VIDEO ROUND-UP: CHILDREN OF BODOM AND VALE OF PNATH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
May 062013
 

(DGR brings us a couple of new video releases that hit our radar screens since the end of our posts on Friday.)

This weekend brought us a lyric video of the new Children Of Bodom song “Transference”, from their due to be released early next month disc Halo Of Blood. I know, NCS isn’t exactly the biggest bastion of CoB news – nor are we planning to become one; but I felt that because I had spent a news post a little while back musing on whether or not the disc would be any good, then at the very least we needed to do some sort of follow-up so folks could judge for themselves.

As far as I know, this is the first song released from the disc other than the samples of songs that have been covered in their video breakdowns. A good rule of thumb on my end for whether or not I am going to find a disc amazing is whether or not I enjoy the lead-off single, and most of the time I never enjoy the first song released; don’t know if I have some sort of old man knee jerk, “I don’t like change!” reaction, but I have very few albums where I have liked the lead-off single. I knew I was really going to enjoy Omnium Gatherum’s and Soilwork’s latest because I loved everything that came off the pre-release PR wagon. This new song? Not so much.

It’s not a bad song and it has way more bass than Children Of Bodom have had before, but I think I’m really going to need to hear the whole disc before I pass any sort of judgement. Right now, we’re about a month out from the June 11th release date, so I figure we’ll probably start hearing more within the next two weeks and I’ll be ending this odd arc of CoB news on NCS. Continue reading »

ATTEMPTING TO CONSTRUCT A GREATEST HITS DISC FOR A BAND THAT DOESN’T NEED ONE YET: ARSIS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
May 052013
 

(DGR took it upon himself to create a “greatest hits” album for Arsis, with explanations for his picks. Too bad the album is only in his mind.)

Some people are good with lists, amazingly good. The fact that they can cut something down to five or ten seems incredible, especially given my wishy washy bullshit where if you have an album I enjoy, I’ll probably talk about it to some extent. Andy is one of those guys, and it was while reading his top 5 underrated discs post that I found myself listing something of my own, although to a slightly bigger extent. It was when he mentioned Arsis’ Starve For The Devil as an underrated album that I found about all six of my available neurons firing off at once, for a couple of reasons.

One was that it never really seemed like the folks who hated on Starve had much of a legitimate reason, other than it leaned heavier toward the melodic side of things; if I were to nominate any disc as underrated, it would probably be We Are The Nightmare. Not that I’m claiming that disc was amazing, because I actually think it’s the weakest of the Arsis albums, but I’d really love to see an impassioned defense of it.

The other was that, man, I have followed Arsis for a seemingly long time. Like, since late 2004 long time, when I received a message in an IRC chat from a friend who used to turn me on to all sorts of good music, notifying me that he was emailing me the song “Seven Whispers Fell Silent” and that I needed to hear it. My tastes in metal were not that spectacular at the time, but that song kicked my ass and I needed to have more.

Unfortunately, the local Sam Goody didn’t exactly carry the latest Willowtip releases, so I basically found myself shit out of luck since I hadn’t quite acclimated to my new town and had no idea that places like Dimple or Tower existed – which had sprawling metal sections in comparison. I wound up waiting half a year to make a trip to the Bay Area and hit up a Rasputin’s where I bought A Celebration of Guilt and Evergrey’s Recreation Day, because opposites get you really weird looks at the checkout counter – also paying the last three dollars in rolled-up pennies because you’re poor. Continue reading »

FREE SHIT FROM HELLS HEADBANGERS (INCLUDING NEW SONGS FROM MIDNIGHT, WITCH CROSS, PROFANATICA, AND IMPIETY)

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  24 Responses »
May 042013
 

Many of our readers are intimately familiar with Hells Headbangers, but for those who aren’t, it’s an online distro and record label specializing in death, black, thrash, grind, doom, and heavy metal. As a label, Hells Headbangers is home to a tremendous line-up of slaughtering bands, many of whom we’ve featured here at NCS. This morning I discovered that HH has made available a free summer comp of music from many of those bands. The comp consists of 20 tracks and includes brand new songs from forthcoming albums by Midnight, Witch Cross, Profanatica, and Impiety.

The comp also comes with artwork drawn by Antichrist Kramer as an homage to Slayer’s debut album Show No Mercy. The timing is coincidental, but it now seems like a fitting tribute to the late Jeff Hanneman. (There’s a track on the comp listed as a Slayer song . . . but it’s really Vomitor.)

