POWERLESS, PART 3: NIGHTFALL, PINKISH BLACK, AND SAILLE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Nov 202012
 

For most of yesterday and last night, the NCS headquarters was running on generator power and brutally cut off from the internet due to a DSL failure produced by one of our lovely Puget Sound winter storms. At some point while yours truly was sleeping the sleep of the just, the internet connection came back on, and I spent a few hours this morning catching up on what I missed in the world of metal.

Turns out I missed a lot. This is the third of three posts in which I’m collecting the best of what I missed while the NCS HQ was cast into outer darkness yesterday. I’m running through the music in alphabetical order. Featured in this Part 3 are Nightfall, Saille, and Pinkish Black.

NIGHTFALL

Astron Black and the Thirty Tyrants, the 2010 album from this long-running Greek band (now with an international cast), was my introduction to their music. It was a hell of an introduction: I became an immediate fan. Nightfall have now recorded the follow-up to that album, with the title Cassiopeia. The new one is due for release by Metal Blade on January 18, 2013, and pre-orders are being taken here. Yesterday brought the premiere of a lyric video for the album’s first single, “Oberon and Titania”. Continue reading »

POWERLESS, PART 2: BOSSK, CHAOS INCEPTION, AND DECADES OF DESPAIR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 202012
 

For most of yesterday and last night, the NCS headquarters was running on generator power and brutally cut off from the internet due to a DSL failure produced by one of our lovely Puget Sound winter storms. At some point while yours truly was sleeping the sleep of the just, the internet connection came back on, and I spent a few hours this morning catching up on what I missed in the world of metal.

Turns out I missed a lot. This is the second of three posts in which I’m collecting the best of what I missed while the NCS HQ was cast into outer darkness yesterday. I’m running through the music in alphabetical order. Featured in this Part 2 are Bossk, Chaos Inception, and Decades of Despair.

BOSSK

Bossk are a band from Kent in the UK whose name rings bells, but whose music was an undiscovered country to me until this morning. It appears that after releasing a couple of EPs, a DVD, and a split, the band called it quits in 2008 or 2009. However, Bossk revived earlier this year and have recorded a new single named “Pick Up Artist” that debuted in September and is still available for free download here.

I found out about the song earlier today and liked it immediately. It begins with pounding drums and sludgy chords and breaks into an up-tempo, post-metal bone-breaker with caustic vocals, lots of low-end punch, and swirling guitar leads. Past the half-way point, the hammering power abruptly stops and the song turns into an almost dreamlike flow of chiming notes and hypnotic rhythms. Damn cool music. Continue reading »

POWERLESS, PART 1: CONVERGE, ACRANIA, ACRIMONIOUS, AND AMENDFOIL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Nov 202012
 

I stayed home from work yesterday. I picked a bad day to do that. Yesterday afternoon we lost power on our island due to a really nasty day-long storm that raged through the Puget Sound area. We got the generator going, but the DSL service in our area went down at the same time the power did, and it didn’t come back before I went to bed. This morning, the power and the DSL were both back.

The experience vividly demonstrated how obsessive I’ve become about this fucking blog. Being disconnected from the internet for about 12 hours prevented me from keeping up with what was happening in the world of metal. I experienced feelings of anxiety and intense frustration. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

It got so bad that I drove in the darkness  through the driving wind and rain to the ferry terminal, where the power was on and an internet connection was available. I sat there for about 30 minutes, getting this morning’s first post ready to appear automatically and doing a bit of web surfing, and then decided I shouldn’t leave my wife alone in our powerless house any longer and went home. Fucking sick, that’s what I am. I need help of some kind.

This morning I spent hours catching up on what I missed while the net connection was down. I found dozens of interesting-looking things. Even after winnowing out the ones that turned out to be less interesting than they first appeared to be, I still have more shit to share than would manageably fit in one post, so I’m dividing them into three posts, of which this is the first. I’m going to cover the new music and videos in alphabetical order.

But before diving in, here’s one piece of breaking news: Year-end listmania is almost upon us, and it begins with DECIBEL magazine selecting All We Love We Leave Behind by Converge as its Album of the Year. Here’s the proof, as it appeared on the Converge Facebook page: Continue reading »

STREAMS: INCANTATION, HELL MILITIA, UNCLE ACID & THE DEADBEATS, AND AEON

 Metal News  1 Response »
Nov 192012
 

 

This is just a quick note to let you know that four albums are now streaming in full at various locations around the interhole. All four of them are definitely worth checking out.

INCANTATION

Incantation’s ninth album, Vanquish in Vengeance, will be released on November 27 by Listenable Records. It’s their first album since Primordial Domination was released in 2006. It was mixed and mastered Dan Swanö at Unisound. It sounds vicious. It’s streaming exclusively at DECIBEL’s online site, which you can find via this link.

HELL MILITIA

We featured these French marauders not long ago. Their new album, Jacob’s Ladder, is due for release on November 20 via Season of Mist. Today, Brooklyn Vegan began streaming the album in full.  It can be ordered here now. It’s really good. The SoundCloud player at Brooklyn vegan is also embeddable, and so you can check it out here right after the jump. Continue reading »

FACEBOOK UPDATE: NEW WAYS FOR “BRAND PAGES” TO REACH THEIR FANS

 Metal News  5 Responses »
Nov 162012
 

SUMMARY: In this post I’ll review the most recent evidence that over the last two or three months Facebook has intentionally reduced the reach of Facebook Page posts even further — by as much as 40% on average. But I’ll also explain two very recent changes that Facebook has rolled out which, at least for now, will allow users to see all the posts from Pages they want to follow: Page Feed and Notifications. I’ll also explain recent changes that Facebook has made to the Comment feature on Page posts.

Yes, having previously ventured into the gaping maw of Facebook’s machinations, I now find it difficult to get away from them. The rough tongue of the globe’s biggest social media platform has wrapped itself around my torso and won’t let go. I know I shouldn’t care, but I can’t help myself. Chalk it up to morbid fascination. I’m fascinated by books bound with human skin, too.

RECAP OF THE PROBLEM: THE SHRINKING REACH OF PAGE POSTS

It all started in May when Facebook rolled out their Promoted Post feature, which offered administrators of FB Pages the glorious opportunity to pay FB so that more than a small fraction of a Page’s fans would see their posts. This led ignorant grunts like me to discover that for at least a year before that, Facebook had been using computer algorithms called “EdgeRank” to pick which which fans would see which Page posts. Some would see them, most would not.

Then, in July, Facebook removed some of the statistics that Page admins could see on their Page Timelines — the stats that quickly showed the percentage of their “likes” who were seeing each post on the Page. This seemed like a fairly blatant attempt to hide from Page admins the most easily understandable evidence about how few fans their posts were reaching.

At about the same time, Facebook began reducing the number of status updates that would automatically load in user’s news feeds — with FB’s algorithms determining which ones would appear higher up in the feed (thereby increasing the chance they would be seen).

It also became evident at that time what Page admins would get by paying FB to promote posts: FB would not necessarily deliver the posts into the news feeds of more users; they would instead push them higher up the feed for users selected via FB’s algorithms (i.e., not 100% of a Page’s fans), thus increasing the likelihood that those selected users would actually see the posts. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ROTTING CHRIST, NECROWRETCH, SCAR SYMMETRY, MACHINE HEAD, KUOLEMANLAAKSO, TAAKE, AND A SQUIRREL RIDING A SNAKE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Nov 142012
 

Sakis Tolis, laying down a soothing lullaby. 

Once again, your intrepid editor has sifted through the ever flowing stream of metal news and new music to find those gleaming nuggets that will enrich your daily lives.  Actually, I don’t know if you’ll give a shit about any of this, but I do, and that’s what really matters, isn’t it?  No need to answer, that was a rhetorical question.

ALBUMS ON THE HORIZON: ROTTING CHRIST AND NECROWRETCH

We’ve already reported that Rotting Christ are at work on their 11th studio album, but today I saw a few more tidbits of news: The album will be entitled Do What Thou Wilt, and it will hit the stores on March 1, 2013. We usually don’t write about such happenings unless we have a bit more juice to go along with it, such as album art or a song premiere. But these Greek maestros are the kind of band whose every move interests me. And I’m particularly interested to see if the new album will be a further step down the path of strongly folk/ethnic-influenced metal exhibited on Aealo.

I also saw today that the French band Necrowretch have finished the recording and mastering of their debut album for Century Media. It was recorded in late August at Blackout Multimedia studios in Brussels by Phorgath of Enthroned and its title will be Putrid Death Sorcery. The cover art is being prepared by Milovan Novakovic from Montenegro, who also created the beastly cover for the band’s last EP, Now You’re In Hell (reviewed here). And if you’re wondering why this news matters, check out some Necrowretch music right after the jump. Continue reading »

BANDS YOU NEED TO HEAR: INFANT ANNIHILATOR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 142012
 

(We’ve written quite a lot already about the international trio known as Infant Annihilator, but a new album trailer gives us an excuse to do it again, via this post by TheMadIsraeli.)

Infant Annihilator is the fucking shit.  As hyperbolic and complimentary yet non-descriptive as that may be of me to say, I really don’t give two shits because this band know how to bring the br00tz in maximum force.  You can’t front on these dudes, you can’t tell me these guys don’t write some of the most technically accomplished yet well composed yet all over the place of the br00tality-spectrum tunes you’ve ever heard. UK-based  Eddie Pickard and Aaron Kitcher are truly accomplished practitioners of their craft and know exactly what extreme metal fans crave: utter fucking devastation.

Infant Annihilator label themselves a technical deathcore act, although this isn’t entirely accurate.  Take every form of extreme metal, whether it be death metal, deathcore, grindcore, black metal, or slam and mash it all together until you have some kind of fucked-up stillborn deformity of filth, and there you have Infant Annihilator.

We’ve already covered this band repeatedly since the unveiling of their genius video for “Decapitation Fornication”, but I’m really into them and really feeling what they’re bringing to the table.  Eddie (guitar), Aaron (drums), and beast-mode vocalizer Dan Watson (from Indiana) are set to unleash their sonic tome of chaos, The Palpable Leprosy Of Pollution.  Continue reading »

EARACHE AND OSMOSE CONTINUE TO KILL IT ON BANDCAMP: BOLT THROWER AND IMMORTAL ARE NOW UP

 Metal News  6 Responses »
Nov 142012
 

It was all of two days ago that we splashed the news across our site that two of metal’s genuine landmark labels — Earache Records and Osmose Productions — had established beachheads on Bandcamp for the first time. As of two days ago, Earache had uploaded high-quality digital files for albums from their catalogue by At the Gates, Napalm Death, Evile, and Rival Sons, while Osmose had delivered three classic albums by Norway’s Enslaved. But what they’ve each done since then has been equally mind-blowing.

We had gotten word that Earache was interested in suggestions about what albums they should prioritize for upload to Bandcamp, and I included my own short list in that previous post — a list that included Bolt Thrower’s legendary 1991 album War Master. And guess what! As of today, Earache has put War Master on Bandcamp HERE. Allow me to figuratively bow down in humble thanks. Actually, I think I’ll literally bow down, too. So stoked to see what they upload next . . . .

Not to be outdone, wait ’til you hear what Osmose has done: In just the last two days since we published that earlier post, Osmose has added to Bandcamp nine more albums — including the first six albums by the immortal Immortal — Diabolical Fullmoon Mysticism (1992), Pure Holocaust (1993), Battles In the North (1995), Blizzard Beasts (1997), At the Heart of Winter (1999), and Damned In Black (2003).

In addition, Osmose has added three more Enslaved albums: Blodhemn (1998), Mardraum-Beyond the Within (2000), and Below the Lights (2003). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: OVID’S WITHERING AND CORMORANT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Nov 132012
 

This post brings some good news and some sad news. On the positive front, we have a new song from Ovid’s Withering. On the sad front, we’ve just learned that Arthur Von Nagel is leaving Cormorant.

OVID’S WITHERING

We’ve been following this Florida band ever since they released their debut EP, The Cloud Gatherer, last spring (reviewed at NCS here). Ovid’s Withering are now working on their first album and they’ve recently released one of its tracks for streaming and “pay what you want” download on Bandcamp (here).

The song is named “The Reckoning. The Summoning. The Purge”. As described by the band: “This is part of a 5 song concept that will be on our full-length album. The story follows Pan, who is engrossed with the idea of cleansing the world. This is Part II, where he kidnaps Anesidora from her lover, Prometheus.” This part of the story line is reflected in the lyrics and described in detail on Bandcamp.

TheMadIsraeli, who first made me aware of the new song, gives us this introduction to the new music: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: MESHUGGAH, ENSLAVED, CORROSION OF CONFORMITY, ERIC CUTLER (AUTOPSY), MARK RIDDICK, MITOCHONDRION, AND DEIPHAGO

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Nov 132012
 

Here’s a collection of items that came my way over the last 24 hours that I thought were worth sharing — in addition to all of the awesome posts that already graced the site yesterday.  (I can use the words “awesome” and “graced” without tarnishing my well-known reputation for humility because I’m not directly responsible for any of ysterday’s posts, even though this post will also be awesome.)

TOURISM: MESHUGGAH AND ENSLAVED

I saw via Heavy Blog Is Heavy the rumor that Meshuggah will be touring the U.S. along with Animals As Leaders and Intronaut early next year. The rumor is based on a flyer for a date in Minneapolis that you can see above.Yes please.

That same photo up there also provides evidence of another tour that I read about previously. This one is official: Norway’s Enslaved will be returning to the U.S. and Canada in early 2013 for a headlining, 20-show “Winter Rite” tour joined by U.S. doom metallers Pallbearer and occult rockers Ancient VVisdom (and both of those bands are killers).

The tour begins January 30 in Philadelphia and ends February 22 in New York City. The full schedule can be seen after the jump. And in case you missed our earlier post yesterday, Osmose Productions has just uploaded three older Enslaved albums for streaming and download on Bandcamp for the first time. Continue reading »

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