A METAL MILESTONE IN INDIA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Aug 152011
 

Kryptos is a band from Bangalore, India, whose music I heard for the first time today. They’ve set October 29 as the release date for their third album, The Coils of Apollyon. Thanks to a tip from Siddharth Darbha, I also learned that Kryptos has scheduled a nationwide tour of India to begin in Bangalore on that same date.

It appears this will be a history-making tour in India. It’s scheduled to cover 30 cities in 40 days, making it the longest and largest tour of India by any metal band in the history of the Indian metal scene. They’re also doing this in style, traveling in a fully customized bus along with a complete sound and lighting rig as well as a 14-man crew.

As we’ve been discovering here at NCS over the last year and a half, India has a vibrant and talented metal scene, but only recently (thanks to bands such as Demonic Resurrection) has that scene begun to draw the attention of metalheads outside the sub-continent. Undoubtedly, there are also corners within that vast and ancient country itself that haven’t yet been enlightened about the wonders of metal; this tour will help remedy that by including stops in cities and towns that rarely, if ever, get exposed to this kind of live show.

According to The Font of All Human Knowledge, India is a nation of 1.2 billion people (second only to China in population); it’s the 7th largest country on earth by geographic size; and it’s an extraordinarily diverse and complex amalgamation of cultures (to pick but one example, there are 29 different languages spoken by at least 1 million people each). So, the idea of a metal tour that will attempt to span the country is worth some attention. As it turns out, the music of Kryptos is worth some attention, too. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

NEW XERATH VIDEO

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
Aug 152011
 

Are you like me? Do you often fantasize about scaling the fence at a commercial airport, dashing out onto the tarmac, leaping up behind a big plane, and sticking your head in the back end of a jet engine just as the aircraft takes off? Yeah, you’re right: Everyone dreams about that, so why am I talking about something so commonplace?

Well, listening to “Reform III”, one of the songs from Xerath’s 2011 album, II, helps make the dream more vivid. You can almost feel the skin being peeled back from your face and all your hair being ripped out by the roots from the blast effect. Awesome.

Xerath have just released an official music video to accompany “Reform III”, which I watched this morning. My biggest problem with the video is that it doesn’t involve full-head-immersion at the backwash end of a jet engine. What was the director thinking? Instead, we have a tale about trusting your instincts and not trusting your co-workers, at least if your co-workers are killers. Who wear eye-liner. Watch it after the jump. Continue reading »

METAL FROM SOUTH AFRICA: PART 3

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Aug 152011
 

When it comes to NCS, I have trouble making plans and sticking with them, because I have an impulse-control problem. I get distracted easily, which is a serious weakness for someone like me who enjoys a broad swath of metal. Every day, new music appears, often from unexpected sources, and I’m easily carried off in some unintended and uncharted direction. I offer this confession as a feeble excuse for allowing almost three months to pass since Part 2 of our series on metal from South Africa. I’ll go ahead and say right now that there WILL be a Part 4 — and I have no fucking clue when it will appear.

Now that I have that out of the way, let’s move forward with Part 3 before I lose my concentration and fly off again. As many of you longer-term readers know, we didn’t intend to create a series on SA metal. It just happened. We ran a post in April about three SA metal bands. That led to lots of recommendations about other bands, so we added a second post about three more bands, and that led to more recommendations, and so here we are.

In this installment, we’re focusing (in no particular order) on Riddare av Koden, Warthane, and Architecture of Aggression. I picked these bands in part because I got very enthusiastic recommendations about them from SA metalheads and partly because they’ve got songs that you can go get for yourself instead of being stuck solely with YouTube clips or other music players that keep you tethered to your computer if you want to listen. I also happen to really like what I’ve heard from all three bands. So, here we go . . . after the jump. Continue reading »

A LITTLE BIT OF THIS, A LITTLE BIT OF THAT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Aug 142011
 

Just catching up on news here. But I’ll throw in some new music I heard this morning, too. The bands featured in this post: Thy Catafalque (again), Gire, Threat Signal, Solace, RedScream, and Deicide.

THY CATAFALQUE / GIRE

Just a few days ago, we posted a short feature that included this two-person band named Thy Catalfalque as a result of my first serious effort to get into their music — and man, have I gotten into it. I get more out of it the more I listen, like peeling back the proverbial onion, except without the watering eyes. To my good fortune, this led to a few e-mail exchanges with the band’s principle creative force, Tamás Kátai.

