SEEN AND HEARD: MERCENARY, DARK TRANQUILLITY, BALFOR, AND MAJESTIC DOWNFALL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
May 242013
 

I’ve collected here new music from three bands and older music from a fourth, all of which I came across yesterday. It’s all good, all worth hearing. So read on and listen up . . .

MERCENARY

Denmark’s Mercenary has finished work on their seventh album, Through Our Darkest Days, and it’s due for release on July 26 through NoiseArt Records. It follows an album — 2011’s Metamorphosis — that received a decidedly lukewarm reception from critics. Yesterday the band debuted the new album’s title track, which I found out about via a tip from my NCS comrade TheMadIsraeli. His first impression? “It sounds like the Mercenary of 11 Dreams is back”.

I never heard that 2004 album, though I’ve certainly seen a lot of praise heaped upon it, so I can’t comment on how the new track compares to 11 Dreams. But I do think this new song is a good one, mixing Scandinavian riff chugs, a very catchy keyboard/guitar melody, and an extended guitar solo that’s quite nice, with vocals that are a mix of harsh howls and raspy cleans. As I listened, I was reminded of late-stage Soilwork. I’m curious what other people who know Mercenary’s previous music better than I do think of this. Continue reading »

BLOOD RED THRONE: “BLOOD RED THRONE”

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
May 232013
 

(Andy Synn reviews the new, self-titled album by Norway’s Blood Red Throne, which will be released May 25 by Sevared Records.)

I think even the members of Blood Red Throne would admit that their line-up over the years has been far from stable. Though core-member Daniel Olaisen (a/k/a Død) remains a consistent thread throughout their history, the band have by my count now had 4 vocalists, 3 guitarists (so only one change there, luckily), 2 bassists, and 5 drummers. That’s a lot of members.

Funny thing is, I don’t think the quality of their output has suffered in the slightest. There are albums I personally prefer, but you’d be hard pushed to argue that BRT have any weak links in their musical chain.

The group solidified a new permanent line-up in 2011, just after the recording of Brualitarian Regime, an album that featured the final recorded appearances of long-time vocalist Vald and original bassist Erlend Caspersen. However, although both Ivan Gujic (gutiars) and Emil Wiksten (drums) made their debuts on Brutalitarian Regime, new vocalist Yngve “Bolt” Christiansen and new bassist Ole Bent Madsen have, so far, only been introduced to the band’s fanbase via their appearances on the band’s many tour dates and live shows. So this is the first chance we’re all getting to hear the new iteration of the band as a recording entity, and to see what the newly redefined collective brings to the table. Continue reading »

CONVERGE RELEASE “POUND FOR POUND: THE WOLVERINE BLUES SESSIONS”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 232013
 

You may remember that last August Converge and Napalm Death released a split, both digitally and as a 7″ vinyl record. (If you missed that, it’s still available here.) Converge contributed two songs to the split, a song called “No Light Escapes” and a cover of Entombed’s masterful “Wolverine Blues”. The cover song included a multitude of guest vocals. It turns out that when Converge created the cover track, each of the guest vocalists recorded a full version of the song, which Converge then used to compile the final version included on the split.

Today, Converge released a digital EP entitled Pound For Pound: The Wolverine Blues Sessions, which includes the complete mixes of each guest vocalist’s recording (as well as Jacob Bannon’s and Nate Newton’s), presented as five unique versions of the song, to wit:

1. Wolverine Blues w/ Aaron Turner (Isis, Old Man Gloom, etc)
2. Wolverine Blues w/ Jacob Bannon (Converge, Wear Your Wounds)
3. Wolverine Blues w/ Kevin Baker (All Pigs Must Die, The Hope Conspiracy, etc)
4. Wolverine Blues w/ Nate Newton (Converge, Doomriders, Old Man Gloom, etc)
5. Wolverine Blues w / Tomas Lindberg (Disfear, At The Gates, etc) and Kurt (Converge, etc)

Check out a full stream of this unusual EP right after the jump. You can get it here.  Cool cover art, too. Continue reading »

CARCASS SIGNS TO NUCLEAR BLAST

 Metal News  3 Responses »
May 232013
 

In today’s first post I commented about the fact that we usually don’t post press releases, or much of anything else that doesn’t involve the release of actual music, as opposed to forecasts of music to come. One exception to that general rule, as happened in that first article, occurs when we find disclosures of eye-catching album art. We’re making another exception in this post — because it involves fuckin’ CARCASS!!!

