LIVING SACRIFICE UPDATE

 Album Reviews, Metal News  4 Responses »
Dec 142009
 

livingsacrifice

Tonight: Long miserable day at work ends. I trudge homeward in the dark under a leaking sky. I fire up the computer and check the news headlines, just to see if something really earthshaking has happened while I was being miserable at work — you know, like if the U.S. got into another war, or swine flu has really turned out to be the no-shit, unstoppable killer we were told it would be, or my utility rates are going up again. Fortunately, none of these things has happened. All I see on a quick look is this:

Twenty-two million missing Bush White House e-mails found (what a shock), Obama begs top banks to start lending money again (that’s probably not going to work), new computer modeling shows that Arctic ice cap may completely vanish by 2014 (we’ve got plenty of polar bears in zoos anyway, right?), Italian prime minister Berlusconi hospitalized in Milan after man hits him in the face with a souvenir statue (I was wondering when someone was going to hit that disgusting fucker in the face with a souvenir statue).

I finish reading the headlines and I breathe a big sigh of relief:  as they say in the Army, Situation Normal (All Fucked Up).

I turn to the real news of the day:  metal news! And what do I see almost immediately?  Living Sacrifice has put up yet another new song on their MySpace page.  We here at NCS had barely finished drooling over the band’s new single “Rules of Engagement” and now we’ve got yet another teaser for their forthcoming full-length, The Infinite Order (scheduled for a Jan 26 release). I check out the new song — and damn! It’s even more hot shit than “Rules”! Continue reading »

DARK TRANQUILLITY UPDATE

 Metal News  No Responses »
Dec 142009
 

Dark+Tranquillity

Last week I saw a snippet on Lambgoat reporting that Killswitch Engage had announced national tour dates with support from The Devil Wears Prada.  The tour dates included a March 10 stop here in the Emerald City at Showbox-SoDo.  My reaction?  Meh.  There was a time when the chance to see KsE would have elevated my pulse rate.  Not so much any more.  Not even sure they still qualify as NCS Metal at all.

But KsE has now added a new blog entry on their MySpace page about the same tour, and guess what? That update says Swedish melodic death titans Dark Tranquillity will be opening all shows on the tour. Now that caused my pulse rate to go up! In an ideal world, a legendary, groundbreaking band like Dark Tranquillity wouldn’t be an opening act for the likes of Killswitch Engage and (worse still) The Devil Wears Prada. They’d be headlining.  But beggars like me can’t be choosers. At least DT will get back to the US and the fans will be assured of some decent venues.

Even more exciting is that DT has scheduled the US release of their ninth studio album, We Are the Void, for March 9 — the day before their Showbox performance in Seattle. Full tour dates available after the jump. Continue reading »

IN FLAMES NEWS (or news in flames)

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Dec 132009
 

in flames

Swedish melodic death metal pioneers In Flames will always hold a special place in my heart.  They were my introduction to extreme metal, and though their music has become poppier over the years, I still love what they do.  I’ve been lucky enough to see them play in the Northwest on three occasions and to meet the guys in person on one of those tours (and they’re about as nice and unpretentious a group of dudes as you could hope to meet).

Guitarist Jesper Strömblad is one of the founders and the only remaining original member of the band. So it was with some trepidation that I read in February of this year that he’d checked himself into a rehab clinic to get treatment for alcohol abuse and would therefore miss the band’s Australia/SouthAmerica/Japan tour. A significant and positive step for Jesper, but one that raised some questions about how it would affect the future of In Flames.  In March, drummer Björn Gelotte gave an interview in which he had this to say about the situation:

“Well, as with every problem of this kind, it’s not something that you want to tell everybody. It is something that you are sort of embarrassed about, but we’ve been living around this problem now for many many years. The thing is that with something like this you can’t really force anybody to go to the doctor or to feel better. You have to wait until this person realizes that himself. And what happened is that it got to be too much and he had a breakdown and he realized when his body said, “This is it.” He had to go and get medication, get some treatment and lock himself in for a couple of weeks and take it easy and take care of himself. And this is the only way of waking up, I think. I don’t know how it is with other abuses, but with this one — it’s kind of embarrassing. It’s tough for him to realize it, but when he finally did it, now he’s doing something about it. But it takes time to get back.”

