GOJIRA. “BACKBONE”. LIVE. NEED WE SAY MORE?

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Oct 092011
 

Gojira – Backbone – Sonisphère 2011 from KLIKON on Vimeo.

On July 8, 2011, Gojira played the Sonisphere festival at Snowhall Parc, Amnéville, France. A new video of the band performing “Backbone” (which is probably my favorite Gojira song) has just surfaced. It starts with the French version of the running of the bulls, and then the neck-snapping starts.

Prepare to BANG YO’ FUCKEN HEADS.

UPDATE: Jan Lavadome e-mailed me a link to another Gojira video that I’d never seen. It’s the band performing “Remembrance” in 2003 and comes off their Link Alive DVD (released in 2007). It kills. Especially the super-tight rhythmic assault from 3:26 to the end. Watch after the jump. Continue reading »

TUKAARIA: “RAW TO THE RAPINE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Oct 072011
 

NCS writer Andy Synn was bored by my last post about Iced Earth and all the discussion in the comments about power metal. Boring Andy is the last thing I want to do. Well, actually, the last thing I want to do is mutilate my genitals with a blowtorch, but boring Andy is certainly high on the list of things to avoid.

So, I decided I would go to Facebook and pick the very first piece of nasty music I saw in the recent stories on my wall and throw it up here. And the very first status I saw on my wall was a post by Profound Lore with a link to a song on Soundcloud by a one-man Los Angeles black metal band called Tukaaria. It turns out that Profound Lore has plans to release a CD later this year that will include Tukaaria’s sole full-length, 2011’s Raw to the Rapine (released on tape by Rhinocervs), plus material from a cassette split that Tukaaria did with a band called Odz Manouk. The song on Soundcloud is the title track from Raw to the Rapine.

Finding this song was piece of luck. It just seems right for several reasons. One, Tuukaria is a Yaqui word meaning “night”. If you don’t know about the Yaqui, stay with me past the jump. Two, “Raw to the Rapine” is an awesomely metal song name. And three, the song name is apt, because the music is raw as road-burn and senses-raping. It also got my head bobbing. It could have been a big piece of shit and I would have posted it here anyway because I promised myself I’d go with the first thing I saw. But it’s damned good.

Also, there’s a fourth thing: the song is available for free download. Listen, get the download link, and read about the Yaqui, after the jump. Continue reading »

ICED EARTH: “DYSTOPIA”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  71 Responses »
Oct 072011
 

Call me blasphemous, but I’ve never been a fan of Iced Earth. Not just them, but power metal bands in general, and it’s mainly because of the vocals. To be clear, this isn’t criticism, but simply a matter of taste. It just doesn’t taste good to me. However, I do get the attraction of the instrumental part of the music — the physical charge produced by the infusion of thrash and speed metal is undeniable. Given that attraction, I did make time to hear the title track from Iced Earth’s next album, Dystopia, when it premiered on REVOLVER’s web site yesterday.

Now, I’m sure that for many metalheads the vocals are part of the attraction to Iced Earth’s music, rather than an aspect that you have to tolerate as the price of feeding on the instrumental goodness. Iced Earth has run through a succession of vocalists, with Matt Barlow being the longest-tenured. But he’s gone now, and in March of this year the band named his replacement: Stu Block of Into Eternity.

Stu Block sounds very good on this new song, and the song itself is galvanizing. So, although I doubt I’m suddenly going to become an Iced Earth convert, I felt this was worth sharing. So, you might want to jump over to REVOLVER and hear the Soundcloud stream (which is only available there) or you can go past the jump in this post and hear it on a YouTube clip.

Dystopia is scheduled for release in Europe on October 17 and in the U.S. on October 18 via Century Media Records. Two bonus tracks are also being recording for inclusion on special editions of the album. Any Iced Earth fans out there? Continue reading »

CAN WE GET MORE FREE SONG DOWNLOADS? WHY YES WE CAN!

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Oct 072011
 

Free song downloads are good. They are better than simply getting the chance to stream a new song, which requires you to be hooked up to your computer or some other device with a solid net connection. They sound better when you play them back, and you can carry them around with you so you can listen while you’re out and about doing whatever scintillating things you do while out and about, or even when you’re parked on the throne in the midst of an eye-watering bowel evacuation.

