LORD MANTIS: “DEATH MASK”

 Album Reviews  25 Responses »
Mar 242014
 

(In this post NCS writer BadWolf reviews the new album by Chicago’s Lord Mantis – Death Mask).

There is something deeply wrong with the minds and hearts of Charlie Fell, Andrew Markuszewski, Bill Bumgardner, and Ken Sorceron, who together form Lord Mantis. I’m not sure how we didn’t know before—each of these musicians has made waves in the underground for quite some time as members of Nachtmystium, Avichi, Indian, and Abigail Williams, among other bands. But there’s just something deeply upsetting about the music they make together as Lord Mantis on their new album, Death Mask.

At this point, people probably know the Chicago-based black-sludge outfit best for their filthy taste in cover art. 2012’s critically-acclaimed album Pervertor featured a limbless, vaginal Jesus being gang-penetrated by some Lovecraftian tongue beasties. Death Mask might be even worse, sporting a sickly-green big-bushed hermaphrodite sewing a death mask (get it?) onto his/her own face. The image has already stirred some controversy (see this and this). For my money, I feel the artwork has about as much artistic depth of content as Lady Gaga getting covered in vomit. As a PR move, however, it’s adept, since Death Mask is such an inaccessible album that it requires some sort of outside hook to get listeners interested.

I have no idea what they’re putting in the waters of Lake Michigan, but it seems like this year has marked release after release of well and truly unsettling music, including Catharsis Absolute by Avichi (a solo project by Markuszewski), and From All Purity by Indian. Death Mask might be the best record of the bunch—it’s the one I’ve revisited most, at least, and it probably has the most hooks. But make no mistake, this is a difficult album to listen to. Almost the whole of the record comes coated in distortion and noise—industrial effects pepper the background, while several digital filters mask the blackened shriek vocals that populate Death Mask. Continue reading »

CONTRASTS: AMENRA AND ARSAFES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 242014
 

In this post I’ve paired a new video by an interesting director for “A Mon Âme” by the French band Amenra, and a brand new song named “Dog Eat God” by Russian multi-instrumentalist Arsafes. They’re a study in contrasts.

AMENRA

What happens when a fashion photographer whose work has adorned ad campaigns by the likes of Christian Dior, Jil Sander, and Raf Simons turns his hand to a metal video? You’re about to find out.

Belgian photographer Willy Vanderperre says he was inspired to approach the sludge/doom band Amenra (who are also Belgian) after seeing them play live in Paris. Vanderperre explains: “Growing up in the same area of Belgium as the band members—no one captures the vibe and the spirit of South West Flanders in music as they do. The sound transports me back there instantly…. For the video, I wanted to be almost on their skin, very close in a hypnotic way.” Continue reading »

2014: FIRST QUARTER RECOMMENDATIONS

 LISTMANIA 2014  39 Responses »
Mar 242014
 

(NCS supporter KevinP came up with an idea. Unlike his idea that the NY GIants will return to the Super Bowl in this decade, it’s a good one, so we’re going with it. Read on…)

If you are like me (shudder at that thought for a moment) then you get overwhelmed with all the new music that comes out over the course of the year.  Call it professional curiousity (I guess I feel special today calling myself a “pro”), but I’m always on the hunt for new bands and music (even from older bands). I feel some type of moral obligation to myself to hear as much as I possibly can.  But there’s simply not enough hours in the day and we all miss a plethora of releases.  Then at the end of the year I comb through endless “Best Of” lists trying to see what I missed and what I should check out.

So instead of waiting until the end of the year and trying to pack it all in at once (which inevitably causes even the best of us to overlook something by not giving it enough time), I propose after each quarter of the year (that’s every 3 months for those of you who failed math), we all list 5 releases that each of us recommends everyone check out (in the Comments section below if that wasn’t painfully obvious). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: THE SLOW DEATH, KHONSU, AETHERIAN, INFINITE DEATH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 232014
 

I put together one round-up of newly discovered music in today’s first post, but I have more discoveries I want to share with you.

THE SLOW DEATH

The Slow Death is an Australian doom band whom I first wrote about last fall. I paid attention to them at that time because I had learned that they would be joining with the awesome Majestic Downfall in a forthcoming split, to be released by Chaos Records (the cover art is above). Yesterday, the band released a complete version of their contribution to the split for streaming, and it’s mighty good.

“Criticality Incident I” begins slowly, drifting like clouds lit from above by the sun, casting deep shadows but edged by a radiant glow. Shimmering, chiming guitar melodies swirl around the power of stark drumbeats and booming bass notes, and effervescent soloing adds more light to the darkness. The singing varies between soaring clean expressions (Mandy Andresen) and ultra-deep guttural growls (Gregg Williamson). As the song progresses, it accelerates into a hammering drive. It’s a beautiful kind of sorrow. Continue reading »

PHYLLOMEDUSA: “PUDDLE DEPENDENCY”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Mar 232014
 

Here’s how this story goes:  Late yesterday afternoon I posted that photo up there on Facebook. I just wanted to make sure I had saved it because I think the sight of those two frogs fucking will always cheer me up on those rare occasions when I’m feeling down. And no sooner had I done that than Utmu suggested I needed to listen to Phyllomedusa while gazing upon the fucking frogs. So I did, and holy frog copulation, did it pulp my brain into pond scum. I wanted to turn it off, but I couldn’t.

The Phyllomedusa album I started cranking is called Puddle Dependency, and the cover is a photo of a frog. But of course it is. I’ll show it to you after the jump. I think the photo above would have been a better choice, but it’s a new pic (taken by Jana Miller) and wasn’t available when Puddle Dependency was released in January, so all is forgiven. Also, I don’t think these frogs belong to the right genus (more on that later).