I hadn’t heard much more about this situation until today, when I saw a story that really brightened up my Sunday morning.   Continue reading »

2010 WHIPLASH THREATS

 Metal News  No Responses »
Dec 112009
 

MetalFans2

This post is a two-fer.  Part 2 concerns the photo above and the story in UK’s The Independent that it accompanied.  But first, Part 1:  Elise over at the excellent Reign in Blonde site put up an initial list of 2010 winter/spring tours rolling through the NYC area that she’s stoked about, and asked “What’s on your calendar?” On our NW METAL CALENDAR page, we’ve got a pretty complete list of tours scheduled for touch-down in the Seattle area so far, and here are a few I’m particularly psyched about:

JAN 26:  Hypnose, Revocation, Binary Code

JAN 27:  Nile, Immolation, Krisiun

FEB 6:  Arch Enemy, Exodus, Arsis, Mutiny Within

APR 21:  Finntroll, Moonsorrow, Swallow the Sun, Survivors Zero

Gonna be some serious headbanging at those shows.

Now for Part 2:  A year ago The Independent reported the results of a psychological survey of 36,000 music lovers.  (OK, yeah, it’s old news, but I just saw the story.) The survey showed a definite correlation between people’s personality traits and the style of music they enjoy. Check it out:

Fans of indie music, for instance, were found to have low self-esteem and little motivation, but described themselves as creative. Rap enthusiasts, on the other hand, tend to think a lot of themselves and are extremely outgoing. . . . But the study’s most remarkable discovery is that refined lovers of classical music share a high number of personality traits with those who prefer rocking out to heavy metal.

ClassicalFansAnd here is the study’s summary of classical and metal lovers’ personality traits:

Classical: Classical music lovers have high self-esteem, are creative and at ease with themselves, but not outgoing.

Heavy metal: Very creative and at ease with themselves, but not very outgoing or hard-working.

Kinda cool right up til the end, huh?

LIVING SACRIFICE

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Dec 102009
 

livingsacrifice2

Resurrected death/thrash band Living Sacrifice has just released a new single, “Rules of Engagement” in advance of their forthcoming CD, The Infinite Order, due for release on January 26. It’s streaming on the band’s MySpace page, it’s available on iTunes, and it kicks ass.

This Arkansas band originally formed in 1988, broke up in 2002, and reunited in 2008 with a six-week US tour (“Stronger Than Hell”) headlined by Seattle metalcore band Demon Hunter. I had lost sight of the band during their hiatus and had not paid any serious attention to them even before the break-up — frankly, because of preconceptions based on their categorization as Christian metal. But I caught the “Stronger Than Hell” tour when it passed through Seattle, and their performance that night was one of the best I saw that year.  Hell, one of the best in many years. They totally tore up the place, and a worshipful packed crowd at El Corazon went crazy over them. So did I. Continue reading »

TEXAS IN JULY

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Dec 082009
 

Texas+in+July+texas

My co-Author IntoTheDarkness turned me on to Texas in July this past summer not long after they released their full-length CD I Am. I liked it immediately and have found myself going back to it periodically since then (and I’ll eventually explain why). When I first started listening to I Am, I knew nothing about the band and there wasn’t a lot to learn on the netz, though I did discover that despite their band name the guys were from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. (As a native Texan, I was a little disappointed by that discovery, but managed to get over it.)

Recently, after one of my periodic returns to I Am, I decided to hunt the web again for more info and found a lot more than when I looked the first time 6 months ago. For one thing, the band’s MySpace page now shows more than 1 million song plays, which is a shit-load. And I found that the band had released an EP called Salt of the Earth in October 2008 (both releases are now available on iTunes).  I also found all sorts of on-the-surface reasons why the odds would be against me liking this band.

First, they’re really young (ages 16-18, and two of them still in high school) and I’m really not.  I’ve found very few metal bands that young who have enough song-writing sophistication and playing chops to be worth more than a brisk once-over. Second, look at that photo above: kind of screams “Emo!” doesn’t it? Third, their label (CI Records) bills them  as a Christian metalcore band. Now don’t get me wrong — they’re some bands stuck in that same genre pigeon-hole that I really like (e.g., August Burns Red) — but it’s not a long list. My tastes these days tend to run toward the more brutal end of the extreme metal spectrum.

But against all these odds, I’m still addicted to Texas in July. Call it a guilty pleasure. And the source of the appeal, as it should be, is the music. To explain . . . Continue reading »

METAL TSUNAMI

 Listmania, Metal News  No Responses »
Dec 062009
 

tsunami

For all you horn-headed stat geeks out there, Cosmo Lee has compiled some fascinating numbers that you can read about in detail at his Invisible Oranges site. In a nutshell, in 1986 (which Lee uses as a baseline), 458 full-length metal releases came out. Assuming you had wanted to, you could have listened to all of them at the rate of 38 a month. Last year, there were almost 5,000 full-length metal releases. You’d have had to listen to more than 400 albums a month to cover all of them. And that’s not counting demos — there were more than 4,000 of them released last year.

We can guess about why this flood of metal has built to tsunami-like proportions over the last 23 years. For example, advances in technology have made DIY digital recording much easier and cheaper, and the netz have made it vastly easier for bands to get their music out into the world (regardless of whether the music is worth a shit or not).

