AN ICELANDIC TAG TEAM: SOLSTAFIR AND DIMMA

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  16 Responses »
Feb 292012
 

I’m going to do to you what I did to myself last night, and I hope you get the same charge out of it that I got. It will take more time than it usually takes to zip through our posts here, but even if you choose to stay with me for only part of the journey, I think it will be worthwhile. It starts with Solstafir, it continues with Dimma, and it ends with both of them, in the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a live tag-team performance by two bands.

SOLSTAFIR

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve written about Sólstafir and their brilliant two-disk 2011 album, Svartir Sandir. They’re only a borderline metal band, but the borderland they occupy is a place I go to live in my mind quite often. There’s a song that ends the second disc called “Djákninn”. It’s a jam that’s nearly 11 minutes long, and I get lost in it every time I listen.

Listening is like getting behind the wheel of a car with some muscle under the hood, starting from a standing stillness and patiently shifting through the gears as it builds speed on an a climbing open road with some curves ahead. You hear the engine begin to purr, and as the throttle opens up in stages, it begins to roar, and then you’re really cruising like there’s no tomorrow, with the wind rushing through the open windows under a blue sky with not another care in the world. Continue reading »

TROLL BENDS FIR: “AVE CELIA!”

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Feb 262012
 

We’re masquerading as Also, Wolves in this post, except we won’t fool anyone because this won’t be as funny or as clever as Trollfiend’s prose. But as he would say, Behold the Trollfinger!

So, the music of Russia’s Troll Bends Fir won’t bubble your skin from the heat or cause you to pee out your bunghole from fright like much of what we feature here, but it might still capture you like a mink in a trap, particularly the song we’re eventually coming to in this post.

We featured the music of this band once before last October. Then, the music was humppa, which was in keeping both with the band’s own description of its music as “beer folk” and and also with the prominent appearance of “troll” in their name. Fun-loving, toe-tapping, humppa-folk-metal is a big smile, particularly if you’re beered-up to your eyebrows. But it turns out that Troll Bends Fir are more multi-faceted than I suspected.

The band’s latest album, a compilation released last September called Братья Во Хмелю (Brothers in Drinks), includes more than beer-folk-rock-metal. It includes a song called “Ave Celia!”, which is the only song on the album that doesn’t have a Russian title in the original. And “Ave Celia!” is the subject of a new official video that’s well worth watching . . . and hearing. Continue reading »

LACUNA COIL: “DARK ADRENALINE”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  8 Responses »
Feb 262012
 

(DemiGodRaven wrote this review. In a moment of weakness, I decided to post it.)

I have a sneaking suspicion that that is either the chemical compound for meth or caffeine. Either way, don’t trust it.

I understand this isn’t the most timely of reviews. I am easily distracted, much like a moth to a flame. Can you believe that I still have a review for Lamb of God’s Resolution in the works? Maybe I’ll save that one for when I have kids and the band have long since broken up.

Look, I know a lot of you guys have very high opinions of me and I appreciate it, I really do. I’m saying this up front because I know that a lot of you are going to turn on me over the course of this review, after some of the revelations about me that will come out. That’s fine, ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do’, and all that jazz. That said, the reason you’re staring at the cover art for the recently released Lacuna Coil disc, Dark Adrenaline, on our fine No Clean Singing site is because this album actually ain’t half bad.

I was one of the long-time fans who found themselves turning up their noses at the group’s previous release, Shallow Life, for focusing too much on being mainstream radio rock and just in general containing some really bad songwriting. Dark Adrenaline actually isn’t dramatically different, but the band have started to meld the darker, more bass-heavy sound they found on Karmacode with Shallow Life to create what is a pretty solid, guilty-pleasure rock disc. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: TETRAFUSION — “HORIZONS”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  3 Responses »
Feb 202012
 

(groverXIII rejoins us with a review of the new EP from Louisiana’s Tetrafusion.)

I’m about to drop some knowledge, son. ACT LIKE YA HEARD.

OK, actually, this post is about a sweet free EP from a band called Tetrafusion, because I can’t stop fucking listening to it. Post begins . . . now.

The band I am about to tell you about goes against the very nature of this site.

