LISTMANIA CONTINUES: NORWEGIAN METAL TO WATCH FOR (Part 2)

 Listmania, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Dec 112011
 

This is the second part of a multi-part post about up-and-coming Norwegian bands. The first part is HERE, and this is an abbreviated version of the full explanation, which appears in Part 1:

“Pyro” is the name of a radio program on one of the radio channels (P3) operated by NRK, the state-owned Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The NRK P3 radio channel is mainly aimed at younger listeners, and Pyro is the program that focuses mainly on metal and hard rock.

Last week, the Pyro web site rolled out its 2011 list of the most promising metal bands in Norway. What I’m doing in this series is just rolling out what I found on the Pyro web site, doing my best (with the lame assistance of Google Translate) to give Pyro’s descriptions of each band they picked as the best new metal bands in Norway, plus the same music from each band that they gave as an example — except I’m giving a few more examples of songs because I’m having to find my own sources for the music (the Pyro stream clips aren’t embeddable). Since the verbiage isn’t a professional translation, any fuck-ups are mine, not Pyro’s.

So here we go with Part 2. In this part, we’re including Maladronia Institute, No Dawn, Corsair, Springskalle, and Okular. The musical styles vary a lot, but I enjoyed listening to all five (and by coincidence, I’ll be reviewing Okular’s new album soon). Below the images in the rest of this post, I’ve turned each of the band’s names into links that will take you to social media sites for each of them, in case you want to explore further. Continue reading »

YAY! MORE CHRISTMAS SEASON CHEER!

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Dec 082011
 

Yessirree, it’s that special time of year when our tender ears are bombarded not only by multi-media ads exhorting us to spend our money like there’s no tomorrow, but also by manifold forms of musical Christmas cheer, whether in the form of carols or other “standards” we’ve heard a jillion times before, or special seasonal items being released for the first time.

Take this new video by Ancient VVisdom, for example. Specially timed to help celebrate the Yuletide season with tidings of great joy and the harking of heralds, these Austin-based musical angels have chosen to bless us all, every one, with a very catchy tune from their well-received 2011 debut, A Godlike Inferno. It’s called “The Opposition”, and it’s guaranteed to be a hit wherever fine Christmas music is heard on a non-stop basis, such as shopping malls and elevators.

So go ahead, get in the Christmas spirit: fill up a glass with eggnog, light some votive candles, and sing along with Ancient VVisdom to these stirring lyrics:

“Hail to thee, Lord Lucifer/I sing praises to thee/and I suffer no longer” Continue reading »

ARTIFICIAL BRAIN IS STILL COMMUNICATING WITH MY ARTIFICIAL BRAIN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Dec 082011
 

“The name of this game is death fucking metal, the kind that rampages like a heartless, mechanized beast the size of a house. The music slams and hammers with advanced pneumatics, interwoven with snakelike guitar leads and bounding bass lines. It’s fast and technical, and the vocals are downright voracious. Very fucking impressive, and possibly originating from space.”

That’s what I wrote in our review of the new EP from a Long Island, NY band called Artificial Brain, which includes Revocation guitarist Dan Gargiulo, possibly may include ex-Biolich vocalist Will Smith, and others whose identities I haven’t yet discovered with certainty. I wrote other things, too, but I’m pretty sure I was under the influence of biomechanoid larva from space who Artificial Brain keep as pets and use to infiltrate the weak-minded.

Wait, that didn’t come out right.  Anyway, whatever the fucking things are that wormed into my brain stem when I listened to the EP, those things have returned and are acting as receptors of microwave transmissions from space. I feel like something is crawling under my skin and looking out through my eyes with multifaceted cornea. Milky white foam is coming out my nose and dropping onto my keyboard.

I also hear a massive mechanized noise that’s starting to crack the walls in my home. I think it’s the sound of the new Artificial Brain video for “Tongues”, the one song from the EP I didn’t stream with my review. The EP is still available for free download at the Artificial Brain Bandcamp page. The video is after the jump. The green slime is coming out of my ears again. My brain is in a mixer. Continue reading »

FUCK. IT’S ALREADY THURSDAY AND WE HAVEN’T POSTED ANY FINNISH METAL. TIME TO FIX THAT EGREGIOUS OVERSIGHT.