The comp is available as a free digital download on Bandcamp, and HH says a double-LP and a CD version will be coming soon.

I’ve been blasting this shit this morning, and it’s awful strong. Links are after the jump, along with the new tracks and the complete album stream. Continue reading »

RAINBOWDRAGONEYES WRITES A LIM’RICK FOR NO CLEAN SINGING

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
May 032013
 


photo credit: JR Hunter Photography, Belfast, NI

Thanks to my NCS comrade DGR, I learned back in April that Rainbowdragoneyes — that one-man creator of “extreme chiptune dance metal” also known as Eric W. Brown — had begun offering an unusual piece of merch on Bandcamp. For the price of $8, Rainbowdragoneyes offered to write a personalized limerick and mail it to you, and provide an immediate download of an EP entitled Uentitled that collects 11 Rainbowdragoneyes tunes. Well fuck, how could I resist? I didn’t want a limerick about myself, but something that would be about NCS. So, I plunked down my $8 and waited.

Since then, Uentitled has become available separately (here) for the price of $4, so it seems that I paid $4 for the limerick. But it was $4 well spent. The handwritten limerick did indeed arrive in the mail this week, and here it is:

The blog is No Clean Singing
the place is the World Wide Web
if Extreme music ain’t your thingie,
better look elsewhere instead.

They review lots of pretty cool bands
and the occasional shitey one too
but I bet you can count with one hand
the ones that rhyme like I do.

Continue reading »

ROUND-UP: KALMAH, DECEASE, AND SLAYER

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
May 032013
 

Here’s what I’ve been watching and listening to this morning.

KALMAH

Seventh Swamphony, the next album from Finland’s Kalmah, is set for release by Spinefarm on June 14 in Finland and Europe, June 17 in the UK, and June 18 in the U.S. About a month ago we spread the word about the album’s first single, “Windlake Tale” (here), and today the band released an official video for the album’s title track. The video seems to be a cautionary tale about the perils of burying waste in Finnish swamps, with interspersed film of the swamplords in their element (musically and geographically).

The song is a racing romp of invigorating, Finnish-style melodic death metal, or perhaps I should say “Kalmah style”, because it does sound like the Kalmah of old.

The editing on the video makes the music sound even faster than it is. You’ll see what I mean . . . Continue reading »

NEWS AND NEW MUSIC FROM TORTURE DIVISION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 032013
 

It’s been a while since I’ve written about Sweden’s Torture Division (pictured above), and some of you may be unfamiliar with them. Allow me to fix that. The three members of the band – Lord K Philipson (guitar), Tobben Gustafsson (drums), and Jörgen Sandström (bass/vocals) — collectively have over 60 years of combined death metal experience, including membership in bands such as Grave, Entombed, Vicious Art, The Project Hate MCMXCIX, Vomitory, and God Among Insects.  In their words, “we know what we do, we love what we do and that we will keep on doing it until the end of days.”

They also have an unusual approach to recording and distributing their music. Their modus operandi is to release short demos and give them away for free. In fact, they have no plans to record an album — ever. However, every time they finish releasing a group of three demo’s, they’ve been giving labels permission to package them up and sell them as compilation CDs. So far, this has happened twice (two CDs have been released, each collecting three demo’s). The next compilation, The Army of Three, will include their two most recent demos plus some additional tracks and will be released by Abyss Records.

Based on a recent statement on their FB page, Torture Division also plan to release three new 3-track demos in 2013, as well as two split releases (one with Asphyx that will include a brand new track as well as a cover song, and a second split about which details haven’t yet been revealed). But while we’re waiting for all of this, Torture Division have just given all of us a stand-alone song for free download called “Gimp Grind”. Continue reading »

MISCELLANY NO. 54: HEBOSAGIL, SUFFIX, BELGRADO

 MISCELLANY, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
May 022013
 

I am so far behind in so many ways, perhaps most far behind in completing album reviews. So what am I doing? Listening to music from bands I’ve never heard of. I suppose this could be a form of procrastination, but instead I think it’s just my hunger for new things, which appears to be insatiable and uncontrollable.

So much time has passed since my last MISCELLANY experiment, that I ought to provide a reminder about my self-imposed rules: I pick bands at random whose music I’ve never heard; I listen to one song (sometimes I cheat and listen to more); I write my impressions; and I stream what I heard so you can judge for yourselves. The bands selected for this test are Hebosagil (Finland), Suffix (Sweden), and Belgrado (Spain).

