BEFORE THE DAWN: “THRONE OF ICE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Mar 252012
 

At this rate maybe we’ll get the whole album for free!

About two weeks ago, we featured the official music video by Finland’s Before the Dawn for a song called “Phoenix Rising” from their new album, Rise of the Phoenix. We also included this link for a free download of the song, courtesy of Nuclear Blast (and the download offer is still available).

Yesterday, another song called “Throne of Ice” became available for free download via the Finnish language EMI web site. You have to register on this page to get the download, but it doesn’t seem to be limited to residents of Finland, because I got it. The registration page is in Finnish, but with a little help from Google Translate, I can tell you that the boxes you’ll need to fill out ask for the following info in the following order: a first name, a last name, an e-mail address, a gender selection, and a year of birth. After that is a box with stuff you can sign up for like e-mail alerts (you’ll probably want to uncheck what’s in that box). Then click the “Rekisteroldy” button and you’ll immediately get a download link.

Why am I giving you this tedious step-by-step info? Because the song fuckin’ rocks hard, that’s why. Listen to it after the jump if you don’t believe me. What the hell, we’ll include a stream of “Phoenix Rising” after the jump, too, just in case you missed it the first time. Continue reading »

AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED MAKES BANDCAMP’S NOSE BLEED

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Mar 242012
 

In 2005, Relapse Records released a double-CD album by Agoraphobic Nosebleed titled Bestial Machinery. It collected all of the band’s recorded material before their Relapse debut, Honkey Reduction, including tracks from the Agoraphobic Nosebleed splits with Cattlepress, Laceration, and Enemy Soil, plus out of print material and previously unreleased tracks.

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with ANb, it is the mutated offspring of the infernally talented Scott Hull (Pig Destroyer) and a drum machine from Hell. The rest of the line-up (mainly vocalists) has varied over time, and I don’t think the current group was around when the material on Bestial Machinery was recorded. And what’s on Bestial Machinery is a rampaging cybernetic grindfreak on steroids, just as violent and otherworldly as Florian Bertmer’s magnificent album cover.

The main reason I’m posting about an album that’s now about seven years old is that I just discovered that it’s available for download on Bandcamp. I’m not sure how long it’s been there, but I think the addition is pretty recent.

Also, I’m posting about it because the album consists of . . . wait for it . . . 136 tracks!!! Now, a bunch of the songs are less than 10 seconds long, and the vast majority clock in under a minute, but still.

I can’t resist embedding all 136 tracks here at NCS, because that’s what having the album on Bandcamp permits me to do. The player is after the jump. Go listen and get fucked hard in the head. Should you choose to buy the album, you may do so HERE. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: IN MOURNING

 Eye-Catchers, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  22 Responses »
Mar 242012
 

THAT, my friends, is the cover art for the new (third) album by Sweden’s In Mourning, The Weight Of Oceans, which will be released by Spinefarm Records on April 18. The artwork is by none other than Kristian Whålin (Necrolord).

This is old news, since the album art and details about the album were released in late February — except I didn’t pick up on it until TheMadIsraeli started chatting with me about In Mourning earlier today on FB.

Necrolord has created so many stupendous metal album covers in his career, but this is definitely one of my favorites.  This excerpt from his bio at The Font of All Human Knowledge includes some info I didn’t know (and after the jump, I’ve got some music from The Weight of Oceans):

At the age of 17, Wåhlin formed Grotesque (as guitarist) with school friend Tomas Lindberg on vocals, Alf Svensson on guitar, and Tomas Eriksson on drums. The 1990 break-up of Grotesque would lead to the formation of At the Gates, who would be credited as instigators of the “Gothenburg Melodic death metal sound”. Wåhlin would collaborate with Lindberg and other At the Gates members a short time additionally in the death metal band Liers in Wait, and would go on to design the “Russian icon” cover-art of At the Gates’ cornerstone release, Slaughter of the Soul.

Dissection, who shared practice quarters with At the Gates, would display illustrations by Wåhlin on the cover of The Somberlain and also Storm of the Light’s Bane; the latter featuring the infamous scene of the “grim reaper horseman” in the middle of a snow-covered forest tundra. In the Nightside Eclipse, the debut of seminal Norwegian black metal band Emperor, would also be graced with his work on the cover. Wahlin would continue as an album artist for several other bands in the European death, black, doom, power and gothic metal collective throughout the 2000s.