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Dec 082011
 

Bob Malmström. That’s a band name. They’re from someplace called Westend in Finland. They claim to have originated borgarcore, which seems to be an abbreviation for bourgeois-hardcore. They are politically incorrect, in that they celebrate the enjoyment of things like eating meat, wearing furs, drinking copious amounts of Dom, lap dances, and making big piles of money.

In October, Spinefarm Records released Bob Malmström’s debut album, Tala svenska eller dö, which means “Speak Swedish or Die”. This has something to do with a linguistic minority group in Finland consisting of Swedish-speaking Finns. According to The Font of All Human Knowledge, “they maintain a strong identity and are alternatively seen either as a distinct subgroup of the Finnish people or as a separate ethnic group or even as a distinct nationality,” and they represent about 5.5% of the total Finnish population.

There seems to be some kind of continuing controversy over various government protections of the right of Swedish-speaking Finns to speak Swedish. Problem is, I can’t quite tell which side of this debate Bob Malmström is on. I found this Bob Malmström interview in Finnish, but as we all know, Google Translate does an especially piss-poor job converting Finnish into English, and the translation I get is mostly gibberish. So, I can’t tell whether Bob Malmström is protesting prejudice against the finlandssvenskar/suomenruotsalaiset or fomenting it — or just putting everyone on. Any Finns out there care to help me out?

Anyway, although this is all kind of an interesting aspect of Finnish culture that I didn’t know existed, it’s not the reason for this post. The reason for this post is the recently released official music video for a Bob Malmström song called “Eliten”, which has been rocking my ass this morning. It’s kind of a searing, headbanging, thrash/hardcore/punk onslaught, as rendered by a bunch of dudes in suits sipping champagne. Fuckin good pancake. Check it after the jump. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA CONTINUES: NORWEGIAN METAL TO WATCH FOR (Part 1)

 Listmania, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Dec 082011
 

This is a different spin on Listmania. For this post, we’re jumping outside North America and landing in Norway. Also, this isn’t really a “Best Album” list. Let me explain:

NRK is the state-owned Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. It operates three main TV channels, three main radio channels, and several “niche” channels on radio and the internet. The NRK P3 radio channel is mainly aimed at younger listeners in the 15-30 age bracket, and of course, since this is Norway, it includes a healthy dose of metal. As far as I can figure out with help from Google Translate, “Pyro” is the name of the NRK P3 radio program that focuses mainly on metal and hard rock.

Last week, the Pyro web site rolled out its 2011 list of the most promising metal bands in Norway. I found out about this by seeing a Facebook post by a Norwegian band who showed up on the list. I got curious, and so I visited the site. Now, because this is radio programming, I figured the music wasn’t going to be quite as extreme as a lot of the metal that’s our bread and butter here at NCS. On the other hand, this is fucking Norway, and so I decided it would be worth spending some time exploring what they had to offer — and I guessed right.

I don’t speak Norwegian, of course. So, I used Google Translate. It rendered the Norwegian text on the web site into a kind of English . . . the kind spoken by people who’ve suffered some kind of severe trauma to the speech center in the brain. But I could get the gist of the text, and so I’ve tried my best to clean it up and make it mean what I think it means. But since this isn’t really a translation, I may have fucked it up. All errors are mine, not Pyro’s.

On the other hand, I’m not terribly worried about the text, because the site included music from each of the bands, so we’ve got music to hear, and the music is what counts, isn’t it? Continue reading »

IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T BANGED YOUR HEAD YET TODAY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Dec 072011
 

I discovered a French band called Svart Crown more than a year ago when I reviewed their second album, Witnessing the Fall. I compared them to a joint venture between Immortal and Immolation. Since then, the band signed with Listenable Records, which put the album into wider distribution. It’s still a damned strong listen.

This morning I saw that the band have released an official video for “Into A Demential Sea”, one of the songs from Witnessing the Fall. To crib from my review (since I’m too fucking lazy to come up with any new phraseology), it’s “almost experimental in its combination of raging guitars, complex drumming, and sharp rhythm breaks that cause the song to trudge with death-doom chord progressions.”

But more importantly, it will trigger the old headbang reflex, which is a reflex that needs to be triggered often, so that you don’t get fixed-neck syndrome, which is a precursor to tight-sphincter complex and stick-up-the-ass disease.

