HERESIARCH, NICK KELLER, AND DARK DESCENT

 Album Reviews, Eye-Catchers, SHORT BUT SWEET  11 Responses »
Aug 172012
 

I saw this stunning painting long before I knew what it was or that it had any connection to metal. Only yesterday did I find the connection. The artist is a New Zealander named Nick Keller, and the painting is the gatefold interior artwork for an EP named Hammer of Intransigence by a New Zealand band named Heresiarch. To see any even higher-res version, click on the image.

The cover art for the EP, also painted by Nick Keller, is also amazing (and you can again click on it to see a larger version):

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about Hammer of Intransigence — though I’ll be coming back to Nick Keller shortly. Continue reading »

METAL AND ART (AND AUROCH)

 Eye-Catchers, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Aug 062012
 

Here are some thoughts, one of which is well-established and the rest of which are just assertions based mainly on my own observations:

–  Across all genres of music, CD sales have declined drastically over the last decade (well-proven)

–  Production and sale of vinyl records are on the rise, at least in the world of metal

–  Album art (as opposed, for example, to photos of the artists) is more prevalent in metal than in any other genre of music

–  Being able to get a big physical piece of artwork is part of the reason why vinyl metal is on the rise

–  At least among metalheads, album art is still important, and is a significant part of what attracts listeners to new music, even when listeners are only buying digital downloads instead of physical formats

–  A band doesn’t need the financial backing of a label to get a cool piece of artwork for their album covers; just as there are a lot of talented but broke bands hungry to get their music spread around (and not expecting a big payday from it), there are a lot of talented artists trying to do the same thing

I really do think it’s undeniable that album art is a vital part of metal culture. How much it has to do with a band’s success in selling/distributing their music I really don’t know — maybe I just hope it’s true, because I love metal album art and I want it to continue. But my guess is that bands who neglect the importance of album art are hampering their success in attracting listeners, building their own identity/”mystique”, and amassing a fan following. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: DUBLIN DEATH PATROL

 Eye-Catchers, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jul 272012
 

I’m a big fan of Eliran Kantor’s artwork. The guy is just tremendously talented. And so I haunt his Facebook page to keep tabs on his new creations. This morning, I saw that he had uploaded the artwork above. It’s an homage to HP Lovecraft — a kind of Shoggoth / Shub-Niggurath/ Cthulhu hybrid. It’s the cover for an album by a band I’d never heard of called Dublin Death Patrol.

I assumed this was some new Irish metal band, but I was wrong. The “Dublin” in Dublin Death Patrol refers to the town of Dublin, California, population 46,000+, located about 25 miles east of Oakland. Many of the band’s 11 members are Dubliners. And yes, you read that right: 11 members.

But look who’s included in DPP’s membership: Chuck Billy (Testament), Steve “ZETRO” Souza (ex-Testament, ex-Exodus), Willy Lange (Rampage, Laaz Rockit), two of Chuck Billy’s brothers (Andy and Eddie), Steve Souza’s brother John, and a bunch of other East Bay ragers (Steve Robello, Greg Bustamante, Danny Cunningham, Troy Luccketta, and John Hartsinck). It’s definitely a “family and friends” kind of band. You get one guess as to what kind of metal they play.

All of these guys have apparently known each other since they were teenagers. They’ve recorded two albums. One of them, DDP4Life (2005), apparently had some kind of limited release on a label called Godfodder, but the second one — Death Sentence (2011) — has never been released. But as a result of some internet sleuthing after seeing that Eliran Kantor cover art, I discovered that Mascot Records will be releasing both of the DDP albums on August 13 (they’re taking pre-orders here). Continue reading »

PRETTY PICTURES

 Eye-Catchers, Metal News  9 Responses »
Jun 222012
 

Beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder. I suppose people in our community have as varied a set of tastes in artwork as the rest of society at large, but when it comes to album art in particular, we’re off in a world unto ourselves. What we find “beautiful” in album art tends to fall on the ugly side of things. I think that’s because we look for album art that represents the dissonant, frequently voracious, often bleak sound of the music.

But even within the realm of extreme metal album art, there’s good and bad. Today I came across a collection of new artwork for forthcoming albums that I’d put on the good end of the scale . . . plus some works in progress by a well-known metal artist for album covers that are in the making.

