NOCTEM: “THE ARRIVAL OF THE FALSE GODS” (PIG HEADS FOR EVERYONE!)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Nov 292011
 

Just so that last post featuring me tooting my own horn about myself doesn’t linger at the top of the NCS site for the next 8 1/2 hours until tomorrow’s first scheduled post, I have this official video, just released, from the most excellent Noctem, whose new album Oblivion our most excellent Andy Synn reviewed here and who Andy also interviewed here.

The featured song is called “The Arrival of the False Gods”, which Andy described as “all piledriving rhythms and violent vocal catharsis whose brooding guitar adds a palpable sense of menace to the proceedings”. If you’re an epileptic off your meds or have a moral problem with bands who play with pig heads on stage and eat pig organs during the performance, don’t watch this.

P.S. My interview by The Number of the Blog can be found via THIS LINK.

NEW NACHTMYSTIUM TRACK ON THE WAY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Nov 292011
 

About the only way you could get Nachtmystium to stand still would be to nail their feet to the floor. Blake Judd and company are just too musically peripatetic to expect that what comes next will resemble what came before. Or at least that’s what I thought. But Nachtmystium and Chicago black metal band Murmur are releasing a 7″ split EP on a Lithuanian label called Inferna Profundus Records, which will include a new track from each band, and here’s what Nachtmystium has said about their contribution to the record:

“Our track is a total return to form, harking back to the writing styles of “Demise” and “Instinct: Decay”. This is a good sneak peak of what’s to come on our next full-length, which we intend to start recording in January / February, 2012 and will be released world-wide on Century Media Records.”

The 7″ vinyl can be ordered from Inferna Profundus here and will be available for shipping in a week or two. Following the vinyl release, Nachtmystium’s new track, “I Wait In Hell”, will also be released digitally via iTunes, Amazon, and other online music outlets via Century Media Records.

So, is the track really a throwback to Demise and Instinct:Decay? Well, hearing is believing, and I like what I hear (from both bands). After the jump, we’ve got a clip that includes two-minute segments from “I Wait In Hell” and Murmur’s song, “Shuttle I”. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA SEASON IS UPON US: DECIBEL’S ALBUM OF THE YEAR

 Listmania, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Nov 282011
 

As the end of 2011 approaches, we are about to be deluged with lists of the year’s best metal. We’re going to be doing again what we’ve done the last two years — publishing (1) lists of the year’s best albums by our regular writers, by guest contributors, and by our readers, and (2) our list of 2011’s most infectious extreme metal songs. As usual, we’re going to invite your participation in this frenzy of listmania at our site. Details about how you can do that will be coming later this week.

Listmania has already started at DECIBEL magazine — the only U.S.-based print metal mag still worth reading, in our humble opinion. The January 2012 issue will include their annual list of the Top 40 best extreme metal albums of the year. We haven’t yet received our copy here at NCS, but this morning we learned that DECIBEL has named Path of Totality by Brooklyn-based Tombs as the “Album of the Year”.

We’ve featured music and videos from Path of Totality several times this year, and it’s definitely one of my own favorite releases of 2011. So, congrats to Tombs for this signal recognition by DECIBEL. After the jump, you can stream the whole album, and if you like what you hear, it’s available on the Tombs Bandcamp page (here). Also after the jump, check out a cool video of Tombs performing live on a Hudson River metal cruise on October 22. We featured this video previously, but one good turn deserves another. Continue reading »

CORMORANT HITS BANDCAMP AND NPR WITH NEW MUSICS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Nov 282011
 

Thanks to Metal Bandcamp and MaxR, I discovered yesterday that Cormorant has made its new album, Dwellings, available for pre-order on Bandcamp (here). This supplements the now-closed exclusive pre-order option that the band offered earlier in the fall through their blog page.

As MaxR reported, you can choose between 7 different packages ranging from the download-only for $7 up to a bundle that includes the CD, a t-shirt, a zip-up hoodie, and the album download for $50 (plus shipping). The CD comes in a 6-panel Digipak, which includes the hand-drawn vertical panorama cover artwork by Alice Duke, full-color on-disk design, and a 12-page booklet containing lyrics and liner notes.The pre-orders will ship on December 7, which is the day after the official album release.

Maybe best of all, for people who are as impatient as I am, if you make a pre-order, you get an immediate download of three tracks from the album. Like MaxR, I went with the shirt+CD option and got me that immediate download in the bargain. The band is also now streaming those three tracks on their Bandcamp page. You can find two of them streaming elsewhere (“Junta” and “The Purest Land”), but as MaxR noted, the third one didn’t seem to be currently available anywhere except at Bandcamp.

