GIRL GROWLERS – PART 2

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Dec 052011
 

Still making up for the infliction of Amaranthe on your ears earlier today . . .

Part 2 of this day-long mini-series focuses on an L.A. band called My Ruin. As in the case of Wykked Wytch, this band is a new discovery for me despite the fact that they’ve previously release six albums, and a seventh one is about to debut. The core of the band is a husband and wife team consisting of vocalist Tairrie B and multi-instrumentalist Mick Murphy. The new album is called A Southern Revelation, and fittingly it was recorded in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Although the band has had label support in the past (and apparently an ugly falling out with their last label), the new album is 100% DIY and will be made available on December 7 as a free digital download on My Ruin’s Bandcamp page HERE.

To promote the album, My Ruin recently premiered an official music video for the album’s opening track, a song called “Tennessee Elegy”. The video was made by the band themselves and friends on a low budget, but it looks pretty good to me. As for the music on the new album, I’ve seen it referred to as Black Sabbath meets Black Label Society, and that’s a decent description, based on this one song. Continue reading »

HUMBLED

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  30 Responses »
Dec 052011
 

Believe it or not, I try hard each day to concoct something interesting to post on this site. I try to avoid posting completely lame-ass bullshit (hereafter, “C-LAB”). Some days, avoiding C-LAB is difficult. I run out of time, or I party too hard and too late, and I do something that basically just feels like I’m showing my ass. And then some days, I feel like I’ve written something really good.

But how do I really know whether I’ve done a C-LAB post or instead something better than that, i.e.,  something that’s mainly lame-ass bullshit (“M-LAB”) but not C-LAB? Well, one way to find out is to check Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a service that gives web sites a shitload of data about their traffic. It’s mainly used by people who are trying to make money off their sites. Since we don’t advertise, and therefore don’t make shit off what we do here, I only use it to satisfy my curiosity about whether we’re dishing up C-LAB or M-LAB.

I don’t check our Google Analytics account that often, but since we’re nearing the end of the year, I thought I’d explore the data more deeply than usual. What I found really boggled my already boggled mind. I found that the third most popular post we’ve ever done since starting NCS is THIS ONE about Elize Ryd, the vocalist for a band called Amaranthe, which I posted in January 2010. Continue reading »

CHROME WAVES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Dec 042011
 

Unless I miss my bet (and I would bet a lot on this), the day will come when you will be reading and hearing about this band far and wide, and you can tell your friends that you heard them first at NO CLEAN SINGING. Your friends may then look at you like a slug just crawled out of your nose, but pay them no mind. Who cares if they’ve never heard of NCS? What matters is the music of Chrome Waves.

First, here’s the line-up of this band:

Vocals: Stavros Giannopolous (vocalist and guitarist for The Atlas Moth), whose current album is popping up on “Best of 2011” lists far and wide)

Guitars: Jeff Wilson (guitarist of Wolvhammer, whose 2011 album The Obsidian Plains is superb and is also appearing on lots of year-end best-lists; formerly of Nachtmystium and Bringers of Disease)

Drums and bass: Bob Fouts (bassist for doom-metal band Apostle of Solitude; formerly with The Gates of Slumber)

I saw those names, and that was all the inducement I needed to spend some time with the first track they’ve released — a song that publicly debuted only last night called “”Height of the Rifles”. After the jump, we’ll be streaming it for you, but first, a little more intelligence about Chrome Waves from this interview of Bob Fouts. Continue reading »

SYLOSIS: “A SERPENT’S TONGUE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Dec 032011
 

I’m awake now, but still want to keep my “fuck yeah” face on.

I may write something later.  Or not.

This just up-loaded video sounds like the album track synced with video of the band’s last hometown performance in Reading, England, before embarking on their current US tour.

YOUR GALLIC GOODIES FOR THE DAY: OUTCAST AND HYPNO5E

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Dec 022011
 

On March 4, 2011, we included a song from a French band called Outcast in a post called Diversionary Tactics. The title of the song was “Elements”, and it was very fucking diverting. To quote from the post: “The riffs and time signatures jump around like barefoot children on a hot pavement, the drums rarely repeat the same patterns twice, there’s a freaky-good guitar solo, and the vocals bray in a hot fury (a mix of hardcore howls and death-metal growls). If you’re a fan of bands like Textures, CiLiCe, and Tardive Dyskinesia, do check this shit out.”

The song was taken from Outcast’s third studio album, Awaken the Reason, which hadn’t yet been released — an album mixed by Jochem Jacobs of Textures and mastered by Alan Douches. Well, here we are in December and the album still hasn’t been released. BUT, the latest word is that it will be coming in early 2012 and that specific info about the release date and the label will be coming within days — AND today, the band released another song from the album called “Abysmal”.

The music still puts me in mind of those three bands I mentioned in the March post — its pneumatic rhythms are pummeling and physically convulsive, with lots of funky, math-metally riffing, but it also includes nice melodic choruses and swirling, proggy, clean guitar solos in between the rounds of heavy, djent-style head-bashing. I am definitely looking forward to the album, just as much as I have been since March. Bring it on! You can hear the song after the jump.