Tetrafusion, a progressive/technical rock/metal band hailing from Shreveport, Louisiana, have clean vocals. In fact, they have exclusively clean vocals, with nary a guttural, shout, shriek, scream, or grunt to be found.

So, you may be wondering, why am I posting about them here? Well, my friends, Horizons (Tetrafusion’s recently-released EP, available for free and produced by Jamie King of Between The Buried And Me/The Human Abstract/Last Chance To Reason/White Arms Of Athena production fame) is fucking amazing, plain and simple. Continue reading »

PARADISE LOST, NOW AND THEN

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Feb 142012
 

Huh, it still seems to be Valentine’s Day. And I found someone else who loves you, even if no one else does (besides your friends at NCS, of course, because we love all of you). The someone else is Paradise Lost. I discovered that they love you last night (thank you DemiGodRaven), and meant to tell you about it earlier today, and . . . just fucked up.  What a shock.

Here’s how much they love you: They and their label (Century Media) are giving away a song from their next release (their 13th studio album), Tragic Idol. The song is called “Crucify”, and you can listen to it after the jump and get the download link if you like it — but the free download is only for today.

I may have listened to Paradise Lost once long ago, but if I did, I’ve forgotten. I became interested more recently because of all the coverage we gave the UK death-doom band Vallenfyre last year. Vallenfyre was started by Greg Mackintosh, who is a key member of Paradise Lost. I liked the Vallenfyre album so much that I decided to give Paradise Lost a chance, even though I knew their music wouldn’t be my standard fare.

If you’re unfamiliar with the band, their music is melodic doom, with mainly clean singing. Much of it is slow. Of course, much of it is atmospherically bleak. But much of it is also beautiful, and it achieves that without sacrificing heaviness. Continue reading »

BORKNAGAR: “ROOTS”

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Feb 102012
 

Yesterday, I devoted three separate posts to three new songs by three different bands (not counting that track by some djent band named Meshuggah). Though I don’t plan to make a habit of this, I’m doing it again today, because yesterday and today I spotted three more songs worth sharing around. But unlike yesterday, today’s songs come from bands whose music I already know.

First up is Borknagar. We already splashed the eye-catching Marcelo Vasco cover art for their new album Urd (here), and now we have the first song from the album — “Roots”. Here’s what Borknagar mastermind Øystein G. Brun had to say about the song on the band’s official site:

“In regards to the depth, diversity and magnitude of our new album, “Urd”, it almost feels painful to slice off just a tiny bit of the bloody roast for the very first official “starter”. I would argue that each and every song on the new album stands on solid ground, but as usual with our music, the songs empower each other in the context of a full album.

That said, “Roots” is probably the song on the album that gives you the most representative impression of “Urd”. Musically it contains most of the elements that framework the musical universe of BORKNAGAR, and lyrically this song is gnawing on the very spine of our lyrical tradition. Hope you enjoy this song, the first tiny glimpse into our new opus. The beast is about to be unleashed…”

The song debuted yesterday exclusively on DECIBEL magazine’s on-line site and on Metal Hammer’s site. I’d recommend a visit to either place, because the song is worth hearing. Continue reading »

“RED TIDE RISING”: ORANGE GOBLIN DEBUT A NEW VIDEO

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Feb 062012
 

In my observation, nearly everyone who’s a serious fan of metal started out in one particular genre. But I think if you’re passionate about music, the more you listen, the more your interests will expand to encompass different styles. It’s not necessarily the product of boredom with where you started, though that might be part of it. Sometimes, it’s the listener who is changing, and a different kind of music begins to appeal to a different you. And sometimes as your sophistication and knowledge as a listener grow, you simply begin to understand and appreciate aspects of music that once held no interest.

In my case, I’m developing a new-found enjoyment of heavy-riffed stoner metal, a school of music that for me used to start and stop with Mastodon. Don’t get me wrong — it’s not going to replace more extreme forms of metal as my favorites, but I’d be lying if I denied that I’m having fun with it. Most recently, I’ve been having fun with the forthcoming album by long-running UK band Orange Goblin. It’s titled A Eulogy For the Damned, and Candlelight Records is scheduled to release it on February 14. I don’t know if we’ll review it here — I don’t feel particularly qualified to do it myself — but we’ll see.

