SEEN AND HEARD: RAGE NUCLÉAIRE, DECLINE OF THE I, BLACK SEPTEMBER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Sep 062012
 

I realize that recently I’ve been making these “Seen and Heard” posts a daily occurrence when I should have been concentrating more in depth on individual albums or EPs. But I’ve been fucking off a lot pressed for time recently, and although I’ve fallen even further behind on reviewing albums and EPs I like, I’m at least trying to keep up with the news — especially news that involves new music that really strikes a chord.

Yesterday was a big fucken bonanza of new music. In fact, I found so many likable new discoveries that I’ll have not one but two of these posts today (and maybe more, depending on how much I fuck off how today goes). This is the first one, and I’m really excited about the songs I’ve collected here, all of which are dramatically different shades of black metal — from Rage Nucléaire (Montreal), Decline of the I (Paris), and Black September (Chicago).

RAGE NUCLÉAIRE

Late June it was when I saw an announcement by Season of Mist that they had signed a four-piece black metal band called Rage Nucléaire. It got my attention because the band was formed by Lord Worm, former vocalist of Cryptopsy. I wrote about the event (here) despite having no music to hear. Now I do.

As SOM begins the ramp-up to the debut of Unrelenting Fucking Hatred, they’ve now disclosed the release dates — Nov. 6 for North America and Oct. 19 for the rest of the [fortunate] world — and they’ve started streaming the album’s opening track, the name of which is “Violence Is Golden”. And you beginning to detect a theme about the music? Continue reading »

THE LATEST MESSAGES FROM HELL: AN ANAAL NATHRAKH “VANITAS” TEASER AND “WIDOWMAKER” IS ABOUT TO BE DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Sep 052012
 

The two items in this post both appeared this morning. I thought their near-simultaneous appearance was ominous, as if constituting a kind of queasiness-inducing evidence that there really are Great Old Ones in the Earth, and they are beginning to rouse themselves from their slumbers.

Both Anaal Nathrakh and Dragged Into Sunlight are from the UK, they are both favorites of this site, and they both create brilliant, hellish, obliterating music — though not of the same kind. As I wrote the last time we paired news from these bands together, “Anaal Nathrakh give you a nightmarish rocket-ride into the abyss, and Dragged Into Sunlight trap you there in a vat of acid sludge that slowly liquifies your flesh.” Here’s the latest news from both bands:

ANAAL NATHRAKH

As we reported four days ago (here), Candlelight Records will be releasing Anaal Nathrakh’s new album on October 15. Its name is Vanitas, and for that earlier post we even managed to find a small image of the album cover (which has now “officially” surfaced on the band’s Facebook page).

As of this morning we now have a teaser clip of music from the album. It’s harrowing stuff (and we would expect nothing less) — a catastrophic blast of infernal grind that sounds terrifically pissed off; the vocals are intense, even by Dave Hunt’s previous standards. Check it out next: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HIVESMASHER, SUN DRIED INTESTINES, WINTERFYLLETH, BOBÓK, AND MORE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Sep 052012
 

This is a collection of nuggets that I sifted from the ever-flowing stream of the internet yesterday. I’m going to start with some head-smashing new music and end with some head-warping music. With any luck, by the time we’re finished, you’ll have lost your head altogether.

HIVESMASHER

I like this band’s name. Any band with “smasher” in their name is already past second base and headed for third. “Hivesmasher” also reminds me of the time when my brother and I thought it would be a good idea to smash a hive of wasps after we thought they were all dead, because we had burned their nest first. We were young and stupid, and very soon we were also in agony.

Hivesmasher, the band, is also about as pissed off and poisonous as that nest of undead wasps. They’re from Massachusetts and they have a debut album named Gutter Choir that’s due on October 23 on the Black Market Activities label. Yesterday I heard two tracks from the album. Lambgoat premiered one of them — “En Route To Meat Land” — which I think is what those wasps were singing when they delivered some hellfire retribution to my brother and me.

