SEEN AND HEARD: SOILWORK, PIG DESTROYER, AND THE TONY DANZA TAPDANCE EXTRAVAGANZA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Aug 302012
 

Here’s a quick round-up of news items I saw today. I may have more later . . .

SOILWORK

That’s a really good promo shot up there, don’t you think? It was taken by Hannah Verbeuren. Could there be a relationship to the band’s fabulous drummer Dirk Verbeuren?

In addition to seeing that great photo, I also saw the news that Soilwork’s new album, The Living Infinite, is going to be a double-album. According to the band’s front dude Björn “Speed” Strid , it will be: “A REAL double album, in the true sense of the word, which means no fillers and no left-overs.”

Oh, let’s hope that will prove to be true! And let’s further hope that with all that extra room it will include the kind of harder-edged, melodeath marauders like “Needlefeast”, “Follow the Hollow”, “Like the Average Stalker”, and “The Chainheart Machine” that Soilwork once enjoyed delivering, in addition to the catchy, poppier, cleanly sung stuff that dominated The Panic Broadcast (2010). I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy that last album, because I did, but I kept waiting for something with real teeth in it . . . and waited in vain. Now I’ll start waiting again . . . .

On the other hand, I don’t think lack of teeth will be the problem with this next band’s new album. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: KATATONIA, KRODA, ASMODÉE, AND TAKEN BY THE TIDE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

As mentioned in today’s last post, the last 24 hours have brought a torrential flood of news and new music that I care about, and because I care about all this shit, I’ve been grinding my talons down to nubs on the keyboard, on the assumption that you will care about it, too. And if you don’t, please keep that to yourselves, because I bruise easily. Without further ado, here are four more items to add to the long list that has already filled up our site today.

KATATONIA

We published a very, very early guest review of Katatonia’s new album, Dead End Kings, in this post. We also were fast in posting about the wonderful music video for the first song to debut from the album, “Dead Letters”. For reasons I haven’t figured out, we’ve been getting a ton of hits on both of those posts over the last 3 or 4 days despite the fact that both of them are two months old. We might as well add something a bit more current.

This afternoon, DGR alerted me to the fact that the entire album is now streaming at the Canadian Exclaim.ca web site. HERE is the link for that. Dead End Kings was released yesterday (August 28) via Peaceville.

KRODA

We’ve written so many times about this Ukrainian black metal band that I’ve lost count (actually, I could count them if I had more fingers, because all the previous posts are collected here). Schwarzpfad was probably my favorite 2011 black metal album of all the ones I heard last year. It also showed up on Andy Synn’s list of the year’s Critical Top 10 albums, as well as his list of 2011′s Great Albums, and I included a song from Schwarzpfad on our list of the year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GLOWSUN, TOMBS, P.O.O.R., AND TOTAL VOMIT EXPERIENCE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

For someone of my tastes, this has been an action-packed 24 hours in the world of metal, and hence the flood of posts on our site today. But the new videos from Enslaved and Kvelertak, the new song from Daylight Dies, the new free download from Impureza, and . . . uh . . . the new video from Baby Metal . . . have just been the tip of the iceberg. I’ve seen and heard a lot more things that have got me really pumped up at the moment — so much so that I’ve written two of these “seen and heard” posts. This is the first one.

GLOWSUN

First things first: that colorful album art caught my eye in a big way. It wasn’t the name “Glowsun”, because I hadn’t heard of that band (or their music) before seeing the artwork. It turns out that Glowsun are from northern France, and their second album Eternal Season is scheduled for release by Napalm Records on September 28. It also turns out that the cover art was created by Glowsun’s own singer and guitarist Johan Jaccob.

So, having been hooked by the cover art, I listened to a track from the album that Napalm debuted today, not knowing what to expect. What I got was . . . completely bowled over by the song. Stylistically, I suppose you’d classify “Reverse” as psychedelic stoner metal, with a real retro feel, but for those of you (like me) who don’t immediately start salivating when you see that genre label, just bear with me a moment longer:

Glowsun have ultra-mad guitar chops. Their guitar chops have guitar chops. The song’s opening riff got my head nodding quickly . . . but that proved to be just a small appetizer for the soloing explosion to come on the back half of the song. Fuckin’ caused my hair to start smoking. Listen: Continue reading »

DAYLIGHT DIES: “INFIDEL”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Aug 292012
 

“Normally, we like to pen a few lines of senseless drivel to entertain before you click that orange button thingie, but today—as August rightfully wanes into oblivion—our digital inkwell is virtually dry. Parched, if you will. That being said, we’re going to let Daylight Dies dash your hopes and weather-make your sunny day outright cloudy. They can do that, you know. It’s time to enter an overcast state of mind.”