That third song is called “The First Man”, and it’s now available for purchase all by itself for $1. A few words about the song, plus the song-stream, follow the jump. But as of this morning, the whole album is now streaming at NPR, whose writer Lars Gotrich had this to say about the record: “Dwellings is, far and away, the best metal record of 2011: an emotionally and musically complex album which wrestles with our desperate and sometimes violent attempts to secure a place in history.”

By the way, speaking of the fantastic Dwellings album cover by Alice Duke, you should check out her on-line portfolio here for more fantastic-ness. Also after the jump: the full vertical piece of artwork, of which the cover is only a part. Continue reading »

LONE GUNMEN: LIBERTEER, AMPUTATION SPREE, and MORGH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Nov 272011
 

Here we have three one-man projects, one recently signed to a major label and the others unsigned, and all of them worth a listen: Liberteer (California), Amputation Spree (North Carolina), and Morgh (Pennsylvania).

LIBERTEER

Liberteer is the creation of SoCal resident Matt Widener, a former Marine, a former member of Exhumed, and the bass player for Cretin. Widener’s previous solo project was called Citizen. Earlier this month, Relapse Records announced that it had signed Liberteer and will be releasing the band’s debut album, Better To Die On Your Feet Than Live On Your Knees, on January 31, 2012. Widener had these comments about the Liberteer project:

“My thoughts on politics slowly changed over the past six years. In Citizen I had a sense of outrage about our government, but because it still supported the idea of state, it doesn’t make much sense to me now. I’ve come to embrace the ideas of anarchy. The old band name, Citizen, represents a system of exclusion and nationalism, things I can’t stand now, so I had to rename the band and change a lot of things. I think the good things about the music are still there—the thematic, major-key riffs, the d-beats and blasts—but the message is now pure.

“The album is one long song, with a handful of the coolest riffs reappearing as leitmotifs, like a pissed off opera made of blasts and d-beats. It’s utterly relentless. Plus, there’s a training montage at the halfway point.”

Seeing this in a press release was enough to pique my interest. I’m particularly curious about the “training montage”. But what sealed the deal was listening to the title track. Continue reading »

AGALLOCH LIVE IN TEL AVIV

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 262011
 

Last night, Oregonian black-metal icons Agalloch played a special show in Tel Aviv, Israel. Through the wonders of the interhole, a high-quality video of the show’s opening has already surfaced. It depicts the usual Agalloch incense-burning ritual that takes place before the live music starts, followed by “They Escaped the Weight of Darkness” and “Into the Painted Grey”. A second video features the band performing “Odal” and “Of Stone, Wind, and Pillor”. The video quality of both clips is excellent, and the sound quality is decent. As a die-hard Agalloch acolyte, I have to feature these videos (after the jump). They’re reminders of how fucking much I’ve enjoyed the Agalloch shows I’ve seen.

And this also gives me an excuse to report other Agalloch news that I meant to say something about a while ago: Agalloch has established a Bandcamp page and are using it to distribute eight (mainly acoustic and ambient) tracks of music, available for purchase individually, that previously appeared on compilations or hard-to-find EPs and LPs. You can stream and buy them HERE, including the epic 18-minute song “Scars of the Shattered Sky”, which originally appeared as a bonus “D side” track on the Ashes Against the Grain LP. I picked one of those songs to play for you after the jump, too.

“Temples of magma stream across the grey
The arc that transcends my iconic pride . . .” Continue reading »

WILD//TRIBE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Nov 262011
 

I grew up in Texas, I used to work there, and I still go back to the state for work. I’ve been to Ft. Worth a handful of times in the last 10 years. It’s in the North Central part of the state, a region that gets attacked by tornadoes, especially in the late spring and early summer of each year. It’s part of a broad north-south belt, extending as far north as Minnesota, that’s called Tornado Alley.

I was in an office building in downtown Ft. Worth during tornado season one year when an announcement came over the PA system in the building telling everyone to move away from the windows and into the building’s interior, because a tornado was headed toward downtown. Of course, the first thing I did was run to the windows to see if I could spot it. It was doubly stupid because, walking to that job, I had seen windows in high-rise office buildings throughout downtown boarded up with plywood because of damage caused by the last twister.

Looking out, I saw a massive wall of black that extended from the horizon up into a rank of equally black clouds, and I could actually see that wall moving — quickly — toward the downtown area. As it turned out, the tornado veered away from the area where I was and ripped the hell out of other buildings and homes. It still scared the living shit out of me.