There are 15 tracks on Puddle Dependency. Some are slower, some are faster, but otherwise they’re kind of hard to tell apart. However, they are all goddamn obliterating. Utmu told me the style of music is called “gorenoise”. I suggested that “frogrind” is better, especially since it’s one of the labels that Phyllomedusa uses. Utmu countered with “croakslam”, and that works, too. Be sure to pay attention to the song titles. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ACHREN, DEAD WORLD, VULTURE INDUSTRIES, ABHORRENT

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Mar 232014
 

To make your Sunday more metal I’ve collected here a handful of recommended songs and videos I discovered yesterday in my tramping through the interhole and a quick skimming of emails we recently received.

ACHREN

I first discovered Achren (from Glasgow, Scotland) in a June 2011 MISCELLANY post and have written about them a couple more times since then. The last time was more than a year ago, when I featured an song from their excellent debut album The Forgotten King in a round-up of metal from Scotland. I’ve now learned that they will soon be releasing a new EP entitled The White Death, and yesterday they began streaming one of its three tracks.

“The Eschatologist” is a memorable song, made all the more compelling by its powerful production quality. It reminded me immediately of the Norwegian black metal band Byfrost, blending a lot of thunder in the low end with a driving, dramatic guitar melody, which at times seems to draw upon the folk traditions of the band’s homeland. It’s a rocking, romping, slashing song that makes me anxious to hear the rest of the EP. Continue reading »

THE LATEST EXTORTION FROM FACEBOOK

 Off Topic  33 Responses »
Mar 222014
 

Aw hell, here we go again.

The writing has been on the Facebook wall for a while, and I’m not talking about your writing. I’m talking about the invisible writing of Facebook’s programmers, the increasingly demonic sigils inscribed into the backbone of the Facebook monolith that determine what its users will and won’t see in their news feeds.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written on the subject of how Facebook manipulates the selection of content that each user will see, but the story is a continuing one, with a consistent theme. This is just the latest chapter in the company’s efforts to leverage their gargantuan user base for the extraction of more advertising dollars — including money that Facebook Pages can spend to “promote” their posts so that more people will see them.

Honestly, on a day-to-day basis I don’t pay much attention to developments such as the one I’m about to describe. Other people watch Facebook’s moves like a hawk, because they can have a big effect on big bidness. I generally avoid the subject because it makes me queasy. But my fellow metal blogger Angry Metal Guy recently alerted me to a new piece of intelligence that confirmed some of my recent suspicions — and I’m writing about it because misery really does love company. Continue reading »

GAZE UPON THE COVER ART FOR VADER’S NEW ALBUM

 Metal News  8 Responses »
Mar 212014
 

There it is, the cover art for Vader’s next album (their 12th), Tibi Et Igni. My Latin is a little rusty, but I’m pretty sure Tibit Et Igni means “we will hammer the back of your head so hard your eyeballs will be ejected at the speed of sound and then we’ll start on your spine”.

The cover is damned cool. It was created is by veteran artist Joe Petagno, and the album was recorded by the Wieslawski brothers at Hertz Studio in Bialystok, Poland (we already mentioned them earlier today because they recorded Beneath’s new album). The album will be released on May 30 by Nuclear Blast. A two-song single will be released on April 18, both digitally and on 7″ vinyl.

Actually, I just checked, and my Latin is rustier than I thought. Tibit Et Igni apparently means “For You and Fire”. I think this is just another way of saying “we will burn you like dry kindling and scatter your ash to the four winds”. The track list is after the jump for those who are into that kind of thing (the bonus tracks look interesting). Here also is the band’s previously released quote about the new music: Continue reading »

DOOM, DOOM, DOOM, DEPRESSION AND BEING DOOMED

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Mar 212014
 

(In this post DGR takes us on a globe-hopping tour of recent releases that fall within the varied realms of doom.)

It’s hard to believe that it is already March. Of course, I say that every year because February feels like a bullshit month with its short amount of days, but still. Sacramento has decided to park its hot ass right at about eighty degrees for the next week or so, yet I still find myself feeling bleak and down. Maybe it was the promise of grey skies and rain, but I found myself surfing the web seeking out doom in all its various forms and today I’d like to share with you some of the discoveries that I made.

A couple were found by just wading through circles on Facebook and by the random band button on Metal-Archives, which is always an interesting experiment in its own right. You could probably do a whole feature on that some day with the right amount of time and investment. As I wrote this over the past week or so, I kept adding more and more bands that I was coming across and wanted to talk about, so I apologize if this gets a little too verbose, but I figured it might be worth it to concentrate a bunch of smaller reviews into a post than spread out a bunch of giant tomes on a group of really good EPs.

Plus, maybe we’ll expose people to multiple groups in this one post. On top of that, I’m going to add in a little mini-review of an artist we’ve covered before in one of our ‘free music’ updates — as they released a new album earlier this year and it’ll be a good change of pace from all the roiling waters and restless seas you’re about to get dragged through. If anything, the tempo change will probably be appreciated. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC FROM INSOMNIUM: “REVELATIONS”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 212014
 

All of us here at NO CLEAN SINGING are eager — eager, I tell you — for Shadows of the Dying Sun, which is the name of the new album by Finland’s Insomnium. Today we got the first example of music from the album via Terrorizer’s premiere of a new song named “Revelations”.

But guess what?  I can’t listen to it!  Because I am writing this from the middle of a meeting for my day job. I can type this without invoking suspicion from the other 7 people in the room with me. But strapping on the headphones and blasting this song would probably be too much. Probably.

So, please listen to it after the jump and let me know this: am I missing something awesome? I bet I am. I will know in about an hour… Continue reading »

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