at the same time, but that’s the chance Eye of Solitude and Kaotoxin Records are giving you with the band’s brand new EP, The Deceit, which is now available for download at Bandcamp.

First, a word about the charity. All money raised by this EP before June 1s, 2013, will go directly to Asociaţia Nevăzătorilor din România — the Romanian Association for the Blind and Sight Impaired. The amount raised by June 1 and donated to the charity will be posted on the label’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/kaotoxinrecords.

Since Eye of Solitude is a UK-based band, you may wonder about the choice of charity, but the connection probably can be traced to the band’s vocalist Daniel Neagoe, who is Romanian born.

And now let’s get to the music. If the band’s name seems familiar, it may be because I’ve written about them before in connection with an official video for a song from their most recent album, Sui Caedere, which is available for streaming and purchase on Bandcamp here. The new EP includes three songs, totaling about 18 minutes of music. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 69)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  6 Responses »
Feb 032013
 

Well now, I have been shirking this feature, No. 68 having appeared on December 9 of last year. Mainly, I was preoccupied with our year-end Listmania series and the nearly endless roll-out of our 2012 “Most Infectious Song” installments. I’m finally finished with those projects and now trying to resume more usual NCS activities, including this series in which I collect images, videos, and news items that I think are metal despite the fact that they’re (usually) not musical.

In this installment: a stunning Rubik’s Cube solution, swans in Poland, People vs Winter, a dude cleaning a cobra pit, another dude playing keep-away with a polar bear, the world’s biggest fireworks display, and Bad Lip Reading takes on the NFL.

ITEM ONE

The human brain is capable of amazing things. Okay, well maybe not my brain, but some brains in some people. Take Mike Hughey’s brain, for example. Mike Hughey can take an 8x8x8 Rubik’s Cube, scramble the shit out of it, and then solve the puzzle blindfolded.

He was filmed while doing this. After scrambling the cube, he studied it for 40 minutes, visualizing and memorizing the steps necessary to solve the puzzle. Then he lowered the blindfold and spent 37 minutes executing the solution. The video is accelerated in the following YouTube clip, so you can see this in 7:39. It is utterly phenomenal. Hughey’s reaction after finishing is priceless. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC AND NEWS: CNOC AN TURSA, INTER ARMA, DEATHEMBER, AND HEAVEN SHALL BURN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Feb 032013
 

Yesterday I featured four new releases that appeared on Bandcamp on February 1. In this post I’ve collected more kickass new music that I discovered yesterday, plus a news item that excited me when I saw it.

CNOC AN TURSA

I wrote about this Scottish band last October after seeing the news that they’d been signed by Candlelight Records. In that earlier post I included all of the music from the band that I could then find, including a portion of a track called “The Lion of Scotland”. Sometime between then and now, that fragment disappeared from Soundcloud, but in the last couple of days it has reappeared in all its complete glory — and it is indeed a glorious song — along with the cover art for their Candlelight debut, The Giants of Auld.

I could hardly be more stoked for this debut, and “The Lion of Scotland” is an example of why I’m so eager to hear the album. It’s a genuinely soul-stirring song, with a skirling tremolo melody, an epic keyboard overlay, hard-charging rhythms, and passionate harsh vocals. If this doesn’t get your blood racing and your fist pumping, I’ll be surprised. Listen: Continue reading »

NEW BANDCAMP DEBUTS: THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR, SCORDATURA, FOUL BODY AUTOPSY, AND TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Feb 022013
 

Work and work-related travel cut short my blog time the last couple of days, but I’m now back in the land of the grey and soggy, also known as home. So, last night and this morning I plunged through the sphincter of the interhole in search of metal things I missed, and here’s some of what I found. These are all new albums or songs that have appeared on Bandcamp over the last day or two — and they all fuckin’ blew me away.

THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR

Our blog brother MaxR (Metal Bandcamp) contributed a line-up of doom favorites in our 2011 Listmania series, and it included a song from an album (“Essence of Nine”) by a Colorado band named The Flight of Sleipnir. I’m pretty sure that was the first time I’d heard of them, and I’m also pretty sure I failed to check out their music even after Max praised them in these words: “Perfectly executed black metal rasps, beautiful clean singing, folk harmonies and a doomy groove. So atmospheric and, yes, mellow.”

Fast forward to last night when NCS supporter Utmu sent me a message about a new album by this band — Saga — that’s due for release on February 15. The album art (above) is awful damned cool, and so is the song from Saga that began streaming on Bandcamp yesterday. Continue reading »

VENOM BANTER 1986

 Mosh Pit  24 Responses »
Feb 022013
 

On April 2, 1986, the seminal British metal band Venom played a gig in Trenton, New Jersey, at a punk club called City Gardens. Also on the bill: Black Flag, as then fronted by Henry Rollins.

