TASTES OF THINGS TO COME: KRAMPUS, CYTOTOXIN, AND PROJECT:ABOMINATION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Aug 132012
 

This is a fairly random collection of new music I heard over the last two days from forthcoming albums. Of course, it’s wildly divergent, because that’s the nature of metal. The bands are Krampus (Italy), Cytotoxin (Germany), and Project:Abomination (U.S.)

KRAMPUS

Krampus are an Italian horde (eight members!) whose last EP was reviewed for us by Trollfiend (here), and he followed that with a band interview (here). They’ve now completed a full-length album, Survival of the Fittest, which is slated for release on August 24 by Noise Art Records, and yesterday brought us a new song: “Unspoken”. Previously, the band started streaming another track, “Kronos’ Heritage”, which  if I’m not mistaken also appeared on the last EP.

Krampus bill themselves as a folk metal band, but “Unspoken is much more straight-ahead, Scandinavian-styled melodic death metal, with a metalcore flavoring of both bestial and clean vocals. The bestial vox are indeed beastly (and excellent), and although you know what I think of clean vocals, I admit that they do have a fitting place in this song. The music is an infectious gallop — not ground-breaking by any stretch, but a lot of fun to hear.

A stream of the new song is right after the jump, and I’m also including “Kronos’ Heritage”, a song in which folk influences are more pronounced. Like “Unspoken”, it’s very catchy.  Continue reading »

CHATEAU BRUTAL: “MEET MY MEAT”

 Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Aug 132012
 

It’s a fact: No one has ever accused the humor at this site of being too sophisticated. We pride ourselves on being moronic, juvenile, and foul as often as possible, or at least I do. For example, I don’t think you can ever have too much dick humor. I know you feel that way, too, which is why this post is just gonna light you up!

Yesterday I was introduced to a French band called Chateau Brutal by the always entertaining Church of the Riff — and if you’re not reading that blog on a regular basis, you’re missing out on some primo entertainment. For example, here’s what the Church had to say about Chateau Brutal’s new second album, Ham Slicer:

This French garage rock duo’s second album is 10 tracks of rump rattling, ear splitting, foot tapping rawk and fucking roll. It’s the drunk guy at the bar who’s lost his pants and is screaming at the half-empty pint on the table to fill itself up again. Noisy, fast and frenetic, it’ll grab you by the nose and shake you until the screaming stops.

Take one porterhouse thick guitar tone, mix in a hammering percussion section and season with everything from turntables to saxophones. Then soak it in beer, rip it’s pants off and stay the fuck out of the way. It goes hard, but not on the sonic destruction front, on the “drink all your beer, then steal some more, then get laid, then find more beer, then steal a zebra from the zoo and get the police to chase you”…front.

Well, fuck, don’t mind if I do!

You just know an album is going to be good when it’s opening track is “My Dick”, and it’s followed immediately by “Meet My Meat”.  Continue reading »

HAMFERÐ

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Aug 122012
 

The United States has always been run by a plutocracy whose power has rarely been challenged in any meaningful way, regardless of which political party happens to be in office. For complex reasons, class warfare has just never really been a serious factor in the civic and political life of the U.S. The big dogs gobble up an ever-increasing share of the pie, and most people don’t ever seem bothered enough by it to rise up politically and demand that their own interests be put first. But as a people, strangely enough, we do like to root for the underdog, and we tend to cheer when the underdog wins. I’m no exception . . . and hence, this story.

Wacken Metal Battle is a globe-spanning competition designed to showcase up-and-coming bands in the world of metal, and this year it celebrated its 10th anniversary. National competitions are now held in 33 countries, with the winner of each national competition journeying to Germany to perform on the first day of the Wacken Open Air festival, playing for all the marbles. And it’s a big bag of marbles, too. Apart from the thrill of getting to play at the world’s biggest metal fest, the winner this year was to receive a world-wide record deal with Nuclear Blast and a shitload of other prizes, such as a Marshall Full-Stack, Washburn guitars, and Paise Boomer cymbals (the whole list of prizes can be seen at this page).

For the first time in 2012, the Faroe Islands joined the Metal Battle competition. The Faroe Islands are a country consisting of 18 mountainous islands located in the North Atlantic between Iceland and the rest of Scandinavia. The total population is about 49,000, with nearly half the people living in the capital region of Tórshavn. They are the descendants of Vikings (and Irish), they have their own language, and they have metal (as those of you who know bands such as Týr, The Apocryphal Order, or SiC are well aware).

