KRIEGSMASCHINE GODDAMMIT!

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Dec 252011
 

I am so fucking retarded.  I had tomorrow’s first installment of the MOST INFECTIOUS song list all planned out and ready to go. We were going to bolt from the starting gate with a cannon blast of extremity, starting with a band I thought might surprise you since we’ve never mentioned them on this site and they’re a pretty underground act. I’ve been plodding along for the last month trying to winnow down the long master list of selections for the list, but this song was an early and easy choice.

I stupidly assumed the song was released this year because I only found out about it through a post by Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges in July. And then, just to be sure, I double-checked the release date a few minutes ago and discovered to my chagrin that it came out in 2010.  FUCK!  FUCK!!  FUCK!!!

So now I have to go back to the drawing board and figure out a different way to start the list tomorrow. But I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to leave the song alone. I can’t put it in this year’s MOST INFECTIOUS list, but I can sure as hell create this post as a showcase for it.

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard it since July. The song is “Onward Destrudo” and it’s by a Polish black metal band called Kriegsmaschine. It’s one of two songs that Kriegsmaschine contributed to a split with Infernal War called Transfigurations. Like many black metal songs, it’s built around a repeating riff and rhythm. There’s one cool musical digression about 3 minutes in — filled with a massively groaning bass, rancid reverb effects, and what sounds like an increasingly freaked-out harmonica! — but otherwise it’s one continuing, rolling, head-ripping phalanx of swarming infection. And if it’s not firmly rooted in your head by the time it’s over, I’ll be a motherfucker. Continue reading »

MORE NEW MUSIC – ELUVEITIE’S “MEET THE ENEMY”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Dec 242011
 

As we reported previously, Switzerland’s Eluveitie have a new album coming on Nuclear Blast in February. Called Helvetios, it’s a concept album about a time long ago when a Celtic tribe called the Helvetii occupied part of Eluveitie’s homeland. Today, the band released the first song from the album for streaming — “Meet the Enemy”.

Unsurprisingly, it includes a variety of folk instruments and a bit of folk melody — but these contributions are brief. The song is mainly a galloping dash of familiar Scandinavian melodic death metal, albeit with a female warrior playing the hurdy-gurdy with the reins clenched in her teeth. The apparently studious Chrigel Glanzmann (who belts out the lyrics on the new song in full-on harsh mode) had this to say about the track on Eluveitie’s blog:

“We’re happy and proud to already present you “Meet The Enemy” – track 7 off our upcoming album “Helvetios”!

It tells you about the ‘encounter’ the Helvetians had with the roman legions in the year 58 BC – one of the crucial points in their history, for it was basically when the gaulish wars erupted.

So the song is pretty much filled with wrath and rage – upholding the furious spirit you might know from tracks such as “Kingdom Come Undone”, “Bloodstained Ground” or “Lament”.
Furthermore the song’s substantial instrumentation (including fiddle, hurdy gurdy, whistles and uilleann pipes) is also enriched by one of the guest musicians, we had the honour to work with – Fredy Schnyder (from Nucleus Torn) who contributed some amazing parts on the hammered dulcimer.

Hope you enjoy!”

Continue reading »

NAGLFAR FINALLY RELEASE A NEW SONG: “PALE HORSE”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Dec 242011
 

The Friday before Christmas is probably not an ideal day for releasing important news. In fact, as eagle-eyed as I am, I nearly missed this item. I’m so glad I didn’t. When I saw it last night, I became nearly giddy with excitement. Not actually giddy, because giddy is not metal, but nearly giddy. Here are the key elements of this story:

Sweden’s Naglfar has finished recording their new album — the first one since Harvest was released in 2007. It will be called Téras. It will be released by Century Media in March of next year. Sometime between now and then, the band will put out a limited-edition 7″ single that will include one track from Téras and a second song that will be exclusive to the single.

The band’s new line-up is down to vocalist Kristoffer W. Olivius (the band’s original bass player, who become Naglfar’s lead vocalist prior to the recording of Pariah (2005) after the departure of Jens Rydén), guitarist Andreas Nilsson (who has been with the band since its inception), and guitarist Marcus E. Norman (who joined in 2000). The drums for Téras were recorded by Dirk Verbeuren (Soilwork, Scarve).

Last but certainly not least, yesterday Century Media made at song from the new album available for streaming. It’s called “Pale Horse”, and you can listen after the jump. If the quality of Naglfar’s previous albums weren’t enough to put Téras on your radar screen, this song should do it. Continue reading »

DEMONIC RESURRECTION LIVE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Dec 222011
 

It was a good morning on our metallic island. The day here in the Pacific Northwest is dry and bright, I enjoyed BadWolf’s immensely entertaining interview with Arthur Von Nagel (Cormorant), and I’ve been filling my head non-stop with good metal — some cathartic black death from A Hill To Die Upon, a sampling of grindviolence courtesy of Alex Layzell, and a few head-wrecking tracks from Condemned.