It reminds me of Pig Destroyer. It’s berserk, but really skillfully played. You should definitely go HERE to check it out. Continue reading »

PIG DESTROYER LIVE IN TOKYO (WITH NEW SONGS)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 042012
 

Pig Destroyer’s new album Book Burner will be out in the U.S. on October 22. A bit earlier today I watched a fan-filmed video of most of their set on August 23 in Tokyo. Here’s an index to what’s on the video that I found in the YouTube comments — including some new songs:

1:10 Rotten Yellow
2:23 Deathtripper
3:52 ?????
7:00 Pretty in Casts
8:14 Dark Satellites
9:08 Trojan Whore
10:50 Sheet Metal Girl
12:43 Alexandria
16:56 New Songs!
21:12 Piss Angel
25:11 Cheerleader Corpses
25:45 Terrifyer

The video and audio quality are pretty good. Explosively violent music. Video is after the jump. Continue reading »

A FLOOD OF NEW VIDEOS FROM OBLIVION, NEKROGOBLIKON, HEAVENWOOD, DROPBUNNY, AND ENGEL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Sep 042012
 

Holy shit!  The last 24 hours have brought a flood of brand new music videos that are (a) constructed around kickass music of considerable diversity, and (b) fun to watch. I’ve collected five of them in this post, and have kept my introductory verbiage to a minimum so you can spend your time listening and watching.  Go!

OBLIVION

Oblivion are Nick Vasallo (vocals, bass), Ted O’Neill (guitar), and Luis Martinez (drums). They are tech-death hell on wheels. TheMadIsraeli reviewed their 2012 demo here, and we’re damned excited about their forthcoming debut album, Called To Rise.

Today they debuted a video for the first song to be aired from the album, “Black Veils of Justice”. The song just blazes. And the video is cool, too, mixing a band performance together with an animated short film called “ARK” by Grzegorz Jonkajtys.

We’ll have more news about the new album in the near future. You can keep track of what Oblivion are up to by visiting their Facebook page. Here’s the video: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HELLWELL, SHINING, AND VHÖL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 032012
 

Here’s another daily round-up of metal things I saw and heard this morning that I thought were worth sharing. Fair warning: there is clean singing in the first two items, but it’s counter-balanced by harsh vocals and an overlay of darkness.

HELLWELL

I came to metal relatively late in life. I’ve devoted a lot of effort catching up on what I missed in the decades preceding my initiation. One of the bands I missed was Wichita-based Manila Road, though judging from the enthusiasm that greeted our report about the band’s scheduled appearance at MARYLAND DEATHFEST 2013, it seems many of our readers are quite familiar with them.

This item, however, is not about Manila Road. It’s about a side project created by Manila Road’s Mark “The Shark” Shelton. The band is called Hellwell, the album is named Beyond the Boundaries of Sin, and it will be released this month by High Roller Records and Shadow Kingdom Records — though it’s already up on Bandcamp. Shelton describes it as “like Manilla Road’s evil twin”, with a sound that resembles “a cross between Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, early Metallica and Manilla Road.”

The band is named after Ernest “Ernie” Cunningham Hellwell, who Shelton says is a writer of horror-themed fiction and plays keyboards, synthesizers, and bass on Hellwell’s debut album. I am somewhat skeptical about whether Hellwell is a real person as opposed to the alter ego of someone else, because I can find nothing about him in my net sleuthing, either as a writer or as a musician.

In any event, I was attracted to the music by the awesome cover art (above) by Alexander von Wieding, and this morning I listened to about half of the album on Bandcamp. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BROOD OF HATRED, PLANKS, A TRIBE CALLED RED, AND ALLEGAEON

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Sep 022012
 

It may be Labor Day Weekend here in the U.S., and although it’s fair to say that I’m fucking off even more than usual with a 3-day weekend to enjoy, I’m also still prowling the interhole in search of new metal experiences worth sharing with our beloved readers, without whom I would just be talking to myself like the average homeless person. And man oh man, did I find some intriguing items yesterday.

I knew only one of these bands before seeing and hearing what I saw — Allegaeon. But we’ve slobbered over them a lot at NCS already, and they’re getting buckets of slobber from fans and critics already, so despite the fact that their new video is indeed awesome, I’m putting them last today. In front of them come three more obscure collectives that deserve the front end of the spotlight.

