READY TO HAVE YOUR MIND BLOWN? WATCH THESE KIDS COVER TOOL’S “Forty Six & 2”

 Exceptions to the Rule  21 Responses »
Sep 282013
 

Holy fuckin’ shit on a stick!

I just came across a professionally filmed video of a bunch of teen-aged (and sub-teen) music students recording a cover of Tool’s song “Forty Six & 2” from their 1996 Ænima album. It’s ridiculously impressive. The vocalist and the drummer are especially amazing to watch and hear, but all of the kids really kick the hell out of this song.

Their instructor is a dude named Aaron O’Keefe who teaches at various music academies in Ohio. He’s obviously doing a fantastic job.

Yes, this is an Exception to the Rule round here, but one that’s completely justified in my humble opinion. If there’s ever a School of Rock sequel, Jack Black could save some time: Here’s your cast, dude.

Watch this next: Continue reading »

A SATURDAY SMORGASBORD: PHANTOM, FATES WARNING, DISPARAGED, CARPATHIAN FOREST, CARCASS, IMMOLATION

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Sep 282013
 

Happy Saturday motherfuckers (and of course I mean that in the nicest possible way). You haven’t asked what I’ve been listening to this morning, but I’m going to share that with you anyway, because sometimes people want things that they don’t know they want, and I feel sure this is such a time.

PHANTOM

In listening to the kind of albums I, Voidhanger releases, I’m used to getting my brain pureed in a blender or torn apart by black hurricanes of harrowing noise. But this morning I listened to the first song on a forthcoming I, Voidhanger album that takes a different turn. The album is Incendiary Serum by a Danish band named Phantom, and it’s scheduled for release before the end of this year. The opening track is “Ghostly”, and it is ghostly (and ghastly).

The aura of the music is still very black and bleak, still filled by vocal vomit, but it’s slow, crushing, and melodic. Powerful degraded riffs stomp and moan, twisted tremolo trills flit through the murk, minor-key piano melodies sing the songs of dead, homeless souls. You can headbang, and you can sink into a state of melancholy bereavement. This is an excellent melding of doom, death, and black metal. I, Voidhanger does not disappoint. Here’s “Ghostly”: Continue reading »

MINDGRINDER, VAURA, YEAR OF NO LIGHT

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Sep 272013
 

I know it seems like all we’ve done recently is collect new songs for you to hear, but there’s a good reason for this: All we’ve done recently is collect new songs for you to hear. In fact, we’re doing it again in this post, though we’ll be breaking the habit with a review or two later today. I’ve had more time than usual to go exploring, and I continue to find new music that get’s me pumped up. So, here we go again… and the bands, in alphabetical order, are MindGrinder (Norway), Vaura (U.S.), and Year of No Light (France).

MINDGRINDER

Until about two days ago I didn’t know MindGrinder existed, despite the fact that they produced two albums in 2004 and 2005. But in my defense, eight years is a long time between albums, and yes, they did release a new album on September 20 entitled Prop Agenda. I found out about it haphazardly, because the artist who created the cover (Eliran Kantor) is someone who I follow on Facebook and he happened to post the cover on his page.

That peaked my curiosity and I went in search of music and found two cuts from the album. The first one I heard is a cover of Emperor’s “I Am the Black Wizards”, on which the father of Emperor’s Samoth (who is a renowned blues artist in Norway) laid down the bass track. It blew my fuckin’ mind (you can tell I’m enthusiastic because I can’t help but use the F word when I get excited). Continue reading »

AMORAL: “IF NOT HERE, WHERE?”

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Sep 262013
 

Amoral are a Finnish band who I first heard about almost two years ago through my internet pen pal fireangel of the Night Elves. They released their fifth album, Beneath, in 2011, but they recently announced that they’ve completed a new one entitled Fallen Leaves & Dead Sparrows that will be released next year. Today they began streaming the first advance track from the album, a song called “If Not Here, Where?”

I gather from some info that fireangel sent me in the past that Amoral’s sound began to change following the addition of new vocalist Ari Koivunen before the recording of the fourth album — more melodic songs with big choruses, more clean vocals, a drift toward more “classic” metal, with even some glam overtones. You can probably guess why I didn’t dive right into Beneath. I did post a video for one of the songs from that album (“Wrapped In Barbwire”), because it was such a catchy motherfucker, with groovy riffs and a repeatable chorus — but the vocals still weren’t my kind of thing.

The new song, on the other hand, has hooked me — and not just because the clean vocals are balanced by jagged howls. At more than 9 minutes, it’s an ambitious undertaking, one that begins with an extended, primarily acoustic overture and Koivunen’s power-metal-styled tenor in the spotlight. For some reason, I thought I was about to hear a previously unreleased Journey or Yes song. And then the heavy riffing began, and the song grew progressively more interesting as it grew more  . . .progressive. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: DOOMRIDERS, MYGRAIN, TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, VULTURE INDUSTRIES

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Sep 252013
 


Within the last day or two, a number of new albums became available for streaming in full. Here are four that I think are worth checking out. In some cases I’ve been able to embed the streams here. In other cases, I’ll have to give you a link to hear it elsewhere. The bands are listed in alphabetical order; as you’ll discover, this selection includes a lot of Exceptions to the Rule around here (you know, the one about singing).

DOOMRIDERS

Doomriders, the Boston outfit fronted by Converge bassist Nate Newton, are releasing Grand Blood on October 15 via Deathwish Inc. It’s the follow-up to Darkness Comes Alive. Stream it at Pitchfork Advance here. Continue reading »

INQUISITION AND YOB

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Sep 172013
 

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to make headway in listening to entire new EPs and albums when one is continually being distracted by the premiere of individual songs, especially when so many are so good. And that’s been the way the last several days have gone. So here’s one more round-up, though I’m limiting this one to two songs.