This year, eight bands competed in the Faroese national Metal Battle event, and the winner was a band named Hamferð. Hamferð made the trip to Germany and took the Wacken W.E.T. stage on August 6 to throw down against bands from throughout Europe, plus countries as far away as China, Japan, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil. And guess who won the whole thing, as their nation’s first-ever competitor in Wacken Metal Battle? That’s right — Hamferð did. Continue reading »

SHUFFLE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHUFFLE  17 Responses »
Aug 112012
 

As much as I like working on this blog, it has changed my listening habits. One of our missions is to stay abreast of song and video premieres and new albums, sifting through the flood of new metal to find things we believe are worth recommending and reviewing. So I spend almost all my listening time nowadays checking out metal I’ve never heard before. The cost, unfortunately, is that I rarely listen to what’s in the library of albums I’ve accumulated over the years. No more “oldies but goodies” for me.

But yesterday, on a whim, I decided that I’d spend the time walking to and from my job listening to what was on my iPod already, and I used Shuffle to pick what I heard. My iPod Classic is full. It has 22,331 songs on it, and almost all of the shit is metal. To put a new album on there requires that I delete another one, which is horribly painful to do. That process has made the library more top-heavy with newer music over time, which may explain why most of the Shuffle choices turned out to be of relatively recent vintage.

Anyway, it turned out to be a blast, because the first five songs that Shuffle picked were all really good and really beastly. The next couple weren’t as killer, so I decided to just go with the first five in this post. Oddly, two of the five turned out to be from Japanese bands.

DISMEMBER

Fuckin’ Dismember! What an auspicious way to start the Shuffle medley! I didn’t need reminding about how completely amazing Like An Ever Flowing Stream was — and still is — but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve listened to “Skin Her Alive”. What a thoroughly skin-flaying, meat-grinding experience. Continue reading »

WORMFOOD, ANT NOISE, AND THE CALL OF THE WILD

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Aug 102012
 

The weekend is nearly upon us. Almost time for the revels to begin. In addition to reveling in my own preferred way after a tough week (i.e., sleeping like a dead man), I hope to catch up on my metal listening. But before diving into a big batch of album-length goodies that are high on my list, I thought I’d close out the week with one more grab-bag of song-length sounds.

Two fresh tracks caught my ears this morning, one from a French band named Wormfood and one from a Brooklyn outfit, Call of the Wild. I also have ant noise. I also have this photo from Mars, beamed back to the mother ship by the Curiosity rover. What look like hills in the distance are the rim of the Gale Crater, where Curiosity is now located.

There’s a better photo of the crater rim after the jump, though it’s in black and white. Continue reading »

NEW VIDEO FROM EX DEO AND NEW SONGS FROM HOODED MENACE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Aug 102012
 

Ex Deo — the “other band” of Kataklysm frontman Mauriozio Iacono — has completed a new album entitled CALIGVLA, the thematic focus of which is Rome under the unhinged rule of Emperor Caligula.

You remember Caligula, don’t you? The emperor who demanded that he be worshipped as a living god, threatened to make his horse a consul (and actually did make him a priest), slaughtered innocent people for amusement, prostituted his sisters to other men (and allegedly engaged in incestuous relations with them), and indulged all manner of sexual perversity, turning his palace into a brothel? The first Roman emperor to be assassinated? The subject of an infamous 1979 movie starring Malcolm McDowell and financed by Penthouse?   Yeah, that guy.

The album is scheduled for release by Napalm Records on August 31, and a couple days ago Napalm began streaming the first official video for the album, for a track called “I, Caligvla”. Two things jumped out at me about the song: First, it’s a real headbanger. Second, it includes a lot of bombastic orchestral music in conjunction with the thundering riffage — more so than I remember from Ex Deo’s last release.

As for the video, if you’re getting your hopes up about scenes of bestiality and fisting, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. About as deviant as it gets are a few swats at a shapely female butt and some gladiatorial combat for the emperor’s amusement. Still, I thought it was worth sharing. And after that . . . I’ll come to two new songs from Finland’s Hooded Menace. Continue reading »

EVOCATION: “ILLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR” ON THE WAY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Aug 102012
 

I really can’t get enough of Sweden’s Evocation. They combine old-school death metal with some newer-school learning in a way that just really hits my sweet spot. Their music is raw, it’s heavy, it’s galvanizing, it’s groove-filled, and it’s memorable. Their last album of new material, Apocalyptic, was released in 2010, and after that Century Media signed ’em up. Century then compiled a collection of demo, unreleased, and rehearsal material from the band — whose roots go back to the early 90’s — and unleashed it in June as Evoked From Demonic Depths – The Early Years.

