THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT: A “TETRAGRAMMATON” PREVIEW

 Metal News  10 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

One of our number has heard The Monolith Deathcult’s new album, Tetragrammaton. Not wanting to say too much at this early stage of the ramp-up to its release, we present only this brief diagnostic analysis:

As food for the brain, The Monolith Deathcult’s new album Tetragrammaton is a well-balanced diet.

Most immediately noticeable, it includes a super-sized helping of nutrition for the cerebellum and the brain stem, those parts of the organ responsible for motor control and involuntary physical activity such as headbanging and fist-pumping. It’s loaded with industrial strength pneumatic grooves. It also includes breakdowns. We think they threw in the kitchen sink, too.

Tetragrammaton also feeds the deep limbic system, which plays a vital role in setting a person’s emotional state. The album contains moments of high drama and even darkness. It also provokes impulses of aggression, as in the desire to tear shit up. And it also tickles the funny bone.  That’s in the brain, isn’t it?  Two words: Optimus Prime. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC AND NEWS: CNOC AN TURSA, INTER ARMA, DEATHEMBER, AND HEAVEN SHALL BURN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Feb 032013
 

Yesterday I featured four new releases that appeared on Bandcamp on February 1. In this post I’ve collected more kickass new music that I discovered yesterday, plus a news item that excited me when I saw it.

CNOC AN TURSA

I wrote about this Scottish band last October after seeing the news that they’d been signed by Candlelight Records. In that earlier post I included all of the music from the band that I could then find, including a portion of a track called “The Lion of Scotland”. Sometime between then and now, that fragment disappeared from Soundcloud, but in the last couple of days it has reappeared in all its complete glory — and it is indeed a glorious song — along with the cover art for their Candlelight debut, The Giants of Auld.

I could hardly be more stoked for this debut, and “The Lion of Scotland” is an example of why I’m so eager to hear the album. It’s a genuinely soul-stirring song, with a skirling tremolo melody, an epic keyboard overlay, hard-charging rhythms, and passionate harsh vocals. If this doesn’t get your blood racing and your fist pumping, I’ll be surprised. Listen: Continue reading »

NEW BANDCAMP DEBUTS: THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR, SCORDATURA, FOUL BODY AUTOPSY, AND TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Feb 022013
 

Work and work-related travel cut short my blog time the last couple of days, but I’m now back in the land of the grey and soggy, also known as home. So, last night and this morning I plunged through the sphincter of the interhole in search of metal things I missed, and here’s some of what I found. These are all new albums or songs that have appeared on Bandcamp over the last day or two — and they all fuckin’ blew me away.

THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR

Our blog brother MaxR (Metal Bandcamp) contributed a line-up of doom favorites in our 2011 Listmania series, and it included a song from an album (“Essence of Nine”) by a Colorado band named The Flight of Sleipnir. I’m pretty sure that was the first time I’d heard of them, and I’m also pretty sure I failed to check out their music even after Max praised them in these words: “Perfectly executed black metal rasps, beautiful clean singing, folk harmonies and a doomy groove. So atmospheric and, yes, mellow.”

Fast forward to last night when NCS supporter Utmu sent me a message about a new album by this band — Saga — that’s due for release on February 15. The album art (above) is awful damned cool, and so is the song from Saga that began streaming on Bandcamp yesterday. Continue reading »

FRACTAL GATES ARE ABOUT TO OPEN AGAIN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jan 312013
 

So, this morning I was poking around a nice new India-based metal blog established by our supporter “Deckard Cain” (Metalspree), and what should I spy but the news that Fractal Gates have a new album coming and a new video streaming. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

I discovered this Parisian band 2 1/2 years ago through an insistent recommendation from one of this site’s original co-founders and was blown away by their 2009 album, Altered State of Consciousness, which I reviewed here. I was taken by everything about it, not only the music but also the artwork for each song and the sci-fi oriented concept behind the album — which is a tale of an apocalyptic future in which human minds escape into the depths of space, eventually to discover that they are not alone . . . and never have been.

The music itself was a kind of dark, brooding melodic death metal that at times reminded me of Insomnium, and I spun that album to death.

Thanks to Metalspree, I now know that the band have finished a new album — Beyond the Self — which will be released by Great Dane Records in February. It was mixed and mastered by the godly Dan Swanö with guest appearances by  Swanö himself (vocals) and by Septic Flesh guitarist Soritis. And based on a few samples, it appears there will once again be separate artwork for each song: Continue reading »

YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHO’S NOMINATED FOR ALBUM OF THE YEAR AT THIS YEAR’S REVOLVER GOLDEN GODS AWARD (THEY’RE FROM FRANCE)

 Metal News  19 Responses »
Jan 302013
 

Well, holy shit. I’m nearly speechless. Here we have an awards event that I’ve been making fun of as long as this blog has been in existence — the REVOLVER GOLDEN GODS AWARD (sub-titled “Fellating the Old Gods Since 2009”) — and this year they actually nominate a band for best album who I actually care about.

Seriously, I had just about decided that these awards weren’t even worth making fun of this year, so irrelevant have they become to the kind of metal that matters to me and most of this site’s readers. And then they go and nominate Gojira and L’Enfant Sauvage for Album of the Year. And that’s not all: Mario Duplantier is nominated for Best Drummer.

There are a few other nominations that involve bands I like — both Ghost and Kvelertak are nominated for Best New Talent; Dethklok picked up nominations for Best Guitarist (Brendon Small), Best Drummer (Gene Hoglan ), and Song of the Year (“I Ejaculate Fire”); Refused is nominated for Comeback of the Year, and Deftones got some nods too (including Album of the Year).  Continue reading »

KILLSWITCH ENGAGE DEBUT A NEW SONG — “IN DUE TIME” — ON KERRANG RADIO

 Metal News  6 Responses »
Jan 302013
 

I got into metal relatively late in my life. Not long after I started, metalcore began to emerge, and then melodic metalcore took off like a rocket, with me hitching a ride on the sound. Killswitch Engage were one of the bands firing the boosters, and their early albums became personal favorites. Time passed and the rocket’s ascent stalled, reaching no further heights and merely circling in a stable and eventually degrading orbit. My own interest waned considerably and I jumped off the ride, moving on to other (more extreme) things.

But, perhaps more from a feeling of nostalgia than anything else, I’ve been interested in hearing what the revamped Killswitch Engage have done with their new album Disarm the Descent, their first release since original vocalist Jesse Leach rejoined the line-up last year. The album is due for release by Roadrunner on April 2, 2013, with the first single — “In Due Time” — scheduled for release on February 5.

Yesterday that single debuted on Kerrang Radio (here), and it didn’t take long for a radio rip to appear on YouTube [UPDATE: KSE have now posted an official stream of the song in better quality sound]. There is nothing groundbreaking about the song. It follows the well-defined blueprint of the metalcore genre. Yet there is mediocre and bad metalcore and there is good metalcore, and this sounds pretty damned good to me (though I suspect the tug of nostalgia is having something to do with my reaction). Continue reading »

BANDCAMP UPDATES (AND A PHOTO OF PHRO WEARING THAT TOSHIHIRO EGAWA BABY METAL SHIRT)

 Metal News  10 Responses »
Jan 292013
 

I love Bandcamp. I know that’s not a revelation, since I’ve been ejaculating my love for Bandcamp at NCS for years. But I have new reasons to love Bandcamp.

For example, Kroda. One of my favorite black metal bands on Earth, whose 2011 album Schwarzpfad was one of my favorite releases of that year in any genre. As of today, Schwarzpfad is on Bandcamp and available for streaming and digital download — the first time this album has become available legally as a download anywhere. This is the second Kroda album that has appeared on Bandcamp, joining the excellent 2012 release, Live Under Hexenhammer: Heil Ragnarok! Here’s the link, and the stream:

http://kroda.bandcamp.com/album/schwarzpfad

But that’s not the only Bandcamp news I want to share. Continue reading »

MESHUGGAH AND SCION A/V ARE COOKING UP SOMETHING PITCH BLACK

 Metal News  4 Responses »
Jan 292013
 

I generally don’t see much point in trying to guess about a future event when all I have to do is wait a week and I’ll have the answer. But this time I just can’t resist.

What you see above is an image that appeared on the Scion A/V Facebook page late yesterday along with these words: “We’ve got something special coming to you from Meshuggah next Tuesday.”

By way of background, consider these facts. First, Scion A/V, that renowned automotive patron of metal, is sponsoring The Ophidian Trek 2013, which is Meshuggah’s up-coming North American tour with Animals As Leaders and Intronaut; it kicks off on Feb 11 in Orlando.

Second, Scion A/V also sponsored Meshuggah’s 2012 North American tour with Baroness and Decapitated, and to boost that baby Scion A/V made the lead track from Koloss (“I Am Colossus”) available for free download and financed a limited edition 7″ vinyl version of the song as a giveaway on the tour. Continue reading »

“THE ONLY GOOD TORY”: IMPORTANT UPDATES ABOUT THIS NCS-GTD COMP

 Metal News  3 Responses »
Jan 252013
 

Last October, in collaboration with GRIND TO DEATH, we launched the NCS Bandcamp page and released our first compilation of recorded music — The Only Good Tory — as a FREE collection of 47 songs by 47 UK bands who are on the cutting edge of grind, powerviolence, harsh crust, and fastcore. The NCS Bandcamp page is at this location, where the songs can be individually streamed and individually downloaded, as well as obtained as an album along with a variety of bonus features.

I checked the stats this morning, and there have been 9,281 song plays from the comp, and the entire comp has been downloaded 843 times, with numerous other individual song downloads on top of that.

When we unveiled this download, we explained that tapes of the comp would eventually be produced by DIY Noise, and that has now become a reality. A limited number of tapes are available for purchase, essentially at cost, via this location. We also have some tapes and patches to give away — and there will be more about that after the jump.

But first, I’m stoked to report that UK’s Terrorizer magazine gave the comp a write-up earlier this week, calling it “a near-definitive snapshot of the UK powerviolence/grindcore scene”. To read the entire article, go HERE.

Now, about those tape giveaways. Continue reading »

NEW SONGS FROM HYPOCRISY, OCTOBER TIDE, AND VREID

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jan 252013
 

Thanks to tips from DGR, I learned about two attention-grabbing developments this morning — new details about the forthcoming albums by Sweden’s Hypocrisy and October Tide plus new songs from each of them. And then on my very own I found a new single from the next album by Norway’s Vreid. It is a good day to be alive.

HYPOCRISY

Here’s how I progressed toward the new Hypocrisy song: First, I saw the cover art for the new album, End of Disclosure, which was created by Wes Benscoter (Slayer, Kreator, Nile, Vader, and more). I found it pleasing. Kind of a Zen demon. Also, many skulls. Second, I read, and was intrigued by, this quote by Hyporcisy’s main man Peter Tägtgren in the Nuclear Blast write-up on the album:

“This time I wanted to go back to basic, felt like we lost it for the last couple of albums , it’s straight to the point, it’s more Hypocrisy than ever, the fast, the heavy, the epic.. Enjoy!”

And then I listened to an edited version of the album’s title track, “End of Disclosure” — which you are about to hear, too, and which is available for free download. Continue reading »

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