EYE-CATCHERS: REVOCATION AND MISERY SIGNALS

 Eye-Catchers, Metal News  5 Responses »
May 232013
 

Last night I was talking with my NCS comrade DGR about the fact that we never just copy and paste PR announcements, and about how uninteresting we find most announcements about new music that don’t include actual music. But of course there are exceptions, such as the two featured in this post, where the artwork alone is enough to catch my interest. Also, I’m more inclined to make exceptions when I’ve been out carousing late the night before and have awakened with a hammering hangover and all of today’s posts in various stages of incompletion. Hypothetically speaking, of course. I’m not saying I did that last night. But would you please speak very, very softly for the next few hours?

REVOCATION

I have no new music from Revocation to share with you, unless you count the few song fragments that appear in the studio videos I’m going to stick in this post. What I do have is the artwork (above) for their fourth album, which I really like. It’s by Orion Landau, who has created album covers for the likes of Dying Fetus, Obscura, and Nile.

I also have a release date: August 6 (via Relapse). I have the track list, but I don’t know who really cares about song titles. There are ten of them. I also have the album title: its name is Revocation.

And then I have those two studio videos that have been released so far, plus I have tour dates. Most of these dates are for the SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour. Come to think of it, I don’t think we’ve yet posted the SUMMER SLAUGHTER schedule, so that might be interesting to some of you. Mainly I’m writing about Revocation because I’m a big fan. Also, could you please try whispering? Continue reading »

METAL ON BANDCAMP: A NEW MILESTONE

 Metal News  22 Responses »
May 202013
 

Bandcamp has hit a new milestone. Thanks to our blog brother MaxR of Metal Bandcamp, we learned this morning that there are now 80 labels who have established beachheads on Bandcamp, with a total of 3,715 albums featured.

No one follows metal happenings on Bandcamp like MaxR. In addition to publishing reviews by a growing cadre of writers, he has methodically been assembling a list of all the metal labels who have availed themselves of the platform. Even better, he has compiled all the labels, alphabetically arranged, into a table with links that will take you to each label’s offerings. We’ve reproduced that table after the jump. This is a work in progress, and if you’d like to be notified by e-mail when he updates the listing of labels, go HERE and click the “Subscribe by email” link at the bottom

I suppose every true metal fan knows about Bandcamp by now, but I’ll say again what I’ve said many times before since discovering the existence of Bandcamp when it was in its infancy: Every band and every label needs to be there, at least for the purpose of streaming music, if not for selling it. Doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t have your music available elsewhere — it’s not an exclusive option. But it’s a very good one, and in this day and age, if you’re not giving fans a chance to hear your music before they buy, then you’re going to miss sales (wherever you sell your releases) and you’re inviting piracy even by some people who consider themselves scrupulous. Continue reading »

NOW AVAILABLE: “HEART OF GOLD: A TRIBUTE TO WOODS OF YPRES” (AND A NEW CANOPY RECORDING)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
May 182013
 

On December 22, 2011, David Gold died in an automobile collision near Barrie, Ontario, at the age of 31. With his death, so died Woods of Ypres — the doom/black metal band that he co-founded and of which he was the sole consistent member over the course of five albums and assorted other releases. But of course the music of Woods lives on in the lives of the band’s passionate fanbase.

As we reported last July, a woman named Steph LeDrew organized a musical tribute to Gold and Woods, recruiting a large number of bands to record covers of Woods songs. Yesterday, the tribute album — Heart of Gold: A Tribute To Woods of Ypres — was finally released and is now available for purchase on Bandcamp as a digital download for $10. At one point the project was soliciting PayPal donations to that gave donors the option of receiving a 2-CD physical version of the album, though the option to buy a physical format doesn’t currently appear on the Bandcamp page.