Today, we got the news that Century will release Evocation’s fourth studio album, Illusions Of Grandeur, on September 24 in Europe and October 23 in the US. It will include guest vocals by Amon Amarth’s Johan Hegg on a song called “Into Submission”, as well as three studio bonus tracks on a limited-edition digipak. And it features the eye-catching artwork of Michal “Xaay” Loranc — about whom more in a minute.

I wish I had a new song from the new album to play for you (and for myself), but we’ll have to wait a bit longer for that. But I do have a handful of videos as well as a track from the Evoked From Demonic Depths compilation as a reminder of why the new album should be eagerly anticipated. All of that is after the jump (we’ve streamed some of this stuff at various places and times in the past, but some of you might be new to this band).

Xaay is a Polish artist whose work we’ve featured before at NCS. He’s been a professional designer and digital artist since 1999 and has created album covers and/or merch designs for the likes of Nile, Behemoth, Kamelot, Vader, Necrophagist, and Decapitated. He also created the cover art for both Evocation’s Apocalyptic and for the 2012 compilation. Check those out here: Continue reading »

QUICK AND DIRTY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  16 Responses »
Aug 092012
 

Due to a combination of morning-long work commitments and another 5-hour flight home without wi-fi, this will likely be the last NCS post of the day.  Things should be more (ab)normal tomorrow.

In this post, I’ve quickly collected a variety of items that caught my eyes (and ears) last night.

CATTLE DECAPITATION

Cattle Decap posted this status on their FB page last night: “We sodomized the city of Budapest, Hungary tonight. On Thursday we spill our seed upon the citizens of Czech Republic at Brutal Assault. Bye, bye fuckers”  At times like these, it’s fun to imagine the reaction of people outside metal if they knew how our bands showered gratitude on their fans. We, of course, only laugh.

CONQUERORS OF THE WORLD

I included news of this tour in a post on July 10 when only 13 dates had been announced. Now, a more complete schedule is available. I’m so fucking pleased to see a Seattle stop on the list. Septic Flesh . . . Krisiun . . . Melechesh . . . Ex Deo . . . Inquisition . . . wow . . . Continue reading »

NO, WE DIDN’T OVERLOOK THAT SECOND NEW SYLOSIS SONG: “A DYING VINE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Aug 082012
 

We watched the social media pages for Sylosis like hawks over the last couple of weeks, waiting for the new songs that the band had promised, and pounced immediately once the first one (“Born Anew”) debuted early yesterday (see this).

And then I got on an airplane yesterday morning to fly across the country, with no wi-fi onboard, cut off from the bubbling world of metal for 5+ hours, feeling like an abandoned brat with no blankie and nothing on which to nurse. By the time I got where I was going and plugged back in to the ether of metal, I had an in-box for of mail with links to the second Sylosis track — “A Dying Vine” — which had emerged while I was confined at 35,000 feet.

I hate being late with news, and thought about just moving on because so many other metal sites had been spreading the news already. BUT, the damned song is so sweet that, tardy or not, I have to post about it.

The song is streaming now on the band’s recently activated web site, Sylosis.com, where pre-orders from the new album (Monolith) are also being fielded, but of course it’s up on YouTube now as well, which means we have it here, too. Continue reading »

NEW ENSLAVED SONG! “THOUGHTS LIKE HAMMERS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Aug 082012
 

Well, I’m rushing again, with my day job pounding at the door, so to speak, so I will hold my own words to a handful: NPR has debuted a long new song by Enslaved — “Thoughts Like Hammers” — from their forthcoming album, RIITIIR. Here’s an excerpt from Lars Gotrich’s excellent NPR write-up about the band, the album, and this new music:

The intro to “Thoughts Like Hammers” comes out of nowhere — three seconds in and we’re bludgeoned by decibel-damaging feedback, chaotic chord voicings and stuttering blast beats. But then the song goes through several transformations: A mean groove turns into a pumping Angus Young riff, which then sneaks into a syncopated, King Crimson-y organ. That all happens in the first two minutes. There’s no telling where Bjørnson will take “Thoughts Like Hammers” next, but the patchwork pieces all come together at the soaring chorus, as vocalist and keyboardist Herbrand Larsen helps rein in Enslaved’s experiments. Surprisingly, the nine-and-a-half-minute “Thoughts Like Hammers” is instantly memorable for all its organic twists and turns.

And THIS is the link to the NPR page where the song is streaming. Seriously, go listen, and then think about coming back here to share your reactions in the Comments.

UPDATE: This song is now streaming on Soundcloud, which means we have it here now, after the jump: Continue reading »

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