The other offering of Gallic goodness for today comes from a band called Hypno5e, who I had the pleasure of seeing on the Art As Metal tour a couple years ago with Revocation and The Binary Code. Yesterday, Lambgoat exclusively premiered the title song from the band’s forthcoming second album, Acid Mist Tomorrow. It’s a helluva song, parts of which are very strongly reminiscent of Gojira (a plus, of course) and parts of which are soft, melodic, beautiful, and experimentally progressive. And you can hear it after the jump, too. The album should be very interesting and absolutely worth hearing. Fair warning: clean singing is involved. Continue reading »

THE THALL MEME

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  21 Responses »
Dec 012011
 

Definitions of the words in the title to this post from The Oxford English Dictionary (online):

MEME

noun
an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.

Origin:

1970s: from Greek mimēma ‘that which is imitated’, on the pattern of gene

Word trends:

When Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, he wanted a word like gene that conveyed the way in which ideas and behaviour spread within society by non-genetic means. Since then the word has been picked up to describe a piece of information spread by email or via blogs and social networking sites. A meme can be almost anything—a joke, a video clip, a cartoon, a news story—and can also evolve as it spreads, with users editing the content or adding comments. Common collocates in the Oxford English Corpus are spread, pass, and transmit: as with the Internet sense of  viral, meme uses the metaphor of disease and infection

THALL

Ask Vildhjarta, because I have no fucking idea. Continue reading »

OPERA IX: “MANDRAGORA”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Dec 012011
 

Opera IX is a symphonic black metal band from Italy who’ve been around since 1989, which makes them . . . survivors. On January 24, 2012 in Europe and February 28 in North America, Agonia Records will release their first studio album in 7 years — Strix Maledictae In Aeternum. The new album is described as the last in a trilogy of records that explores witchcraft.

I’ve heard a bit of Opera IX music in the past, but it came from the days when Cadaveria was fronting the band, and I’ve heard nothing since. But curiosity about what had become of their post-Cadaveria sound led me to watch an official video that was released in early November for a song from the new album called “Mandragora”. I’m including the video after the jump (because it’s NSFW), and featuring it here for three reasons.

First, I enjoyed the song. It reminded me of Satanica-era Behemoth, an imperial mix of black and death metal. Second, I was surprised to see that the video is hosted on YouTube, because it features copious nudity. And then I saw the little notation on the YouTube page: “This video has been age-restricted based on our Community Guidelines.” I’d never actually read the Community Guidelines, and I wondered why the video was available with an age restriction rather than being banned altogether. Continue reading »

NEW ASPHYX ON THE HORIZON

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 302011
 


On a day at NCS that began with Vallenfyre, it seemed only fitting to bring our posting day to a close with news about Asphyx.

They’re one of those bands whose name springs to mind immediately when I see or hear the phrase “death/doom”, and they made a strong comeback with Death…The Brutal Way (2009) after a nearly decade-long recording hiatus. They’ve now finished work on their newest studio album, titled Deathhammer, and today Century Media announced that it will be released on February 27, 2012 in Europe and February 28 in North America.

In addition to that welcome news, the band also released an image (above) of the cover art for the album, created by Axel Hermann, who worked on all of the band’s early releases. Brutal.

One more tidbit — the new album was mixed and mastered by the legendary Dan Swanö, who produced Death…The Brutal Way as well as the band’s Live Death Doom release. And speaking of that DVD, I’ve added a clip from the DVD after the jump featuring the title track to the last Asphyx album. Twenty years on, and still wielding the deadly hammer of doom. Gotta love it. Continue reading »

UNDERGROUND METAL FOR THE TRVE CURMUDGEON (NO. 2)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 302011
 

(Brutish friend of NCS, SurgicalBrute, brings us a further installment in what may be turning into a continuing series.  This time he’s spotlighting Drowned (Germany), Speedwolf (U.S.-Denver), Depravity (Finland), and Grá (Sweden).)

I remember when I first got into metal I was trying to absorb everything. I’d see names like Dismember, Overkill, and Darkthrone tossed around message boards and off I’d go to check them out. I was discovering new bands every day, and even if a band didn’t appeal to me the first time around, I would do my best to give them a fair try because my tastes were always changing.

It was around this time that I discovered something fairly simple….I hate technical metal. Bands like Nile, Meshuggah, and Necrophagist. I tried them over and over again, and while I can appreciate the skill of the muscians involved, more often than not, it sounds so cold and clinical that it comes across flat to my ears.

I think that’s why I eventually found myself gravitating toward the darker underbelly of metal. While the music is rarely complex, it’s the raw energy these bands bring with them that I enjoy so much.

So, in an effort to bring a few more of these bands to wider attention, it’s time for another dose of underground metal. \m/ Continue reading »

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