I watched some of the opening ceremonies from London. Some of it was cool, like the cascade of lights falling from those big gold rings in the sky. But I gave up not long after Mr. Bean accompanied the orchestra on the theme song from Chariots of Fire.
I decided if I was going to watch spectacle, with big throngs of people, lots of lights, and explosions of sound, I should at least watch something with good fuckin’ music going on. So I watched these instead:
Among all the many genres of metal, melodic death metal was my personal pathway into the realms of extreme music. Although I eventually branched off in more dissonant and atonal directions, I still get off on that first love.
Mors Principium Est is one of the melodic death metal bands whose albums I go back to for a periodic fix. When I found out that guitarist and primary songwriter Jori Haukio had split from the band soon after release of their last album (2007’s Liberation = Termination), I worried about their future. Second guitarist Jarkko Kokko also left, and my worries were exacerbated when time passed and it seemed like MPE was having no luck in finding a new guitar tandem that would be the right fit for the band.
Well, it seems like the problem has finally been solved. Venturing outside their native Finland, MPE have found two new guitarists in British musician Andy Gillion and New Zealand-based guitarist Andhe Chandler. The new line-up is now finally recording a new album, and they’ve signed contracts with AFM Records for release of the album in Europe and the U.S., with Truth Inc Records for release in Australia, and with Marquee Records/Avalon for Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. WIth luck, we’ll see MPE’s first album in five years by the end of 2012.
Usually, I avoid posting news piece unless I have something tangible to go along with them, such as new album art or new music. Here, I don’t have either. All I have is a new promo photo, in which drummer Mikko Sipola seems to be using the great outdoors as it was intended, i.e., as a giant urinal. So, although we have no new song to stream, I guess we do have a stream.
Hell, we must have musics! So, after the jump, I’ve added a couple of MPE tracks from Liberation = Termination. Continue reading »
I’m a big fan of Eliran Kantor’s artwork. The guy is just tremendously talented. And so I haunt his Facebook page to keep tabs on his new creations. This morning, I saw that he had uploaded the artwork above. It’s an homage to HP Lovecraft — a kind of Shoggoth / Shub-Niggurath/ Cthulhu hybrid. It’s the cover for an album by a band I’d never heard of called Dublin Death Patrol.
I assumed this was some new Irish metal band, but I was wrong. The “Dublin” in Dublin Death Patrol refers to the town of Dublin, California, population 46,000+, located about 25 miles east of Oakland. Many of the band’s 11 members are Dubliners. And yes, you read that right: 11 members.
But look who’s included in DPP’s membership: Chuck Billy (Testament), Steve “ZETRO” Souza (ex-Testament, ex-Exodus), Willy Lange (Rampage, Laaz Rockit), two of Chuck Billy’s brothers (Andy and Eddie), Steve Souza’s brother John, and a bunch of other East Bay ragers (Steve Robello, Greg Bustamante, Danny Cunningham, Troy Luccketta, and John Hartsinck). It’s definitely a “family and friends” kind of band. You get one guess as to what kind of metal they play.
All of these guys have apparently known each other since they were teenagers. They’ve recorded two albums. One of them, DDP4Life (2005), apparently had some kind of limited release on a label called Godfodder, but the second one — Death Sentence (2011) — has never been released. But as a result of some internet sleuthing after seeing that Eliran Kantor cover art, I discovered that Mascot Records will be releasing both of the DDP albums on August 13 (they’re taking pre-orders here). Continue reading »
Good morning class. Our subject for today is that well-known romantic ballad by Cannibal Corpse, “I Cum Blood”.
Of course, many of you know this gentle ode like the palm of your hand. But please raise those hands — how many of you have ever read the lyrics?
I thought so. This is the problem with our instant-gratification society. You consume music so quickly and superficially. You get the quick headbang and then move on, without delving more deeply into the philosophical underpinnings of the artist’s inspiration and the nuances of the lyrical message. You miss the opportunity for personal growth that comes from a thoughtful exegesis of the words. You hear the noise and miss the poetry. This will not do.
