UK DEATH METAL IN REVIEW (Part 2)

 Album Reviews, Metal News  3 Responses »
Jan 202010
 

While we wait for 2010 to really get up to fucking speed, we’re still periodically looking back at 2009. A couple weeks ago, we wrote about some UK extreme metal bands that we listened to a lot in the Old Year. But one post doesn’t do justice to the subject. The fact is that the UK death metal scene hasn’t been so bursting with putrescent life in years.

So, we’re going to continue our look back today, dip our toes into the acidic pool of brutal death metal, and express our fond regard for three more UK death-dealers: Ingested, Detrimentum, and Infected Disarray.

In our first feature on “UK Death Metal in Review,” we had to push the “death metal” envelope a little to include some extreme bands that hooked us in 2009. No need to push the envelope today. In fact, you wouldn’t want to touch this nasty envelope — it’s radioactive, with razor-sharp edges and some big fucking spikes. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

ROTTING CHRIST UPDATE

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Jan 192010
 

There are some bands we dig so much that just about anything they do becomes newsworthy on NCS. Rotting Christ is one of those bands. Their last album, 2007’s Theogonia, has become an old friend that we visit on a monthly basis, and we’ve been salivating over the prospect of their new release scheduled for February. It will be called Aealo, and we’ve now learned that audio samples of all the tracks are currently available for streaming on Amazon.fr.  You can also find samples from Aealo mixed in with Rotting Christ tracks from older albums at Amazon.com.

Even though all you can hear is about 30 random seconds per track, it’s enough to increase the salivation to embarrassing proportions. And the samples are really intriguing at the same time — they make clear that Aealo isn’t just a Theogonia clone (though that would have been just fine with me). The most startingly difference is in the appearance of guest vocalist, Greek-American Diamanda Galas, an avant-garde performance artist, vocalist, keyboardist, and composer. Rotting Christ hasn’t been a pure black metal band for a while, and it sounds like Aealo is going to carry it even further away.

Due on February 15 in Europe and February 23 in the U.S. via Season of the Mist, the CD will also feature a guest appearance by Alan Nemtheanga from Irish black metal band Primordial. It’s going to be interesting to see what influence he has on the album. (Note to self: One of these days we have to write about Primordial!)

According to a press release, Aealo will delve deeper into Rotting Christ’s Greek roots (and that’s really evident in the samples that include Galas’s vocals). The band’s guitarist and vocalist Sakis Tolis explains: “Aealo is the transcription of an ancient Greek word into the Latin alphabet. It means thrashing, catastrophe or destruction and reflects the musical and lyrical content of the album.”

Regarding the musical direction of the new album, Nemtheanga said, “It sounds classic Rotting Christ although it sees them continue where they left off with Theogonia, further away from the older ‘satanic’ feel and more into the realm of the ancient Greek gods, mythology and folklore.”

If you’re not familiar with Rotting Christ, here’s a sample from Theogonia:

Rotting Christ: Nemecic


OLD MEN

 Metal News  2 Responses »
Jan 182010
 

Henry Rollins has led an interesting life. In the early 80s, he was the uber-intense frontman of legendary hardcore punk band Black Flag. After Black Flag broke up, he formed the Rollins Band and continued to record and tour, while also releasing a series of spoken-word albums (and won a Grammy for one of them). He’s published multiple books of diaries, essays, and stories, he’s appeared in more than 20 films, and last year he became a running character in the TV biker drama Sons of Anarchy. And he continues to tour the world as a one-man show.

Whenever he opens his mouth, which is basically always open, something interesting usually comes out. A few days ago he touched down in Dublin and gave an interview to TimesOnline (UK), which you can find here. The whole interview is worth reading, but this passage in particular caught our eye:

A couple of years ago Rollins went to see Van Halen on their reunion tour. “And they were good,” he says. “I know all the lyrics. I like those records. But to watch men in their fifties play music they wrote in their twenties, there’s something distinctly sad about that.” A famous friend of his, he says, “sells a gajillion records. But he has to go out and play the same 20 songs each night. He says, ‘Well, that’s what the people want’. That’s one school of thought. I’m more from the Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane school: What they want? Who gives a fuck what they want? The art says we move on. So as I hurtle toward 50 I’m trying to be brave. I want to do stuff that looks like I am. I’ve got grey hair, a leg that kind of thunks around. I’m still mad as hell. I’m just trying to rouse rabble in a different way.”

