HORROR FOR HALLOWEEN: WATCH PORTAL’S NEW VIDEO FOR “CURTAIN”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Oct 312013
 

Not long ago Australia’s Portal released a new official music video for the song “Curtain” from their tremendous 2013 album Vexovoid. It was produced by Panorama Programming and directed by Zev Deans, who drew inspiration for the video from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Conqueror Worm”.

And the video really is inspired. “Curtain” is a horrifying assault of blackened death metal, thoroughly inhuman, oppressive, and doomed in its atmospherics. The video matches the music in its hopelessness and its ominous obscurity. You can watch it after the jump, and I thought it might also be interesting to include the text of Poe’s poem, too.

Trick or treat! Continue reading »

YOUR MESHUGGAH FIXES FOR THE DAY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Oct 312013
 

Maybe you don’t realize that you need a Meshuggah fix, but you do. In fact, needing it and not knowing you need it could be the source of many of your mental and emotional instabilities. If you watch these two videos, you could become a happier and more well-adjusted person. And by “happier and more well-adjusted”, I mean vacant-eyed, slack-jawed, and slobbery.

I almost didn’t post the first video. I almost didn’t even watch it. I don’t like being the last metal blogger in creation to post about things, so when I see a video that has already made the rounds, I kind of assume that everyone who cares has seen it and I should spend my time on something else. But I got an e-mail today from Johan, an NCS reader who was actually at the club in Sweden where the video was filmed, watching the performance as it happened, and he changed my mind.

As he explained in his message, “Last year Toontrack (creators of drum-software and sample-libraries) decided to throw a staff party/PR stunt by having Periphery and Meshuggah play gigs at Scharinska villan in Meshuggah’s hometown of Umeå. Nothing special right? Except for the fact that Scharinska is a tiny club fitting 300 people in total, maybe 200 in the actual concert room, and that only 100 tickets were released to the public. The rest were given away to employees and partners. Needless to say, the gig was tremendous and the crowd was boiling (literally, it was insanely hot)….  The camera that is shooting straight towards the stage is pretty much where the back of the room is, it’s that tiny.” Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: SKELETONWITCH, CHTHONIC, SAKTMÓÐIGUR, AND HATSUNE MIKU

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Oct 292013
 

In this post we bring you three globe-spanning videos that premiered either yesterday or today, with our performers hailing from the exotic locales of Ohio, Taiwan, Iceland, and Japan.

SKELETONWITCH

The lyrics to the title track from Serpents Unleashed tell you a lot about what you hear in the song: “Demonic, defiant, eyes of burning chaos / With darkness at our side / Evil at our command / Crush the weak and feeble, their place within the dust / Rain fire from the shadows / Striking hard and fast / Vomiting the blackest hate / The spawn of wickedness…”

The new video for the song strikes hard and fast, too. Rapidly strobing between shots as the band deliver the goods, the film makes effective use of light and shadow, slo-mo interludes, and split-screen views. Check it out next: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: MASTODON, CULT OF LUNA, IMPUREZA, UNFATHOMABLE RUINATION, YEAR OF NO LIGHT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 282013
 

Oh joy! Rapture! Oh, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in ’t!

Okay, I’m just trying to put a good face on another goddamn Monday that blows, like a noxious wind coming off a tire fire. At least we still have beauteous metal, flights of fallen angels to sing us to our rest at nightfall. Here’s a collection of things, in no particular order, seen and heard over the last 24 hours.

MASTODON

I saw that on December 10 Warner Bros. Records will be releasing Mastodon Live At Brixton, a digital-only recording of the band’s live performance at London’s O2 Academy in Brixton on February 11, 2012. That show was part of the band’s world tour in support of their last album The Hunter. I caught another stop on that tour in Seattle, and it was a powerhouse performance.

Interestingly, the digital-only release (which will be sold through Amazon and iTunes) will come in two versions, one that’s audio-only and one that’s a live video version of the 97-minute show. Here’s the set list: Continue reading »

SECTIONED: “REPEATER”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 272013
 

Your humble editor is going to be taking a blog break for the rest of the day, but before leaving I wanted to throw one more piece of music your way, and in this case it’s sort of like throwing a grenade after pulling the pin.

Sectioned are a band from Edinburgh, Scotland. I first came across them in May 2012 through a MISCELLANY excursion, which turned into a review of their second EP, Monotonne. Earlier this year they then finished work on another EP by the name of Outlier, and I wrote about a song from that EP named “Trismus”, which they debuted on Valentine’s Day.  Both of those EPs are available on Bandcamp as “name your price” downloads.

Sectioned have been working on an album, but in the meantime they’ve discharged a new single just in time for Halloween. Like everything else they’ve done, this is up on Bandcamp for free (though they’ll gladly accept a donation toward their future efforts). The song’s name is “Repeater”, and when I first heard it, it blew some of my brains out through my nose. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: SUM OF R, CHAOS MOON, GRUE, AND WITCHRIST

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Oct 262013
 

I’ve heard a lot of new music in the last couple of days, mostly isolated songs and videos from fairly deep underground. From those I compiled this mix, which I thought deserved that “Shades of Black” preface that I’ve used before. Despite the fact that the first and last offerings aren’t black metal, they’re still black as a moonless night.

SUM OF R

Sum of R is a Swiss band that since 2012 has consisted of Reto Mäder (bass, drums, percussion, synthesizer, piano, effects) and Julia Wolf (guitar, effects). Their most recent work is an album entitled Ride Out the Waves, which was released in late 2012 by Storm As He Walks. It’s also now available on Bandcamp. The last song on the album is “Alarming”, and in 2012 it was released in advance of the album as a music video. The video is a montage of film clips edited and assembled by Francesca Marongiu, an Italian multi-instrumentalist and visual artist, in her alter ego as Agartthacave.