To correct your shortcomings in music appreciation, we are privileged to have with us today Professor Big C, who will deliver for us a spoken-word recital of the lyrics to “I Cum Blood”.
It goes without saying that you have also neglected the heart-felt lyrical message in that classic Dying Fetus song, “Homicidal Retribution”, with its passionate protest against a justice system that allows killers to escape their just deserts. This tune, which appears on War of Attrition (2007), is one of your instructor’s favorite Dying Fetus ballads, and we are fortunate that the Relapse Records label has uploaded to YouTube for the first time a high-quality version of the official video for this masterwork. It was filmed at Philadelphia’s historic Eastern State Penitentiary. You will wish to familiarize yourself with its environs, because many of you are undoubtedly headed for similar accommodations.
After you have reflected upon Professor Big C’s rendition of “I Cum Blood”, your next assignment will be to absorb the “Homicidal Retribution” video and write a 2,000-word essay on what it means to you. You may not use the words “fuck”, “fucking”, “awesome”, “shit”, “cum”, or “splooge” in your essay. Continue reading »
While browsing the interhole this morning in an effort to find something that would cheer me up in the wake of learning about the cancellation of the Gojira-LambOfGod-Dethklok tour, I happened upon two new videos that helped considerably. By coincidence, both involve bands whose new music carries an air of dark symphonic grandeur, while inflicting vicious body blows at the same time: Diabolical (Sweden) and Welicoruss (Russia).
DIABOLICAL
Diabolical are a Swedish death metal band with three studio albums and a live recording (2011’s Ars Vitae) to their credit. They’re now in the process of recording a new album entitled Neogenesis. Today, they released a video that includes pre-production excerpts from a few of the new songs, and the music is sounding really fucken good.
The music is a dark kind of melodic death metal, frequently with a black metal sheen. Whether galloping at a furious pace or stomping with imperial might, it’s infernally majestic. The vocals are deep and bestial and the riffing is titanic. But the band also spin sweeping melodies, and they leaven the blasting with soft spaces that include the mournful sound of violins. Through the guitars, subtle keyboard additions, and even choral clean voices, they also create a symphonic aura around this very ominous and apocalyptic metal.
The new video teaser also features a dude who looks like he took in a few too many roentgens somewhere. Continue reading »
All of your friends here at NCS are immensely anxious for the release of the next album by North Carolina’s Daylight Dies. Three years have passed since the release of the band’s third album, Lost To the Living. But yesterday Candlelight Records announced a release date for the new album, entitled A Frail Becoming: October 9. In addition, the label put up a brief video teaser for the album, which is . . . way too fucking brief.
The new record was mixed by Jens Bogren (Opeth, Katatonia, Devin Townsend, and many more) at Fascination Street Studios in Sweden, and the album will feature photography from award-winning Jonathan Mehring.
I’m going to embed the teaser video after the jump, but I’m also including a more effective reminder of why this is one of our most anticipated releases for 2012 — the official video for “Lies That Bind”, a track from the band’s second album, Dismanting Devotion (2006). It vividly displays the band’s talent for moving from dark ethereal beauty to a crushingly heavy assault, without warning, and the video is cool to watch, too.
Speaking of videos, the press release we received states that the band are currently working on a video for the song “Dreaming of Breathing” from the new record. The clip is being filmed by Ramon Boutviseth, who also directed the video for “Lies That Bind”. For more updates, watch this space or visit Daylight Dies on Facebook. Continue reading »
As previously mentioned, we’ve got another doom-oriented post planned for today, as a bookend for the one with which we started, but in the meantime here’s one more interlude.
Vallenfyre and Paradise Lost are two of our favorite bands, united by the common presence of Greg Mackintosh. Both of them have released extremely strong albums over the last eight months — Vallenfyre’s A Fragile King (reviewed at NCS here and here) last November and Tragic Idol by Paradise Lost (reviewed here) earlier this year.
Both of them also seem to be united by the dedication of fans who are not only faithful but also really fuckin’ talented. Witness the two videos featured in this post, which I just saw this morning.