The news is this: After weeks of hinting around, Carcass has revealed that they’ve signed with Nuclear Blast for the release of Surgical Steel, their first album in something like 18 years. We’ll have to wait until an unidentified date this fall to get our mitts on it, but since we’ve been waiting for 18 years, what’s a few more months?

As noted, there’s no music to be heard, yet, but we do have this statement about the new album by Nuclear Blast owner and founder Markus Staiger: “It is a perfect mixture of Heartwork and Necroticism with a massive production to boot. The album is without a doubt just as perfect and lethal as surgical steel itself, and exactly what both old and new fans have waited for eagerly all of these years!”

Be still my beating heart. Continue reading »

AUTOLATRY: “NATIVE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
May 232013
 

“American Black Metal” probably isn’t a valid genre label. There are too many variations in the music created by American bands who have been using, to greater or lesser degrees, the traditional elements of black metal. In fact, newer bands such as Castevet, Cormorant, deafheaven, Krallice, Nachtmystium, Oak Pantheon, Panopticon, VHÖL, and Woe probably have more differences in their approaches than they do common characteristics. In fact, I wouldn’t fight you if you argued that a few of those outfits I just mentioned shouldn’t be called black metal bands at all.

But despite the fact that no common set of traits makes it possible to anoint “American Black Metal” as a discrete genre, the term does suggest (at least to me) an approach to black metal that both pushes the boundaries associated with first- and second-wave Scandinavian bands and pulls inside those boundaries musical ideas from other metal genres, and sometimes from outside metal altogether. It’s that creative, genre-bending approach that makes bands such as those listed above so interesting.

And now I have another band whose name needs to be added to that list: Autolatry. To be clear, I don’t mean that this Connecticut group is just another example of a band who use the traditional tropes of black metal along with a lot of other musical influences. I mean they’re so damned good they deserve to be talked about in the same breath with those other excellent bands. Continue reading »

ANCIIENTS: “HEART OF OAK”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
May 232013
 

 (NCS contributor Tyler Lowery wrote this review of the new album by Vancouver’s Anciients.)

Sometimes happy accidents happen. There’s no rhyme in the chaos of the world at any given moment, but under the perfect circumstances, we sometimes happen to stumble upon things that are amazing. Such is the method by which I have come across Anciients. You see, this Vancouver troupe just happened to be added to a Lamb of God tour after Terror had to back out, and this tour just happened to be dropping by a city close enough to me to make attending worthwhile, and I happened to learn about the tour the day of the show. I won’t lie, I trucked it from Knoxville, TN to Chattanooga for Decapitated and Lamb of God, but when I got there and heard these guys rip into the crowd, I knew I was going to walk away with an album that night.

Anciients tread a fine middle ground between progressive metal and sludge / stoner rock. Now, when you first read that, the word progressive almost immediately makes you lose interest, right? Then you add messy riffing and stoner ramblings on top of that. What would you expect to come from that? It sounds like a cluster-fuck, right? However, these guys toe the line with expert measure. From album opener “Raise the Sun” to closer “For Lisa”, this band keep all the meandering intentional, in the way that Colombo would always act like a naïf until the suspects gave themselves away. By the way, if you got that reference, you, sir or madam, are old. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: REVOCATION AND MISERY SIGNALS

 Eye-Catchers, Metal News  5 Responses »
May 232013
 

Last night I was talking with my NCS comrade DGR about the fact that we never just copy and paste PR announcements, and about how uninteresting we find most announcements about new music that don’t include actual music. But of course there are exceptions, such as the two featured in this post, where the artwork alone is enough to catch my interest. Also, I’m more inclined to make exceptions when I’ve been out carousing late the night before and have awakened with a hammering hangover and all of today’s posts in various stages of incompletion. Hypothetically speaking, of course. I’m not saying I did that last night. But would you please speak very, very softly for the next few hours?

REVOCATION

I have no new music from Revocation to share with you, unless you count the few song fragments that appear in the studio videos I’m going to stick in this post. What I do have is the artwork (above) for their fourth album, which I really like. It’s by Orion Landau, who has created album covers for the likes of Dying Fetus, Obscura, and Nile.