This was my first exposure to Sum of R (thanks to our supporter KevinP’s posting of a link to the video on FB today), and the combined audio and visual synthesis floored me. The music is a glacial floe of funereal doom and drone, shrouded in caustic distortion and punctuated by cataclysmic percussive downbeats and shrill electronic noises. Withering harsh shrieks and the sound of a siren ratchet the tension until everything falls apart beneath the final mallet blows. It’s completely crushing. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: GLORIOR BELLI, SEPULTURA, AND PROFANATICA

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 252013
 

The subjects of this post are three full-album streams now available for listening.

The first is Gators Rumble, Chaos Unfurls by the French band Glorior Belli. It will be released on November 12 by Agonia Records. Our man BadWolf gave it a favorable review here. Three of your five regular NCS writers consider it one of the year’s best albums (and the other two haven’t weighed in). The full stream premiered yesterday at Stereogum, but you can also listen to it here, after the jump.

The second is a full stream of the new album by Sepultura, The Mediator Between Head and Hands Must be the Heart, which will be released in NorthAm by Nuclear Blast on October 29. In the US, the album is streaming exclusively at Metal Sucks, so you’ll need to go here to listen.

In light of certain accusations leveled at Nuclear Blast for not playing nice with web sites who don’t favorably review their releases, I thought it interesting that MS was selected for this stream, since their reviewer didn’t treat the album very well. We haven’t reviewed the album yet, and I haven’t heard it. But it’s Sepultura, and I thought that fact alone made the stream newsworthy. Here, by the way, is the album cover: Continue reading »

BRAIN STEW: TERATISM, NECROSIS, THEOLOGIAN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Oct 252013
 

I keep endless lists of music I mean to check out some day based on things I see or messages I receive. Unfortunately, time being in short supply, I never make it through everything. But last night I ticked off about a dozen items on the list and I picked these three with which to launch this Happy Friday. I picked them because in different ways they tend to mess with your brain, and collectively they create a nice stew bubbling inside the cranium.

TERATISM

This black metal band’s last release was an MLP entitled La Bas, which I reviewed here. All of those songs were recorded years ago though they were only officially released this past summer. But Teratism are working on their next album and they’ve recently made two demo tracks available on Bandcamp for a “pay what you want” price, under the title Prelude to the Second Death. While both songs contain eruptions of destructive blasting, they are for the most part slow and freighted with the weight of doom.

“Four Waters” is draped in sheets of radioactive guitar noise and harrowing feedback, which are pulled back in the song’s mid-section to reveal guitar notes that peal like funeral bells, the steady pulse of a bass, and the muffled thump of the drums. “Micturation Into the Tributary of Death” works with a similar funereal atmosphere, lacing it with eerie harmonic arpeggios that transform the music into a slow waltz of death. Both songs are deeply unsettling, and yet they are both almost beautiful in their utter bleakness. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PYLAR, SKYDANCER, IMPENDING DOOM, AND ANTERO SLEEPS

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Oct 242013
 

Here’s a round-up of music I discovered today in periodic forays through the interhole and a quick glimpse at the flooded NCS e-mail inbox. Stylistically, the music is all over the place, and it’s scattered geographically, too.

PYLAR

I came across this band via a short post at CVLT Nation, which gave no clue what the music is like (apart from calling it “pure magic”) or any information about the band, other than the fact that they’ve recorded an album entitled Rises In My Mighty that’s being released (on Nov 1) by Knockturne Records. (Actually, the album’s name is Poderoso se alza en my; I can’t vouch for the English rendition of the title.) Pylar have a Facebook page, but it’s not very informative either, providing neither the band’s location nor the identity of its members, though it’s apparent they’re from somewhere in Spain.

But I decided to listen to the song that CVLT Nation premiered because of that eye-catching album cover that you see above. According to the band’s FB page, it was created by “the expert in alchemical symbolism and sacred geometry, Gamaheo, member of the Numinoso Círculo Atlante.” Speaking of which, it’s also apparent that Pylar themselves devote their music (and possibly other activities) to certain ancient alchemical and occult arts, the meanings of which are completely obscure to whitebread me. But I do find that song fascinating. Continue reading »

IN SOLITUDE, IN THE CASTLE

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  16 Responses »
Oct 242013
 

Last week I had the chance to see Sweden’s In Solitude perform in Seattle as support on a tour headlined by Watain (who, by the way, were stunningly good). I was already a fan of the band’s 2013 album Sister, but came away even more impressed because of the high quality of their live show — an experience marred only slightly by the over-the-top “I’m a rock god” posing of the band’s bass player in the spotlight at the center of the stage while the true rock god, vocalist Pelle Åman, positioned himself off to the side, head down, hair covering his face, belting out wailing vocals that were damned near pitch-perfect.

This morning I watched a new video of the band in an unusual setting that captures their skill in the flesh, as well as the brilliance of their songwriting. A Swedish TV channel called PSL journeyed to the band’s hometown of Uppsala last spring to interview the band. While there, In Solitude took the crew to the band’s favorite hometown place, the castle ruin of the bloodthirsty King Erik XIV, who descended into madness before ultimately being deposed and most likely poisoned while in prison. As PSL writes at their online blog:

As the clock struck 12 – exactly 446 years after the king orchestrated a bloodbath in the very room where we stood – the band played us the song ”A Burried Sun” from their latest album ”Sister”.

And that’s what’s captured on the shadow-blanketed video — the potent mix of occult rock, doom, and psychedelia that makes up “A Buried Sun” and the spooky power of Pelle Åman’s voice. It’s very cool, and it’s available for viewing right after the jump (and yes, the music is an Exception to the Rule around here). Continue reading »

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