The first example is the one you see above. It’s the just-disclosed artwork for the next album by long-running Swedish death metal band Grave, who happen to be one of my perennial favorites. The next album will be their 10th and is titled Endless Procession of Souls. It’s due for release in Europe on August 27 by Century Media. The artwork is by Costin Chioreanu, who also created the art for Grave’s last two albums. If you know anything about Grave’s music, you’ll appreciate how perfectly appropriate this creation is for their style of music. Beautiful. Continue reading »

GREAT ALBUM – SHAME ABOUT THE ARTWORK

 Eye-Catchers  8 Responses »
Jun 212012
 

(Andy Synn gives us examples of reverse-Eye-Catchers.)

In between reviews (at the moment I have pieces on the new Vintersorg, Gojira, Ihsahn, and De Profundis in gestation) and work on future editions of The Synn Report (for which I have a vague outline of what bands I want to cover, and in what order), I’d like to drop in little columns on bits of metal culture tangentially connected with the music. It’s fun to do, and it gives me a bit of breathing space and a place to clear my head.

Now, while I have a long-running piece on metal lyrics and the art of writing them (and then setting them to music) in the works, I thought for now I’d do a short, irreverent piece on metal artwork.  More precisely, bad metal artwork.

Ok, so clearly I could have filled this entire list with bad black metal artwork… although similarly I could easily have filled it with bad death metal artwork (any number of covers featuring zombies, rape, or zombie rape would do) or bad thrash artwork (robots, tanks, robot-tanks, etc). But I’ve gone for a cross-genre approach to make things a little fairer, and to allow me to fit in some real stinkers.

All these examples have been chosen from my own collection, and I’ve selected a few pieces of artwork that have unfortunately been latched onto otherwise great albums. Not all of them are utterly terrible, but none of them do justice to the music contained within. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: HELCARAXË AND MANIC SCUM

 Eye-Catchers, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Jun 132012
 

As you know, I’m a sucker for cool album art. Long ago, I started an experiment, testing the hypothesis that if the album art is cool, the music will probably be cool, too. There’s absolutely no reason why the two should necessarily go together, but it just seemed that way to me. So, I started a series of NCS posts where I picked music to check out based solely on the album art. You can see the previous installments through the EYE-CATCHERS category link on the right side of this page.

I haven’t done one of these posts in ages, but decided to revive the series today with new music from two bands: Helcaraxë and Manic Scum.

HELCARAXË

I knew nothing about this New Jersey band until seeing the stupendous painted album art (above) for their forthcoming album (their third), Red Dragon. The artist is Alan Lathwell, who it turns out also did the awesome cover for the latest album from The Horde (check that HERE).

I didn’t find any definitive word about a release date, but I did find that Helcaraxë have recently uploaded their entire discography to Bandcamp, including a song-stream for four tracks off of Red Dragon — one of which (“Skin Changer”) features guest vocals by Mikael Stanne of Dark Tranquillity. So I listened to those four songs, and they support the EYE-CATCHERS hypothesis: This is a genuine bonanza. Continue reading »

YOUR MORNING TRIP THROUGH HELL AND BACK: ISRATHOUM, ENABLER, PUTRID PILE, AND JOHNNY WINTER

 Eye-Catchers, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
May 182012
 

I spent last evening in Tacoma witnessing a momentous event in the life of a friend and then celebrating it with her and her family. Had a blast, but between that and day-job shit, I didn’t make much headway on reviews I’ve been trying to write. I did have time to latch on to a few new songs that struck a chord, and they’re in this post. Also, on the way out of Tacoma back to Seattle, I saw something that sent me on a nostalgia trip — more on that at the end of this post. But first, I bring you Hell.

ISRATHOUM

I latched onto this band (or they latched on to me) almost entirely as a result of that eye-catching album cover you see above. It’s for their second full-length release, Black Poison and Shared Wounds, which is out now on Daemon Worship Productions (the same label/distro that’s handling the U.S. release of the new album by Iceland’s Svartidauði that I wrote about two days ago.

Israthoum was originally created in Portugal during the early 90’s, but its members relocated to The Netherlands around 1998. The three current members are, shall we say, devoted followers of The Left Hand Path. All three of them also interchangeably play bass and guitars on the album (one of them also plays the drums), and all three share vocal duties.