And in other welcome news, an Ulcerate-Svart Crown European tour has been announced for February 2012. I say “welcome” because I’m trying to be happy for our European readers. I myself do not find this news welcome, because, since I can’t go to any of these shows, the news simply makes me jealous and slightly miserable because of my loss. I’m going to console myself by watching this video again. It’s after the big goddamn tour poster which immediately follows the jump. I hope all you Euro motherfuckers are happy. Continue reading »

LAMB OF GOD: THE “GHOST WALKING” VIDEO

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Dec 062011
 

As we reported yesterday, Lamb of God premiered the first track from their new album, Resolution, on Metal Sucks. Today, they’ve unveiled the official music video for the same song (“Ghost Walking”).

It’s one of those “lyric videos”, but with a creative visual twist. Gaze upon it after the jump.

Resolution will be released on Jan. 24 and is available for pre-order at this link. Continue reading »

GIRL GROWLERS – PART 4

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  29 Responses »
Dec 052011
 

Here’s the last feature in today’s impromptu mini-series on female-fronted metal bands who are not Amaranthe.

When I started collecting bands for this series, this last post was originally going to be about a Vancouver band called Without Mercy (pictured above). About six weeks ago, I got an e-mail from an NCS reader (David) pointing me to them, and more specifically to the YouTube channel for their female vocalist, Alxs Ness.

But today, when I got the idea of pulling together a handful of female-fronted bands as compensation for that Amaranthe thing and started doing a little homework about Alxs, I found out that at some point over the last six weeks she had become the vocalist for yet another Vancouver band called Abriosis. So, if I’m understanding things correctly, she will be the vocalist for both bands. [CORRECTION: Since posting this piece originally, I’ve learned that Alxs did leave Without Mercy, but Without Mercy is moving ahead with a new vocalist and working on new music.]

Abriosis put out a self-titled EP in 2008 and a debut album earlier this year called Tattered and Bound. Both of those collections were pre-Alxs Ness, so that sort of disqualifies them for discussion in this post. Instead, what I have for you after the jump is an amusing video (complete with some toaster-ball near the end) depicting how Abriosis met their new vocalist, and a second video of the band jamming one of their songs with Alxs behind the mic. Not surprisingly, Abriosis plans to record a new EP next year with the new line-up. Abriosis has a Facebook page here.

Without Mercy released an EP in 2007 called All Else Fails and then a self-titled debut album in 2009, which is available for streaming and purchase via Bandcamp. I like the heady dose of death-thrash brutality I’ve heard so far from the album, and I’m putting up an album stream for you to hear after the jump. But, first things first — the YouTube clip that David sent me featuring Alxs’ vocal cover of “Eaten” by Bloodbath. Elize Ryd, eat your heart out. Continue reading »

GIRL GROWLERS – PART 3

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Dec 052011
 

In this third part of our impromptu mini-series on female fronted metal bands we’ve recently discovered, the subject is Winds of Genocide. This band is based in Durham City, in the northeast of England and are fronted by a woman named Kat “Shevil” Gillham. Their debut effort is an EP released in 2010 called The Arrival of Apokalyptic Armageddon. I heard about them recently via a message from occasional NCS contributor “Willard Shrapnelspear”. He may not have been a patron of NCS for very long, but he has already figured out the kind of rank, disgusting musical assaults I often prefer in metal.

Just a few days ago, the reliable, Singapore-based Pulverised Records (home of bands such as Desultory, Interment, Impiety, Bastard Priest, and Morbus Chron) announced the signing of Winds of Genocide for the release of their debut album sometime in 2012. The music is described in a press release as “an offensive d-beat onslaught” and “a bastardized fusion of Cianide, Amebix, Unleashed and Bolt Thrower.” That all sounded pretty fuckin good to me.

The most recent song released by the band is a tune from an upcoming split with Abigail (Japan), and it’s called “Into the Darkness of Eternal Nuclear Winter”. The band describes it as “kinda like Unanimated, Naglfar, early Unleashed thrown into a blender with old school Svensk Käng/ Crust Punk”. Check it out on the Soundcloud player right after the jump. It’s also the first song streaming on the ReverbNation player that I’m also including after the jump. It includes songs from that 2010 EP, too. Check it out. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries