AN A CAPELLA COVER OF FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE THAT WORKS BETTER THAN YOU COULD IMAGINE

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

Dan-Elias Brevig is a wonder. He has taken “The Violation”, by those Italian maestros of utterly bombastic death metal, Fleshgod Apocalypse, and created a completely a cappela cover of the song in a YouTube video. And by “a capella”, I mean that he has not only recorded the growls and falsetto cleans from the song, he has also used his voice to mimic the song’s instrumental arrangements.

Think about the original for a moment, and ponder what this would entail. After you’ve stopped shaking your head and going “No Way!”, move past the jump and see/hear for yourselves. Mr. Brevig calls it a parody, but it’s pretty damned impressive.

(Dan-Elias Brevig is from the vicinity of Oslo, Norway; he has a band named Immetic (whose music may be found here); and his Facebook page is at this location. To give you another example of his pipes in action, I’ve included an Immetic song after the video; it’s partially an exception to our rule, but I’m digging it — and it sort of helps explain his affinity for Fleshgod Apocalypse.) Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HANGING GARDEN, DRUG HONKEY, VALLENFYRE, VETUR

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  29 Responses »
Jan 212014
 

I’ve been in a state of Seahawks-inspired delirium since Sunday morning. Apart from my own ridiculous heights of excitement, the city I call home as been completely engulfed in a similar type of out-of-body experience. Everyone wants to talk about Sunday’s win and the impending Super Bowl trip, even the people who are still trying to figure out how many innings it takes to complete a football game. You can’t listen to radio or watch any kind of sports-related TV without being engulfed in Seahawks talk (although much of it has consisted of uninformed yammering about Richard Sherman). Some of you have probably found yourselves in a similar environment in past years, but it hasn’t happened here in Seattle in a long, long time.

One result of all this is that I’m way behind on my usual search for metal news and new metal. This morning I did tear myself away from Seahawks mania long enough to check out a few things and put this post together.

HANGING GARDEN

If you haven’t heard the 2013 EP by Finland’s Hanging Garden, stop wasting time and go find it. I don’t want to have to tell you twice. I Was A Soldier (Lifeforce records) is worth your 15 minutes, and all the other minutes you’ll spend with it after the first listen. To give you some evidence of why the EP is so worthwhile, allow me to show you a video that premiered today for its final track, “Will You Share This Ending With Me?” Continue reading »

KATATONIA: “DETHRONED AND UNCROWNED”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  3 Responses »
Jan 112014
 

(DGR catches up with another album from 2013, Katatonia’s Dethroned and Uncrowned.)

We’re still running around here at NoCleanSinging like chickens with our heads cut off, the whole date-rolling-over thing and the idea of the year restarting still generally blowing our minds. It’s a constant thing, as we usually get used to the idea of a month happening again along about the July timeframe. We’re also still extending our looking glass into 2013, trying to talk about discs we either never got around to or, in the case of most of my upcoming ones, discs I had intended to review and have listened to a lot and just never got the chance to write about.

The beginning of the year usually has about a week-long lull where you have the ability to catch up before the new 2014 releases start to stack up, though the groups who have started to put out new releases on January 1st have really taken to shooting that idea in the foot. Such is the case with Katatonia’s 2013 re-imagining of their 2012 release Dead End Kings known as Dethroned and Uncrowned. It’s an album that I have listened to a ton, in both of its forms, and with this brief respite at the beginning of the year we finally have time to sit down and chat about it. Continue reading »

MUTOID MAN: “HELIUM HEAD”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  10 Responses »
Jan 102014
 

(Guest writer Leperkahn reviews the new EP by Mutoid Man.)

2013 was the year where I finally came to accept the EP. In years past, I had been a bit of a quantity guy with music: I found it hard to pull out my hard-foraged earned cash to buy less than an album’s worth of music. However, extremely strong EP (and shorter) efforts from Black Crown Initiate, Bolzer, Obliterations, and Exmortus, among others, luckily broke that habit, as I now would easily go for 20 minutes of great music over an hour of decent stuff.

I say this because, had I not kicked that habit, I might never have listened to Mutoid Man’s new EP, Helium Head.

Granted, there were some very strong reasons unrelated to length that spurred me to press play; namely, that this is a “supergroup” featuring Ben Koller of Converge and Stephen Brodsky of Cave In in its ranks. Also, that cover art is pretty alluring.

Thus, I did indeed press play, especially now that the release is Bandcamp-able. Turns out, I should have done this about a month ago when this was released. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SÓLSTAFIR, SHINING, SHITFUCKER — AND WILDERNESSKING

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jan 082014
 

I noticed a lot of new things yesterday. A few of them are collected in this post — an alliterative line-up of new videos and/or songs from Sólstafir (Iceland), Shining (Norway), and Shitfucker (Detroit), plus some welcome news from Wildernessking (South Africa).

SÓLSTAFIR

Yesterday, I spied not one, but three new things from one of our site’s favorite bands, Iceland’s Sólstafir. The first is a new song that appears on a forthcoming 7″ split with another Icelandic band named Legend.  For this split, each of the bands has covered a song by the other. In Sólstafir’s case, the song is Legend’s “Runaway Train”, the original of which you can find here.

I was hooked from the first compulsive drumbeats and darting guitar notes. From there, Addi Tryggvason adds his gritty vocals to what becomes a dark, urgent, hard-rocking take on the original, enhanced by keyboards and an unexpected chant in the mid-section. Damned catchy. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: HAIL SPIRIT NOIR, CULTED, TRENCHROT, THRALL

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  12 Responses »
Dec 282013
 

Between the time I’ve spent with family and friends over the holidays and pushing out the biggest year-end LISTMANIA series our site has ever published, I’ve been constricted in my ability to listen to new songs and forthcoming releases. But I keep lists. I keep lists like a hoarder of names. Never mind that actually making it through the lists is a frail hope, given that they keep growing, and growing, and growing…

But yesterday, I made a small dent in them and came away with four songs I’m really high on. Two of them are new tracks by bands whose past work I’ve admired, and two of them come from bands who I’d never heard before. Musically, the four songs have very little in common, other than the fact that they are all winners — and they all have darkness in their souls.

HAIL SPIRIT NOIR

Hail Spirit Noir’s first album, Pneuma (reviewed here), was unlike anything else I heard in 2012. It was exceedingly strange and yet brilliant, a splicing together of black metal, 60′s flower-power pop psychedelics, 70′s prog rock, 80′s New Wave dance beats, melodic doom, and even cool jazz. Each song was distinctively different from, though related to, the others, like cousins on a gnarled family tree. Continue reading »

INNER MISSING: “PERJURY”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  8 Responses »
Dec 232013
 

(DGR felt compelled to review the new album by a Russian group named Inner Missing before this fine year draws to a close. Approach this with an open mind, won’t you?)

I still haven’t written my top list. I know the site is in the midst of Listmania, but there are still albums that came out this year that I feel like we owe something to. This is always the case at the end of the year, though. A million discs come out and we swear up and down we’re going to get to them, but we never do, for whatever reason. And thusly, we find ourselves playing catch up, or in my case discovering shit that came out way earlier this year that I really enjoy and want to share with you fine folks. Such is the case with Perjury, the 2013 self-released disc by St. Petersburg, Russia-based group Inner Missing.

Somehow, the band’s video for the song “The Sea Of Grey” wound up in our staff discussion space, and I really took a shining to it. I know everyone else reacted pretty strongly to it, but for some reason I was drawn to this band’s style. Maybe it is the whole underdog nature of it all: a Russian group who take themselves very seriously put out a disc that is incredibly goth, so much so that all the tropes of that style of music are identifiable to a ‘T’ from the get-go. For some reason, I found it so goddamn endearing that the group has always been on the back of my mind, and only now have I found myself determined to review this album.

So, for a change of pace and something a little different from the usual No Clean Singing slate of madness, I give you Inner Missing’s Perjury. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: NOCTURNAL, EGO DEPTHS, FATES WARNING, UNIVERSE217

 Exceptions to the Rule, Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Dec 182013
 

Collected in this post are a handful of new songs (and three new videos) that I heard and saw last night. There’s a little bit of everything in here, culled from a lot of other things I found in my rambling through the interhole. Two of the new things are exceptions to our rule, and two involve female vocalists. Hope you like all of this diverse music as much as I did.

NOCTURNAL

Nocturnal (pictured above) are a German band who came to life around 2000 “out of the ashes of Bestial Desecration”, dedicated to churning out teutonic thrash in homage to bands such as Destruction and Sodom. Yesterday they released a new video for a song named “Rising Demons”, which will appear on the band’s forthcoming album Storming Evil — their first in almost four years. It will be released by High Roller Records on February 28, 2014.

The song is a hell of a lot of evil-sounding fun — with whirling dervish riffs, a straightforward but nonetheless compulsive drumbeat, and Tyrannizer’s blackened howling vocals, which sound like a wildcat with esophageal cancer. The DIY video is also fun — B-movie clips interspersed with band performance clips, all in B&W of course. So strap on your bullet belt and spiked gauntlets and check out this thrashing unholiness: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: RED FANG, CARCASS, CHROME DIVISION, COLISEUM, AWAKENING SUN, ACHERON

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Dec 162013
 

For various reasons, including a long vacation, a buttload of work and work-related travel that confronted me in my day job upon returning from said vacation, and the dedication of space to our ongoing year-end LISTMANIA series, I’ve not been doing a very good job of spreading the word about new music and videos. Much new music and videos of interest have been accumulating. I’m collecting five of the recent videos and one new song in this post. Many of them lean more toward hard rocking that the kind of extreme metaling I usually feature in these round-ups, but it’s all good stuff.

RED FANG

Red Fang have consistently produced videos that are sure-fire chuckle fests. Their new one is no exception. Directed by Whitey McConnaughy, it’s for “Blood Like Cream”, one of the songs on the band’s latest album Whales and Leeches. It’s a twist on the zombie theme. These undead monsters want PBR instead of brains — but it is fuckin’ Portland, so that’s not a total shock.

Yeah, there’s clean singing in the song, but it’s crunchy, it rocks out, and it gets its hooks in your brain meat. Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: KAMPFAR, ALCEST, BABY METAL, TREPALIUM, ELEMENTAL NIGHTMARES

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Nov 292013
 

I may have mentioned that I’m on vacation through December 8. In addition to not writing much for NCS, I’ve also largely abandoned my daily routine of reading press releases and roaming the web looking for metal news and video or song premieres to feature on the site. However, today some of my NCS comrades gave me a slew of links that together make a tidy package of extremely diverse new things worth writing about.

KAMPFAR

First, Andy Synn wrote me as follows: “New Kampfar. Put that in your pipe and smoke it”. I tried to smoke it, but the song smoked me instead. It’s name is “Mylder”, and it will appear on this excellent Norwegian band’s new album Djevelmakt, due for release on January 21 via Indie Recordings.

If I could shriek “Helvete!” like Kampfar’s vocalist, I would, because that’s what I want to do when I listen to “Mylder”. It’s an electrifying, dynamic song — with plenty of reaping, roaring, stomping, and jabbing, but also infiltrated with an ethereal flute melody (among other unexpected elements). It’s a great combination of black metal savagery and memorable songwriting. Djevelmakt can’t come soon enough. Continue reading »

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