Daemon Worship have put two songs from the album on SoundCloud — “The Unravelling Traveller” and “The Presence, The Baying”. The music is scathing — definitely not for the faint of heart. But beneath the surface veil of blasting and rending there lurks an almost avant-garde layer of complexity that reminded me in some ways of Deathspell Omega, and I found the melodies crouching in the dark corners of my head long after the music stopped. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: PAOLO GIRARDI (plus TYRANTS BLOOD, WARPSTONE, and STAV)

 Eye-Catchers  19 Responses »
Apr 092012
 

I first came across Paolo Girardi’s name when writing about the Italian nuclear incinerator known as Blasphemophagher (here). Girardi painted the cover art for Blasphemophagher’s latest album, The III Command of the Absolute Chaos, which you can see above. He has painted many more album covers for metal bands, though it took a link from Rev. Will to one of Girardi’s most recent creations to remind me that I intended to explore his work in depth.

Girardi, who is also from Italy, doesn’t limit himself to album art for metal bands. He also paints landscapes, for example, such as these:

Girardi-Finnish landscape Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: PUTREVORE, RIBSPREADER, AND JUANJO CASTELLANO

 Eye-Catchers  13 Responses »
Apr 042012
 

Putrevore is a joint project of Sweden’s Rogga Johansson (Ribspreader, Paganizer, Bone Gnawer, Demiurg, The 11th Hour) and Spain’s Dave Rotten (Avulsed, Christ Denied). I found out about them only yesterday via a message from NCS reader and occasional writer KevinP (he and I share a mutual admiration for Rogga’s work, which I presume is the reason for his alert).

Kevin’s message concerned that album art you see up there. It will grace the cover of Putrevore’s second album, Macabre Kingdom, which is currently being mixed and is projected for a late 2012 release via Xtreem Music. According to a press release, the instrumental parts were recorded during January/February in Sweden with the help of Brynjar Helgetun on drums, who is another Ribspreader alum.

Macabre Kingdom will initially be released on 12-inch vinyl around June — several months before the effort is made available on CD.

The artwork for Macabre Kingdom was created by the Spanish artist Juanjo Castellano. His name was new to me, but after a bit of research I’ve learned that he is responsible for a slew of artwork for other metal bands (a pretty complete list can be found here). After the jump, I’ve collected some of the other art, plus a song from Putrevore’s first album, Morphed From Deadbreath (2008).

But while researching Sr. Castellano’s artwork, I discovered — and fuck me sideways for not knowing this before — that a new Ribspreader album was released earlier this year by Vic Records. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: IN MOURNING

 Eye-Catchers, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  22 Responses »
Mar 242012
 

THAT, my friends, is the cover art for the new (third) album by Sweden’s In Mourning, The Weight Of Oceans, which will be released by Spinefarm Records on April 18. The artwork is by none other than Kristian Whålin (Necrolord).

This is old news, since the album art and details about the album were released in late February — except I didn’t pick up on it until TheMadIsraeli started chatting with me about In Mourning earlier today on FB.

Necrolord has created so many stupendous metal album covers in his career, but this is definitely one of my favorites.  This excerpt from his bio at The Font of All Human Knowledge includes some info I didn’t know (and after the jump, I’ve got some music from The Weight of Oceans):

At the age of 17, Wåhlin formed Grotesque (as guitarist) with school friend Tomas Lindberg on vocals, Alf Svensson on guitar, and Tomas Eriksson on drums. The 1990 break-up of Grotesque would lead to the formation of At the Gates, who would be credited as instigators of the “Gothenburg Melodic death metal sound”. Wåhlin would collaborate with Lindberg and other At the Gates members a short time additionally in the death metal band Liers in Wait, and would go on to design the “Russian icon” cover-art of At the Gates’ cornerstone release, Slaughter of the Soul.

Dissection, who shared practice quarters with At the Gates, would display illustrations by Wåhlin on the cover of The Somberlain and also Storm of the Light’s Bane; the latter featuring the infamous scene of the “grim reaper horseman” in the middle of a snow-covered forest tundra. In the Nightside Eclipse, the debut of seminal Norwegian black metal band Emperor, would also be graced with his work on the cover. Wahlin would continue as an album artist for several other bands in the European death, black, doom, power and gothic metal collective throughout the 2000s.

Continue reading »

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