OAK PANTHEON: “TOGETHER WE RIDE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

Holy hell, get a load of that badass artwork, would you? It’s by Wes Talbott and it accompanies a brand new free single from Minnesota-based Oak Pantheon that just premiered: “Together We Ride”.

Now, if you know the music of Oak Pantheon — and you damned well should — this track will throw you for a loop. It’s a medley of instrumental music that originally appeared in various installments of the Fire Emblem video game series and it was apparently also the series theme in Super Smash Bros. Melee. Not being a gamer, I had to look this up . . . and needless to say, I’d never heard the music before. I just took the Oak Pantheon version as it came.

As the name implies, it’s one hell of a galloping, trampling, epic romp. Yeah, all the cheese will immediately raise your cholesterol level, but I’m going back for seconds and thirds, mainly because I’m hooked on the guitar lead in this baby. And the galloping. I like the galloping, because music like this is as close as I’ll ever get to being on a charging horse with a pennant in one hand, a sword in the other, and the reins between my fuckin’ teeth. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC AND NEWS: CNOC AN TURSA, INTER ARMA, DEATHEMBER, AND HEAVEN SHALL BURN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Feb 032013
 

Yesterday I featured four new releases that appeared on Bandcamp on February 1. In this post I’ve collected more kickass new music that I discovered yesterday, plus a news item that excited me when I saw it.

CNOC AN TURSA

I wrote about this Scottish band last October after seeing the news that they’d been signed by Candlelight Records. In that earlier post I included all of the music from the band that I could then find, including a portion of a track called “The Lion of Scotland”. Sometime between then and now, that fragment disappeared from Soundcloud, but in the last couple of days it has reappeared in all its complete glory — and it is indeed a glorious song — along with the cover art for their Candlelight debut, The Giants of Auld.

I could hardly be more stoked for this debut, and “The Lion of Scotland” is an example of why I’m so eager to hear the album. It’s a genuinely soul-stirring song, with a skirling tremolo melody, an epic keyboard overlay, hard-charging rhythms, and passionate harsh vocals. If this doesn’t get your blood racing and your fist pumping, I’ll be surprised. Listen: Continue reading »

NEW BANDCAMP DEBUTS: THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR, SCORDATURA, FOUL BODY AUTOPSY, AND TOTAL FUCKING DESTRUCTION

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Feb 022013
 

Work and work-related travel cut short my blog time the last couple of days, but I’m now back in the land of the grey and soggy, also known as home. So, last night and this morning I plunged through the sphincter of the interhole in search of metal things I missed, and here’s some of what I found. These are all new albums or songs that have appeared on Bandcamp over the last day or two — and they all fuckin’ blew me away.

THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR

Our blog brother MaxR (Metal Bandcamp) contributed a line-up of doom favorites in our 2011 Listmania series, and it included a song from an album (“Essence of Nine”) by a Colorado band named The Flight of Sleipnir. I’m pretty sure that was the first time I’d heard of them, and I’m also pretty sure I failed to check out their music even after Max praised them in these words: “Perfectly executed black metal rasps, beautiful clean singing, folk harmonies and a doomy groove. So atmospheric and, yes, mellow.”

Fast forward to last night when NCS supporter Utmu sent me a message about a new album by this band — Saga — that’s due for release on February 15. The album art (above) is awful damned cool, and so is the song from Saga that began streaming on Bandcamp yesterday. Continue reading »

CHECK OUT SOILWORK’S NEW VIDEO FOR “RISE ABOVE THE SENTIMENT”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Feb 012013
 

“Once upon a time, in a rural town in Sweden, in a cozy little home that still has wooden furniture, a bearded aging man finds something from another time that awakens the beast of his own youth within him: a VHS cassette tape featuring the recording studio antics of his fellow countrymen SOILWORK.

“And hey, with streamed digital files, holographic projections, and possible direct electronic transmissions into the occipital lobe of the human brain… who won’t be aching for the simpler times of old?

“Check out the video for the soul-soaring SOILWORK track, “Rise Above The Sentiment,” on YouTube.”