However, it doesn’t take deep knowledge of the genre to spot a good video for a good song, and that’s what I did this morning. Orange Goblin and Candlelight just released a black-and-white, part-performance, part-animation video for a new track called “Red Tide Rising”. The song is a titanic motherfucker of a headbanging romp, with hooky melodies rising and falling, evil lyrics addressing the rise of Cthulhu, and instrumentation that does its level best to break necks. All those who worship at the church of the riff, come forth and lend your ears to this: Continue reading »

THY CATAFALQUE: “RENGETEG”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  20 Responses »
Jan 102012
 

I listened to a lot of albums in 2011, most of them new releases. I made mental lists and written lists of the ones I wanted to review, not because I think I’m particularly good at it, but because I want to do my part to help spread the word about music I admire and to support good bands so they’ll continue making music that makes me happy ( yes, it all comes down to selfishness in the end).

Of course, I fell down on the job miserably. I just didn’t get around to reviewing everything I wanted to praise in 2011. With the new year under way, I know that psychologically I’ll feel motivated to focus on new releases this year instead of trying to catch up on writing about 2011 albums.  But if I never write about another 2011 album, there’s one I cannot leave unheralded — Rengeteg.

If this 2011 album from Thy Catafalque consisted of the 9 minutes and 20 seconds of “Fekete mezők” and 51 minutes of mind-numbing elevator music, I would still be happy. “Fekete mezők” is one of my favorite songs of the year. But that song is just the beginning of an album’s worth of musical marvels — and no two of them are alike.

The songs flow into each other without pause, pulling the listener along with them as they cross a constantly changing landscape of sounds and emotions. The idea of crossing a landscape isn’t just the feeling conjured by the movement of the music. It also emerges from the lyrics.

The words are in Hungarian, but they’ve recently become available in English translations, and I found them interesting to read while listening to the album (for the umpteenth time). If there’s a concept I can discern, it is one about the unity of life and matter, about the connectedness of human beings to the Earth, and more than the Earth, to the star-spawned matter of which we and it are made. Continue reading »

STREAM THE NEW ALCEST ALBUM

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News  3 Responses »
Jan 042012
 

Alcest are from France. Many people I know like their music. In two days, their third album will be officially released by Prophecy Productions. Its title is Les Voyages de L’Âme. It’s now streaming in full on Prophecy Productions’ YouTube channel — which you can find via this link.

I’ve been listening to the album this morning for the first time. It’s beautiful, often hypnotic, one of those albums that pulls you in. You swim in it, it swims in you. Almost all the singing is clean, but Neige has a beautiful voice. Occasionally, he lets rip with black metal shrieking. When that happens, the intensity of the music also increases and the effect is galvanizing.

But mainly, this is just beautiful stuff. Not our usual fare around here, but I’d like to stream one of the new songs for you after the jump anyway. You can get lost . . . Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2011’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 3

 Exceptions to the Rule, MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011  6 Responses »
Dec 282011
 

This is Part 3 of our list of the most infectious extreme metal songs released this year. Each day until the list is finished, I’m posting two songs that made the cut. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the Introduction via this link. To see the selections that preceded this one, click the Category link on the right side of the page called MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011.

The first song in today’s feature comes from Deathstar Rising, the 2011 album released by Finland’s Before the Dawn. The band was started in 1999 by the prolific Tuomas Saukkonen (also a member of Black Sun Aeon, Dawn of Solace, and RoutaSielu), and that 2011 album is their sixth. Although I reviewed the band’s immediately preceding album, Soundscape of Silence (2008), I neglected Deathstar Rising on this site. Actually, I believe that qualifies as criminal neglect, because I enjoyed the fuck out of that record. As punishment, I’m hoping for probation instead of hard time.

Before the Dawn’s success comes down to two principal factors, which are fully displayed on Deathstar Rising: skilled song-writing that effectively combines hard-driving riffs and rhythms with dark, beautiful, hook-filled melodies; and, on the last four albums, an amazing one-two vocal punch delivered by Saukkonen (whose harsh delivery is killer) and bass player Lars Eikind, whose clean vocals are just as remarkable. (Yes, this band is one of our Exceptions To the Rule.) Continue reading »

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