I thought briefly about continuing my painful efforts to whittle down the list of most-infectious-song candidates into something less than 100 songs, but decided to put that off a while longer (“Procrastination” being one of my middle names) and instead check out news from the 5,000 bands I follow on Facebook. Turned out to be a wise decision, because in doing that I discovered some extremely high-quality concert video of the mighty Demonic Resurrection performing at the 26th annual Independence Rock festival in Mumbai, India, on November 26.

And by high-quality, I mean (a) it was filmed with about 100 cameras from about 100 different angles (including, like, just underneath the hand of DR’s keyboardist so you get a close-up of his fingers in motion), and (b) it sounds fucking awesome. Also, the stage is festooned with color and smoke and lights and looks killer.

As for the music, it’s over the top. Despite the fact that “Apocalyptic Dawn” is a single song, it almost sounds like a medley (even more so than on DR’s 2005 album, A Darkness Descends), with elements of symphonic black metal, death metal, power metal, and folk metal all effectively fused together — plus a heavy dose of hardcore vocal violence added by guest singer Sunneith Revankar of another Indian band we love around here, Bhayanak Maut. Continue reading »

AN EXCLUSIVE NCS PREMIERE: ABORTED’S “THE ORIGIN OF DISEASE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Dec 212011
 

Instead of being institutionalized for long-term treatment, the psychopaths in Aborted are about to release their seventh full-length album, Global Flatline. This monstrosity will be vomited forth on the unprotected public by Century Media on January 24. Today, we’re as happy as zombies feasting on a putrid corpse to premiere the album’s third track, “The Origin of Disease”.

Over the course of their storied career, Aborted have churned out a grisly body of work that has stood the test of time and amassed a global following of fans who are now hungry for more. From what we’ve heard of the album so far, they won’t be disappointed.

“The Origin of Disease” is on the bleeding forward-edge of speed, propelled by a relentless drum barrage and scalpel-sharp riffing. It’s caustic and crushing, but it’s also loaded with powerful grooves and spiced up with infectious bursts of lead guitar and a solo near the end that spins out in unexpected directions. It features titanic bass lines, explosive bass drops, irresistible chugging, and dual vocals — Sven De Caluwé’s hair-raising shrieks and sink-hole gutturals courtesy of guest vocalist Julien Truchan (Benighted) — which carve quite viciously.

In short, it’s a fully loaded, jet-fueled, razor-sharp head-fucker of a song: a blast of modern death metal from a band who definitely aren’t just regurgitating the gory glories of the past, but who haven’t pulled up their roots from it either. Continue reading »

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC (NEKROMANTHEON, KRODA, AND INTERVALS)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Dec 202011
 

Here are a few things I saw and heard last night and this morning that I thought were worth your time.

Of course, I don’t know exactly what you do with your time, or how valuable your time is, or what potentially horrible consequences might result if you spent time listening to this music instead of doing what you would be doing if you weren’t listening to this music.  So, I guess you could say I’m being presumptuous.  I prefer to believe that I’m enriching your miserable lives with the beauty and joy of good metal, compared to which most things are drab and stultifying, including your lives.

ITEM ONE: NEKROMANTHEON

This item came my way from KevinP, who believes that I do not need erectile dysfunction drugs because I pop wood over almost every metal band on the planet. He sent me a link about a band named Nekromantheon. The fact that I like their music in no way validates his own opinion about it, because my own standards are so low. Perhaps sending me links such as this is KevinP’s subtle way of trying to raise my standards. If so, that’s a mission doomed to failure. I like what I like, and if you don’t like it, fuck you. (I’m not talking about YOU when I say that; I’m referring to that one person who stopped reading NCS because he thought my standards were too low. Of course, there’s only one such person, ever, or ever will be.)

Nekromantheon is from Norway and the style of their music is a certain kind of thrash. But it’s not let’s-get-drunk-and-fuck thrash. It’s more like let’s-find-innocent-children-and-sacrifice-them-to-Cthulhu thrash. Continue reading »

DYSCARNATE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Dec 192011
 

I decided I couldn’t leave that last post sitting at the top of this page for the next 15 hours until we start tomorrow’s postings. Someone might get the wrong idea about what this blog is all about or, worse yet, about my sexual prowess. Someone might come away with the impression that I need ED drugs. Ha ha! That would be, like, a total misimpression, 180 degrees off course, really wrong-headed, and just a dumb idea. Wrong.  And dumb.

But still, I decided to put something up here for overnight, and what I picked was a song called “A Drone In the Hive” by a three-piece UK death metal band called Dyscarnate. Their second album, And So It Came To Pass, will be released on Feb 27 by Siege of Amida Records, and this song is from that album. It debuted on their Facebook page.