Yesterday I discovered three free song downloads from bands we like around here: Hypocrisy (Sweden), Graveworm (Italy), and Immolation (U.S.). The songs? We like them, too. Quite a lot, in fact. And the Immolation offering was a very pleasant surprise — while only one song was promised, the download link provides an entire EP of music, and it happens to be one of the best death metal releases of the year.

HYPOCRISY

On October 21, Nuclear Blast will release a new DVD/CD combo from Hypocrisy called Hell Over Sofia – 20 Years of Chaos and Confusion. The disc will contain film of the band’s February 27, 2010 concert at the Blue Box club in Sofia, Bulgaria — which Hypocrisy called “one of our best shows ever in our history” — as well as a 90-minite documentary about the band’s 20-year history. Yesterday, Nuclear Blast made available for free download (at this location) one of the live performance tracks — “Roswell 47”, from the band’s 1996 album, Abducted. Continue reading »

RANDOM MUSIC TIME

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Oct 062011
 

(In this post, NCS writer TheMadIsraeli has compiled short introductions to four bands: Uneven Structures, Deus Invictus, Azrath-11, and By Night.)

It’s random music time again. Hope you all have been well. I got reviews coming down the pipe of some nice, rather unknown, shit. I’ll even be giving you a taste of some of it in this post.

Uneven Structure is an ambidjent band hailing from both France and Sweden, including ex-Vildjharta vocalist Matthieu Romarin (if you’ve heard the song “Shiver”, you know who this is). They’ve been working on their very ambitious debut Februus for some time now. It’s a two-disc long concept album with three 20-minute epics to close it out. I’ve been excited just from the snippets, but now they’ve finally unleashed the first taste of their debut.

The album’s opener “Awaken” employs massive revolving-door grooves, dreamy clean, almost-oriental-tinged ambient textures, and an epic outro that builds up to an explosion, only to be cut off before the explosion happens. It’s a nice, and fucking unfair, way to tease you for the album. Hopefully you’ll dig this like I do. The last two minutes or so of this song are simply awe-inducing to me.  Februus will be released on October 31 by Basick Records. Expect to see a review of this album in a couple of weeks once I get my promo around the 14th. (the song is right after the jump) Continue reading »

DYSRHYTHMIA: “TOWARDS THE END”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 052011
 

July 7, 2009. That’s how long it’s been since Brooklyn-based Dysrhythmia released their last album, Psychic Maps. However, the latest news is that they’ve finished recording a 4-song “pre-production” demo on their way toward completion of a new album for release sometime in 2012. Today, they made one of those songs available for free download on their Bandcamp page.

If Dysrhythmia is a new name for you, they’re a three-man instrumental project that currently consists of Kevin Hufnagel (Gorguts) on guitar, Colin Marston (Krallice, Behold . . . the Arctopus, Gorguts) on bass, and Jeff Eber on drums. These are not average musicians. Both in their conception of music and in their performance, they’re very much top-shelf. What they do is unpredictable, even avant-garde, and I’ve always found their music really intriguing.

The new song is very much in the Dysrhythmia vein. It’s a slow build, growing in complexity and speed, like a brain that becomes increasingly engaged and focused until all the synapses are firing with neural bursts — until the music collapses into a pool of quivering sludge near the end. It’s brainy music, but with a bit of brawn to it as well — like a big dog solving quadratic equations that periodically remembers it’s a dog and begins to bark and growl before returning to his work.

Go past the jump to hear the new song and get the link for the download if you like what you hear. Continue reading »

TEASERS: NEW MUSIC FROM THY CATAFALQUE, VEKTOR, IMMOLATION, AND GOATWHORE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Oct 052011
 

Oh baby, did yesterday bring some titillating musical teasers. Actually, only two of the four teasers featured in this post are actual music. The other two are simply forecasts of music that will become available shortly.

