HIT AND RUN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Nov 152011
 

My blogging time still being restricted, I’m just gonna hit you quickly with the following three items and then run away back to cloudland. What I have are new songs from Coldworker (Sweden), Mordbrand (Sweden again), and Zillah (Scotland).

COLDWORKER

I’ve been a fan of Coldworker since their early days. Both albums they’ve released to date — The Contaminated Void (2006) and Rotting Paradise (2008) — are worth your time if you like extreme trauma in your music. Featuring former members of Nasum, Relentless, Ruin, and Phobos, they play a violent amalgamation of grind and death metal.

In August, they signed with Listenable Records, which will be releasing their third album, The Doomsayer’s Call, on February 13, 2012. The cover art, which you can see above, is by the masterful Pär Olofsson (not his usual style, but still quite cool). Yesterday, they released the first song from the album. It’s called “Violent Society”. It will tear you a new one but leave you smiling as you bleed out. Give it a listen after the jump. Continue reading »

MAUDLIN OF THE WELL TO RE-RELEASE “BATH/LEAVING YOUR BODY MAP”

 Metal News  6 Responses »
Nov 142011
 

(NCS writer BadWolf brings us a bit of intriguing news . . .)

This is incredible news.

maudlin of the Well [yes, it’s like that on purpose] are one of metal’s best-kept secrets. During a too-brief career, they created two of the best avant-garde/progressive metal albums of all time: My Fruit Psychobells and Bath/Leaving Your Body Map. Led by Toby Driver (who transformed the band into evil jazz/metallic ambient band Kayo Dot), motW were blending jazz and metal nearly a decade before Shining and Ihsahn made it cool again.

In 2009 they reformed and released their third album, Part the Second, independently via free download.

Enough history, let’s talk music and news. maudlin of the Well made music of incredible quality that was likewise next to impossible to listen to. In that way I would call them the only true contemporary of Blut Aus Nord. While all of mauldin’s (and Kayo Dot’s) albums are worth listening to, 2001’s Bath/Leaving Your Body Map is their opus. I can only describe it as two hours of pure mania, at times mellow and at times invigorating. They have a unique talent for unnerving listeners and making gorgeous sounds at the same time –especially on Bath/Leaving Your Body Map. Sadly it’s been out of print for a very, VERY long time.

Fortunately for us, Driver and Co are reissuing this masterpiece on vinyl. Unfortunately, it’s limited to 300 copies. In any event, this is a great opportunity to re-discover the bad acid amazing that was(is?) maudlin of the Well. (details about the re-issue are after the jump, along with motW music . . .) Continue reading »

BLACK GOATS AND CANDLELIGHTS: 10 Metal Record Labels on Bandcamp

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
Nov 112011
 

(We’re really pleased to feature today this guest post by MaxR, the proprietor of Metal Bandcamp, an extremely useful site that maintains a close watch on new metal being added to the Bandcamp platform. In this post Max focuses on labels who have established Bandcamp outposts and he provides a ton of great music to illustrate what’s available.)

You probably know about Bandcamp, the place where bands can release their music as free downloads or for a price (including the popular name-you-price option). You can get awesome free demos like the one from epic doomsters Pallbearer or you can buy albums from DIY bands like progressive black metallers Cormorant. What you may not be aware of is that many metal record labels have set up camp (harh harh) on Bandcamp. I will describe some of them and provide links and Bandcamp players to a great selection of metal – much of which hasn’t been covered on No Clean Singing before.