The first one is a stop-action animation for Vallenfyre’s tremendously monstrous song “Ravenous Whore”. It tells the story of theocratic rat people trying to summon a creature through the sacrifice of one of their own, and it’s really well-done. Not only is the animation extremely cool, but the conception and syncing of the visuals to the music are creative and beautifully executed. Credit goes to Jamie Evans from the UK, who is submitting the video to the upcoming Bradford Animation Festival.
The second video is another animation, in the style of a lyric video, for the song “Theories From Another World”, which is probably my favorite track on Tragic Idol. A Russian fan who goes by the name MrHuempolbu created the animation using the Tragic Idol cover artwork created by Jean Emmanuel Simoulin (www.metastazis.com), and it’s also superb.
Both videos are greatly helped by the fact that the songs kick so much ass, but the creativity and artistic skill shown in both of them deserve a round of applause. Watch them next . . . Continue reading »
We started this day with doom (mixed with stoner) in a review of the debut EP by France’s Mudbath. We’ll be going back to doom in the next post (and I’m talkin’ about seriously catastrophic doom), but just to prevent things from getting too abysmal around here, this post includes two videos and a song that I saw and heard yesterday that get the blood pumping (instead of freezing it into a viscous sludge). And the bands are: Fallen Joy (France), From Ashes Rise (U.S. – Portland), and Throwers (Germany) — clicking on their names will take you to their Facebook pages for more info.
FALLEN JOY
Fallen Joy have a debut album coming soon called Inner Supremacy. The artwork for the cover and the CD booklet can be seen above, created by the very talented Strychneen Studio; in fact, I discovered this band through Strychneen’s posting of the album art on their Facebook page.
So far, the band have released one song from the new album for streaming on SoundCloud (here), and now they’ve released a music video for the same song: “Hymn To Silent Soldiers”. Whoever those silent soldiers may be, the song is also a hymn to bands such as At the Gates, but with some blackening in this canticle and an air of modernity in the riffing and soloing. The song is a blood-pumping, jolting gallop with riffs that blister and a nice blend of black- and death-metal vocals. Check out the video right after the jump. Continue reading »
Between the Buried and Me have a new album coming. Its title is Parallax II: Future Sequence, it will be released on October 9, and it’s already available for pre-order from Metal Blade HERE and from this site, which is offering some nice bundles (including a spacesuit!). Today we also have a new official video for “Telos”, a song from the album that has made the rounds in a few fan-filmed videos of recent BTBAM shows.
The video is mainly a series of fade-in, fade-out ads for the release with a couple of excellent pieces of album art interspersed. The main benefit of the video is the the song, straight from the album. It’s a neuron-twister of a tech-death workout spliced into an ethereal space-swimming, time-traveling segment, which is part jazz fusion, part prog exploration.
I’m tolerating the clean vocals in the cosmic-drift part of the song, but confess that I’m much higher on the harsh, tech-death mind-fuckery, which is really excellent.
Check out the video after the jump. Continue reading »
I find it occasionally amusing and more often annoying to see how often male metal fanboys and even metal bloggers describe their enthusiasm for music by referring in graphic (but presumably figurative) terms to having explosive orgasms. I took a personal vow that I would never resort to anything so stupid and juvenile in my writing for NCS. And then this morning I saw Zatokrev’s official music video for a new song called “Goddamn Lights”.
I came so hard that I punched a gaping hole in the wall with my cum. I splooged so voluminously that I’ll be scrubbing my computer screen with industrial-strength solvent for the rest of the week. Both of my heads exploded with the force of my money shot like the second coming (cumming) of Krakatoa. My shorts are in tatters.
I also took a personal vow that I would try to hold my use of the term “epic” to a bare minimum (having failed in my vow never to use the word at all). But “Goddamn Lights” is just fucking epic — not only to hear, but also to watch. It’s a hybrid of Agalloch-ian melodic black metal and dramatic progressive metal, with undertones of stoner metal and psychedelic rock. It’s a guaranteed headbang trigger. It’s both scarifying and beautiful. It gets this work week off to an awesome start.
And the video is beautifully made (credit to Lionel Weitnauer for the awesomeness), the band drenched in hot colors, with the shadows filled by images of nature. Continue reading »