With those words of introduction, DECIBEL today began streaming a new song from Daylight Dies’ forthcoming album, A Frail Becoming, which is out October 9th on Candlelight Records USA and is available HERE for pre-order.

The song is “Infidel”. As you might expect if you know this band’s fantastic previous music, it’s a combination (on the one hand) of the deep, the dark, and the crushing, and (on the other) the sublimely beautiful. A Frail Becoming has been very high on our site’s list of most anticipated fall releases, and I can tell you that the rest of the album is every bit as strong as “Infidel”. A review is forthcoming . . . .

THIS is the link that will take you to DECIBEL to hear the song.  On that page there’s also an interesting interview with the band’s bassist/vocalist Egan O’Rourke. GO!

NEW FROM NORWAY: ENSLAVED’S “THOUGHTS LIKE HAMMERS” LYRIC VIDEO AND KVELERTAK LIVE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

The new album by Norway’s Enslaved, RIITIIR, comes out Sept. 28 in Europe and Oct. 9 in North America on Nuclear Blast. It’s already available for pre-order in a variety of bundles at this location. The deluxe digi-pak edition comes with a bonus DVD that includes segments on the making of RIITIIR, the band, the recording studios, and the artwork. But the coolest looking bundle is the one with the bone-and-charcoal-splatter double-LP gatefold, which is limited to 1,000 copies.

About three weeks ago NPR debuted a long new song from  RIITIIR called “Thoughts Like Hammers”. Now the band have debuted a lyric video for the song, which you can watch after the jump. The song is such a trip. It’s part stoner metal, part indie rock, part prog, and the whole package is wrapped up in a blackened skin. It’s also an exception to the rule around here, because it includes clean vocals as well as scalding rasps, but man, the clean vocals are really good.

I usually find lyric videos to be distracting and annoying. Most of the time I’d rather just hear the music. But at least the words to “Thoughts Like Hammers” aren’t ridiculous. To the contrary, they’re interesting. So yes, I think the video is worth seeing, especially if you haven’t yet heard this song.

But the “Thoughts Like Hammers” video isn’t the only goodie from Norway we’ve got in this post. Last night I also watched a professionally filmed and edited video of Kvelertak’s live performance at the AREA4 festival in Germany on August 18. It’s about 22 minutes long, and I ate up every minute. To be fair, I’m already a Kvelertak fan, but I have a feeling that even people who haven’t yet gotten into their recorded music will rock out to this jam. Continue reading »

FREE SHIT FROM IMPUREZA

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Aug 292012
 

(photo credit: Nicolas Abraham)

It occurs to me that human beings have never been content to simply feel emotion. We are social creatures, and so we’re driven by the impulse to share our emotions with others, to convey to other people what we’re feeling. I think that impulse drives artists in every field, whether it’s pictorial art or writing or music. And it goes beyond that. Artists not only want to communicate their own emotions through what they create, they also want other people to feel what they (the artists) are feeling.

Music has always been a vehicle for this two-fold drive, a vehicle for expressing what the musician feels and for changing the listeners so that they experience it, too. And one of those experiences is the very human desire to be wild, to let go of responsibilities, to defy order, to throw off the very conventions that make it possible for human beings to co-exist without tearing each other’s throats out, to dive headlong into unbridled passion.

There’s probably some connection between this and orgasms, but I’ll leave that for another day.

Anyway, the appeal of music that makes you want to be wild is one of the reasons I really like high-speed death metal. But that’s a comparatively recent form of music, and definitely not the first kind designed to sweep up the listener and take them on the Wild Hunt. Flamenco music is a much older art form that, at least as I hear it, does the same thing. It lights a fire and then fans it into a wildfire.