HEBOSAGIL

As noted, these dudes are from Finland, so I already knew there was a better than even chance they would be good. I found out about them via a press release announcing that they have a new album named Lähtö that’s due for release by Ektro Records on May 17. The seventh track on that album is “Valmis mihin vaan” (yes, Hebosagil’s songs are in Finnish), and it happens to be streaming on Soundcloud, so that’s what I picked for purposes of this experiment. Continue reading »

FIVE OF MY FAVOURITE . . . UNFAIRLY MALIGNED ALBUMS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  27 Responses »
May 022013
 

(Here’s another in Andy Synn’s irregular series of things that come in five’s.)

That’s right, with this edition of the column I’m going to try and convince you that your opinions are wrong, and break the Pavlovian conditioning that has led you all to unfairly loathe some genuinely fine albums.

But… this is the internet… so none of that’s probably going to happen.

A little context first off though. A couple of days back I was listening to the new Cryptopsy album (still stunning btw) and suddenly thought to myself, “You know what, I haven’t listened to The Unspoken King in forever… surely it’s not as bad as I remember?”.

And you know what… it is. Ok, so it has a couple of solid songs, and a few that would be pretty good if they weren’t Cryptopsy songs, but overall… wow… it really is bad.

But it did get me thinking about albums towards which the general public consensus is largely negative (often influenced strongly by prevailing media portrayals, and sometimes out and out misrepresentations) but which I think deserve a renaissance, now that the initial furore has died down.

So here I present five of my picks for albums which have been castigated and criticised by the metal community at large, sometimes seemingly without even listening to the actual music, but which I think are actually pretty brilliant, once you get past all the politics and preconceptions. In fact, having spoken to several people about some of these albums, it seems a lot of folks “remember” the albums as being bad, but can’t tell you much about when, or even if, they’ve actually listened to them. So here I intend to rectify that. Continue reading »

A MORNING ROUND-UP: SYNAPSES, BÖLZER, MUMAKIL, AND DEAFHEAVEN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
May 022013
 

Here are some things I heard yesterday that grabbed me. I’m starting with two bands who were new to me and finishing with two of whom I was already a fan.

SYNAPSES

Yesterday we posted Andy Synn’s engaging and informative interview with Alan Cassidy, The Black Dahlia Murder’s talented new drummer and formerly the hitter for Abigail Williams. If you haven’t read that yet, you should. At the end of the interview, Andy asked him for musical recommendations, and Alan made a pitch for an Italian band named Synapses. The name was new to me so I investigated.

It turns out that Synapses are a relatively new band whose debut album Expiation was released by Deepsend Records in February 2012, and they’re currently at work on a follow-up. Some tracks from the album are on YouTube and I listened to one called “Assault of the Weak”.

I can understand why Alan Cassidy thinks these dudes are awesome. It’s because they are indeed awesome, and a big reason why is drummer Riccardo “Cannibale” Fanara. “Assault of the Weak” is a fairly brutal form of highly percussive, fleet-fingered death metal with rapid-fire guitar and bass riffing and roaring vox. But as balls-out blazing as the hi-tech music is, it incorporates some mighty grooves and some inventive (and acrobatic) drumming. I’m particularly digging the snare hits, which come in unexpected places and punctuate the blasting in creative ways. Continue reading »

YOUR HAIRLESS CAT PHOTOS FOR THE DAY

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Apr 302013
 

Yeah, hairless cats. We don’t have enough hairless cats here at NCS. Actually, the only other time we had a hairless cat at NCS was in this post from three years ago, of which I’m still awfully damned proud. But today I saw some hairless cat photos that just seemed to cry out for a feature.  Voila!

POTERGEIST

The first photo is up above. It was taken by none other than Seth Siro Anton (Septic Flesh), and the subjects are Alex S. Wamp of Greek “swamp metal” band Potergeist and Sethi. That’s Sethi on top. I think it’s a badass pic.

Before seeing it I didn’t know anything about Potergeist, but now I know that they have a new album on the way named Swampire and that Mr.Anton will be doing the cover art for it. In hunting for Potergeist music, I found two things that I liked. The first is a cover they recently recorded of Black Sabbath’s “The Wizard”, which appears on a Greek tribute to Sabbath named Sabbath Cadabra that Metal Hammer Greece is giving away with issue #340 (it went on sale April 2). Some fuckin’ juicy riffs in this thing, not to mention a sweet blues harmonica, a nice guitar solo, and some squalling vocals.

Before I get to the second thing I found, here’s another photo of Alex and Sethi: Continue reading »

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