Seems to us that Mr. Rollins has hit the fucking nail on the fucking head. His words resonated in our addled brains as we browsed the latest metal news on Blabbermouth this morning. There we saw the following reports about the following bands/performers — all on the very first page of Blabbermouth reports. My mood?  Bored shitless. Continue reading »

SUNDAY STREAMING

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Jan 172010
 

It’s Sunday. A perfect day to jack your headphones or earbuds into a computer somewhere and let the music stream into your synapses. Why would you want to do that instead of listen on your personal music player so you can move around and take care of other shit at the same time? Because we’ve got some recommendations that, for the moment, you can only stream.

LIVING SACRIFICE

Living Sacrifice has slowly been releasing new songs from its forthcoming album The Infinite Order for streaming on its MySpace page.  The band has now made the entire album available for streaming here. The album will be available for purchase on January 26. We’ll provide our review of the album in the near future, but for now we’ll just say that this mutha is a headbanging jewel. Here’s the track listing:

01. Overkill Exposure
02. Rules Of Engagement
03. Nietzche’s Madman
04. Unfit To Live
05. The Training
06. Organized Lie
07. The Reckoning
08. Love Forgives
09. They Were One
10. God Is My Home
11. Apostasy

We’ve got two more recommendations after the jump, so don’t stop here! Continue reading »

SOREPTION UPDATE

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Jan 172010
 

In one of our previous Math Metal Monday features, we wrote about Swedish tech-death band Soreption and their June 2008 EP Illuminate the Excessive. Illuminate included only four tracks, creatively entitled 1, 2, 3, and 4.

We didn’t discover these guys until sometime in the middle of 2009, but from the first listen, we realized these guys were turning out some genuinely original music. Only problem was that those 4 tracks flew by way too fast.

Now we have some very welcome breaking news about Soreption: the band will release their debut album, “Deterioration Of Minds”, on March 3 via Ninetone Records. The tracks will be entitled 5 – 12. But hey, if the full-length really picks up right where the EP left off, we could hardly be happier.

These dudes have excellent technical chops and songwriting ability. This is fast, intricate, brutal music that you should check out here if you haven’t already. Or go back to our earlier Math Metal Monday post and stream the track we made available then.

And then start counting the days to March 3.

BURNING IDEAS (Part 3)

 Metal News, Mosh Pit  2 Responses »
Jan 162010
 

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this post, we focused on the recent exploits of ex-Gorgoroth vocalist Gaahl. Gaahl has publicly supported the burning of churches in his native Norway. Norwegian churches don’t much care for Gaahl’s rhetoric (shocking, isn’t it?). They are now pressuring Norway’s National Stage to drop Gaahl from the cast of a black metal musical scheduled to be performed there in May. They might succeed.

You may remember that this isn’t the first time or the first place where Gaahl has run into trouble for being offensive to institutional religion. In 2005, he and Gorgoroth narrowly escaped criminal prosecution in Poland for staging a concert that featured impaled sheep’s heads, satanic symbols, and a mock crucifixion by naked models doused in blood. Poland has laws that prohibit behavior offensive to people’s religious beliefs.

Gorgoroth are not the only corpse-painted dudes who’ve had run-ins with those Polish laws. Which brings us to Behemoth (more after the jump). Continue reading »

BURNING IDEAS (Part 2)

 Metal News, Mosh Pit  2 Responses »
Jan 152010
 

Editor’s note: This isn’t the Part 2 of “Burning Ideas” that we originally planned to run today. But some breaking news directly relevant to what we wrote in Part 1 shoved the original Part 2 off the front page. So the original Part 2 has become Part 3, and we’ll run that tomorrow.

I’ve never been to Norway, but I know a few things about it that are different from the good old US of A. In Norway, for example, you can stage a black metal musical at Den Nationale Scene (translation: The National Stage), one of Norway’s oldest and most renowned theaters, as part of an annual international music and culture festival. And as we wrote yesterday in Part 1 of this post, you can apparently include in your cast a guy like Gaahl, ex-Gorgoroth vocalist and twice imprisoned advocate of church burning.