Legend has it that a Black Flag roadie recorded the entire show — and then cut out all the songs in Venom’s set except a few nano-seconds of the guitar intros and outros, leaving behind the between-song stage banter of Venom’s frontman Chronos. The only part of that story that’s legend is who did it — because someone plainly did.

This 8+ minute bootleg montage of Chronos communing with the punks, metalheads, and assorted refugees from the law in the audience was subsequently released as a seven-inch “single” on the Ecstatic Peace label. Somehow, I’d never heard this until a good friend sent me a link to an mp3 of the single yesterday.

Let’s just say it’s not the finest example of metal stage banter, but let’s also say that it’s representative of the majority of metal stage banter, which is to say that it’s a caricature of itself. It’s dumb, meaningless, and unintentionally funny, but also kind of endearing. To quote one blogger who wrote about this in 2009, “There’s a lot of Spinal Tap in so much heavy metal…” Continue reading »

CHECK OUT SOILWORK’S NEW VIDEO FOR “RISE ABOVE THE SENTIMENT”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Feb 012013
 

“Once upon a time, in a rural town in Sweden, in a cozy little home that still has wooden furniture, a bearded aging man finds something from another time that awakens the beast of his own youth within him: a VHS cassette tape featuring the recording studio antics of his fellow countrymen SOILWORK.

“And hey, with streamed digital files, holographic projections, and possible direct electronic transmissions into the occipital lobe of the human brain… who won’t be aching for the simpler times of old?

“Check out the video for the soul-soaring SOILWORK track, “Rise Above The Sentiment,” on YouTube.”

And that’s part of the text I received not long from Nuclear Blast. And after the jump you can watch “Rise Above the Sentiment”, which comes from the band’s ninth studio album (a double-disc), The Living Infinite , which will be released in Europe on March 1, and in North America on March 5. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC: THE BIG FUCKIN WAVE EDITION

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  3 Responses »
Feb 012013
 

That’s a big fuckin’ wave, innit? If you look closely at the photo, you’ll see a puny human surfing down the face of that titanic wall of water.

That puny human is veteran surfer Garrett McNamara, and it appears that on Monday of this week (January 28) he broke the world record for the highest wave ever ridden. This one reportedly was 100 feet high (30.48m), though I have no idea how such things can be measured.

This took place off the coast of Nazaré in Portugal on Monday (January 28). It was reportedly 100ft high (30.48m), although that is subject to verification.

If the record is confirmed, McNamara will beat his own world record of 23.77 metres, which he achieved in 2011 at this same place after being towed into the wave by a jet ski.

And now for the real bonus — this event was captured on film, which you can see after the jump, long with film of McNamara setting the last record in 2011. But first, a few excuses by your humble editor. Continue reading »

SHARE THE WEALTH (OR, HOW I LEARNED THAT NU-METAL IS STILL A THRIVING GENRE)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
Feb 012013
 

(I’ve always liked Andy Synn. And the following article he wrote reminds me of one of the reasons why. Read it, and then find out more about how to vote for his band in the Bloodstock contest HERE.)

Ok, so, blatant plug time… you know I’m trying to get my band more exposure by applying for both the Bloodstock and Damnation festivals this year, right? Well the former involves bands submitting a live video, and the latter requires a simple vote on a facebook poll (here). The best thing about the Bloodstock angle so far, though, has been looking through the competition and seeing exactly what’s out there, and also the lengths to which people will go in order to make themselves stand out – or appear to be something that they’re not.

So, one evening recently myself and a few buddies/bros/mates got together to have a few beers and trawl through the different entries to the Bloodstock/Hobgoblin competition and see what we could find.

Some of it wasn’t pretty. There’s an awful, awful lot of generic retro-thrash out there, with songs generally just about ‘being metal’… which would seem pretty obvious, considering the music, right? There’s also a heck of a lot of nu-metal still out there, positively brimming with angst (as well as some rather disjointed, occasionally hilarious, pseudo-intellectual imagery).

There’s also quite a lot of metalcore pretending not to be metalcore (6th generation Killswitch riffs and over-processed clean vocals, by any other name, don’t smell any sweeter, I can tell you that). There’s even quite a few bands claiming to be metalcore when their sound is a tad too… light… even for that now-over-saturated genre.

BUT – it’s not all bad. I’ve gone through and picked out a few real stand-outs for you, that (at the risk of damaging our own chances of getting any further exposure or support) I’ve winnowed down to the few after the jump.

Let’s begin… Continue reading »

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