And that’s part of the text I received not long from Nuclear Blast. And after the jump you can watch “Rise Above the Sentiment”, which comes from the band’s ninth studio album (a double-disc), The Living Infinite , which will be released in Europe on March 1, and in North America on March 5. Continue reading »

SHARE THE WEALTH (OR, HOW I LEARNED THAT NU-METAL IS STILL A THRIVING GENRE)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
Feb 012013
 

(I’ve always liked Andy Synn. And the following article he wrote reminds me of one of the reasons why. Read it, and then find out more about how to vote for his band in the Bloodstock contest HERE.)

Ok, so, blatant plug time… you know I’m trying to get my band more exposure by applying for both the Bloodstock and Damnation festivals this year, right? Well the former involves bands submitting a live video, and the latter requires a simple vote on a facebook poll (here). The best thing about the Bloodstock angle so far, though, has been looking through the competition and seeing exactly what’s out there, and also the lengths to which people will go in order to make themselves stand out – or appear to be something that they’re not.

So, one evening recently myself and a few buddies/bros/mates got together to have a few beers and trawl through the different entries to the Bloodstock/Hobgoblin competition and see what we could find.

Some of it wasn’t pretty. There’s an awful, awful lot of generic retro-thrash out there, with songs generally just about ‘being metal’… which would seem pretty obvious, considering the music, right? There’s also a heck of a lot of nu-metal still out there, positively brimming with angst (as well as some rather disjointed, occasionally hilarious, pseudo-intellectual imagery).

There’s also quite a lot of metalcore pretending not to be metalcore (6th generation Killswitch riffs and over-processed clean vocals, by any other name, don’t smell any sweeter, I can tell you that). There’s even quite a few bands claiming to be metalcore when their sound is a tad too… light… even for that now-over-saturated genre.

BUT – it’s not all bad. I’ve gone through and picked out a few real stand-outs for you, that (at the risk of damaging our own chances of getting any further exposure or support) I’ve winnowed down to the few after the jump.

Let’s begin… Continue reading »

FRACTAL GATES ARE ABOUT TO OPEN AGAIN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jan 312013
 

So, this morning I was poking around a nice new India-based metal blog established by our supporter “Deckard Cain” (Metalspree), and what should I spy but the news that Fractal Gates have a new album coming and a new video streaming. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

I discovered this Parisian band 2 1/2 years ago through an insistent recommendation from one of this site’s original co-founders and was blown away by their 2009 album, Altered State of Consciousness, which I reviewed here. I was taken by everything about it, not only the music but also the artwork for each song and the sci-fi oriented concept behind the album — which is a tale of an apocalyptic future in which human minds escape into the depths of space, eventually to discover that they are not alone . . . and never have been.

The music itself was a kind of dark, brooding melodic death metal that at times reminded me of Insomnium, and I spun that album to death.

Thanks to Metalspree, I now know that the band have finished a new album — Beyond the Self — which will be released by Great Dane Records in February. It was mixed and mastered by the godly Dan Swanö with guest appearances by  Swanö himself (vocals) and by Septic Flesh guitarist Soritis. And based on a few samples, it appears there will once again be separate artwork for each song: Continue reading »

A SMALL ROUND-UP OF SMASHING NEW MUSIC FROM NADER SADEK, ROTTING CHRIST, AND KRYPTS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jan 302013
 

Here are a few new songs and videos I heard and saw yesterday and this morning that I thought were worth spreading around

NADER SADEK

Nader Sadek is an Egyptian set designer, visual effects director, and composer. His well-received 2011 debut album In the Flesh featured a host of name-brand guest musicians performing Sadek’s compositions. It made several of our “best of 2011” year-end lists, including one from guest contributor Tamás Kátai, the man behind the brilliant band Thy Catafalque, who wrote about it as follows: “This is exactly like Morbid Angel and Chimera-era Mayhem mixed together. Odd, exciting, dark death metal exploiting the contributing musicians’ ability, charisma, and character to the maximum.”

On February 27, Sadek plans to self-release a live CD/DVD called In the Flesh. It’s a video of the first performance of In the Flesh on November 20, 2011, and includes the album’s original line-up — drummer Flo Mournier (Cryptopsy), guitarist Rune Eriksen (Aura Noir, ex-Mayhem), bassist Novy Nowak (ex-Behemoth, ex-Vader), and vocalist Steve Tucker (ex-Morbid Angel) — plus guest guitarist Sean Frey and operatic backing vocalist Carmen Simoes (Ava Inferi).

