SEEN AND HEARD: A STREAM DUMP (PART 2)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Apr 132014
 

John Martin: “The Deluge” (1834)

As I mentioned yesterday, the past week brought good song and video premieres in a flood, which was unfortunate only in the sense that I didn’t have time to write about all those discoveries day-by-day as they happened. So this weekend I decided to just flood you with them, leaving behind all but some short snippets of my own sparkling prose and mainly delivering the streams, along with release info.

Yesterday I collected 11 (!) new songs and videos, plus a couple of tantalizing news items, and today I’ve got 12 more, plus a few more news items. Once again, I present them in alphabetical order:

AMBIENT DEATH

The Song: “Apotheosis of the Hangman”
From: Dismembering the Image of God
Release info: self-released by the band on April 7; below is a new video for the opening track

Vicious melodic death metal with flying fretwork that gets more interesting and seductive as the song progresses. Punches pretty damned hard, too. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: A STREAM DUMP (PART 1)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Apr 122014
 

This has been one of those weeks where my blog time was severely constricted by both personal and job-related demands. You might have guessed that, based on the complete absence of any “seen and heard” posts since Monday. I didn’t have time to do much more than quickly scan through the interhole each day looking for new song and video premieres and make lists of what I’d like to hear and see when time would permit. This morning, I finally crawled through that list, and found a shitload of new things I really liked.

Because I’m behind, and because I don’t want to fall further behind, I’m taking the wimp’s way out in this post. I’m just going to stitch together a bunch of recommended song and video streams (11 of them) with almost no commentary. It’s a stream dump, and I will bet money you’ll find something to like, almost regardless of your tastes. It’s spring, and metal is in bloom.

Salted within this list are a couple of news items that perked my interest, even though there’s nothing available to hear… yet.

I present this box of chocolates in alphabetical order. There will be another similar collection either later today or tomorrow. Tell me what you like. Leave comments! Continue reading »

METAL FASTING — REFLECTING ON EXILE

 Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 102014
 

(NCS contributor Leperkahn decided that for a school project he was going to spend a week without metal. He received a lot of suggestions from our readers for non-metal listening, and he wrote day-by-day reports of what he explored instead of metal. In this post he reflects on the experience.)

Well, I’ve finally returned to my beloved metal. Though it was very interesting and informative to explore other genres, the experiment also proved to affirm metal as my outright favorite genre, at its best combining all the disparate positive elements of nearly every other genre into one. Part of that may stem from the extremely vague definition metal has come to assume: Perhaps the only uniting factor is a strong, loud percussive unit (and even that could be called into question).  Many of the other genres I explored seem to have somewhat stricter definitions, which necessarily seems to place an eventual constraint on the directions in which a genre can evolve.

That’s not to discount the ability of these other genres to go places where metal has never gone, nor could ever go. Most forays of metal into rap’s “territory”, for example, have been rather ill-fated (I think of Limp Bizkit here, as opposed to the success story of Rage Against The Machine). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: IMPALED NAZARENE, DIOCLETIAN, GOJIRA, THE BODY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Apr 062014
 

I’ve collected here some things that made a big impression on me when I discovered them over the last 24 hours. Perhaps they will make an impression on you, too.

IMPALED NAZARENE

2014 will see the release of the TWELFTH (!!) album by Finland’s Impaled Nazarene. Although I haven’t listened to even half of those dozen, I’ve listened enough to know that although their sound might not be entirely predictable from album to album (not a bad thing), it’s always likely to be a skull-hammering good time. From what I’ve heard of the new album, that will hold true yet again.

The new one’s name is Vigorous and Liberating Death, and the album cover was painted by Taneli Jarva. It’s scheduled for release by Osmose Productions on April 14. It includes 13 songs, almost all in sub-three-minute territory. You can get a sense of what’s coming via a track named “Kuoleman Varjot” that recently appeared on SoundCloud. Plus, the band have released a lyric video for the album’s title track. You can check out both below. Continue reading »

MAJESTIC DOWNFALL: “THE DARK LULLABY”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  7 Responses »
Apr 042014
 


cover art by Anne O’Neill

I’ve been waiting impatiently to hear Majestic Downfall’s contribution to the band’s forthcoming split with The Slow Death for two weeks, ever since hearing the latter band’s part of the split (which I thought was wonderful). And this morning it began streaming through the interhole. Using my well-known cat-like reflexes, I pounced on it without delay. I prepared to be enveloped in its fuzzy embrace, but instead lost my grip and fell into it like a drowning pool.

As the solo project of Zombiefication’s Jacobo Córdova, Majestic Downfall secured a place on my personal “listen to everything they do” list with 2013’s Three, an album from which we had the pleasure of premiering a song last year. And this new song proves the wisdom of pouncing on the band’s every new release without delay.

The song’s name is “The Dark Lullaby” and it’s an amazingly rich and varied tapestry of sound that makes full use of its 13 minute run-time. It may be premature to say this, since I’ve only heard the song a few times, but I’d venture to say that it’s the best thing I’ve yet heard from this very talented project. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ROTTING HILLS, SCHAMMASCH, SABBATORY, BLACK MONOLITH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  6 Responses »
Apr 032014
 

Over the last 48 hours I found a lot of really good new metal. I’ve picked three of those new songs to feature in this post. The “Shades of Black” post title doesn’t mean all the music is black metal, and it isn’t.

ROTTING HILLS

Rotting Hills are a Vancouver sludge/doom band consisting of four drummers, two guitarists, and a bass player (and one of them is a vocalist, too). As far as I can tell, they’ve put out three singles so far, all of which are available on Bandcamp. The second of those, released in mid-2012, is named “Belgrave”. For that song, the band’s Brian Sepanzyk wrote and directed a striking video with a different title — “Seventh Prayer” — that premiered just a few days ago.