Continue reading »

MOONLOOP

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Mar 242012
 

My fucking day job forced me to be away from my computer most of yesterday. It was like a severing of the umbilical cord between fetal me and the mother web who gives me the sustenance of new metal, except no one slapped me on the ass to get me breathing on my own. This morning I was able to reconnect the umbilical and re-establish blood flow to my brain, although oxygen deprivation may have caused some brain damage. With me, it’s difficult to tell, because I come up with bad metaphors even at the best of times.

Anyway, I started catching up with metal news over the last 24 hours by browsing my Facebook news feed. I stopped when I came to a Listenable Records post about a band called Moonloop. I stopped because they are called Moonloop. How could I not check out music from a band named Moonloop?

It turns out that Moonloop are from Barcelona, Spain, and Listenable signed them last month for release of their second album Deeply From the Earth, which will come out in Europe on May 28 and in the U.S. sometime this summer. I found one of the songs from the album on Soundcloud. It’s called “Strombus”, and I dig it deeply.

Listenable says Moonloop’s music will appeal to fans of Gojira and Opeth. References to Gojira and Opeth in the description of other bands’ music are over-used (I’m certainly guilty of it myself), though in listening to “Strombus”, I can sort of see the connections. The structure of the song, the combining of harsh and clean vocals, and the incorporation of progressive musical elements could call Opeth to mind. And I suppose there’s a certain elephantine stomp in the guitar tuning and chord progression in parts of the song, along with the timbre of vocalist/guitarist Eric Baule’s voice and the environmentally themed lyrical focus, that could explain the Gojira reference. But as I heard other songs from the album, I also thought of Cynic and Obscura.

Regardless of which references might best capture the feel of the music, “Strombus” and the other two songs I found are definitely worth hearing. Continue reading »

FULL ALBUM STREAM: MESHUGGAH’S “KOLOSS”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Mar 242012
 

Meshuggah and Nuclear Blast did a cool thing. They created this massive widget that allows you to stream the entire album and allows people like us to embed it in our web sites. If you hover your mouse over the center of the image, you will see a semi-circle of circles. If you then hover your mouse over each circle, you’ll see a song title and then you can play it. Magic!

You can also read BadWolf’s early review of KOLOSS, which Meshuggah themselves featured on their Facebook page, by going here. KOLOSS was released by Nuclear Blast in Europe yesterday and will be released in North America on Monday.

NEW VIDEOS FROM INSOMNIUM AND PARADISE LOST

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Mar 222012
 

I’m just taking a short break from slaving away at my fucking day job . . . just long enough to tell you that TERRORIZER just premiered brand new videos from Insomnium and Paradise Lost in advance of their UK tour next month, the poster for which you can see above.

The Insomnium video is for “Regain the Fire” from One For Sorrow. The Paradise Lost video is for “Honesty In Death” from their new album Tragic Idol.

To see these videos, go past the jump. I haven’t even seen them yet, so please let me know what you think so that I will know what to think when I watch them during my next momentary break from my fucking day job.

Thank you for your service. Continue reading »

THE SWEATPANTS MOSH UPDATE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  22 Responses »
Mar 222012
 

(We’re pleased to welcome guest columnist JJ “Shiv” Polachek, the vocalist for both 7 Horns 7 Eyes, whose debut full-length Throes of Absolution will be released on April 24 by Century Media, and Ovid’s Withering, whose debut EP we recently reviewed here. In this first of what we hope will be many posts, Shiv gives us some slamz.)

So I’ve been given an opportunity to stand on a soapbox and deliver a brain dump to you faithful readers of NCS, and I’m gonna utilize it to aware you all of something that the major metal news and media sites always seem to overlook: SICKASS NEW SLAMZ.

