OPERA IX: “MANDRAGORA”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Dec 012011
 

Opera IX is a symphonic black metal band from Italy who’ve been around since 1989, which makes them . . . survivors. On January 24, 2012 in Europe and February 28 in North America, Agonia Records will release their first studio album in 7 years — Strix Maledictae In Aeternum. The new album is described as the last in a trilogy of records that explores witchcraft.

I’ve heard a bit of Opera IX music in the past, but it came from the days when Cadaveria was fronting the band, and I’ve heard nothing since. But curiosity about what had become of their post-Cadaveria sound led me to watch an official video that was released in early November for a song from the new album called “Mandragora”. I’m including the video after the jump (because it’s NSFW), and featuring it here for three reasons.

First, I enjoyed the song. It reminded me of Satanica-era Behemoth, an imperial mix of black and death metal. Second, I was surprised to see that the video is hosted on YouTube, because it features copious nudity. And then I saw the little notation on the YouTube page: “This video has been age-restricted based on our Community Guidelines.” I’d never actually read the Community Guidelines, and I wondered why the video was available with an age restriction rather than being banned altogether. Continue reading »

NEW ASPHYX ON THE HORIZON

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 302011
 


On a day at NCS that began with Vallenfyre, it seemed only fitting to bring our posting day to a close with news about Asphyx.

They’re one of those bands whose name springs to mind immediately when I see or hear the phrase “death/doom”, and they made a strong comeback with Death…The Brutal Way (2009) after a nearly decade-long recording hiatus. They’ve now finished work on their newest studio album, titled Deathhammer, and today Century Media announced that it will be released on February 27, 2012 in Europe and February 28 in North America.

In addition to that welcome news, the band also released an image (above) of the cover art for the album, created by Axel Hermann, who worked on all of the band’s early releases. Brutal.

One more tidbit — the new album was mixed and mastered by the legendary Dan Swanö, who produced Death…The Brutal Way as well as the band’s Live Death Doom release. And speaking of that DVD, I’ve added a clip from the DVD after the jump featuring the title track to the last Asphyx album. Twenty years on, and still wielding the deadly hammer of doom. Gotta love it. Continue reading »

MASTODON TO THROW HAIR AND DIRT ON FEIST; FEIST TO PRETTY-UP MASTODON

 Metal News  5 Responses »
Nov 302011
 

I bet this will sound better than Loutallica.

According to a comment by Mastodon’s Troy Sanders, the band will collaborate with a Canadian singer named Feist on a limited-edition 7-inch single due next year. According to this article from The Guardian, the Canadian singer was introduced to Mastodon on a BBC TV show called Later … with Jools Holland and thought “these two worlds [should] collide”.

“We’re going to do everything we can to work with Feist and have a split 7-inch to support independent record stores,” Sanders told MTV Canada . The next international Record Store Day will take place on April 21, 2012. “The idea is for Mastodon to cover a Feist song and throw some hair and dirt on it. [Then Feist will] take a Mastodon song and pretty it up a little bit.”

According to reports, the two acts got the idea in late October, when Feist performed songs from her album Metals and Mastodon performed some of their songs on that BBC show. Feist told HitFix: “[Mastodon frontman] Brent [Hinds] and I were nodding at each other, and he’s like, ‘Nice riff,’ and I’m like ‘Nice tone,'” she said. “So backstage I’m thinking about letting these two worlds collide, how they should collide, so I’m like, ‘How about Metals meeting metal?’ Brent was like: ‘Well, I do like that “Bad in Each Other” song, I could see that.’ Maybe now I will look into learning to cover “Oblivion” or anything off [The Hunter]. That album’s amazing.”

Hmmm, two worlds colliding. When has that happened recently? Will this be a Loutallica-style train wreck or something that can actually be heard without experiencing a wave of nausea? In an effort to anticipate the answer to that question, I watched the video of Feist performing that song “Bad In Each Other” on Later . . . with Jools Holland. Continue reading »

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SWALLOW THE SUN’S NEW ALBUM

 Metal News  15 Responses »
Nov 292011
 

We are pleased to re-post some early remarks by Matti Riekki from the Inferno (Finland) web site about Swallow the Sun’s fifth album, Emerald Forest and the Blackbird, which will be released on Feb. 1, 2012, by Spinefarm Records. Thank dog for Google Translate:

“Swallow the Sun’s boss Juha Raivio said recently Inferno haastiksessa band from the forthcoming album to tell stories.

“If you mirror this against the Emerald Forest and the Blackbird is the atmosphere like a colorful blend of narrative, but the brutal teachings Grimm production, and even M. Night Shyamalanin life and fantasy adventures of the world movies.