CANDLELIGHT

First up is Candlelight Records. They add five albums per week to their Bandcamp, either new releases or from their catalog. And they are pretty smart about it. New Opeth released? Hey, we got their first three albums. New Insomnium out? We have Above the Weeping World and Across the Dark for ya. And they even have Bandcamp exclusives – apparently the original mix of Quietly, Undramatically was pretty crappy, so now you can get a remix by Woe mastermind Chris Grigg. Check it out, it’s raw and melodic black metal. Continue reading »

PSYCROPTIC NEWS (AND A REMINDER ABOUT WHY YOU SHOULD CARE)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Nov 102011
 

Today’s e-mails brought this piece of welcome news to NCS: Australia’s Psycroptic has announced that their fifth studio album, The Inherited Repression, will hit stores on February 7 in North America and February 10 in Europe. The album, which will be the band’s second release on Nuclear Blast Records, will include nine tracks. Here’s what Psycroptic guitarist, Joe Haley, had to say about the new music:

“The Inherited Repression is far and away my favorite Psycroptic album thus far – all of us in the band think this. It’s the age-old cliché from bands when they talk about their current album as being the best of their career, blah, blah, but I have to say it because it’s true. We wouldn’t think there is a point of going on if we couldn’t outdo each album prior. We are certainly not playing music for anything else than the love of creating it and performing it.

“The Inherited Repression is quite different from anything we have done in terms of song writing and structure, and we spent a lot longer writing and demoing the songs before we recorded it, which you can tell. It’s a very dynamic album – the fast elements faster, the slow elements slower, and a lot of light and dark binding it together. It’s a very catchy album as well – you can tap your foot, bang your head or anything else you want. Basically it has a lot of groove on it from start to finish.”

This all sounds good to me, but then again, I would be in the market for this album even if Joe Haley had said, “I don’t know what went wrong, but the new album sounds like utter shit, yet we’re releasing it anyway because there ain’t no fuckin’ way we’re going to start over after all the fucking time we put into it.”

As for why I would get this album sound unheard, go past the jump and check out the official video for “Initiate”, one of the songs from Psycroptic’s last album, Ob(Servant). Awesome song, and an awesome video, too. Continue reading »

A FREE SAMPLER FROM INSIDEOUT

 Metal News  2 Responses »
Nov 092011
 

I found a press release from yesterday in my in-box that I thought was worth sharing, because it’s an offer of free music and includes some very good bands (along with others whose music I don’t yet know). This is a sampler from InsideOut Music that includes songs from the label’s best 2011 releases. You can see them above. Not all of the music is metal, but with tracks from Devin Townsend, Redemption, and Leprous (whose fascinating new album will be reviewed here shortly), it’s tough to go wrong.

To get the sampler for free, go to this location (you’ll need to supply an e-mail address for the download code).

A SMATTERING OF NEWS

 Metal News  30 Responses »
Nov 082011
 


I haven’t been keeping tabs on metal news while mellowing out here in cloudland. But I have been checking my e-mail every now and then, and e-mails have brought news, so I’ve pulled together a few items in this post, just to keep my hand in, y’know? I’m starting with the really important news.

BRING ME THE HORIZON

Thanks to Jeimssi, who’s in Finland, I have a link to a news article about a brawl. This has probably been picked up by other metal blogs already, but I have something they don’t have. I have a Google Translate rendition of the report about the incident that appeared in the Finnish press. And we know from past experience that there are few things funnier than what Google Translate produces when you let it work on the Finnish language. So, without further ado, here’s the “translated” report about British metal band bandwagon-jumpers Bring Me the Horizon and their scuffle with members of the crowd in Helsinki a couple days ago. The original article appeared here, and there’s a video clip at the end.

The British band Bring Me the Horizon guitarist raged in The Circus gig at a restaurant on Sunday evening.

A man upset the audience came herjasta fists and stormed up to fight among the general public. Who was on the viewer says that the first stage guitarist rose to the security fence on top of the audience and tried to tear him down.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

DUST-UP IN DELHI

 Metal News  22 Responses »
Oct 302011
 

On Friday night (Oct. 28), Metallica was scheduled to play a concert in Gurgaon, a suburb of Delhi in India. It was to have been the first stop in Metallica’s first tour of the sub-continent. Tickets to the show were priced between the equivalent of $34 and $57, and the concert had drawn fans from cities across India as well as countries such as Bangladesh, China, Nepal, Indonesia and Singapore. Unfortunately, it never happened.