I’m not talking about artsy-fartsy stuff like Deeds of Flesh, Disgorge, Blasphemer, or the new Condemned (even though I love all those bands). I’m talking about good old-fashioned, blue-collar, working-class SLAM. Bands that make a conscious decision to not get too out-of-the-box because that would take away from the crushing sickness throughout, and they don’t have time to worry about luxuries and privileges like “counterpoint” and “polyrhythms”. As a direct result of this, they always kick infinite ass 100% of the time. I could wax pretentious like any typical Internet Metal Nerd, but these jams speak for themselves. I’ll still write about them though, I guess, whatever:

PIGHEAD

 

Continue reading »

UFOMAMMUT: “EMPIREUM”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

February 22, 2012: a day that will forever after be remembered as U-Day.

Okay, well at least I’ll remember it because I was so damned clever in coming up with that post title for a Feb 22 feature about new sounds from bands whose names begin with U.

Okay, I probably won’t remember it either.  In fact, the only reason I remembered it at all is because one of those bands was Italy’s Ufomammut, and today brought us a new Ufomammut track in the form of an official video. The music is called “Empirean”, and it’s the first movement on an album titled Oro: Opus Primum — “primum” because it’s the first of two albums that together will form the Oro saga in 10 movements. Neurot Recordings will release the first one on April 17 and the second in September.

Ufomammut plans to release videos for each track from both albums over the coming months and then collect them in a DVD that will be sold with a limited edition vinyl on the band’s own Supernatural Cat Records.

Now, with those details behind us, let’s move on to “Empirean”. The video, which is embedded here after the jump, originally debuted today on a fascinatingly eclectic metal blog called The Obelisk that I used to read before I sacrificed most of my reading to NCS (and congrats to The Obelisk on landing the debut). “Empirean” is about 14 minutes long, and it’s a disturbing, hypnotic journey. Continue reading »

TUESDAY VIDEOGRAPHY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

This morning I woke up, dressed hurriedly, slugged caffeine, drove a friend to the airport, and drove back — by which time it was 4 a.m. I feel like a reanimated corpse, but only partially reanimated. The only upside to this agony is that it gave me time to snoop around in search of new music, which I found in the form of videos from De Lirium’s Order (Finland), Job For A Cowboy (U.S.), and Horseback (U.S.).

DE LIRIUM’S ORDER

I came across this band because their drummer, Ukri Suvilehto, is also the live session drummer for Before the Dawn, which is one of our favorite bands. Also, they are from Finland, and you know what that means.

WIthin the last couple of days, De Lirium’s Order debuted a video for a song called “Autistic Savant”. It’s the opening track from their latest album (their third), Veniversum, which is being officially released today. According to the band, “the video was shot in freezing conditions, minus 30 degrees Celcius, in an abandoned factory located in Joensuu, Finland.” This may explain why they’re playing so fast.

Whatever the reason, the song is very cool and so is the video. The music is a proggy, techy take on melodic death metal, with lots of spidery picking and hammering percussion, a resonant melody, and in the mid-section, a soft piano bridge leading to attention-grabbing solo’s by both of the band’s guitarists and a bass solo! I think this is a band we need to know better. Continue reading »

THE WRETCHED END: “DEATH BY NATURE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 202012
 

It seems to be the day for new videos — Wretched new videos. First we had the new video from North Carolina’s Wretched. Now we move across the Atlantic for a new video by a Norway-based band called The Wretched End.

This band started in 2008 as a collaboration between Emperor guitarist Samoth and Mindgrinder bassist Cosmo — both of whom played together in Zyklon — joined by Swedish drummer Nils Fjellström of Dark Funeral. Their debut album Ominous made NCS writer Andy Synn’s list of 2010’s greatest albums, and it was one of my personal favorites, too.

Naturally, we’re really looking forward to the April 23 release of the band’s second effort, Inroads, which will be distributed by Nocturnal Art Productions and Candlelight Records. Today we got our first taste of the music with the debut of an official video for the album’s third track, “Death By Nature”.

Ominous was a hell-ripping dose of blackened death-thrash, and “Death By Nature” punctures the same vein, but if anything it’s even darker. The pneumatic riffs in this song will kick your body into movement while the ominous melody thunders like a breaking storm. And when the gang vocals hit the chorus, you WILL want to sing along with an evil snarl. The video is worth seeing, too. Continue reading »

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