TESTAMENT: “RISE UP” (LIVE)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Sep 122013
 

We’re working on a news and new music round-up, which should be ready soon, but in the meantime we thought you might want to thrash your nuts (or ovaries) off.

Dark Roots Of Thrash is a forthcoming DVD/2-CD release by Testament, which was filmed at their performance at The Paramount in Huntington, New York, this past February. It’s scheduled for release by Nuclear Blast on October 11 in Europe and October 15 in NorthAm. Not long ago, NB uploaded a clip from the DVD showcasing Testament’s performance of “Rise Up”, which appeared on their last studio release, Dark Roots of Earth.

Even though I’m not the biggest thrash fan, Testament are an exception for me. I do enjoy listening to Chuck Billy howl and Alex Skolnick shred, and they’re both in fine form in this clip, which was shot from about 1,000 different camera angles and strobes between them rapidly. Watch after the jump. Continue reading »

PERCIVAL SCHUTTENBACH: “WODNIK”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Sep 122013
 

I don’t have anything planned for today other than the completion of DGR’s raunchy challenge, which has been sitting at the top of the site for about 4 1/2 hours. I did other things last night and have to be involved in non-blog things this morning. Sorry about that. There will be something else by early afternoon, Pacific time.

Until then, let me leave you with a song named “Wodnik” by a Polish band named Percival Schuttenbach. When I have more time I’ll have to research where that name came from. The song will appear on an album entitled Svantevit, which will be released on September 21. I picked the song for four reasons. First, because we haven’t had any folk metal on the site for a long time. Second, because the song includes guest vocals by Maria “Masha Scream” Arkhipova from Arkona, of whom I am a fan.

Third, because I like the song (and yes, there really is a song in the video I’m embedding below, you just have to wait for it). Fourth, because it reminds me again that just about anything sung in a Slavic language automatically sounds more metal to my American ears.

Listen after the jump. See you again later today. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: IHSAHN, SIGHT OF EMPTINESS, BYZANTINE, URNA

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 112013
 

Here are a some things I’d like to recommend from my reading and listening last night.

IHSAHN

On Monday night of this week, a new song from Ihsahn premiered on BBC Radio 1’s “Rock Show” with Daniel P. Carter. The song is “Hilber” and it will appear on Ihsahn’s fifth solo album, Das Seelenbrechen, which will be released on October 21 in North America via Candlelight Records. Fortunately, the program will remain available for streaming for the next seven days at BBC.co.uk, and you can use that link to hear it (just skip to the 21:45 mark on the player you’ll find there).

Also, for now at least, it’s been uploaded to YouTube (I’m shocked, I tell you, simply shocked!) and so you can also listen right here, after the jump.

Man, I do like this song. It swirls and it stomps, it echoes and it pounds, the guitar spirals around complex rhythms, a string section takes wing, and Ihsahn claws with his voice (no clean singing on this one, thank you very much). It’s dark, disconcerting, and occasionally dissonant, but it will also stick with you. Imaginative music. You should hear it. Continue reading »

ANOTHER ROUND-UP: VUTURE INDUSTRIES, ZEMIAL, TRANSIENT, AND SCYTHE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Sep 102013
 

Because of reasons, I haven’t had time to finish any reviews in weeks, but I will have one tomorrow even if it means I have to stop going to the bathroom and begin soiling myself (again). What I have had time to do is browse and listen randomly to new things. Here are a slew of goodies I found today. I promise, they will keep you off-balance.

VULTURE INDUSTRIES

This is almost becoming embarrassing. Three new songs and/or videos have premiered from the forthcoming album by this Norwegian band and I’ve featured every one of them. That’s saying something, because we don’t do this with every damned thing that emerges on a daily basis. The news and new music we choose to cover as compared to everything happening each day is something like the ratio of a gnat’s ass to an elephant’s ass. Yet I’m strangely attracted to all of the strange new music I’ve heard so far from The Tower.

Today’s new piece of vulturization comes in the form of a music video for “Lost Among Liars”. It starts with a saxophone and ends with the strumming of acoustic guitar, and in the middle Bjørnar Erevik Nilsen’s unusual vocals weave dark spells over a moody guitar melody. At least as attractive as the song is the wonderful animated artwork of  Costin Chioreanu.  Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ULCERATE AND CARCASS STREAMS, SLAYER-GOJIRA-4ARM TOUR UPDATE, A NEW VEIL OF MAYA TOUR WITH VILDHJARTA, A NEW SONG BY HAIL OF BULLETS, AND ALBUM NEWS FOR GIFT OF GODS AND SARKE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Sep 102013
 

Painstakingly selected from among the detritus that litters the interhole and the NCS in-box, here are items of interest that appeared over the last 24 hours.

ULCERATE

If you need more darkness in your life — and who doesn’t? — then you should listen to Vermis, the new death metal monstrosity by New Zealand’s Ulcerate. The album won’t be released in North America until September 17 (a day earlier in the UK and September 13 in certain European countries), but yesterday Metal Sucks began hosting an exclusive stream of the album. Ulcerate are one of those rare death metal bands who are pushing (or dragging) the genre in new directions. The music of Vermis is harrowing and inhuman, but it exerts a powerful attraction. You should hear it.

THIS is the link for the stream.

