Islander

AN NCS PREMIERE: VARATHRON — “KABALISTIC INVOCATION OF SOLOMON”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Nov 042014
 

 

Untrodden Corridors of Hades is the new album by the long-running, influential Greek black metal band Varathron, their first since 2009’s Stygian Forces of Scorn. In September we featured the album’s first advance track, “Realm of Obscure”, and followed that (here) with the lyric video for “Arcane Conjuring”. Now we bring you the premiere of a third song — which is the album’s opening track — “Kabalistic Invocation of Solomon”.

In this new long song Varathron gradually build an atmosphere thick with the potent vapors of the occult, drawing the listener ever deeper into the mysteries of a dark ritual. At the beginning and again later, a choral chant echoes as if being sung within a catacomb, accompanied by the massive booming of drums and the slow rumbling of the bass. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MARKO PAVLOVIC (THE HOUSE OF CAPRICORN)

 Interviews  2 Responses »
Nov 042014
 

 

(About one week ago we premiered a song from an album by New Zealand’s House of Capricorn that has rapidly become one of my favorite records of this year, even though it might seem like an odd fit for a site with our name. Today, we’re lucky to have New Zealand-based metal writer and broadcaster Craig Hayes’ interview with the band’s impressive vocalist Marko Pavlovic.)

Over ten-thousand miles separate New Zealand’s harbingers of apocalyptic devilry, The House of Capricorn, from their new label, Finland-based Svart Records. Still, evil knows no boundaries, and the meeting of minds between Svart, one of the most captivating labels around, and The House of Capricorn, one of the most riveting entities in the ritualistic rock ‘n’ roll underground, makes for the perfect Mephistophelian pact.

On November 9th, Svart is releasing The House of Capricorn’s third full-length, Morning Star Rise. The album is one of the year’s best examples of profoundly wicked music wrapped in a black-hearted aesthetic. Drawing from the cauldron of gothic rock, black metal, and deathrock, the stench of hellfire and eternal damnation pervades all of Morning Star Rise. But it hasn’t always been that way for The House of Capricorn. Continue reading »

OBLITERATIONS: “POISON EVERYTHING”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 032014
 

 

(Leperkahn returns to NCS with this review of the latest release by Obliterations from Los Angeles.)

I just came off my first midterms week of college. As expected, this resulted in quite a bit of anger and stress, and a wish to blow off said stress both during and after the week. Basically, I was in dire need of something that would make me want to careen off of people, bumper-cars style, something to accompany the cathartic screams of rage and frustration that come with trying to understand that damn delta-epsilon proof. Luckily, that’s exactly when Obliterations came out with a new record, Poison Everything.

I nearly had a panic attack when I heard these guys’ first self-titled EP roughly a year ago. Their brand of ballsy hardcore punk was exactly the kind of thing I needed to blow off college app stress, with its self-professed mix of Black Sabbath and Black Flag. This time around – after throwing in one more EP in the interim – the band have tossed in just a touch of Motorhead, particularly on the “Ace of Spades”-like opening for “The One That Got Away” and the bluesy swagger of “Shame”. That said, this record is largely just an extension of the EPs before it, a collection of raucous two-minute explosions boiling over with cathartic rage and riffs that Greg Ginn wishes he wrote. Each track is merely another sonic punch in the face, with only the title track breaking up the feverish pace before “Shame” marks the album’s transition to a more oozing, slow-burning anger, as on “Ad Nauseum”, “Open Casket”, and closer “The Middle Of The End”. Continue reading »

A DISPATCH FROM NORWAY

 Uncategorized  5 Responses »
Nov 032014
 

(We welcome our guest Jeff from Life In the Vinyl Lane, who will be reporting on the Iceland Airwaves festival in the near future.)

This is Jeff from the Life in the Vinyl Lane blog, coming to you from the land of the midnight sun and black metal, Oslo, Norway. I’d asked Islander if I could send a dispatch from this year’s version of Iceland Airwaves, which is just around the corner, and while I was at it I figured I’d tell you a bit about what’s out there for metal fans who might be visiting Oslo, since we stopped off here prior to the festival.

Now, to be fair, at least 99% of the No Clean Singing readers are probably bigger and/or more knowledgeable metal fans than I am. Let’s get that out there right from the start. I came of age in the early 1980s, back when you couldn’t turn on MTV without seeing Quiet Riot and Mötley Crüe videos in regular rotation, before metal was ghettoized into “Headbangers Ball”. So while I discovered the genre in the 80s, I didn’t advance too much past there — the hardest stuff on my shelves are the classics like Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Slayer, and most of the bands featured on No Clean Singing are new to me, with the notable exception of Iceland’s Sólstafir. Maybe that makes me a tourist here. I don’t know.

Be that as it may, I knew that since we were spending a few days in Oslo prior to Iceland Airwaves this year, I owed it to myself to check out Norway’s black metal scene, and some quick research indicated that the one “must visit” stop on the trip was Neseblod Records. Continue reading »

SEXCREMENT: “SALT PETER”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Nov 032014
 

 

I discovered the Boston-based deviants in Sexcrement back in 2012, when they released their second album Sloppy Seconds. I sure as fuck did enjoy that album. I forgot how much I went on and on and on about it when I finally got around to writing a review until revisiting that tome earlier today. I’m not going to blather quite so incessantly about the subject of this post. I’m mainly going too let the music and the video speak for themselves.