Wild//Tribe is from Ft. Worth. Maybe Ft. Worth’s violent weather has something to do with the music that Wild//Tribe plays, because they’re like a sonic Tornado Alley, a fast-moving wall of black, a roaring, out-of-control, violent, whipping storm of hardcore Texas punk noise. Continue reading »

“BEARDING THE UK”: TOUR DIARY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 252011
 

(In late October, Becoming the Archetype and Bloodguard embarked on an NCS co-sponsored mini-tour of England called BEARDING THE UK.  Bloodguard’s Andy Synn recorded portions of the tour for posterity, and we’ve got his tour video after the jump, along with this diary of the experience.)

Well, the short tour with Becoming The Archetype (plus one extra date with Abgott, just for some drastic contrast) was both remarkably eventful and extremely good fun.

We knew it would be a good time when, having collected our awesome van (christened the Guard-Van for the duration of the tour) from Cambridge we realised, approximately 20 minutes down the road, that we had in fact accepted the keys and driven away with the vehicle without actually… paying for it. It’s always good to start a tour with a bit of accidental automotive theft!

Anyway, we did eventually organise leaving the necessary hire fee for the van, precluding the involvement of the police, and Ed and I set out to collect BTA from Liverpool airport. Simple enough right?

Well after almost an hour of waiting after their flight had landed and disembarked there was still no sign of the band. But then I received a phone call… from the immigration authorities. Who were refusing to let the band enter the country in the fear that they’d be taking hard-earned cash from the pockets of good British metal bands. However, some quick talking by yours truly, coupled with a very pleasant and helpful representative on the other end of the line, saw the band released and allowed to enter their ancestral homeland. Continue reading »

V-DAY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Nov 242011
 

I bet all of the non-U.S. readers of NCS and other U.S.-based metal blogs are getting sick of reading about Thanksgiving and turkey. Don’t worry, because by nightfall, many of your U.S. compatriots will be sick, too, having stuffed themselves with too much traditional grub and fallen into tryptophan comas, unable to rouse themselves even to go to the bathroom, and therefore wallowing in their own waste. Wallowing in my own waste is actually one of the highlights of Thanksgiving Day for me, but I realize that it’s uncomfortable for other people.

Where was I? Oh yeah. V-Day. “V” is for Vektor and Vildhjarta. “V” is also for “Vhat the vuck? Vhy did I eat so much vucking turkey? Vould someone kill me now?”

Vektor and Vildhjarta have new albums. They are both veddy good. Ve vill have re-Views soonish. But for now, ve have streams of both albums. So, U.S. readers will have good music to ease the pain emanating from their distended abdomens. And non-U.S. readers will have good music to ease their other pains, because life is inherently painful, and therefore we all have pain of one kind or another (except for me, because I will soon be happily wallowing in my own waste). This is actually the true meaning of Thanksgiving: what Americans are really doing today is expressing thanks for not being in more pain than they are already in.

Where was I? Oh yeah. Vektor and Vildhjarta. Go HERE to stream Vektor’s Outer Isolation and go HERE to stream Vildhjarta’s Måsstaden. And in other news, someone finally uploaded Vildhjarta’s “Dagger” video to YouTube so we no longer have to experience frustration trying to play the thing from Metal Hammer’s wonky player. That video is after the jump.

Also after the jump: two Vektor songs from Outer Isolation that you can stream right here in case you missed them earlier, and a collection of older Vildhjarta stuff for streaming right here, too. Continue reading »

D-FE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
Nov 242011
 

D-Fe was a band who had an 11-year run from June 1997 to October 2008. As far as I can tell from what little English-language writing is available, they were based in Paris. They created a kind of metal unlike anything else I’ve heard, fusing together Afro-Caribbean rhythms with extreme metal and adding stylistic elements from lots of other genres besides. Sometimes the music has a nu-metal vibe, but much of it sounds like a tribal form of death metal and grindcore.

The lyrics are apparently a kind of Caribbean dialect spoken on the island of Guadalupe, plus an African dialect spoken in Cameroon, plus French, plus who knows what else. I have no idea what the words mean, but the band’s now-dormant MySpace page (here) says “D-Fe was nervous and violent (and sometimes dark), because the band wanted to sensitize the public about different problems of the African continent and its Diaspora.”

As you can see from the photo above, they wore masks or African tribal paint and dressed in an assortment of styles, both urban and somewhat more traditionally African. They also had an exotic-looking female singer who shared vocal duties before the band ended their run. I got intrigued about this band as much by the visuals as by the music, and the two come together in a video you can see right after the jump. Don’t be misled by the music in the first minute and a half; the shit does get heavy and crazy after that intro. Continue reading »

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