“Musical waves are familiar in a large scale, tunnelmamelodisen matelumetallin marks go, but the trip can be found quite surprising ports, which should be enough to explore in the corners for a long time. Let’s just say this, that if one of the O-beginning with the band moving away from the metal market, annoying, this disc may be found in moments of comfort. (And do not now, pliis, take this, so that StS sounds like it is now beginning with the O-band. The question is more about building a political parable of the song.)

“Speech Shares, clean and rough vocals korinat alternate style, and the plate is sovitusten behalf of a good and balanced reverb. As far as the quality of the compositions, so deuce take, for the most part the songs do not leave a huge mind squeezing all correct any invalid. Right now, huimin kipale typeonegatiivisen atmosphere of the north end of the rotation period of a hymn on April 14th, which gets all the body hair sojottamaan smalliron bar. So is the man as the porcupine.

“Listening to the sum of the three in one sentence: I think this is definitely the most interesting Swallow’ta bushes, then come as a surprise debut. Invalid kaamosmasennella here.” Continue reading »

NEW NACHTMYSTIUM TRACK ON THE WAY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Nov 292011
 

About the only way you could get Nachtmystium to stand still would be to nail their feet to the floor. Blake Judd and company are just too musically peripatetic to expect that what comes next will resemble what came before. Or at least that’s what I thought. But Nachtmystium and Chicago black metal band Murmur are releasing a 7″ split EP on a Lithuanian label called Inferna Profundus Records, which will include a new track from each band, and here’s what Nachtmystium has said about their contribution to the record:

“Our track is a total return to form, harking back to the writing styles of “Demise” and “Instinct: Decay”. This is a good sneak peak of what’s to come on our next full-length, which we intend to start recording in January / February, 2012 and will be released world-wide on Century Media Records.”

The 7″ vinyl can be ordered from Inferna Profundus here and will be available for shipping in a week or two. Following the vinyl release, Nachtmystium’s new track, “I Wait In Hell”, will also be released digitally via iTunes, Amazon, and other online music outlets via Century Media Records.

So, is the track really a throwback to Demise and Instinct:Decay? Well, hearing is believing, and I like what I hear (from both bands). After the jump, we’ve got a clip that includes two-minute segments from “I Wait In Hell” and Murmur’s song, “Shuttle I”. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA SEASON IS UPON US: DECIBEL’S ALBUM OF THE YEAR

 Listmania, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Nov 282011
 

As the end of 2011 approaches, we are about to be deluged with lists of the year’s best metal. We’re going to be doing again what we’ve done the last two years — publishing (1) lists of the year’s best albums by our regular writers, by guest contributors, and by our readers, and (2) our list of 2011’s most infectious extreme metal songs. As usual, we’re going to invite your participation in this frenzy of listmania at our site. Details about how you can do that will be coming later this week.

Listmania has already started at DECIBEL magazine — the only U.S.-based print metal mag still worth reading, in our humble opinion. The January 2012 issue will include their annual list of the Top 40 best extreme metal albums of the year. We haven’t yet received our copy here at NCS, but this morning we learned that DECIBEL has named Path of Totality by Brooklyn-based Tombs as the “Album of the Year”.

We’ve featured music and videos from Path of Totality several times this year, and it’s definitely one of my own favorite releases of 2011. So, congrats to Tombs for this signal recognition by DECIBEL. After the jump, you can stream the whole album, and if you like what you hear, it’s available on the Tombs Bandcamp page (here). Also after the jump, check out a cool video of Tombs performing live on a Hudson River metal cruise on October 22. We featured this video previously, but one good turn deserves another. Continue reading »

CORMORANT HITS BANDCAMP AND NPR WITH NEW MUSICS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Nov 282011
 

Thanks to Metal Bandcamp and MaxR, I discovered yesterday that Cormorant has made its new album, Dwellings, available for pre-order on Bandcamp (here). This supplements the now-closed exclusive pre-order option that the band offered earlier in the fall through their blog page.

As MaxR reported, you can choose between 7 different packages ranging from the download-only for $7 up to a bundle that includes the CD, a t-shirt, a zip-up hoodie, and the album download for $50 (plus shipping). The CD comes in a 6-panel Digipak, which includes the hand-drawn vertical panorama cover artwork by Alice Duke, full-color on-disk design, and a 12-page booklet containing lyrics and liner notes.The pre-orders will ship on December 7, which is the day after the official album release.

Maybe best of all, for people who are as impatient as I am, if you make a pre-order, you get an immediate download of three tracks from the album. Like MaxR, I went with the shirt+CD option and got me that immediate download in the bargain. The band is also now streaming those three tracks on their Bandcamp page. You can find two of them streaming elsewhere (“Junta” and “The Purest Land”), but as MaxR noted, the third one didn’t seem to be currently available anywhere except at Bandcamp.