And that’s what we have here — yet another music video directed and edited by underground filmmaker Victor Bonacore for a Sexcrement song. The last piece of perverted genius he created for Sexcrement was for the song “Trucker Bombed” off that Sloppy Seconds album. Now he’s made a new short film for a new Sexcrement song named “Salt Peter”, which appears on a brand new free Sexcrement EP entitled XXX Bargain Bin Vol. 2. I only found out that the EP had been released when I watched the video this morning, so I haven’t listened to it yet. You can be damned sure I will — but I didn’t want to delay in spreading around the video. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PSYCROPTIC, KHORS, GORELUST, PREY FOR NOTHING

 Metal News, Premieres  4 Responses »
Nov 032014
 

 

Happy fucking Monday. Here’s a quartet of recommended songs that I discovered over the last 24 hours, which I hope will prove a good way to help you start your new week.

PSYCROPTIC

As previously reported in these pages, Tasmania’s Psycroptic and Prosthetic Records have joined forces to bring about the release of the band’s new self-titled album worldwide next spring (EVP Recordings will be handling the release in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan). To begin paving the way for the album release, tomorrow (November 4) Prosthetic will release a digital single from the new album, a song named “Echoes To Come”. I’ve gotten to hear the song in advance, and I’m really liking it. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: INTO ORBIT — “CAVERNS”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Nov 022014
 

 

(New Zealand-based metal writer and broadcaster Craig Hayes brings us something very special — the premiere of an album-length video, preceded by the following introduction.)

New Zealand instrumental duo Into Orbit released their debut album, Caverns, to rave reviews at home earlier this year. The band’s guitarist Paul Stewart, and drummer Ian Moir, craft vast and dynamic soundscapes that combine post-metal and post-rock with elements of progressive, drone, and ambient-rock. Caverns featured both tranquil and thundering passages, and plenty of soaring six-string detonations and crashing percussion too, but what the album brought most of all was a sense of epic journeying.

Caverns conjured up imposing landscapes, took deep dives into microscopic worlds, and befitting Into Orbit’s moniker, launched into the wonders and mystery of galaxies overhead. Of course, it’s one thing to summon all of those visions via the mental imagery of the mind’s eye, but Into Orbit have gone one better and released a full-length video, covering the entirely of Caverns’ tracks. That’s 40-plus minutes of mesmerising optical and audio journeying, and No Clean Singing is proud to be streaming the debut of Caverns right here. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 91)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  10 Responses »
Nov 022014
 

 

Welcome to another edition of THAT’S METAL!, in which I collect images, videos, and occasional news items that I think are metal, even though they’re not metal music. Today I have eight items for you.

ITEM ONE

November 11 is Armistice Day in the UK, commemorating the end of hostilities on the Western Front during World War I — a war that sacrificed an entire generation of young men throughout Europe, with more than 9 million soldiers killed (as well as 7 million civilians). This year, Armistice Day is being remembered in London in a way that’s both visually spectacular and entirely appropriate to the slaughter that the armistice officially ended.

Beginning in July and steadily continuing into this month, red ceramic poppies have been placed on and around the Tower of London, with each poppy representing a British or Commonwealth soldier killed in World War I. When the last poppy is installed on November 11, there will be 888,246 of them. Continue reading »

A SAMHAIN HARVEST (Part 3): CRYPTICUS, ABORTED, SAILLE, TWIST ENDING

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Nov 012014
 

 

Ideally I would have posted this collection yesterday, to accompany the first two “Samhain Harvest” posts, but I take comfort in the fact that Samhain lasts until sunset today (November 1), even though most of the costumes will have already been retired for another year and some of you are now suffering from apocalyptic hangovers.

CRYPTICUS

Yesterday, just in time for Halloween, Patrick Bruss and Brynjar Helgetun, also known as Crypticus, released Horror Grind Mixtape #2 “Chains For Devils”. I wrote about two songs from this album when they debuted in August, but now we have the entire monstrosity.

On Bandcamp it’s organized into two tracks — “Chains For Devils” and, as a bonus, a cover of one of my all-time favorite Asphyx songs, “Scorbutics”. But “Chains For Devils” actually consists of nine parts, two of which feature a special guest appearances — Rogga Johansson (Paganizer, and many, many more) providing growls on “Strike the Iron Stake” and Stevo do Caixão (Impetigo, Twist Ending) providing shrieks and lyrics on “Among the Absurb”. Continue reading »

A SAMHAIN HARVEST (Part 2): PTAHIL, BLOODBATH, T.O.M.B.

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Oct 312014
 

The Font of All Human Knowledge tells us that Samhain “is a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter or the ‘darker half’ of the year” and is celebrated from sunset on October 31 to sunset on 1 November, about halfway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. It is a liminal time when spirits more easily enter our world, a time of divination rituals and the revisiting of souls of the dead.

In celebration of blessed Samhain I’ve harvested a collection of news and new musical offerings, a bounty large enough to warrant two posts, this being the second (this being the first).

PTAHIL

Just in time for Samhain, Indiana’s Ptahil have released an official video for the song “Don’t Drink From the Waters of Lethe” from their 2014 album Born Against, which is available on Bandcamp (here). The song is a fitting choice of this day and a blast to hear, beginning as an ominous processional and then erupting about halfway through into a conflagration of corrosive riffs, frenzied soloing, and pummeling drum beats, as the bestial vocals proclaim a warning. Continue reading »

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