And I’m thinking these thoughts today because of Impureza. I think it’s a very safe bet that if you’ve ever heard the music of this French band (pictured above), you haven’t forgotten it. They seamlessly and beautifully combine technically oriented death metal that brings to mind bands such as Nile, Krisiun, Decapitated, and Fleshgod Apocalypse with flamenco music. They combine old and new ways of kicking out the fuckin’ jams. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: SAM NELSON, BUNCH, STOIC DISSENTION, KITEZH, HANDSEL

 Eye-Catchers, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Aug 282012
 

One thing leads to another. In late July, I came across an awesome album cover by Denver-based artist Ken Sarafin (Sarafin Concepts) for a death metal project created by Sarafin called Bunch (and posted about that here). Though it isn’t available yet, the album will be titled Otero.

Then yesterday I saw the amazing artwork you see above, which appeared on the Bunch Facebook page. It’s an alternate cover for Otero (Bunch will eventually have three alternate covers for the album, with the third one coming from Mark Cooper of Mindrape Art — and one day I’ll devote a post to him, too). The artist is Sam Nelson, who’s also in Denver and calls his graphics business Stigma Art.

Well, having seen that killer Otero cover, I had to find more of Sam Nelson’s work, which I did — and holy hell, is he good. Some of his most striking recent works turn out to be covers for forthcoming albums by metal bands whose names were new to me. So of course I had to find some of their music, and it turns out to be worth sharing — and voilà, this post came together!

So, after the jump, feast your eyes on Sam Nelson’s cover art for Stoic Dissention and Kitezh, listen to some of their past music, and also check out a couple tracks from a music project between Nelson and Sarafin called Handsel (yeah, it’s really annoying that these dudes also have musical talent in addition to being fine artists), plus a few more examples of Sam Nelson’s creativity. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: RIVERS OF NIHIL, NEIL ARMSTRONG AND BUZZ ALDRIN, AND CARCINOGEN

 Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Aug 272012
 

Here are a few items of interest that I saw and heard today.

RIVERS OF NIHIL

We were first introduced to this Pennsylvania band by NCS guest writer The Baby Killer (who needs to stick his head back in our lair soon). The focus of his post back in January was not only the band’s ripping recorded music but also their ability to play a fire-breathing brand of technical death metal with immaculate skill on stage, stirring the shit out of the pit while delivering spot-on execution of their complex music.

Today I saw that the band had released an official music video for a song called “(sin)chronos”, which appeared on their 2011 album, Temporality Unbound. Listening to the song is like sticking your head into a blast furnace while simultaneously getting a megawatt jolt straight to your brain stem. Faces will melt and nerve endings will explode. It’s fast and furious, eminently mosh-worthy, and lit up with technical acrobatics. And dat bass!

Watch and listen after the jump. Crank more Rivers of Nihil music and download at their Bandcamp page, buy it as a CD via this link, and hook up with the band on Facebook at this location — and stay tuned, because the band are at work on their next album. Continue reading »

RATTENFÄNGER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Aug 262012
 

Rattenfänger is a new band from Ukraine, but the band’s four members have already established their kvlt cred: They are also the four members of Drudkh and Old Silver Key (along with Neige from Alcest), and three of them are also members of Blood of Kingu. If those band names don’t mean anything to you, then you got some ‘splainin’ to do.

If you are familiar with those other bands, however, I think you’re going to be surprised by what Rattenfänger sounds like. This isn’t black metal or pagan/folk metal or depressive indie rock. This is voracious death metal, of the death/doom variety, and the one song I’ve heard so far is outstanding.  An album’s worth of material, entitled Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum, will be released by the Norwegian label Dark Essence Records in late October/early November of this year.

The band take their name from the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (in German, Rattenfänger von Hameln). You remember that tale, don’t you? The townspeople hire the rat-catcher to rid their town of rats, but then stiff him on the bill after he succeeds, and he then uses his magical pipe to lure the town’s children away, never to be seen again. According to a press release, “the lyrics for Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum are in Latin and are written in style of the medieval poets, the thinkers and the troubadours/minstrels of old.”

Being the curious sort, I did a bit of poking around and discovered via The Font of All Human Knowledge that Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum was “a celebrated collection of satirical Latin letters which appeared in 1515-1519 in Hagenau, Germany . . . mock[ing] the doctrines and modes of living of the scholastics and monks, mainly by pretending to be letters from fanatic Christian theologians discussing whether all Jewish books should be burned as un-Christian or not.” Pope Leo X was not amused and excommunicated the authors, readers, and disseminators of the Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum  in 1517. Continue reading »

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