By the way, I’m writing this in a hurry because I’m about to leave for the airport. The old fucking day job is sending me to the East Coast for a couple of days. I’ll tell you, the life of a coke mule isn’t as glamorous as it’s cracked up to be. The prospect of parking my tender, balloon-filled butt in a cramped airplane seat for 5+ hours isn’t appealing. But it comes with the territory, y’know? Anyway, when I ignore all your comments until tonight, it won’t mean I don’t love you.

THY CATAFALQUE

This talented Hungarian band has already teased us about their new album on Season of Mist, Rengeteg, which won’t actually see the full light of day until November 11 and fucking January 10, 2012 in North America. Yes, last month we got some snippets of music (featured at NCS here) — not even a full song, but certainly enough to stir our loins in anticipation. Now we have a full song, the first to debut from the new album. It’s called “Fekete mezők”, which means “black fields”. And guess what? Season of Mist has made it available for free download HERE. Listen up (right after the jump): Continue reading »

BEHEMOTH: THE “LUCIFER” VIDEO

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  24 Responses »
Oct 052011
 

Behemoth’s video for the song “Lucifer” from the Evangelion album debuted yesterday, in both censored and uncensored versions, and it’s a beautifully made, visually striking piece of work. The song itself is dramatic, potent, massive, and the imagery of the video suits the music.

As far as I can tell, the lyrics to “Lucifer” are the lines from a poem by Tadeusz Micinski. The poem is in Polish, but I found a literary (ie, not entirely literal) translation — which tells me that the imagery in the video has very little to do with the lyrics. And the imagery itself, though highly symbolic, is open to interpretation.

It seems to depict a hospitalized girl in the last minutes of a fatal illness or injury, with a priest in the room calling for divine intercession and a red-eyed black unicorn (perhaps symbolizing death) making his steady approach. And from there, I lose the thread of the visuals. They’re arresting to see, but what they are intended to mean I’m unsure, though I’m still thinking about it. I suppose the fact that I’m still thinking about it is a sign that it’s waaaay above average, as metal videos go.

After the jump is the uncensored version of the video (female nudity, of course) plus the translation of the lyrics to “Lucifer”. If you’ve got ideas about what the video means, or at least how you choose to interpret it, please leave us a Comment. Continue reading »

VALLENFYRE: “DESECRATION”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  22 Responses »
Oct 042011
 

If you haven’t yet heard about Vallenfyre, then you must be new to NCS, because we’ve been frothing at the mouth about them ever since August, when we heard samples of a couple of songs and few people knew the identities of the band members (see our first post here and our update here). Now, the mystery has been solved, and the debut Vallenfyre album, A Fragile King, is due for release by Century Media on November 1.

Since our last post, there have been lots of developments coming out of the Vallenfyre camp. Most recently, as in today, a new song from the album premiered on the DECIBEL web site. The song is called “Desecration”, and in a much-appreciated display of generosity, DECIBEL has made the song stream embeddable, allowing us to play it for you right after the jump — but it will only be streaming for two days. I’m rushing at the moment, so I won’t try to craft a description — I’ll just say you need to hear it. (DECIBEL did provide a nice description of the music, and I’m including that after the jump, too.)

Also, (1) Vallenfyre now has a Facebook page (here); (2) you can hear snippets of all the songs on Amazon UK here; (3) you can pre-order the CD and a shirt here; and (4) the eye-catching album art is out (though you probably guessed that one already, didn’t you?).

After the jump, the song. Also, Vallenfyre rules. Continue reading »

WORMROT: “NOISE”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Oct 042011
 

This just in from our Noise correspondent, Phro: SCION A/V has made available for free download a collection of five new tracks from Singapore grind masters Wormrot. The compilation is called Noise. It went up for download on Sept 20, but I missed that news (thank you Phro for the alert). Here’s the track list:

1.  Loathsome Delusions
2.  False Assumptions
3.  Outburst of Annoyance
4.  Breed to Breed
5.  Perpetual Extinction

After the jump, I’ve got a stream of all five songs, plus the download link. But almost as amazing as that, I’ve got Phro’s custom-crafted, NCS-appropriate, pictorial encouragement, urging all of you to listen to Wormrot. Continue reading »

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