None of this means those thousands of metal bands releasing new music every year are making any more money than the 458 who released albums in 1986. In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked if those 458 metal releases generated more total sales (in constant dollars) than the almost 5,000 released last year. Sure, the population has grown since then (in the U.S., from about 240 million in ’86 to about 304 million in ’08). On the other hand, file-sharing and downloads have just about succeeded in putting a stake through the heart of CD sales.

One thing is for sure: The flood of metal has populated every metal micro-genre with lots of choices and has made it increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff if you’re a listener. As Lee astutely observes in his post:

Such multiplicity means that consensus is likely impossible to reach nowadays. Year-end lists show much less overlap because people have many more choices. . . . In the past, people had limited, overlapping access to information — the same few TV channels, record stores, and so on. Now technology has blasted everything wide open. The only year-end list that matters now is yours.

DISFIGURING THE GODDESS

 Album Reviews, Metal News  No Responses »
Dec 052009
 

DFG2

Someday we’ll write about a band we don’t like. Promise. But not today. Today is a day to write about Disfiguring the Goddess. We really like Disfiguring the Goddess. And irresistable cosmic forces dictate that we write about DTG today. Why?

Well, first, earlier this week the band made 3 “new” songs available for free download here. Second, soon after that, following a long hiatus, the nearly perfect Metal Sucks website relaunched the “Completely Unreadable Band Logo of the Week” contest. Check it out here. And guess whose logo they chose to use for the re-launch? Well, I mean that’s the point — you’re supposed to guess. But we’ll save you the trouble. The logo featured on Metal Sucks was a cropped version of the image above, the same one you’ll find on the MySpace page for — Disfiguring the Goddess.

Your superstitious Author decided he could ignore this kind of cosmic alignment only at his peril. Besides, this band deserves our Authorial attention here at NCS. DTG is unsigned. Its only available body of work consists of a 6-song promo EP (available on iTunes), a 4-song demo you can scrounge from net download sites, and a few “vocal videos” on YouTube. And as far as we know, DTG has never performed even a single live show. Yet it has developed a large cult following, largely on the strength of Cameron “Big Chocolate” Argon’s vocal prowess and his ability to create music that’s “outside the box” — which is saying something in a musical genre that’s itself way outside the box. The inimitable Sergeant D has written over at Metal Inquisition that Argon has produced “the most brutal, crushing, guttural slamz on Earth.” Gotta agree. Continue reading »

METAL DOWN UNDER

 Metal News  No Responses »
Dec 022009
 

Psycroptic in Indonesia

psycroptic2

We’re big fans of Psycroptic. First, they’re called Psycroptic. Second, they’re from Tasmania for fuck’s sake. Third, they play some awesome technical death metal. And fourth, when they tour, they go to places like Indonesia (Java and Bali to be precise) — and they draw big crowds there! I’m not shitting you. The photos up above are from Psycroptic’s Indonesian tour in November. The band’s amazing drummer Dave Haley released a report about the experience. Here’s an excerpt:

“We can honestly say we can’t wait to go back! Indonesia’s metal scene is huge, and feels more like a ‘community’ than just music fans. I can honestly say I’ve never seen so much enthusiam and passion for music anywhere in the world. What an amazing place…I wish every tour could be as good as that one was!”

Who knew?

AustralianHeavyMetalLogo

Then on top of that, Psycroptic returned to Australia to learn that they had received a pile of awards at the first annual Australian Metal Awards show in Sydney, including best live band and — what did I tell you — best band name.

And they’re working on new music for release in 2010.

For more details about all these doings, go here.

PORTLAND IN THE SUN — Part 2

 Album Reviews, Metal News  No Responses »
Dec 012009
 

Dawn in Portland

Yesterday we wrote about American Me, the first of two Portland bands that have produced new releases from Rise Records within the last month or two.  Today, we’re talking about the debut album from . . .

Those Who Lie Beneath

ThoseWhoLieBeneath3

TWLB dropped their first CD, An Awakening, on Oct 13, and it’s one of the best debuts we’ve heard this year. They share this much with their label-mates, American Me: Both bands churn out fast, angry, viscerally affecting sonic assaults — exactly the kind of NCS Metal your Author wants.

But where American Me generates a heavy brand of hardcore, Those Who Lie Beneath have built their sound around a different core: death metal.  But what they’ve produced on An Awakening is a blend of many death-metal influences — old-school death, the crushing breakdowns of deathcore, melodic death metal guitar stylings and solos, and tech-death instrumentation. The music resists simple classification, though it isn’t a forced stitching together of styles for the sake of showing off or trying to be different for the sake of being different.  The music truly hangs together in an integrated, fully realized way. Continue reading »

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