Everyone who worked on the video should be congratulated; it’s beautifully made, with a high level of professional skill. And Rotting Hills should be congratulated on the song as well. It’s slow, spare, and deeply sombre, a gradually unfolding piece that moves from the beautifully melancholy to a wrenching cataclysm. The video is one of those prized accomplishments in which the music and the visuals not only complement but also enhance each other. Continue reading »

CROWDFUNDERS: NERO DI MARTE, TALANAS, DERELICT EARTH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 032014
 

Almost every day we read about new crowdfunding campaigns by metal bands. We don’t try to mention even a small fraction of the ones we see; there’s just not enough time or space. But there are three in this post we wanted to spotlight, in part because all three involve bands we’ve supported in the past — because they’re damned good. And to remind you of that, music is included.

NERO DI MARTE

This first appeal for funds was spawned by a tragedy involving two Italian bands. One of them, Nero di Marte, delivered a self-titled 2013 album that our reviewer Andy Synn called “a phenomenal debut” — “an unusual form of technically twisted death metal with a taste for sudden, erratic explosions of extremity, and a progressive streak a mile wide.” (The review is here.) The other, Void of Sleep, are a sludge-rock band whose 2013 album was Tale Between Reality and Madness.

On Sunday, March 23, after playing a show in Rome, both bands were robbed of all their instruments and gear. Here’s their statement of what happened:

In less than 30 minutes someone broke into our van and was able to take everything. It happened in broad daylight near a police station in Rome, despite there being a massive amount of police forces surveilling the area but, alas, no security cameras.

Guitars, amps, pedalboards, drums, merchandise and personal belongings… a total amount of 25.000€ was stolen from both bands. They took everything. A full list can be found here:

The sad reality of this situation is that without any instruments we cannot continue as a band. We can’t play, rehearse, tour, record a new album.

It took us years to buy our gear, and to start from absolutely nothing, without any help, means paralyzing anything we could do for a long time or seriously put ourselves into debt beyond what we can afford.

Continue reading »

JUST BEFORE DAWN’S “THE AFTERMATH” — NEW ALBUM DETAILS AND MUSICAL TEASERS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 022014
 

The debut album by Sweden’s Just Before Dawn — Precis innan gryningen – was one of the best old-school, Swedish-style death metal albums I heard last year. I attempted to explain why in this review. In a nutshell, it delivered lethally infectious riffs and grim melodies that gave each song a distinctive and memorable personality; the production made it sound massive; and the top-shelf instrumental chops of mastermind Anders Biazzi (Blood Mortized) were matched by the horrible roars of an impressive line-up of guest vocalists. And today I’m delighted to report news about Just Before Dawn’s next album — The Aftermath — and to give you a taste of the new music.

First, we’re pleased to bring you one of the record’s two album covers, created by Benny Moberg, who also mixed and mastered The Aftermath (the second cover for an edition of the album that includes a different bonus track has yet to be revealed). As in the case of the band’s first release, The Aftermath’s lyrical themes are derived from the history of World War II, and the music is dedicated to the fallen heroes of all wars throughout the ages.

Second, Anders Biazzi has once again lined up a stellar array of vocalists to join their roars to his guitar and bass ferocity, as well as some noteworthy guest guitar soloists. Check out the track list and the vocalists who contributed to each song: Continue reading »

APRIL FOOLS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Apr 022014
 

My close friends and family members will tell you that I’m one of the most gullible people you could ever encounter. I prefer to think of it as an innately trusting nature, but my history of being duped is so long and rich that I can’t really quarrel with their judgment. Even on April 1, when I try to be on guard, I still get suckered like a carnival rube.

There were lots of metal-oriented pranks yesterday that were funny even though they were obvious — such as the 50 reviews that suddenly materialized on Metal-Archives for the ingeniously named Penis Metal by Hades Archer. At least I think that was a prank. Sometimes gullibility can work in reverse.

One prank I fell for, hook, line, and sinker, appears at the top of this post. I have such a hard-on for Oak Pantheon and Amiensus, and their 2013 split Gathering, that I took one look at that flyer — and the appearance of a Seattle date — and started marking my calendar and exclaiming enthusiastically about it on Facebook. I didn’t dwell on the logistical difficulty of a tour that would start on the US East Coast, jump to a bunch of European capitols, and then pick up on the US West Coast, all within the space of a month. I also completely missed the two tiny words in the lower right-hand corner of the flyer. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PUTERAEON, VANHELGD, MISERY INDEX, DAWN OF DEMENTIA, FALL OF THE ALBATROSS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Apr 012014
 

Here we have another round-up of new music to recommend for your aural pleasure. I’m splitting this quintet with one of our other writers, Austin Weber. I’m introducing the first three items, and he’s got the other two after that. Here we go:

PUTERAEON

I’ve massively enjoyed this Swedish death metal band’s last two albums, The Esoteric Order (2011) (reviewed here) and Cult Cthulhu (2012) (which I miserably failed to review). They’ve now completed another Lovecraftian-inspired album entitled The Crawling Chaos, which will be released by Cyclone Empire on April 25 and features chilling cover art by Christoffer Fredriksson. The band recently released an official video for the album’s third track, “Path To Oblivion”, and I caught up with that today. You should catch up with it, too.

The music is like a hard-charging phalanx of ghouls and golems, a ghastly and galvanizing gallop of gore-strewn gruesomeness. The crypt door has been flung wide open, and all manner of unholy, undead things are coming for your teeth. Continue reading »

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