I also have a release date: August 6 (via Relapse). I have the track list, but I don’t know who really cares about song titles. There are ten of them. I also have the album title: its name is Revocation.

And then I have those two studio videos that have been released so far, plus I have tour dates. Most of these dates are for the SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour. Come to think of it, I don’t think we’ve yet posted the SUMMER SLAUGHTER schedule, so that might be interesting to some of you. Mainly I’m writing about Revocation because I’m a big fan. Also, could you please try whispering? Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 74.5)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  14 Responses »
May 222013
 

While you’re waiting breathlessly for the next full installment of THAT’S METAL!, I have a couple of items I’d like to share, to make the pain of waiting somewhat less traumatic.

ITEM ONE

For my first item, I give you the mantis shrimp. Not long ago, The Oatmeal prepared a comic strip about the mantis shrimp that made the rounds on the interweb. It described facts about this creature that make a strong case for anointing it the MOST METAL THING ALIVE, including some of these (I sourced other facts included below from this article):

Our eyes have three types of color-receptive cones (green, blue, and red). Butterflies have five, enabling them not only to see two colors we don’t even have names for, but also a massive spectrum of color that our brains can’t process. The mantis shrimp has sixteen color-receptive cones.

The mantis shrimp is one of the most creatively violent creatures on earth. It has two hinged arms normally held under its head. In the “spearer” species, the arms end in an impaling spike, while the “smashers” wield crushing clubs. Continue reading »

SHOW REVIEW: THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN, THE FACELESS, ROYAL THUNDER, AND JOURNAL (Sacramento, May 18, 2013)

 Concert Reviews  9 Responses »
May 222013
 

(DGR bears witness to the May 18 performances in Sacramento of The Dillinger Escape Plan, The Faceless, Royal Thunder, and Journal.)

It’s been a bit of an odd concert season so far this year. I heaped tons of praise on the Sacramento music scene last year because it seemed like there was show after show, after show, hitting within the span of a few months, to the point that between seeing local bands and bigger acts I actually wound up doing something like seven shows in one month – which was fucking awesome. This year though, work has overtaken a lot of what I’ve been up to. The year has just devolved into an endless stream of overnighters on the job, which have insured that in the span of five months….I’ve seen a whopping three concerts.

This one in particular was very exciting because it meant I’d get to see The Dillinger Escape Plan again. I’d seen them once before with Mastodon, which was a very weird experience. That time it seemed like a lot of people were there because they wanted to hear that one song that Mastodon had on the radio, so something like Dillinger was going to sail right over folks’ heads. This time though, you had a crowd who really wanted to see them and were enthusiastic as hell about it — and no band can create a feedback loop of energy quite like Dillinger can.

Of course, there were other groups on the bill, and whilst I had no idea what I was in for with Royal Thunder outside of the basic description from their Facebook, I did want to see Journal (again) and The Faceless for the first time on this end. Continue reading »

UNDERDOGS IN THE UNDERGROUND: NOTABLE NEWCOMERS (Part 2)

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 222013
 

(This is the second part of a feature by NCS contributor Austin Weber that we began yesterday (here). Today he reviews new releases by Adfectus Exundant (South Carolina) and The Omega Man (Texas).)

Adfectus Exundant – Adfectus Redundant

Beyond Nile and Through The Eyes Of The Dead, not a lot of well known metal has come from the state of South Carolina. As a former decade-long resident of that state, that makes me sad. Fortunately, I recently heard of a fantastic group of forward-thinking metallers from Columbia, S.C., that are amazing. Their name — Adfectus Redundant — is a bit of a mouthful, to the point where I think it’s so uncatchy that it’s uniqueness returns it right back to being catchy. The etymology of their name comes from Latin and means “overflowing with emotion”. This is a pretty fitting moniker then, as their music is positively buzzing with lively emotions.

Overall, Adfectus Exundant are shred-heavy death metal, but are prone to frequently chopping and bookending their aggression with softer progressive moments and interesting jazz breaks that in some parts remind me of Psyopus. All of that is accompanied by an underlying wall of grooves hovering in the backround. Adfectus Redundant is a complex work that takes multiple listens just to take it all in. This is due to their skill in writing long songs that never lose your interest, music that carefully navigates through multiple movements with a reservoir of calm repreives, and softer clean sung passages. Continue reading »

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