DISCUSSION

 Off Topic  8 Responses »
Apr 042013
 

I have some really cool things to post today, including Andy Synn’s report on Day Two at Inferno Festival, a special tag-team review of Soilwork’s new album, and part one of a two-part post by guest contributor Austin Weber putting the spotlight on some underground bands we haven’t covered here before.

HOWEVER, as I write this it is approximately 2 a.m. and your humble editor has just returned to his humble abode after being humbled by Soilwork and Jeff Loomis at El Corazon in Seattle, and I must now fall into bed before I fall on my face. I will get those other posts ready to go just as soon as I wake up, which should be sometime in 2014.

In the meantime, I would like to get an important discussion under way so I’ll have something fun to read when I wake up. Please watch the video after the jump and leave a comment with your explanation of why those fucking dogs are doing what they’re doing. Continue reading »

“BAD MOTHERFUCKER” IS THE BEST MUSIC VIDEO YOU WILL SEE THIS YEAR

 Exceptions to the Rule, Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 202013
 

Yeah, that’s a pretty grandiose claim since it’s only March and I have no crystal ball that would tell me what the rest of 2013 will bring. But I can’t imagine any other music video will be more fun than “Bad Motherfucker” by Biting Elbows.

Our friend Professor D. Grover the XIIIth e-mailed me about this video two days ago, and I’ve been so smashed by work that I didn’t watch it until this morning. His e-mail gave it a big build-up, and man, was he right.

Biting Elbows are an indie/punk band from Moscow, so I guess you’d have to say they’re “off topic” for this site — but the video is definitely metal. After seeing it I did a bit of research and learned that 18 months ago they released another one named “Insane Office Escape” with the music from their single “The Stampede” as the soundtrack. It was directed by the band’s front man Ilya Naishuller, and it apparently racked up 2 million hits in a matter of days.

The new video, also directed by Naishuller, is for a song named “Bad Motherfucker”. Sub-titled “Insane Office Escape 2”, it starts right after the closing moments of the previous video. It’s a piece of branded content for the Russian vodka company Neft, whose product is used at the start of the video as an impromptu disinfectant; if you pay attention, you’ll also see the company’s logo reappearing in odd places later. Continue reading »

SLOWDOWN

 Off Topic  24 Responses »
Feb 252013
 

I’m feelin’ kinda fucked up today. Unfortunately, that feeling probably isn’t going away any time soon.

Here’s the deal: Unlike certain other metal sites and a very small number of metal blogs, this one isn’t a business and creating content for it isn’t a full-time job for me or any of our regular writers. In my case, the old fuckin’ day job usually leaves me enough time to devote significant attention to NCS, but every now and then it demands its pound of flesh in a rather extreme way — and it’s doing that now.

Beginning today and for the next 3 weeks (and possibly a bit longer) I will be away from home and immersed in a project that will kill off not only my days but most of my nights. I’m lucky that these kinds of assignments happen rarely, but when they do happen, they become nearly all-consuming. Don’t ask me for details — I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

The only silver lining to this cloud is that the project could end much sooner than I’m predicting — but whether or not that happens is beyond my control. Continue reading »

EXCUSES, EXCUSES

 Off Topic  15 Responses »
Jan 182013
 

(Wayne Barlowe: “Unholy Communion”)

Here’s how my week is going.

On Sunday I went to the airport in Seattle. I got on an airplane and I flew for about 3 1/2 hours to a place. I got off the airplane and I went to a hotel. I met up with other people and worked Sunday night. I went to sleep. I woke up and worked all day Monday and until late on Monday night. I did the same thing again on Tuesday. Tuesday night I kicked back a little with the people I had been working with. I went to sleep. After getting shit-faced.

Early Wednesday morning I went back to the airport and flew for another 3 1/2 hours to a different place, even farther from Seattle. I got off the airplane and went to a hotel.  I met other people and worked until late Wednesday night. I went to sleep. I got up on Thursday morning and did the same thing, except at the end of the day I got on a train and traveled for 1 1/2 hours to another place.

I met other people there who I work with and had dinner with them, got shit-faced, and then I went to a hotel. It was late by then. I went to sleep.

It’s now Friday morning. I’m about 2,000 miles from home. I think I’ll do some work today. Tonight I’ll be going out to dinner with people I work with. Most likely I will get shit-faced. Most likely I will go to sleep after that. Continue reading »

LET THE FLAME WARS BEGIN: THE OSCAR NOMINATIONS ARE OUT

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Jan 102013
 

Briefly departing from our usual focus on metal, I thought I’d mention that the nominations for the 85th annual Academy Awards were announced this morning by actress Emma Stone and Oscars show host Seth MacFarlane. As usual, many of the the nominations were predictable and expected and some weren’t. And once again, there were omissions that will get many movie fans riled up and pissed off.

Not surprisingly, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln leads this year’s Oscar race with 12 nominations, including best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, and acting nominations for Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones.

Surprisingly, Life of Pi picked up a whopping 11 nominations, including best picture, best director for Ang Lee, best adapted screenplay, and a shitload of technical nominations.

The best actress nominations included both the youngest and the oldest nominees in the history of the category: 9-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis for Beasts of the Southern Wild” (she was 5 years old when the movie was filmed) and 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva for the Austrian drama Amour. The other nominees are Jessica Chastain for Zero Dark Thirty, Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook, and Naomi Watts for The Impossible.