The album was mastered by Dan Swanö in Sweden and includes cover songs by 19 different bands or band members, including Novembers Doom, Panzerfaust, Amaranth, and members of Woods, Thrawsunblat, and Into Eternity. The full track list and album stream appear later in this post. But I first want to highlight one song in particular, because it was recorded by a long-time favorite of this site — Sweden’s Canopy. Continue reading »

FREE SHIT: A CENTURY MEDIA SAMPLER

 Free Shit, Metal News  4 Responses »
May 162013
 

I’m pretty sure this news came out earlier this week, but I completely missed it. Maybe you did, too.

The news is this: Century Media has compiled a free digital sampler of songs from the label’s artists. There are 40 bands represented on the compilation, with songs that are mostly from the bands’ latest albums. It’s a helluva list of bands, too — this sampler focuses on the more extreme end of the Century spectrum, with almost all the songs coming from bands who play varying flavors of death metal or black metal.

Rather than try to pick out a few representative bands, I’ll just include a screen shot of the entire list after the jump. Be aware that in order to get the free download, you have to give up an e-mail address, which will be used by Century Media and its partners to send you not only download info but also marketing messages (at least until you unsubscribe).

If you’re interested, go HERE to begin the download process. Continue reading »

YOU’LL NEVER GUESS HOW MUCH MONEY MISERY SIGNALS RAISED THROUGH THEIR INDIEGOGO CAMPAIGN

 Metal News  13 Responses »
May 142013
 

Last night, Monday, May 13, 2013, at 11:59 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time, the indiegogo.com crowd-funding campaign of Misery Signals — which they launched to help pay for the recoding of a new album — officially came to an end. Do you know how much money they raised? I’m not gonna make you guess. They raised $104,295. Let me repeat that: They raised

One Hundred Four Thousand Two Hundred Ninety-Five Dollars!!!

I shit you not.

They started the campaign on April 3, with a goal of $50,000. A pretty ambitious goal, one would think. Yet in less than 24 hours they had received pledges that exceeded half of that amount. On April 9 they met the $50,000 goal. In six fucking days.

But the campaign deadline was May 13, so they just let it keep going. You’d think people would have stopped contributing once the goal was met. Obviously not. Misery SIgnals doubled their money over the last month. Hell, I was watching the money counter at indiegogo last night and people were still contributing thousands of dollars more in the last few hours of the campaign.

How the hell did they pull this off? I’m so fucking glad you asked. Continue reading »

I’LL HAVE A SHOT AND A PERMANENT FUNERAL

 Metal News  10 Responses »
May 132013
 

Three Floyds bills itself as “a small Artisanal craft brewery located in Munster, IN just down the road from Chicago, IL”. I found out about them because they’ve brought out an ale named “Permanent Funeral”, after the song of the same name from Pig Destroyer’s Book Burner album. The ale’s description is as follows:

“The wolf inside this pale ale is trying to walk upright. This bright and aromatic beer was brewed with our friends in the band Pig Destroyer.”

It’s too bad Three Floyds is so far away from Seattle and so limited in its distribution, because they’d sell the shit out of this stuff here. I mean, even if it tasted like piss from a diabetic goat, lots of people would pay for the pleasure of ordering “a shot and a Permanent Funeral” at their local watering hole, and then drinking the brew from a bottle with a label like the one above.

Plus, it appears that Permanent Funeral will knock you on your ass. Continue reading »

CARCASS AND VADER IN THE NEWS

 Metal News  1 Response »
May 132013
 

If you’ve been following us for very long, then you know we’re not a “news aggregator” site, by which I mean sites that simply copy and paste the daily flood of metal press releases and other newsy blurbs. That’s a useful service, but there are tons of other places out there which do that. In the category of “breaking news”, we usually focus on new music or videos, and we’re selective about what what we recommend. But mainly it’s because we have a small staff of unpaid slaves who spend most of their time sleeping or fending off creditors.

But I’m making an exception for the two items in this post, because they involve Carcass and Vader. Honestly, there’s not much meaningful news in this post, but . . . to repeat . . . the news involves CARCASS AND VADER!!