Oops! Not so fast. Check out this breaking news as reported by Blabbermouth yesterday:

The artistic director of Den Nationale Scene (DNS), the renowned Norwegian theater where Kristian “Gaahl” Espedal (GORGOROTH,GOD SEED, TRELLDOM) is set to make his musical debut this May, is reconsidering his decision to cast the former black metal vocalist for the upcoming “Svartediket” production.

Bjarte Hjelmeland is under pressure from both the clergy and the director of at Festspillene i Bergen (Bergen International Festival), the annual international music and cultural festival where the “first-ever black metal musical” is set to receive its premiere, because Gaahl has once again made it clear that he supports and condones the church burnings associated with the early Norwegian black metal scene. . . .

Hjelmeland says he will travel to Oslo to have “a long talk” with Gaahl about his statements to the media before making a decision on whether to allow the singer to stay involved with the musical. “It is important, both for me personally and on behalf of DNS, to completely distance ourselves from the attitudes Gaahl has expressed in the Bergens Tidende interview,” Hjelmeland says.

“My beliefs are diametrically opposed to his. I pretty much grew up in church and consider myself a Christian. . . . I was not familiar with Kristian‘s past when I hired him to do ‘Svartediket’. And I could not possibly have known that he would come out and publicly support these serious crimes.”

Tell you what: I’d pay decent money to be a fly on the wall when Mr. Hjelmeland has that long talk with Gaahl. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

BURNING IDEAS (Part 1)

 Metal News, Mosh Pit  3 Responses »
Jan 142010
 

I had another late night. But today I’m gonna resist the urge to bail out on my journalistic responsibilities by posting more Elize Ryd-style cheesecake. Instead, we’re returning to our more usual serious-minded, thought-provoking metal journalism. We’re going to talk about burning churches, burning Bibles, and burning ideas.

And because we provided some eye-candy for the dudes yesterday, we’re gonna show how even-handed we are and start off today with some eye candy for the ladies. Feast your orbs on this delicacy:

Okay, so it’s licorice-flavored eye candy.

This handsome Norwegian is named Gaahl. That’s not the name his momma and daddy gave him. They liked the name Kristian, as in Kristian Eivind Espedal. But when Kristian started playing black metal circa 1993, he must have decided it would be better to have a name that sounded like throat-clearing. And voila! Gaahl!

As you black metalists out there well know, Gaahl is one of the more notorious figures in a fairly notorious genre. During his ten-year stretch with Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth, he was imprisoned for assault in Norway in 2002, and then imprisoned for a second nine-month stint in 2006 for allegedly assaulting and torturing a man for six hours while collecting his blood into a cup and threatening to make him drink it. (read more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

VITAL BREAKING NEWS!

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Jan 132010
 

We know you depend on us to sift through the mountains of daily metal news so you don’t have to, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and then bring to your attention only the truly vital information without which your lives would be drab, insignificant, and not worth living. A heavy fucking responsibility, but we’ve got broad shoulders and we’re up to it.

That’s why we’re telling you, hot off the presses, that Amaranthe singer Elize Ryd (pictured above) has been selected to fill the female guest singer spot on KAMELOT‘s upcoming European tour in April/May.

What’s that you say? You think this “news” is bullshit? You say you’ve never heard of Amaranthe and that with a lead singer like this, they couldn’t possibly be metal?

You say you think KAMELOT sounds like an Andrew Lloyd Webber creation? Or maybe like what would happen if Siegfried and Roy decided to start a metal band?

Basically, you’re thinking I made up this “vital breaking news” horseshit as just an excuse to put a hot piece of eye candy up on our site in a desperate attempt to lure more readers?

Well, so fucking what if I did? Just cut me a little slack. Just this once. I had a late night.

(Thank you Blabbermouth for this vital piece of news.)

LIVING SACRIFICE UPDATE (No. 6)

 Metal News  No Responses »
Jan 122010
 

Yesterday Living Sacrifice made available for streaming the fourth song from their forthcoming new album The Infinite Order. The song is called “They Were One.” It’s packed with groove-oriented riffs, and the band’s thrash influences are really in evidence. This is one hellaciously infectious tune and (if possible) makes us even more stoked for the full album when it drops on January 26.

The band begins a 19-state tour on January 15, co-headlining with War of Ages. You can listen to “They Were One” and find dates and places for the tour by going here.

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