After more than 20,000 fans waited for more than 3 hours at the venue (including a two-hour delay in being allowed inside), an announcement was made that the show would be postponed to the following night due to “technical difficulties”. News reports indicate that Metallica (or their representatives) were unhappy with the audio systems and the adequacy of the security barricade that would separate fans from the stage. It also turns out that the tour organizers (from an outfit called DNA Entertainment) had over-sold the 25,000-person capacity of the venue.

Many of the fans didn’t take the postyponement news very well, particularly when it was learned that Metallica was taking part in a press conference at the same time. Although most left the venue calmly when asked to do so, others rushed the stage, damaged equipment, and some even attempted to set fire to banners. And that led the organizers and Metallica to cancel the Gurgaon show altogether.

Early Saturday, police arrested the “operational head” of DNA Entertainment and three other company employees, charging them with fraud and cheating. (more after the jump, including video . . .) Continue reading »

VAULTING: “NUCLEUS”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Oct 282011
 

About a month ago we discovered a German band called Vaulting through one of our MISCELLANY forays into the vast world of unexplored metal. What we heard back then was a five-track EP the band released in 2009 called Modus Humanis. It was damned sweet (read our babbling about it here). We discovered at the time of that post that Vaulting planned to release their debut album Nucleus on October 28. And so they have.

We’re pleased not only to announce that enticing news, but also to help Vaulting premiere a music video for a song from the new album called “Biorobot”. It’s extremely cool to watch, and the music is killer. “Biorobot” is the shortest song on the album — just long enough to tease us into wanting more. We’ve just received the rest of the album, and you’ll be reading more about it at NCS soon. For now, go past the jump and check out the new vid. Continue reading »

NEW LANTLOS: FULL ALBUM STREAM

 Metal News  3 Responses »
Oct 272011
 

Lantlôs is a two-man German band consisting of Herbst, who writes the music and plays all the instruments (other than session drums), and Alcest’s Neige, who supplies scarifying vocals. Their 2010 album, .neon, made several of the “best of the year” lists we published last December. Even after seeing the name on those lists, I never listened to it. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. However, the band have already finished a new album titled Agape — five songs totaling about 35 minutes of music. It’s scheduled for release on October 28 and it’s available for pre-order in a variety of formats from Prophecy Productions at this web store.

Thanks to a tip from BadWolf, I can report that the album is also now streaming — for one week only — at the Finnish web site Inferno, which also hosted a stream of the new Solstafir album that we featured not long ago. Accompanying the album stream is a track-by-track commentary (appearing in Finnish on the Inferno site) by Herbst. This offers two attractive opportunities:

First, you get to hear the new Lantlôs album. Second, English speakers get another chance to see what kind of new hilarity will be produced by running the text through Google Translate. I sure hope whoever’s working on the Finnish-to-English algorithm for Google Translate stops trying to improve it, because it’s perfect just the way it is. For example, Inferno’s description of the Lantlôs music comes out this way: “post-called black metaliksikin”.

Me-tal-ik-sik-in. Beautiful word. It has dueling connotations — it sounds like either “sick metal” (a good thing) or metal that makes you sick-up your breakfast (not so good). I’ve only just started listening to the Lantlôs album stream, and so far I’d say it’s sick metal.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

VALLENFYRE: FULL ALBUM STREAM

 Metal News  25 Responses »
Oct 242011
 

We’ve been fixated on the forthcoming Century Media album by the UK’s Vallenfyre since we first heard excerpts from the band’s two-song Desecration single in August. We’ve followed news about the band and A Fragile King with slavish fervor since then, and have watched as hunger for the release has spread like wildfire — at least among fans with a discriminating taste for old-school European death-doom.

The latest piece of news — and it’s a big fucking piece — is that the entire album is now streaming at the Hails and Horns web site. Even better, there’s a feature accompanying the stream that includes track-by-track comments by the band’s founder/songwriter/vocalist/guitarist Greg Mackintosh (Paradise Lost), plus a revealing interview.

I’m going to withhold any detailed comments about the music for now, because we’ll have our own review. I’ll simply say that this is everything I hoped and expected it would be. GO HERE to listen. And make sure you have un-interruptable time on your hands, because once you start, you really won’t won’t to stop before hearing all of it.

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