CARCASS

The new Carcass album, which we reviewed here, is due for release on September 16. I have a feeling that anyone interested in hearing the new Carcass album has already heard it, but just in case, it’s now streaming in full, too. Nuclear Blast has uploaded the entire album to YouTube. Obviously, it’s one of the biggest releases of 2013, and it also happens to be a fine album. You can hear it next.  (thanks Daniel for the tip) Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ARGENTINUM ASTRUM, ARCEYE, AND GERM

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Sep 092013
 

I woke up at an inhuman hour this morning, so early that friends of mine were still awake from last night and posting things on Facebook. By mid-afternoon on this wretched Monday I expect to have a thousand-yard stare and enough coffee in my gut to eat through sheet metal. What do you do when nothing else is awake except stealthy night predators and night-owl friends? I’ll tell you what I did: I decided to go spelunking through the dank caverns of the interhole in search of new metal. I found some veins of gold.

ARGENTINUM ASTRUM

Argentinum Astrum are from Knoxville, Tennessee. I discovered their existence through a post at CVLT Nation, which reports that the band have a three-song album coming under the title of Malleus Maleficarum. CVLT Nation is also streaming one of those three songs, identified by the Roman numeral “I”. It’s powerful. And by “powerful” I mean it will pound your bones to splinters and then sink them in a vat of tar.

“Heavy” doesn’t begin to describe it. It builds from ominous droning tones and a scattering of freakish noise, eventually joined by a lilting guitar melody, into a full-on crush-fest. Low and slow, the sludgy melodic riffs ring massive bells of doom and the drum hits come down like a rain of boulders. The vocals are pure acid spray. The song heaves like a storm-fueled ocean swell and eventually begins to rock like an earthquake. What a wonderful way to start the day! Continue reading »

NEW THALL: VILDHJARTA — “DIMMAN”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 082013
 

Way back in April we reported that Sweden’s Vildhjarta were almost finished with their new concept EP, Thousands of Evils, which will be released by Century Media. They had already unveiled the wonderful cover art and had previously released three teasers on YouTube with snippets of the new music (which can be heard here), and at that point bootleg videos had begun to surface with entire songs from the new EP performed live at the Thallium Festival in Minsk, Belarus. Now, at last, a new studio track from the EP by the name of “Dimman” has made its appearance.

It comes on a Sunday, without warning or fanfare, and I’m guessing it’s a leak. Hell, I’m not 100% positive it’s the entire track. But hey, I listened to it anyway.

“Dimman” is instrumental-only. It descends with an extended acoustic/synth intro that’s both snappy and spacey (and of course there’s a burly bass line booming away, too). Electric guitar joins in for a few healthy measures, and then the thall begins. My colon is still reverberating, even from only a minute and a half of it. Listen next if you’re interested in seeing what Vildhjarta have gotten up to, but listen fast because I doubt “Dimman” will be on YouTube long. Continue reading »

NEW AND NASTY: DEMONICAL, CRAVEN IDOL, AND MONDVOLLAND

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Sep 072013
 

I hate to let a day go by without something new on the site, and although this morning kind of got away from me, I do have three items from yesterday that I thought were worth sharing.

DEMONICAL

I’ve been following this Swedish death metal band since 2010 and have written about them often since then. Their 2013 album is one I’ve been gleefully anticipating and I finally had the chance to hear it last week. Its name is Darkness Unbound, it’s scheduled for release by Cyclone Empire on September 20, and it’s awfully good.

This, however, is not the time for a review. Instead, I simply want to throw your way a new lyric video for a track named “The Order”. Demonical remain thoroughly wedded to the sound and spirit of evil, throwback, Swedish death metal, and man, do they do it right. Wonderful guitar tone, malicious vocals, an air of festering menace, sharp production values — “The Order” will put a charge into any fan of old-school Swedish butchery. Continue reading »

SARTEGOS, MITOCHONDRION, PROTEAN COLLECTIVE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Sep 062013
 

We’re going to be a little light on content today because your humble editor will soon be embarking on a drive with his spouse to Vancouver, BC, where we will then engage in various entertaining activities that do not include blogging. I do have one very unusual premiere to bring you a bit later this morning, one guest review, and this round-up of items that tunneled their way into my head yesterday and left its meager contents in a state of satisfying disarray.

SARTEGOS

The ghastly words sound as if they’re bubbling up through a lava pool in a caldera, the air rendered opaque with the suffocating stench of sulphur. Primitive occult riffs vibrate with unholy energy. The muffled thump of drums roll like an avalanche of skulls hitting a barren plain. A twisted guitar melody echoes like the recital of a satanic liturgy across the vault of a hellish cathedral. And damned if the thing won’t hook you right through the gills. That’s “Meianoite No Jardim De Deus”, a song by Sartegos.

Sartegos are one of the few metal bands I’ve ever heard of who make their home in Galicia, an autonomous community in northwest Spain with its own language. In English, the song I heard means “Midnight in God’s Garden”, and it’s as dark as the name sounds. It appears on a 2013 EP entitled As Fontes Do Negrume (“The Origin Of Darkness”) that was recently released on CD by Bloody Productions and is about to get a vinyl treatment by I, Voidhanger Records.  Continue reading »

VATTNET VISKAR: “BREATH OF THE ALMIGHTY”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Sep 052013
 

Century Media released Vattnet Viskar’s debut album Sky Swallower on September 3 in North America and it will be out on September 9 in Europe). Previously we featured the first advance track from the album, “Apex”. Not long ago a second song from the album debuted via a music video — “Breath of the Almighty”.

I can’t watch it or listen to it at my current location. I can merely embed it and then come back here when I get a better internet connection and say something. But of course by then you will have seen it, if you know what’s good for you. Here it is: Continue reading »

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