Aug 112010
 

The human brain, if left to its own devices without a lot of external distractions or things to focus on, and if not previously saturated with intoxicants, will jump around from place to place in all sorts of unpredictable ways. That’s kind of what happened to me and my tiny brain last night. Except I was mildly intoxicated. By the end of this post, you may think I’m still intoxicated.

It all started with a fan-filmed video of a U.K./Australian band called Pendulum playing a song called “Self Versus Self” on stage at the U.K. edition of the Sonisphere festival, which took place on July 30 – August 1. I’d never heard of Pendulum. They’re not a metal band. According to the Blabbermouth blurb that featured this video, they’re a drum-and-bass band.

What caught my eye was that, according to the blurb, Anders Fridén of In Flames joined Pendulum on stage for the  performance of that song.

As it happens, all of us here at NCS are big In Flames fans.  We’re still fans despite the slagging the band has suffered from some In Flames purists over the musical direction of their last few albums. So, I decided to watch the video, while at the same time wondering, “What the fuck is Anders Fridén doing on stage with this Pendulum band?”

The quality of the video isn’t that great, but I liked the song. So, after a little research, I found out that the song is on a Pendulum album released earlier this year called Immersion — and it turns out that In Flames recorded the song with Pendulum. Which led to another “what the fuck?” moment.

We’re clearly late to this party, because we discovered that lots of other metal blogs tumbled to this strange collaboration months ago. So we’re not just a little late to the party, we’re the kind of late where you show up and all that’s left is a bunch of people passed out in their own piss. But hey, better late than never, right?  (more unpredictable jumping around, including video and music, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

Aug 062010
 

Well, I said yesterday I would be done talking about the death of Early Graves vocalist Makh Daniels, and death in general. But Chris Brock and the rest of the band have just posted a note on the Early Graves MySpace page that’s worth sharing with those of you who’ve been following our posts at NCS this week about Makh’s death.

The note includes confirmation about the funeral service that we reported earlier in the week, plus a way to make contributions for the support of the family and to pay for funeral costs, plus news of another memorial show on August 29 in San Francisco.

The note follows after the jump. Continue reading »

Aug 062010
 

As you know if you’ve been reading our earlier posts this week, we’ve been feeling kind of bleak. But there’s only so much dwelling on the sadder things in life that we can get away with and still have anyone bother to read what we’re writing.

So, we’re moving on to brighter topics. And in fact, we do have some bright, metal things to write about. That’s one of the many reasons why we listen to extreme metal. It crowds into your space like a giant hairy thing, glowering at you with red-eyed, dripping-fanged, predatory hunger, panting with hot breath. But it does scare all of your worrisome cares into running straight for the exits.

First, we’ve got details on two mouth-watering fall tours that — wonder of wonders — will be stopping here in The Emerald City (that would be Seattle, not Oz). That was the subject of our first post today.

Second, two of our favorite bands just released new videos. One of those bands — Boston’s Revocation — will be on one of the new tours we mentioned in the earlier post. The other, Xerath (from the UK), is hard at work on their second album, which is very welcome news.

The 2009 releases from both bands just knocked our fucking socks off. They were among our favorite albums of that year. Both of the new videos are for tracks off those 2009 albums.

Both videos only show you the bands playing the songs, and in the case of Revocation’s, it’s a live performance. Nothing as mind-blowing as the animation in Heaven Shall Burn’s latest video, but nothing as stupid as the kind of unconnected or poorly executed imagery we see on most metal videos either. And besides, the songs themselves are hot shit.

(See the videos, plus a few more details about the news from each band, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

Aug 062010
 

Man, have we got some breaking news for those of you who occasionally enjoy the sensation of leaving the caves where you live and spending a night in a different kind of cave — one that’s filled with really loud, skull-splattering metal and other cave-dwellers like yourselves.

We’ve just gotten confirmed dates for two new tours that make us gleeful with anticipation. Bet you can’t guess which ones.

Oh, wait. I guess you can guess which ones.

Well, bet you can’t guess the dates and places where these two tours will descend in order to lay waste to paying cave-dwellers. S’okay, you don’t have to guess, because both tour schedules are laid out in all their glory after the jump.

In our humble opinion, these will be two of the fall’s best tours. Not that it matters to you, but we’re particularly stoked because they’re both coming to a cave near us — way the fuck up here in the Northwest corner of the U.S. And there are Canadian dates on one of them, too.

(check it out after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

Aug 042010
 

We received the following comment from Faeryn James Lee on our post about the death of Early Graves’ vocalist Makh Daniels:

Anyone wishing to attend Makh’s Memorial Service is encouraged to do so. He knows we Love and Miss him.

Memorial Service for Makh Daniels: Monday August 9th @ 2-5pm. Location: Good Shepard Funeral Home/ 901 Oceana Blvd, Pacifica, California. Please bring a food item along w/ you… and please re-post this information so others may attend to pay their respects.

We can’t vouch for the accuracy of this information, but Makh was from Pacifica, and there is a Catholic church (not a funeral home) at this address called The Church of the Good Shepherd. For those of you who live within driving distance of Pacifica, we’ll update this post if we get confirmation of the event.

People are starting to write about Makh’s death. The best one I’ve seen so far is by Cosmo Lee, who knew him, and recently spent time with him for a feature published in the current issue of DECIBEL magazine. Cosmo’s piece is at this location.

UPDATE: We’ve now communicated directly with Faeryn James Lee, who was a close friend of Makh Daniels, and the funeral information is legit. It can’t be easy doing what he’s doing right now, helping spread the word to people who want to say goodbye to Makh.  Our thanks to him . . .

