INSOMNIUM AND AGALLOCH: NEW-ALBUM UPDATES (and a playlist)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Dec 292013
 

Here’s a status update that appeared on the Facebook page of Finland’s Insomnium today (emphasis added):

“We’ve now recorded rhythm guitars for 5 songs. In addition to Marshall+EVH combo we’re also using Mesa Single Rectifier and my seven stringed Mayones to add some more depth and fatness to the sound. The new material is definitely more varied than before. For example, we’re flirting a bit with death/black metal vibe with some of the songs. Nevertheless, everything sounds very much like Insomnium and I guess that’s mainly due to our “trademark” melodies. We’re splitting rhythm parts pretty much equally with Markus and also try out different guitar arrangements as we go. All in all, the mood is very relaxed and we’re making good progress without too much pressure and stress.

-Ville”

Aw hell yes.   Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: HAIL SPIRIT NOIR, CULTED, TRENCHROT, THRALL

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  12 Responses »
Dec 282013
 

Between the time I’ve spent with family and friends over the holidays and pushing out the biggest year-end LISTMANIA series our site has ever published, I’ve been constricted in my ability to listen to new songs and forthcoming releases. But I keep lists. I keep lists like a hoarder of names. Never mind that actually making it through the lists is a frail hope, given that they keep growing, and growing, and growing…

But yesterday, I made a small dent in them and came away with four songs I’m really high on. Two of them are new tracks by bands whose past work I’ve admired, and two of them come from bands who I’d never heard before. Musically, the four songs have very little in common, other than the fact that they are all winners — and they all have darkness in their souls.

HAIL SPIRIT NOIR

Hail Spirit Noir’s first album, Pneuma (reviewed here), was unlike anything else I heard in 2012. It was exceedingly strange and yet brilliant, a splicing together of black metal, 60′s flower-power pop psychedelics, 70′s prog rock, 80′s New Wave dance beats, melodic doom, and even cool jazz. Each song was distinctively different from, though related to, the others, like cousins on a gnarled family tree. Continue reading »

MERRY AND BRIGHT

 Free Shit, Mosh Pit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  22 Responses »
Dec 252013
 

I have my own opinions about Christmas and the whole holiday season surrounding it, the kind of opinions that used to provoke an annual rant on this site (such as this one, which still receives new visits at this time of year despite its age). But there will be no rant this year.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t changed my opinions. However, it has dawned on me that spewing vitriol about the holiday is somewhat inconsistent with what we stand for at NCS. Life delivers more than enough frustration, aggravation, hurt feelings, pain, sorrow, loneliness, parking tickets, and bad food without us adding to the negativity. I like to think that what we’re about at NCS is delivering things that make life better, e.g., some daily metal and generally good-humored prose.

Despite its shortcomings, Christmas does make life better for some people (though certainly not all). Some people hold the holiday as a sacred occasion. It gives some people an occasion to enjoy the company of family and friends. For others, it evokes warm memories of years gone by. Some simply enjoy the pretty lights and the chance to stuff themselves with yummy eats. In general, I think it’s wrong to put down activities that make people happy, as long as they’re not hurting themselves or others in the process, even if such activities don’t do much for me. So, this year I won’t be complaining about Christmas. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: MEDECOPHOBIC, PURTENANCE, AETHERIAN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Dec 222013
 

Here’s a selection of metal I discovered yesterday from bands both new and old. It’s a diverse mix of sounds, from bone-mangling and decimating to beautifully melodic, and I found all of it excellent.

MEDECOPHOBIC

Medecophobic is a two-man operation from Munich, Germany. Almost exactly three years ago they self-released their debut album Pandemic of Existence (available on Bandcamp here), and recently they’ve signed with a label called Permeated Records, which will be releasing a new three-song demo in January. The new demo’s name is Escalation, and yesterday the band started streaming one of the new songs — “Cornered”.

Brutal, slamming death metal is intrinsically visceral music, and “Cornered” punches really hard, right in the gut. The darting, jabbing riffs come fast and furious, and the off-the-hook drum attack is merciless (damn, am I loving the snare-drum weaponry on this song!). The instrumental work displays a lot of technical flair, the grooves are abundant, and the vocals sound like the cross-bred yowling of a sabretooth and a bear. Tasty! Continue reading »

YEAR-END INTERLUDE

 Free Shit, LISTMANIA 2013, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Dec 202013
 


ah yes . . . it’s that special time of year

As this week draws to a close, I thought I would let you know what we have planned for you in the 11 days left in 2013, and then toss some free music your way. And by the way, are you as weirded out as I am to realize that this year will be over in only 11 days?

2013 has been a fantastic year for metal. I had been thinking that even before we started our LISTMANIA series, but all the lists we’ve been posting have really driven the point home. With every list I’ve been finding fantastic albums that I failed to hear or never even knew existed, on top of all the great albums, EPs, splits, and demo’s that I did manage to check out. And we’re far from finished with LISTMANIA.

At the risk of overloading you with still more discoveries, at the moment I have 11 more year-end list articles in the publication queue and am expecting at least another half-dozen to arrive in the next week. They come from NCS readers, fellow bloggers (including a quasi-reunion of writers from The Number of the Blog), metal musicians, and of course the NCS staff writers. And they are as diverse as the list pieces we’ve already published. I think they’ll be well worth your time. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: NOCTURNAL, EGO DEPTHS, FATES WARNING, UNIVERSE217

 Exceptions to the Rule, Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Dec 182013
 

Collected in this post are a handful of new songs (and three new videos) that I heard and saw last night. There’s a little bit of everything in here, culled from a lot of other things I found in my rambling through the interhole. Two of the new things are exceptions to our rule, and two involve female vocalists. Hope you like all of this diverse music as much as I did.

