OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 20

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  16 Responses »
Feb 052014
 

Welcome to Part 20 of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the songs I’m announcing today, click here.

In an effort to complete this list in your lifetime, I’ve decided to start tripling up, but hopefully not tripping up. From now until I finish, there will be three songs in each installment. As usual, I’m trying to group the songs together in ways that make some kind of sense. Perhaps you’ll decide that today’s songs are collected together because they really don’t fit anywhere else. I think they actually make a pretty cool little 3-part playlist.

AUTHOR & PUNISHER

For those not in the know, Author & Punisher is the part-band-part-art-project of Tristan Shone, who uses his skills as a mechanical engineer to create unique electronic instruments, out of which he wrings emotionally suffocating industrial doom, with heavy elements of dub and drone music. We have written about A&P frequently, and DGR reviewed the 2013 album, Women & Children here.  Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 19

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  14 Responses »
Feb 042014
 

Here’s Part 19 of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the songs I’m announcing today, click here.

Yes, I missed adding an installment of the list yesterday. I blame my continuing delirium over the Seahawks’ victory in the Superb Owl. And yes, it’s February and I still haven’t finished this list. I blame metal, for giving us so much to like in 2013. Now, with those excuses out of the way, here are three songs I’ve grouped together because, well, because they rock. And they’re vocally vicious, too.

TRIBULATION

Not every song on this list comes from an album that ranked high on a plethora of year-end lists, but this next one does. The Formulas of Death deserves all the praise it has received from so many quarters. It is a highly ambitious, remarkably accomplished album, full to bursting with musical ideas and hell-bent on breaking free of any kind of death metal strait-jacket that might confine the band’s creativity. It leavens the raw and the raucous with the exotic and the atmospheric — it’s a long album, but it’s endlessly interesting.

Tribulation don’t go in for cheap tricks, but they sure do know how to get heads moving when the mood strikes them. In the “highly infectious” category, the two strongest contenders are “Wanderer In the Outer Darkness” and “When the Sky Is Black With Devils”. I picked the latter.  Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 18

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  3 Responses »
Feb 022014
 

Here’s the 18th Part of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the songs I’m announcing today, click here.

I’m adding three tunes to this evolving and potentially never-ending list today. Once again, I’ve grouped these songs together for a reason. Here’s a hint: Fucking Death Metal. Death Fucking Metal. Metal Fucking Death.

TORTURE DIVISION

The three members of this Swedish band – Lord K Philipson (guitar), Tobben Gustafsson (drums), and Jörgen Sandström (bass/vocals) — collectively have over 60 years of combined death metal experience, including membership in bands such as Grave, Entombed, Vicious Art, The Project Hate MCMXCIX, Vomitory, and God Among Insects. Their modus operandi is to release short demos and give them away for free on their web site. Every time they finish releasing a group of three demo’s, they package them up and release them as a compilation CD.

In 2013, Torture Division released two demos, both of them (as usual) mixed and mastered by Dan Swanö at Unisound. The first one was named The Worship, and I reviewed it here. The second one was The Sacrifice, and I reviewed that one, too. They’re both sooooo damned good — crushing guitar and bass tone, bone-breaking percussion, bestial vox, irresistible grooves, grisly infectious melodies, both hard-charging and doomy as a dank crypt, with riffs and rhythms that will make you bang your head so goddamned hard it will come off and bounce around your room like a tennis ball. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 17 (EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE)

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  7 Responses »
Feb 012014
 

Welcome to Part 17 our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the two I’m announcing today, click here.

I’ve called this the “Exception to the Rule” edition of this list, because both songs today involve clean singing. At least measured by how often I’ve heard them, they are also two of my favorite songs of the year. Some newcomers who aren’t aware that we make exceptions may be disappointed. But it would be hypocritical of me to ignore these songs.

SHINING

One One One is a very different album from this band’s startling last release, Blackjazz — more stripped-down, more hook-focused, more “approachable”. As DGR put it in his review for us:

“Whereas the last disc was what four guys who are incredibly accomplished on their chosen instruments could do with absolutely no one stopping them or telling them to tone it down a bit, One One One sounds like what happens when the group chooses to exercise a bit of self-restraint — to see if they can still produce that same effect with a more minimalistic sound…. A lot of One One One brings to mind the old axiom that just because you have the ability to do something, doesn’t mean that you should. Everything feels strategically placed so that the band get the maximum impact for a more minimalist amount of showmanship, and it works. Really, really well.” Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 16

 Metal News, MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  5 Responses »
Jan 312014
 

We proudly bring you the 16th Part of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the two I’m announcing today, click here.

In different ways, both bands we’re featuring today have their tongues in their cheeks — but their music also has the capability to tear yours out and use it for a bookmark.

THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT

I suppose our adoration for TMDC knows no bounds — or so one might think from the volume of words we’ve spilled about their new album, Tetragrammaton. For example, these words by our reviewer Mr. Synn:

“Their music is dark, oppressive, and brutal – but also relentlessly energetic, knowingly pompous, and impressively self-aware…. Right from the start you can tell that this is the sequel to the superfluously awesome Triumvirate. Yet it’s more than just a mere carbon copy or continuation. Everything that album brought to the table is still there – the ostentatious synths, the audacious symphonic pomposity, the back-breaking death metal brutality, the darkly intelligent lyrical themes and vicious vocal hooks – yet twisted and reworked just so to provide a new experience, a newly refined recipe for disaster….  Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 15

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  15 Responses »
Jan 302014
 

Welcome to Part 15 our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the two I’m announcing today, click here.

LANTERN

This Finnish duo’s 2013 album, Below, was one of the year’s best — and most astonishing — surprises. At one level, it is dank, moldering, primitive, highly destructive death metal with an overhang of catastrophic doom. In fact, when I wrote about the album’s first advance track, it was in a post entitled “Horrific”. And yet there is so much more to it than a recapitulation of old-school crypt-born precedents. The music often evolves in unpredictable ways, with strange guitar interludes and off-balance drum rhythms, and the atmosphere is often completely otherworldly, as if we are being treated to death metal from a parallel dimension different from our own.

The production quality is murky and obscure. The vocals become vehement proclamations of damnation when they’re not howling with ghastly malevolence. As TheMadIsraeli put it in his review, “The music of Lantern is really, at its core, an esoteric roar from a cavernous abyss.” And yet I think many of the songs are also strangely infectious. I wouldn’t go so far as to cay they’re “catchy”, but they exert a strong magnetic attraction that has drawn me back to Below many times since first encountering it. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 14

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  17 Responses »
Jan 292014
 

Here we present Part 14 our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the two I’m announcing today, click here.

You may have noticed that some of the fun I have in compiling this list comes from decisions about how to group together the 2 or 3 songs presented in each installment. Today, for example, the unifying theme is the “formula” that each band uses in its music (and I put that word in quotes because the music is far from formulaic):  Riffs + Poison

INQUISITION

I like to think I’m very egalitarian in my outlook about most things, including metal. But every now and then I find myself instinctively falling prey to the disease of “metal elitism” — something to which I’m usually immune. For example, when I saw Inquisition’s 2013 album appearing on one after another year-end list from the so-called “big-platform sites”, I grumbled to myself, “they’re just doing this in an effort to prove they’re cool”.

And then I remembered: The riffs on that album are about as close as you can get to an orgasm without someone rubbing on your nether parts. Anyone can appreciate that! Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 13

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  4 Responses »
Jan 282014
 

Welcome to the lucky 13th Part of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the two I’m announcing today, click here.

You remember that a few days ago I resolved to finish this list by the end of January? Well, like my New Year’s resolution to be nice to children and poodles, I may not be able to follow through on that promise. Just too damned many great songs from 2013 that need to be recognized. Also, it’s easier on me to just keep going than to make hard decisions about what to select and what to cut, and I’m completely in favor of making things easier on myself.

KATAKLYSM

Oh man, did Kataklysm come back strong with 2013’s Waiting For the End To Come — strong, hungry, and with fangs and claws bared. To quote from our review by TheMadIsraeli: Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 12

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  6 Responses »
Jan 272014
 

Here we have Part 12 of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the two I’m announcing today, click here.

Today’s installment of the series is brought to you by the NCS Department of Bombastic Brutality, with an assist from the Division of Wretched Excess. Those segments of the NCS bureaucracy are just full of suggestions, but as much as I like bombast and excess, I find that although such forms of metal expression are fun in the moment, they often lack that contagious quality that’s necessary for selection to this particular list. But today’s two songs are both infectious AND capable of causing epileptic seizures.

FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE

I’ve been such a slobbery fan of these Italian maestros that I had a running joke in my posts years ago that I would pay them enough to come live with me and serenade me whenever I wanted, just as soon as those Nigerians who were always offering me bags of gold dust and stacks of cash paid up on their promises. Except I wasn’t joking. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 11

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  3 Responses »
Jan 252014
 

Welcome to Part 11 of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the three I’m announcing today, click here.

That’s right, three songs today instead of two. I have reasons for grouping them together, but not because they’re similar. In fact, the styles of metal are quite different. I’ve put them together in this post because all three bands are relative newcomers, they’re all from the U.S., and they’ve already given us ample cause to expect great things from them in the future — because what they’ve already accomplished is pretty great. Of course, these three songs are also damned infectious.

OAK PANTHEON

This Minneapolis-based band will not be a new name for followers of NCS because we’ve been covering them closely since June 2011, when I included them in a feature that focused on a handful of promising bands I’d found who had less than 100 Facebook likes (they’re over 2,000 now). Musically, Oak Pantheon haven’t been standing still since then. Every new release seems to bring surprises — and further proof that their talents are as expansive as their musical interests.

Their latest release was a 2013 split with Amiensus (yet another very promising U.S. band), which I reviewed here. Oak Pantheon’s contribution to the split is a song entitled “A Gathering”. It manages to rock very hard while also being worthy of the label “epic”. I thought the riffs were ridiculously catchy when I first heard it, and time has only confirmed my first impressions — I’ve been drawn back to the song a lot over the last three months. It was a foregone conclusion that “A Gathering” would have a place on this list. Listen: Continue reading »

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