As mentioned, Daniel Day-Lewis picked up a predictable best actor nomination for Lincoln, but so did Hugh Jackman for Les Miserables, Bradley Cooper for Silver Linings Playbook, Joaquin Phoenix for The Master, and Denzel Washington for Flight. Now for a few oversights . . . Continue reading »

HAPPY FUCKING NEW YEAR

 Off Topic  7 Responses »
Dec 312012
 

Here in the Great Pacific Northwest, we’re still 13 hours away from the turn of the old year into the new one, and the obligatory celebrations haven’t yet begun on our metallic island. But due to the mysteries of time zones and datelines, it appears that 2013 has arrived or is about to arrive elsewhere — and how the fuck does that work?

Anyway, with the dawn of a new, arbitrary calendar date fast approaching, we want to thank all of you for your support of NO CLEAN SINGING during 2012. It was a great year for metal and a great year for us as a site.

We’re looking forward to what 2013 will bring. We already know it’s going to bring even more outstanding music — we will soon be publishing a list of forthcoming albums that we’re eagerly anticipating, with an invitation for you to add to that list based on what you’ve seen and heard.

And we hope the New Year will bring you fortune, fame, lasting love, happiness, multiple orgasms, a job, a fast getaway, the utter destruction of your enemies, or whatever else your heart desires. Continue reading »

THE DAY AFTER

 Off Topic  48 Responses »
Dec 152012
 

I wanted to write about metal today, as always, but I failed. My mind was still trying to wrap itself around something else, namely, 20 innocent children and six innocent adults gunned down at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, USA, on December 15, 2012.

I don’t know about you, but I’m old enough that I feel pretty hardened against the horrors of the world. Tragedies, big and small, are part of daily life. The world is more interconnected than ever before, and we can read about and watch bloodbaths like this one every day if we want to — because somewhere in the world, each day brings a fresh horror of some kind.

There’s only so much individual human tolerance for bad news. If you don’t armor yourself to some degree against the pain of other people, it’s damned hard to put one foot in front of another and keep going.

But the death of children . . . the unnecessary, unpredictable death of 20 children . . . is especially hard to take.  You have to have really thick armor to deflect something like this.

I know that, somewhere, children die in droves every day, usually in places where disease or starvation or grotesque neglect claim them. But like all horrors, the closer to home they are, the more you feel them. It’s just easier to imagine that they could happen to you, or your children, or your friends, or their children. Evolution is probably to blame for both our increased sensitivity to tragedies that we can more easily imagine as happening to ourselves or those we love, and our comparative indifference to more remote instances of catastrophic loss. Continue reading »

ENJOY YOUR FOOD

 Off Topic  17 Responses »
Oct 262012
 

I made this.

For the last 24 hours we’ve done nothing on the site but play videos and write about videos, so why stop now? Maybe we’ll do something different tomorrow, but let’s have one more video before we stumble headlong into the weekend.

I don’t know about you, but most metalheads I know inhale their food. They devour it like hyenas who know that any minute the lions will be dropping by for their turn at the carcass. Just shoveling the food in and swallowing, without bothering to expend much energy on needless activity like chewing.

I don’t mean to exclude myself from this description. I try damned hard never to eat when there’s a mirror in the vicinity, for fear of scaring the shit out of myself.

But this is not how we’re supposed to eat. Nutritionists and weight-loss specialists say that you should eat slowly, using small bites and chewing the food well. They theorize that this gives your body time to realize that you’re getting food into your stomach and produce those hormones that tell your brain, “STOP, YOU GLUTTONOUS FUCK!  YOU’RE FULL!” As opposed to getting those signals only after you’ve rapidly eaten twice what an entire tribe in the Amazon consumes in a week.

Also, when we inhale food, we don’t really taste it. Of course, given the utter crap food that many of us eat, maybe that’s not a bad thing. Continue reading »

FACEBOOK FURTHER REDUCES THE REACH OF UN-PAID PAGE POSTS — AND WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT

 Off Topic  37 Responses »
Oct 222012
 

This is the latest in a series of increasingly depressing articles we’ve published about Facebook’s manipulation of Page posts in an effort to “monetize” their business. For more detailed background about changes that have come to light earlier this year, go here, here, and here.

The latest development: It strongly appears that in late September 2012, Facebook again changed the complex “EdgeRank” computer algorithm that it uses to decide what appears in its users’ news feeds so as to reduce the reach of so-called “organic” posts, i.e., un-paid posts, while it continues to push Page sponsors to pay Facebook in order to reach readers. If you’re a FB Page admin like me and you’ve noticed a dramatic recent decline in the number of FB users who see your posts, now we know why.

In this article, we’ll summarize the evidence of this change (with all sources listed at the end) and also discuss some ways of circumventing Facebook’s strategy, including one that’s increasingly being suggested around the web — use of Facebook’s “Interest Lists” feature.

This article may prove to be of general interest, but as usual, we’re writing from a narrow perspective: We’re addressing these issues as a non-profit metal blog whose mission is to spread the word about underground music made largely by broke-ass bands, distributed by largely broke-ass labels, and loved by largely broke-ass fans.

We use Facebook for much the same reason that our constituents do — to interact with the community of metal and to publicize what we’re doing. Making money isn’t in our mission statement, and although many metal bands and labels do use Facebook in an effort to generate sales of music, merch, and show tickets, it’s not like they’re raking in the big stacks. Which is why anything Facebook does that pushes metal-oriented Pages to pay for reaching their fans is particularly damaging to our (broke-ass) community. Continue reading »

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