NOCTURNAL

Nocturnal (pictured above) are a German band who came to life around 2000 “out of the ashes of Bestial Desecration”, dedicated to churning out teutonic thrash in homage to bands such as Destruction and Sodom. Yesterday they released a new video for a song named “Rising Demons”, which will appear on the band’s forthcoming album Storming Evil — their first in almost four years. It will be released by High Roller Records on February 28, 2014.

The song is a hell of a lot of evil-sounding fun — with whirling dervish riffs, a straightforward but nonetheless compulsive drumbeat, and Tyrannizer’s blackened howling vocals, which sound like a wildcat with esophageal cancer. The DIY video is also fun — B-movie clips interspersed with band performance clips, all in B&W of course. So strap on your bullet belt and spiked gauntlets and check out this thrashing unholiness: Continue reading »

BANDCAMP FOR THE BROKE: BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE LETTER “A”

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Dec 182013
 

(In this post DGR follows up on another of his recent posts with one more collection of recommended new Bandcamp releases that are “pay what you want”.)

THE ANTIOCH SYNOPSIS

The Antioch Synopsis have been around for some time in Sacramento. They were a name I constantly heard and I really enjoyed their music, though I lacked the means to drag my ass out to the various local venues to actually see the guys play live. They were a tech-death-core band before that whole scene really exploded, and unfortunately they went on hiatus just as that ship sailed, and likewise right around the time when I had obtained the means to see them live. Thus, I’ve always had the songs they posted up on Reverbnation on my Ipod and a soft spot for them.

The members would go on to be in other great bands, too. Vocalist/Monster Monte Bernard would join Soma Ras, and if you haven’t guessed by now, I really fucking love Soma Ras. That never meant the band were officially done, of course, as they would constantly joke about how they were hiatus-core and post on Facebook that yes, something was in fact in the works. Then, more silence. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: RED FANG, CARCASS, CHROME DIVISION, COLISEUM, AWAKENING SUN, ACHERON

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Dec 162013
 

For various reasons, including a long vacation, a buttload of work and work-related travel that confronted me in my day job upon returning from said vacation, and the dedication of space to our ongoing year-end LISTMANIA series, I’ve not been doing a very good job of spreading the word about new music and videos. Much new music and videos of interest have been accumulating. I’m collecting five of the recent videos and one new song in this post. Many of them lean more toward hard rocking that the kind of extreme metaling I usually feature in these round-ups, but it’s all good stuff.

RED FANG

Red Fang have consistently produced videos that are sure-fire chuckle fests. Their new one is no exception. Directed by Whitey McConnaughy, it’s for “Blood Like Cream”, one of the songs on the band’s latest album Whales and Leeches. It’s a twist on the zombie theme. These undead monsters want PBR instead of brains — but it is fuckin’ Portland, so that’s not a total shock.

Yeah, there’s clean singing in the song, but it’s crunchy, it rocks out, and it gets its hooks in your brain meat. Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug. Continue reading »

KATZENJAMMER

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  18 Responses »
Dec 142013
 

Bear with me — there’s some metal at the end of this.

This post is about two things that happened to me yesterday as a result of my day job.  The first thing happened during a work-related lunch I had with someone we do business with. I was meeting with him for only the second time. At some point, making small talk, I told him that the place where I work was having its annual office holiday party last night at a restaurant and bar named Radiator Whiskey. It features one whole wall of nothing but the brown stuff — bourbon, rye, and scotch — all of which I like. After I told him that, he said, “I hope you don’t have major katzenjammer on Saturday morning”.

He pronounced “katzenjammer” in the German way (something like “kah-tsahn-yah-ma”), instead of the way a monolingual American like me would say it. After I asked him to spell the word, I realized I’d heard it before, oddly enough because somewhere I came across a stray bit of trivia that stuck in my head, about an old comic strip called The Katzenjammer Kids (I’ll come back to that). But I didn’t know what the word meant, so I asked him. Here’s what The Font of All Human Knowledge says about the word, which is pretty close to what the guy told me at lunch: Continue reading »

UNDER THE CHURCH: “BURNING”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Dec 132013
 

You know that time when you thought it would be a good idea to hitch a ride on a moving freight train because you like the power of big fuckin’ trains and you thought it would be a fine rush and you ran alongside as fast as you could, your head filled with the roar of the wheels on the tracks, and you made the big leap, thinking you had a good hold, but were instead pulled under the train and had your spine crushed in a dozen places and your head severed at the neck and then your head bounced beneath the wheels of the tank car carrying ethanol which was next in line and your skull was just hard enough to cause the tank car to jump the rails and explode like the Hiroshima weapon, leveling acres of surrounding civilization and incinerating your remains into such a fine ash that it was immediately blown away by the windstorm caused by the conflagration, leaving not even enough for your loved ones to put in a funerary urn? You remember that?

Well, that’s sort of what “Burning” sounds like, “Burning” being the new song by Sweden’s Under the Church, which will appear on their forthcoming EP and is now available for download on Bandcamp. Continue reading »

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