The album art is very cool. It’s by Valnoir Mortasonge of Metastazis, who has done covers for the likes of The Black Dahlia Murder, Morbid Angel, and Watain. The band recorded the album with Chris Fielding at Foel Studio in Wales, and it was mixed and mastered by Jacob Hansen (Aborted, Xerath) in Denmark.

So after the jump, check out the song and let us know what you think. Continue reading »

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Dec 192011
 

There’s now extensive evidence that hundreds of millions of years ago, all of Earth’s continents were joined together in one “super-continent” that scientists call Pangaea. Over immense periods of time, Pangaea divided into two smaller super-continents called Laurasia and Gondwanaland. Those giant land masses eventually divided into the continents we see today, and they have been drifting apart ever since, through the operation of plate tectonics.

Less than hundreds of millions of years ago, I listened to a shit-ton of melodic metalcore. In fact, it made up a significant majority of the metal I used to crank up on a daily basis. It was like a big land-mass of music where I lived. Over time, I’ve steadily drifted away from it, to the point where I almost never listen to it at all. I’ve moved away from it, or it moved away from me, and there’s now an ocean between us. The genre became saturated, but in my case, the main explanation is that my tastes changed.

It’s not enough to say that melodic metalcore stagnated, though it has. I now listen to genres of metal that haven’t changed much more than metalcore has changed over the same period of time, or even longer (old-school death metal anyone?). My tastes have simply moved in the direction of more extreme music.

One of the melodic metalcore bands whose albums I used to eagerly consume as they came out was Germany’s Caliban. They’ve been putting out albums since 1999, and they still are. The latest (their 8th) is called I Am Nemesis, and it’s scheduled for a North American release by Century Media on Feb. 28, 2012. This morning, the band released an official music video for the first single, “Memorial”. For Caliban, time has stood still. Continue reading »

ARSAFES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  27 Responses »
Dec 182011
 

Kartikeya is a Russian band we’ve mentioned quite often at this site (use the search box on this page and you’ll see what I mean). They’re very popular among those of us on the NCS staff, and they seem to be popular among our readers and other contributors, too (e.g., see Trollfiend’s list of the year’s best albums posted earlier today). They play an unusual (and unusually appealing) style of heavy-grooved melodic death metal that incorporates elements of traditional Indian music.

The leader of Kartikeya is a dude named Roman “Arsafes” Iskorostenskiy. Quite by accident, while doing some webernet research on Kartikeya for a forthcoming post, I learned that Arsafes is involved in other musical projects besides Kartikeya, and this morning I quickly checked them out.

One is a Russian pagan-metal band called Nevid (Невидь). Nevid have produced four full-length albums, the most of recent of which is 2011’s Agarta, and it appears that Arsafes has been the composer and guitarist for that band over the course of the last two albums. I’ve only listened to a couple of tracks from Agarta, but man is it good. There are some traditional pagan/folk instruments in the mix, but also some of those Meshuggah-esque, Kartikeya-style riffs and really catchy melodies. Nice, harsh, growly vocals, too.

Arsafes has also created a solo EP called A New Way of Creation that appeared in 2010. It includes an instrumental at the start, five original songs, and a cover of “Relentless” by Strapping Young Lad. I haven’t listened to the entire EP either, but what I’ve heard so far is also . . . aces. It’s a blast-furnace combo of progressive death metal with industrial overtones, sweeping melodies and Meshuggah-style hammering, and a mix of bestial death-metal roars and clean vocals. Reminiscent of SYL, Fear Factory, and the afore-mentioned Meshuggah, among other influences. There are some free download links to be found at this forum.

After the jump I’ve got sample songs from each of these two releases, both of which are quite different from each other — and different from Kartikeya, too.  Continue reading »

[INSERT NAME] SCREAM.COM

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  28 Responses »
Dec 172011
 

So, this new Metal Injection-conceived web page called Tom Araya Scream has been making the rounds of the interhole since it appeared yesterday. It’s a clever idea, and if Slayer is, like, still your favoritest metal band ever, dude, SLAAAAAAAYER!!!! (while throwing two-handed horns), then you’ll probably be punching this button on your smartphone all weekend to get a few seconds of Tom Araya’s tinny scream.

However, if you’re to the point in your metal-listening life (as I am) when this scream has begun to sound sort of . . . what’s the word? . . . anemic? . . .  by comparison to the kind of really ugly, vicious, bile-vomiting screams and roars you really enjoy, then Tom Araya Scream is more useful as a template for something . . . better.  And no, I’m not talking about Bruce Dickinson or Rob Halford.

Like, how about Lord Worm Scream . . . such as the vein-exploder that starts at about the 3:45 mark of Cryptopsy’s classic “Open Face Surgery”?  (after the jump) Continue reading »

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