Today, GunShyAssassin premiered a song from the live CD, “Petropilia”. It’s completely obliterating and remorseless, a cacophony of blackened death rising up from oil-soaked vaults deep beneath the earth and catching fire in a great conflagration. All the performances sound fantastic, but I have to give an extra round of applause to Flo Mournier’s off-the-charts drumming. And I can’t wait to see the video of this show. Continue reading »

MULLET CLOWN BASS GUN CONTROL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Jan 282013
 

You know, it’s about fuckin’ time that someone captured in music the inner pain, sorrow, degradation, and wistfulness that clowns experience every goddamn day. God bless those Cephalic Carnage brethren Nick Schendzielos and Brian Hopp for doing that in this new video.

I mean, let’s be brutally honest: no one likes clowns except other clowns. Little kids may pretend to like them, but deep down inside they’re either scared shitless or experiencing an inarticulate sense that something is not right. And the rest of us KNOW that something is not right.

This widespread prejudice has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of clowns. It is the hidden shame of our great Nation. And the number would be orders of magnitude higher except for the fact that juggalos travel in packs. But (except in the case of juggalos), this mixture of fear and loathing that everyone feels about clowns is heartless and insensitive.

If you prick them, do they not bleed? If you tickle them, do they not laugh? If you poison them, do they not die? Beneath the face paint and the big red noses, are they not human, just as you and I? Actually, I don’t know, because I wouldn’t get close enough to touch one of them if my fuckin’ life depended on it. Continue reading »

MONDAY MURDER: NEW SONGS FROM GUTTURAL SECRETE, BLACK CRUCIFIXION, AND MALEVOLENCE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jan 282013
 

Monday’s are tough enough under the best of circumstances, but your humble editor had something of a lost weekend, with epic revels on Saturday night and a Sunday lost in painful fog, paying the price for all that fun. The brutal reality of normal life and work now intrudes, whether I want it to or not.

But now is not the time to mope and moan over that which can’t be changed. It’s time to get back on the fuckin’ horse and charge out of the gates. And to get the old game face on for what lies ahead this week, here’s some murderous new music that I discovered yesterday — from Guttural Secrete (U.S.), Black Crucifixion (Finland), and Malevolence (Portugal).

GUTTURAL SECRETE

Guttural Secrete are from Nevada. They play brutal death metal. Actually, let’s call it brutal tech-death. They have a new album entitled Nourishing the Spoil due for release next month on the Brutal Bands label (pre-order here). Last October I included a song from that album by the name of “Stainless Conception” in this post, and over the weekend the band debuted another one, “Deadened Prior To Coitus”. What a nice name for a song!

It begins with eerie, reverberating chords and then all hell breaks loose with grinding, pulverizing riffs and a merciless drum attack. There’s a load of fast fretwork and rapid tempo changes throughout, as well as a reappearance by that ghostly melody from the intro. The vocals, of course, are guttural secretions. Continue reading »

SATURDAY

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  12 Responses »
Jan 262013
 

I’m going to a massive bash tonight in celebration (a day late) of the 254th birthday of Robert Burns.  Whisky will be drunk, songs will be sung, whisky will be drunk, poems will be recited, whisky will be drunk, haggis will be eaten, whisky will be drunk. Also, whisky will be drunk, and we will all be drunk.

Therefore, I will be writing something for tomorrow today, because I have a feeling tomorrow will be lost to incapacitation. I will also be preparing myself today for some sort of performance tonight, and also updating my last will and testament, just in case. Between the writing for tomorrow and the preparation for tonight, I will be scarce around the site on this Saturday. But before disappearing, I thought I’d share a few recent discoveries and a few old favorites that are on my mind today, all of which are metal, even if they’re not all music.

PRAISE

Today the following comment appeared on a post about the band General Surgery that I wrote a year ago: “Thank you a lot for giving everyone an extraordinarily brilliant chance to read critical reviews from this site. It is often very kind and full of a lot of fun for me and my office friends to search your web site at the very least three times in 7 days to read the new guidance you have. And of course, I’m just usually satisfied concerning the stunning techniques you give. Selected two ideas in this article are indeed the most efficient I have had.” Continue reading »

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