BROOD OF HATRED

I’m pretty sure that the first and last time I wrote about a metal band from Tunisia was in July 2010, when the subject was a band named Barzakh, in a series on Metal From North Africa. Yesterday I found another Tunisian band named Brood of Hatred, thanks to the wonderful Middle Eastern-based metal blog, Metality. This past March, Brood of Hatred released their debut EP, New Order of Intelligence, which is available for free download on Bandcamp (here). But though I’m now interested in hearing that, what I heard (and saw) yesterday that grabbed my attention was something even more recent.

It’s a brand new video for a new single called “Cacophony In Creation” that will appear on the band’s debut album, Skinless Agony. The song is excellent, both very well written and very well performed.  Continue reading »

MALAYSIAN DEATH: LAVATORY AND HUMILIATION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Sep 012012
 

We’ve never written about a Malaysian metal band in the nearly three years that NCS has been fouling up the interhole. If you had asked me two days ago to name a Malaysian metal band, I couldn’t have done it. I know there’s a scene there, and my guess is that, like a lot of Southeast Asian metal, it’s dominated by brutal/technical death metal and grindcore bands, but as for concrete facts, I had none.

However, within these last two days, by sheer coincidence, I’ve come across two Malaysian bands, both of whom have recently been signed by noteworthy record labels: Lavatory and Humiliation. They’re both devoted to old school death metal (though not the same kind), they’re both working on their label debuts, and they both sound tasty.

LAVATORY

It seems this band (above) is very new, having released their first music in the form of an EP called Transgression just earlier this summer (which I found on cassette at Hells Headbangers). But that EP was enough to snag the attention of Pulverised Records, who signed them for the release of a debut album.

Pulverised can be relied upon to deliver quality, and by “quality” I mean death metal that the average human skull isn’t strong enough to withstand. So the Pulverised signing alone was grounds for high hopes. I also found a song from Transgression that provides further grounds. Its name is “Blinded By Darkness”, and it’s a goddamn good song. The power of the filth is strong with these young ones. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: EARLY GRAVES, ZONARIA, DETHKLOK, NUCLEAR DEATH TERROR, RED ELEVEN

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Aug 312012
 

Someone left a comment on one of today’s earlier posts saying “NCS has always been the most long-winded out of all the metal sites.” Really hurt my feelings. Made me feel real low and pouty. Some people just wanna know if the shit is awesome or not. Makes me wanna just clam up and let all this shit that I saw and heard today speak for itself.

EARLY GRAVES

New Early Graves album. Red Horse. Out 10/30 on No Sleep Records. Pre-Order available at http://www.nosleepstore.com/. New song, too. Also called “Red Horse”. Fucken explosive crusty punky grindy mayhem. Pure awesomeness. (thanks Utmu)


Continue reading »

BLACK SABBATH VOL. 4 TURNS 40

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Aug 312012
 

It’s time to celebrate another metal anniversary. Tomorrow, September 1, 40 years will have passed since the official release of Black Sabbath’s fourth album. Hard to believe: Forty. Fucking. Years.

As I’ve done in the past, I’m stealing from my fellow metal blogger Full Metal Attorney, who is a lot more on the ball watching the calendar for events like this than yours truly. He discusses the significance of this album on his own site today, proclaiming it the pinnacle of Black Sabbath’s career, surpassing each of the band’s first three albums — Black Sabbath (1970), Paranoid (1970), and Master of Reality (1971).

FMA attributes the album’s excellence mainly to Tommy Iommi’s riffs, especially on “Supernaut”, “Wheels of Confusion”, “Cornucopia”, “Snowblind”, and the song he calls “the heaviest Sabbath song of all”, “Under the Sun”. But he also praises the performances of the rest of Sabbath — Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and of course Ozzy.

As FMA himself acknowledges in the article, lots of people would disagree with him putting Vol. 4 above Paranoid and Master of Reality. He chalks that up to the presence of the weird experimental track “FX,” the relatively long acoustic instrumental “Laguna Sunrise,” and the piano/synth ballad “Changes” — but he asserts that these quirky, imperfect songs are precisely what has made the album so memorable after 40 years, in addition to all of the album’s phenomenal successes. Continue reading »

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