INQUISITION

As previously reported, Season of Mist will be releasing the next album by Inquisition — Obscure Verses for the Multiverse — on October 29 in North America and October 25 elsewhere. In our last post about these developments, we included a collection of excerpts from all the songs on the album, but today brought the premiere of one complete track — “Darkness Flows Towards Unseen Horizons”.

There are good reasons why this duo are so highly regarded by lovers of extreme music, and this song proves the case again. It unleashes a flood of mounting intensity, yet couples the storm front of razored riffing and attacking percussion with ringing melodic chords and twisted soloing that provide the magnet for repeat listens. I still prefer the vocal roars to the cracked croaking, both of which are in evidence on this song, but this really is a thoroughly compelling song. Listen via the lyric video that comes next. Continue reading »

PYRE AND JESU

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 162013
 

Over the last 36 hours, your humble editor has been preoccupied with matters of both great importance and trivial insignificance, i.e., one being Seahawks football and the other being the demands of my paying job, and of course you know which is which, am I right? While these matters were distracting me from the glorious world of metal, it turns out that a flood of new things swept through the byways of the interhole. At this point, I don’t have time to collect everything of interest that I found, but I thought I’d at least throw two of them your way, selected in order to provide contrast. I’ll round up the rest for a post tomorrow morning.

PYRE

In June I reviewed (here) a new split by Pyre from St. Petersburg, Russia, and Entrapment from The Netherlands. That was only the second release by Pyre (it followed their 2012 EP, Ravenous Decease), but I was mighty impressed. And now I’m impressed all over again.

Today they released a new 2013 demo track called “We Came To Spill Thy Blood”. So far, I haven’t found that any of my own has been spilled, but the song certainly did accelerate its transit through my veins and arteries. The song reminds me of Wolverine Blues-era Entombed. It has that old school guitar tone, riffs galore, and rhythms that will get your head nodding and your feet moving. The vocals still remind me of LG Petrov. Continue reading »

ULVER: “MESSE I.X-VI.X”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  3 Responses »
Sep 122013
 

(Andy Synn reviews the new DIY album by Norway’s Ulver, with an album stream at the end of the review.)

Sometimes you have to wonder… why do Ulver albums still get reviewed on metal blogs? After all, the band themselves haven’t had a shred of “metal” in them for a long time.

Still, there’s a connection – and it’s more than just nostalgia or a sense of obligation due to the band’s “seminal” early years.

I know quite a lot of metal fans who love the strange, otherworldy music that Ulver make, but don’t really have anything else even vaguely similar in their music collections.

I think, ultimately, what draws people in, and what makes them stay with the band through all their digressions and deviations, is the boundless (stubborn, even) sense of artistic integrity they display. From poppy exuberance to dark psychedelia, they are a band who embrace, and revel in, contradiction. Each of their albums is simultaneously daring and difficult, challenging yet compelling, filled with a warmth of emotion yet governed by a calculating intellect.

And Messe I.X-VI.X is no different, in that regard. Continue reading »

A STUDY IN CONTRASTS: DESPERADOS IN VANCOUVER

 Concert Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Off Topic  24 Responses »
Sep 082013
 

We’re kind of light on the metal at NCS this weekend, and I’m about to explain why.

At the beginning of the summer my wife and I watched a documentary about a band. My wife, to put it mildly, is not into metal, so it was more a question of me going along on her ride than me being behind the wheel. The movie was History of the Eagles. In a word, it was superb.

I suppose it helps to like The Eagles’ music, which I do, but as a look at the rise and fall and resurrection of an unlikely group of very talented and collectively dysfunctional singers, songwriters, and musicians over a 40-year period, the movie is a fascinating story in its own right. (Did you know that The Eagles, Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975, which was released in 1976, was the best-selling album of the 20th Century in the U.S.?  True story.)

Right after we finished watching the movie, my wife asked if we could find out whether the Eagles were touring again — and of course, they are. Because she and I almost never hear live music together and because we haven’t taken even a short vacation together in quite a while, I splurged on a very pricey pair of tickets to an Eagles show in Vancouver, BC, which finally took place two nights ago on September 6, 2013. We hit the road from Seattle that morning.

With five hours of the indie rock and alt-folk favored by my wife blasting in the car on the round trip and a long evening of The Eagles in between, the closest I got to metal until arriving home again last night was driving past The Rickshaw venue on the way into downtown Vancouver. But I couldn’t help thinking about the contrasts with metal that the weekend revealed. Continue reading »

TODAY, ULVER SELF-RELEASED A NEW ALBUM

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Aug 182013
 

This is a surprising piece of news about a band who seem to specialize in surprises. Norway’s Ulver have changed their sound dramatically over the years, losing and gaining different groups of fans as their music has changed. Their latest album (their 12th) is named Messe I.X–VI.X. We’ve been expecting it, but the delivery came today in a way we didn’t expect. Here’s the full text of the message that appeared this morning on Ulver’s official site (and thank you BadWolf for the tip about this):

GLOOMY SUNDAY

Dear parish, as CDs are airborne – and leakage is imminent – we have decided to accelerate the digital release on our own platforms. We have held back as long as we can. Messe I.X–VI.X is now available from our webshop and Bandcamp. Just like that.

Again: we urge all conscientious music lovers to purchase digital from our platforms. WAV and all other formats at Bandcamp, 320 kbps MP3 via our webshop. Spotify and iTunes will follow in September, along with the release of Kscope’s standard editions.

Please share and spread the word. We hope you enjoy the somber sound of the wolves’ mass.

Ulver, Oslo, August 18 2013. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries