You might want to consider stopping what you’re doing, unless you’re performing open heart surgery, and go listen to the title track from Gojira’s forthcoming Roadrunner release, L’Enfant Sauvage. It’s now streaming at Pitchfork, which you can access via this link.
I’m in the middle of a work thing that prevents me from listening. So come back and tell me what I’m missing. Please!
Oh yeah, it looks like we now have the album art.
(via MetalSucks)
As explained previously, I’ve been catching up on what I missed in the metal world over the last couple of weeks while being otherwise occupied. So much happens every day that I can’t include everything I’ve discovered, but I’ve been trying to feature a mix of news and stylistically divergent new music that might have escaped your attention as well as my own. This is the final installment.
Some of what’s in here is VERY recent. And yes, this is long . . . but just treat it like six posts in one. Just pretend that it dribbled out all day long, like posts on some other metal sites that don’t want to tax their readers’ attention spans. Or you could set your alarm to go off once an hour and come read another piece of this as if it had just appeared. Or I could just shut up and get on with it.
NILE
Actually, I suspect this didn’t escape many people’s attention, because it’s Nile, after all. Thanks to Metal Sucks and TheMadIsraeli, I found out yesterday that Nile has now released the cover art for their next album (above), At the Gate of Sethu, which Nuclear Blast plans to release in Europe on June 29 and in the U.S. on July 3. The artwork is by Seth Siro Anton of Septic Flesh.
The central figure looked familiar, and after a bit of research at The Font of All Human Knowledge, I confirmed that it’s the Egyptian god Thoth, which The Font describes as a god who, in the later history of ancient Egypt, “became heavily associated with the arbitration of godly disputes,the arts of magic, the system of writing, the development of science, and the judgment of the dead.” Continue reading »
As explained yesterday, I’ve been kind of off my game here at NCS recently and I’m now trying (hurriedly) to make up for lost time. While investigating the many things I’ve missed in the world of metal over the last week or two, I’ve found a shitload of things I think are worth sharing — both news items and new music. I’m collecting some (but not all) of them in this “Catching Up” mini-series. Here’s Part 2, and there will be one more installment coming.
MISERATION
This is a news item, which is the most recent part of this post. This morning, Sweden’s Miseration revealed the cover art (above) for their next album (on Lifeforce Records), Tragedy Has Spoken. The artwork is by the ubiquitous and dependably awesome Pär Olofsson. I thoroughly enjoyed this band’s ass-blasting last album, The Mirroring Shadow (2009), and have high hopes for the new one. Conceptually, it’s described as an exploration of the nature of tragedy, both man-made and the result of natural disasters.
The new album was also recorded with 8-string guitars and get this: According to Lifeforce, it also incorporates “folk instruments such as the Indian harp Esraj, the Persian hammered dulcimer Santur, sawblade, organ, mandolin and piano, as well as Mongolian throatsinging”!!! I think we have many “what the fuck?” moments in store for us. Continue reading »
To all Gojira fans: the bell has now rung, and you may begin slobbering. We have this information about The Flesh Alive, which is the forthcoming Gojira live DVD and Blueray:
It will be released on June 4 in Europe and on July 31 in the U.S. by the Mascot label, and can be ordered here: http://mascotlabelgroup.com/gojira/GojiraDVD.html
It will include performances from three concerts plus a one-hour documentary feature. Full details are after the jump — where you will also find a video trailer for this beast. Continue reading »
That, my friends, is Happy Metal Guy wearing the NCS Fucking Good Pancake Tour shirt with none other than Frank Motherfucking Mullen and Terrance Motherfucking Hobbs of the almighty Suffocation, and the photo was taken in motherfucking Singapore, no less. And that’s not all — not by a long shot.
After the jump, you’ll see photos of Happy Metal Guy, once again looking just smashing in the old massive wall of penis, with members of Nile and Psycroptic. Yes, HMG collared all of these bands yesterday in advance of the Diablo Open Air Festival in Singapore, which took place on April 26 (Singapore time). He is covering that festival for Teeth of the Divine, and I understand he’ll be meeting up with Arch Enemy by the time you read this. Of course, I expect he will have the same exemplary culinary taste when he dresses for that meeting. UPDATE: HMG did get a quick meet with a few Arch Enemy members, and there’s a pic of him with awesome drummer Daniel Erlandsson and new guitarist Nick Cordle after the jump.
If you don’t immediately recognize the name “Happy Metal Guy”, that’s the pseudonym he uses when he writes for Angry Metal Guy, but he has other names, including a couple he has used when he contributes posts here at NCS (including the “Keyboard Warrior” interview series). He also writes for a bunch of other sites, too — the dude just plain gets around, y’know? But he made me proud wearing the NCS shirt for his meetings with all those big-name metal bands half a world away from where we run this site. So fucking cool.
Also, very fucking cool that none of these bands had HMG ejected from the premises after they saw that shirt.
More fucking cool pics after the jump . . . Continue reading »
If you’re really perceptive (or you’re one of those people who have no real life outside the confines of the internet), you may have noticed that over the last 10 days or so, I haven’t contributed as much to NCS as I usually do. There are reasons for that, but describing them in detail would be boring. Let’s just say it involved unsuccessful transplant surgery, an inter-species paternity suit, and a rigged auction of antique trepanning implements, and leave it at that.
Anyway, I’m behind on all sorts of things, including current events in the world of metal. I was able to spend a little time today catching up, and I found lots of interesting stuff — a combination of news items and new music. Even after I filtered out items that every attentive metalhead already knows (because those items have already been covered on a dozen other metal sites), what’s left is still too much to cram into one post. So, I’m dividing them between at least two posts, and maybe a third. Here’s the first installment:
LANDMINE MARATHON
The first item is a news item. The news is that Arizona’s Landmine Marathon have recorded a new, self-titled 7″ EP. I like this news (a) because it involves Landmine Marathon, who are awesome, (b) because the cover art (above) is cool, and (c) because I’ve finally made the decision to buy a turntable, so I’ll actually be able to listen to this thing when it comes out. The EP will be released on May 14 and will consist of two songs that were recorded at the same time as the band’s last full-length (Gallows); reportedly, the songs won’t be available anywhere else. You can pre-order the EP at Deep Six Records. I am highly confident that it will be good.
Also, because I haven’t owned a turntable since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I have no idea what to buy, so please leave a comment if you have any recommendations, because that would make it easier on me than doing actual research. Continue reading »
I just found this press release waiting patiently in my in-box, and although I usually don’t just quote press releases, this certainly seemed newsworthy. So, here it is:
“Apr. 25, 2012 — Meet Palms, a newly formed Los Angeles based quartet featuring three former members of ISIS (Aaron Harris, Clifford Meyer and Jeff Caxide) with Deftones’ vocalist Chino Moreno.
‘Clifford, Jeff and I started Palms a little over a year ago out of a desire to continue making music together after ISIS ended,” explained Harris. “Chino joined shortly after and our sound took shape from there. We’ve worked really hard on this first release and are excited for people to hear it. It’s nice to be back behind the drum kit, and with this line up.”
“Being a huge ISIS fan I’ve always dug the moods these dudes convey with their sound,” added Moreno. “I am excited to combine my sense of creativity with theirs, and to have fun doing so.”
Palms’ debut album will be issued by ISIS’ former label, Ipecac Recordings, and is slated for a 2012 release with a release date to be announced soon. The album was recorded and mixed by Harris, and produced by Palms.
Palms is Jeff Caxide (bass/keyboards), Aaron Harris (drums), Clifford Meyer (guitar/keyboards) and Chino Moreno (vocals).”
I haven’t heard any music yet, nor seen any info about the musical direction of this new band, but given the names associated with the project, it’s bound to be interesting. We’ll keep you posted when we find out more.
On the right side of every NCS page is a category of links called “Our Inspiration”. It’s been there since our first post in November 2009. Two sites are listed, because reading those sites really was what inspired me to start NO CLEAN SINGING. One of them was Reign In Blonde.
RiB was started by two women — Julia and Elise. Eventually, they were joined on a semi-regular basis by a third, “Angela Gossowski”. I read that blog every day, without fail. Julia and Elise were really good writers, they didn’t take themselves (or much of anything else) too seriously, and they had a talent for making any subject entertaining, even when I wouldn’t have found the subject matter itself intrinsically interesting. And Angela was . . . well . . . just riotously out of control all the time. Part of what I aspired to do with NCS was to create the kind of light-hearted, good-humored approach to writing about metal that those three achieved, though I’d never claim my own writing is in their league (they picked me as Mr. April 2010 in their “Panty Raid” series, but only because I kissed their asses so much that I got lip burn).
I’ve been using the past tense so far, because around the beginning of 2011, the RiB posts started to become less frequent, and there hasn’t been a new RiB post at all since March 3 of last year — until today.
Today, Julia announced that she is back and ready to start things up again at RiB (she says Elise isn’t ready to keep up with RiB at the moment, but maybe that will change). She asks for the support of readers to help get the site off the ground again. She asks these questions: “So what do you say? Shall we give this another go?” To me, these are rhetorical questions, because the answer is obvious: Fuck yeah. Continue reading »
In celebration of yesterday’s fifth annual Record Store Day, various people have made metal available for free download. For example, the organizer of the Death Metal Decapitation 2 festival in Toronto (scheduled to explode on May 4), Blacktooth Entertainment, has put together a free compilation of music from extreme bands who will be playing at the fest. The line-up includes Toronto’s Nephelium, an excellent band who we’ve previously featured at NCS. The comp includes two songs from Nephelium’s new album, Coils of Entropy.
Also on the comp are two tracks from a Montreal band named Derelict, who are also excellent (and we’ll be reviewing their new release, Perpetuation, shortly). We haven’t yet explored the music of the other bands on the comp — Deamon (Ottawa), The Unborn Dead (Toronto), and Blastmycosis (Toronto) — but this comp will make it easy to do that. To stream the music and download it for free, use this link: http://blacktoothmay4.bandcamp.com/
But wait, there’s more! Free music from The Neologist and Dreaming Dead . . . after the jump. Continue reading »
(BadWolf brings us the news!)
In case you haven’t heard, tomorrow, April 21st, is Record Store Day, when all sorts of super-cool (mostly) vinyl releases will be available at record stores across the country for one day only.
In fairness, Record Store Day is some hipster shit—the vast majority of these releases are Pitchfork-approved independent releases, or classic rock re-issues. BUT!!! Participating stores will have two Mastodon split-7” records available, one with psych-rockers The Flaming Lips, and one with lo-fi loving singer-songwriter Feist
So far, the split with Feist has been hyped the hardest on metal blogs as well as indie blogs. And now, it’s streaming!
Behold: Continue reading »