UPDATE: Thanks also to Stephen Parker from Arkhum, for sharing with us the news about a benefit concert this Friday night in Whittier, California, to help pay for the funeral costs.  Details after the jump . . . Continue reading »

Aug 032010
 

Metality.net is a metal blog run by a dude named iRoar from Cairo, Egypt. We first came across it when we were doing research for our series about Metal From North Africa (the first installment of which you can find here). It’s a very slick site, and it’s also a doorway to metal from parts of the world that aren’t uppermost on the radar screen for yokels from Seattle like us.

But the main reason we’re telling you about Metality today is that iRoar has done an amazingly beneficent thing for metalheads worldwide. He has put together a compilation of some truly stupendous metal, apparently with the official approval of all the bands involved — and he has made it available for free download.

The occasion for this comp is the celebration of his 1000th post. And we would like to wish him a very happy 1000th birthday, with best wishes for many thousands of birthdays to come.

As for that comp he put together, it really is a global collective. It includes bands (28 of them, to be precise) from Europe, India, the U.S., South America, and the Middle East/Gulf States region.

Among the band are some we know and really dig — Nervecell (U.A.E.), Norther (Finland), Demonic Resurrection (India), Scarab (Egypt), CiLiCe (Netherlands), Empyreon (U.S.), and Mantric (Norway) — and many we discovered for the first time through this compilation.

After the jump, you can see the whole list, you can stream samples of every song, and we’ll give you a link for the free download. Continue reading »

Aug 022010
 

Just after 5:30 a.m. this morning (Monday), Makh Daniels, the vocalist of Early Graves, lost his life in a highway accident as the members of Early Graves and The Funeral Pyre were driving from Eugene, Oregon, to their next tour stop in Reno. You can read the details in the KTVL.com story after the jump.

I don’t know what to say. I didn’t know Makh Daniels, but I feel ridiculously depressed. I wrote about Early Graves’ music here, and about The Funeral Pyre here. I meant to see both of them when they played Seattle over the weekend, but found myself out of town.

So all I really know about Makh Daniels is the music that he helped to make, and the fact that he was young and talented. I don’t really know, but I would guess that the survivors of this accident from Early Graves and The Funeral Pyre are in rotten shape emotionally, and based on the news story after the jump, some of them were physically injured too.

I don’t think there’s any value in trying to draw lessons from this, because there is no lesson. Pointless deaths happen every day, and there is no rhyme or reason. They are all tragic. They are all fucked up. They are all part of life. Doesn’t make it any easier. Not even a little bit. Continue reading »

Jul 312010
 

My, how time flies. Another month is in the history books. However much time you have on earth, you now have 31 days less of it since since the last installment of this post. Drink up!

But have no fear. You’re headed for a better place. That’s right, basically the same existence you had a month ago, but with more new metal ahead of you. Drink up!

And all those physical processes that are inexorably decaying your bodies on the rocky road to your demise, they’re still there and they’re still working on you like termites that have found a rotting log. But hey, you can still bang your head, so . . . Drink up!

Yes, we’re now a full seven months into 2010, and so it’s time for another monthly update to the list of forthcoming new albums we first posted on January 1. (All the other updates can be found via the “Forthcoming Albums” category link on the right side of our pages.) Below is a list of still more projected new releases we didn’t know about at the time of our previous updates, or updated info about some of the previously noted releases.

Once again, we’ve cobbled together news blurbs about bands whose past work we’ve liked, or who look interesting for other reasons. Perhaps needless to say, these are bands that mostly fit the profile of music we cover on this site — the kind that would like to tear your head off.

So, in alphabetical order, here’s our list of cut-and-pasted items from various sources since our last update about forthcoming new releases. Look for the bands you like and put reminders on your calendar. Or if you’re like us, just stick post-it notes on your forehead. Of course, if your foreheads are the low, sloping kind, you may only have room for a few, so be choosy. Continue reading »

Jul 262010
 

My tastes in music have grown more extreme since I first heard Dagoba‘s album What Hell Is About in 2006. You know, the musical equivalent of the well-known progression that beer leads to hard liquor, which leads to weed, which leads to coke, which leads to heroin, which leads to death (metal).

But despite the increasing extremity of my tastes, I still like Dagoba, even though I was a bit disappointed in the next album, Face the Colossus, because it featured more clean singing and a less extreme sound overall. I certainly still like them well enough to be interested in the album they’ve got coming out on August 30 — Poseidon.

Besides, they’re from France. Maybe not as foolproof a recommendation as if they were from Finland, but French metal is pretty fucking good these days.

But as interested as I am, I obviously haven’t been on my toes, because I didn’t know until a few minutes ago that they’ve already officially released one song from the album (“Black Smoker”) and that a second song (“Waves of Doom”) has been leaked onto YouTube.  (“Thank-you” to the more-on-his-toes deseee at the most excellent The Number of the Blog for posting about these two tracks.)

Of the two, I much prefer the leaked song, because, well, it’s more extreme. But “Black Smoker” is decent, too. Both songs are after the jump, plus more of the amazing artwork created for the new album . . . Continue reading »

Jul 252010
 

Fucking Death Metal!   Death Fucking Metal!   Metal Fucking Death!

The Crown is back.

Knew they had re-formed. Knew they’ve made a new album. Coming out on September 27. On Century Media.

Didn’t know they’ve put up a brand new song from the album. Happened two days ago. Called “Blood O.D.”

Now I know. Just listened to it. More than once. Kinda out of breath now.

Will be more coherent after the jump. Also after the jump is the new song.

Fucking death metal. Ass-kicking music. Trying to take deeper breaths. Continue reading »