That third song is called “The First Man”, and it’s now available for purchase all by itself for $1. A few words about the song, plus the song-stream, follow the jump. But as of this morning, the whole album is now streaming at NPR, whose writer Lars Gotrich had this to say about the record: “Dwellings is, far and away, the best metal record of 2011: an emotionally and musically complex album which wrestles with our desperate and sometimes violent attempts to secure a place in history.”

By the way, speaking of the fantastic Dwellings album cover by Alice Duke, you should check out her on-line portfolio here for more fantastic-ness. Also after the jump: the full vertical piece of artwork, of which the cover is only a part. Continue reading »

“BEARDING THE UK”: TOUR DIARY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 252011
 

(In late October, Becoming the Archetype and Bloodguard embarked on an NCS co-sponsored mini-tour of England called BEARDING THE UK.  Bloodguard’s Andy Synn recorded portions of the tour for posterity, and we’ve got his tour video after the jump, along with this diary of the experience.)

Well, the short tour with Becoming The Archetype (plus one extra date with Abgott, just for some drastic contrast) was both remarkably eventful and extremely good fun.

We knew it would be a good time when, having collected our awesome van (christened the Guard-Van for the duration of the tour) from Cambridge we realised, approximately 20 minutes down the road, that we had in fact accepted the keys and driven away with the vehicle without actually… paying for it. It’s always good to start a tour with a bit of accidental automotive theft!

Anyway, we did eventually organise leaving the necessary hire fee for the van, precluding the involvement of the police, and Ed and I set out to collect BTA from Liverpool airport. Simple enough right?

Well after almost an hour of waiting after their flight had landed and disembarked there was still no sign of the band. But then I received a phone call… from the immigration authorities. Who were refusing to let the band enter the country in the fear that they’d be taking hard-earned cash from the pockets of good British metal bands. However, some quick talking by yours truly, coupled with a very pleasant and helpful representative on the other end of the line, saw the band released and allowed to enter their ancestral homeland. Continue reading »

THE BIZARRE WORLD OF DEVIN TOWNSEND

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 202011
 

Since returning from my vacation late Friday, I’ve been catching up (sporadically) on metal developments while I was away. Quite a few of them turned out to involve Devin Townsend. He is as multi-talented and as exuberantly creative as anyone working in metal today, and as I’ve learned again recently, his live shows are also fan-fucking-tastic. So, I pay attention when I see anything new about him, and I’m collecting in this post all of the recent items I saw — though DT is both so prolific and so unpredictable that I may well have missed something.

ITEM ONE

The first item is captured in the poster above. No sooner did DT finish his four-night series of special shows in London last week (one of which our own Andy Synn reviewed here) than he announced another very special London show — though this one is nearly a year off in the future. This one he’s billing as the biggest show he has ever done and the culmination of his entire career. It will involve “an art exhibition, actors, Ziltoid, stilt walkers, fire breathers” and a host of guest musicians “playing music that has never been attempted due to the size of the songs and the need for certain things“. The extravaganza will happen on October 27 at the Roundhouse, and tickets went on sale last Friday. Details are available here.

By the way, for poor schmoes like me who are too distant from London to make this show, it will be filmed for DVD.

After the jump, I’ve got three more items, and all of them are listening experiences. Continue reading »

TWO NEW NON-METAL ALBUMS FROM CLOUDKICKER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Nov 182011
 

I am very slowly making my way home from vacation today, with limited net access, so I’m writing this in a hurry.  Still, I thought the news was sufficiently interesting that I wanted to get this out there before tomorrow.

Here at NCS, we were latecomers to the musical phenomenon known as Cloudkicker (a/k/a Ben Sharp). But late was better than never, and when we had our eyes opened, they opened wide. NCS co-founder and infrequent contributor IntoTheDarkness put Cloudkicker’s 2010 album, Beacons, at No. 3 on his personal list of the year’s Top 25 releases, calling it “the best instrumental album all year.”

Our more regular contributor BadWolf had it at No. 6 on his list of the year’s best, calling it “one of the first pieces of genuinely brilliant metal-as-art to be released not only outside of the label system but outside of capitalism period.” And one of our guest contributors, The Artist Formerly Known As Dan, assigned it to the No. 8 position on his best-of-2010 list, with these words: “He doesn’t need a label because he can already do everything he needs to by himself.  And he’s beyond talented.” And last, I included a song from Beacons on our list of 2010’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.

With that backdrop, you can imagine how interested I was to see an e-mail from MaxR at Metal Bandcamp today with this news: Cloudkicker has just released not one but two new albums — Loop and Let Yourself Be Huge. I’ve turned the album titles into links that will take you to the Cloudkicker Bandcamp pages where each album is available for free download, or any donation you feel is fair. Both albums are streaming here after the jump — and I’ve got a few more observations about the music, too (it’s not metal). Continue reading »

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