The news about Carcass is two-fold: First, we now have the first official photo (above) of the new Carcass lineup, courtesy of Adrian Erlandsson of Murder Mile Studios: bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker, guitarist Bill Steer, new guitarist Ben Ash (Pig Iron, Desolation, Liquefied Skeleton) and new drummer Dan Wilding (Aborted, Trigger the Bloodshed). And second, Carcass signed a deal last Thursday (May 9) with an as-yet-undisclosed label for the release of their new album, Surgical Steel. Why have Carcass not disclosed the label? Fuck if I know. Continue reading »

A EUROBLAST 2013 UPDATE

 Metal News  3 Responses »
May 102013
 

That flyer up above is the latest one I could find for the 9th edition of the Euroblast Festival, scheduled to occur on October 11-13, 2013, in Cologne, Germany. However, it doesn’t show the most current listing of bands. For example, yesterday the Euroblast organizers announced that Arsis will also be appearing (hell yes), and Threat Signal, Aliases, and Der Weg einer Freiheit are also recent additions to the line-up.

And today brought the exciting announcement that Sweden’s Deathember and Russia’s Kartikeya have been selected to appear. We reviewed Deathember’s new album earlier this week (here), and of course Kartikeya has been a frequently mentioned NCS favorite for years.  Congrats to both of those bands.

And after the jump you can see the complete line-up as it now stands. Many more bands will be announced in the coming months, but the line-up already includes a large number of bands we really like around here. For more info, visit Euroblast’s web site or their Facebook page. Continue reading »

FREE SHIT FROM DEMONHOOD PRODUCTIONS: “ENLIGHTENED DARKNESS”

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
May 102013
 

Demonhood Productions, as I learned this morning, is a relatively new Norwegian label mainly focusing on underground black, death, and thrash metal. It was established in 2012 as “a cooperation” between Duplicate Records and Neseblod Records. As I also discovered only this morning, they released a compilation in March that’s a free download on Bandcamp. Entitled Enlightened Darkness, it consists of 14 tracks by 14 different bands.

I’m not familiar with all the bands on this comp, but the names I do know are impressive (and we’ve written about them here at NCS): Nekromantheon, Wormlust, and Cobolt 60. The compilation also includes a song by a Czech band named Cult of Fire that I’ve recently become interested in. In fact, that’s how I found this comp.

Last year Cult of Fire released their debut album Triumvirát through Demonhood; one of the tracks from that album is what’s included in this comp. However, Cult of Fire are now signed to the German label Iron Bonehead for release of their next album (which should be coming in 2013). This morning I saw that Iron Bonehead has started selling a Cult of Fire shirt called “Insane Dance of Kali”, and it’s so eye-catching that I promptly ordered it (here). This is what the shirt looks like (it comes in black and white): Continue reading »

TIM LAMBESIS PLEADS NOT GUILTY; BAIL SET; FURTHER DETAILS OF PROSECUTION’S CASE COME OUT

 Metal News  17 Responses »
May 092013
 

I actually don’t plan to follow this morbid story every step of the way, but based on our web traffic count, there’s clearly been a lot of interest by NCS readers in the arrest of As I Lay Dying’s Tim Lambesis for allegedly attempting to pay someone to murder his wife, Meggan Lambesis. So, we’ll follow the story at least a little bit further.

The latest news (as reported here) is that Tim Lambesis was arraigned in Vista Superior Court (San Diego) this afternoon on one criminal charge of solicitation of murder, which carries a maximum penalty of 9 years in prison. He entered a plea of not guilty and bail was set at $8 million — although the prosecutors asked for bail in the amount of $20 million.

The court further ordered that if Lambesis makes bail, he is to have no contact with his wife or their three children. The next court date will apparently be a preliminary hearing on July 10.

Further details about the hearing and the prosecution’s case emerged from live tweets by Angie Lee, a freelance reporter for San Diego’s KFMB-TV who was in attendance. According to her tweets, prosecutors told the court the following: Continue reading »

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