To date, Thy Catafalque have produced four albums and a demo, with a new album to be released in the future by Season of Mist. The last two albums (the ones I’ve been listening to) were released by Epidemie Records and have become a bit hard to find, at least if you want physical copies, though Epidemie will be re-releasing Róka Hasa Rádió on November 30, but this time in a jewel-case edition with an 8-page booklet (versus the original, nearly sold-out digipack version).

Thy Catafalque isn’t Tamás Kátai’s only musical project. He also handles keyboards, programming, lyrics, and more for another long-running Hungarian band called Gire, who have six demos to their credit plus a 2007 self-titled debut album (which features that eye-catching album cover above). The Gire debut album is also hard to find, but Tamás helpfully pointed out that it can be downloaded from this location — so, of course, I did that.

I’ve only just started listening, and I have a feeling that, as on the albums from Thy Catafalque, no one song on this album is going to tell you very much about the rest of them. But of the tracks I’ve heard so far,this is a mixture of eviscerating death metal, catastrophic sludge, industrial red-lining, and meteoric, experimental guitar extravaganza. I’m deadly serious. This is a stupendous head-check. (more after the jump . . . .) Continue reading »

BEAR METAL?

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  23 Responses »
Aug 122011
 

Until today, I’d never heard of Svölk. They’re from Norway. They just announced the signing of a record deal with Austria-based Napalm Records. They label their music as “bear metal” — “the perfect blend of stoner, metal, and Nordic redneck attitude.”

I didn’t know Norway had rednecks. But I was curious to see what Norwegian redneckdom might be like, not to mention discovering just exactly what “bear metal” sounds like, so I watched a brand new video of a song from Svölk called “52”. The song definitely has a dirty-south, stoner vibe, though to me it’s more of a sludgy, liquored-up, rock-with-your-cock-out tune than metal. And it’s got nuthin but clean singin’ goin’ on.

Having said that, it’s a damn catchy song with meaty riffs and a cool chorus. As for the video, I don’t understand what holds together the various scenes — it’s hard to pick out any kind of story line that makes sense. But I would guess some serious money went into its production. There are parts that are NSFW, so keep that in mind. Hang in there until the end, because it’s got a . . . bang-up . . .  finish. I still don’t know what “bear metal” is. Continue reading »

IT’S ABOUT TIME: THY CATAFALQUE AND MITOCHONDRION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  18 Responses »
Aug 112011
 

This morning I got two e-mails that reminded me about bands — Thy Catafalque (originally Hungary) and Mitochondrion (Canada) — that I’ve been meaning to say something about for a long time. So rather than procrastinate further, or worry about how many other bands I’ve been unjustly ignoring, I thought, wtf, might as well just do it now.

The first band is Thy Catafalque, who (as of last month) are now signed to the excellent Season of Mist label. I’ve seen this band’s name in various places, but most often at The Number of the Blog, where groverXIII is a big admirer of them (see this, for example). Although I’d forgotten about it, I finally remembered listening at one point long ago to a clip of one of their songs that he featured at TNOTB from their latest album, Róka Hasa Rádió, which was released in 2009. I didn’t fall in love with the song immediately, and therefore moved on to something else important, like picking lint out of my navel.

And then this morning, I got an e-mail from Tamás Kátai, who is the principle alter ego of Thy Catafalque (along with János Juhász) and now resides in Edinburgh, Scotland. He had seen my review of the excellent new album by another Hungarian band, Slytract, which included my confession of ignorance and curiosity about Hungarian metal. So he gave me links to two of Thy Catafalque’s albums — not only Róka Hasa Rádió, which is the fourth album, but also the third one, Tűnő Idő Tárlat (2004), which Tamás thought I might want because, unlike Róka Hasa Rádió, it contains no clean male vocals at all. I wonder why he thought that would matter to me?

Turns out that one of those download files also contained a video for a song called “Paths Untrodden”, which isn’t on either of the two most recent albums. Instead, it’s on the second release, Microcosmos (2001). Because I like moving pictures, and because I do most things ass-backwards, I watched that video before listening to anything else. It may very well not be representative of the band’s current musical direction, since it’s roughly 10 years old, but damn, it’s a fine, scathing black-metal song that has become firmly stuck in my head, and the video is beautiful — definitely worth sharing.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

VARIETY IS THE SPICE OF LIFE (NIGHTRAGE, DIRGE WITHIN, AND LANDMINE MARATHON)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  17 Responses »
Aug 092011
 

Well, that’s what people say. In my experience, they usually say it when they’re trying to calm you down after you’ve been exposed to something you really aren’t interested in or maybe dislike intensely. But, taken literally, it’s true. Variety IS the spice of life, or at least one of them. Along with oregano.

That saying popped into my head when I took a short break from my fucking day job, which is currently wearing me down to a stump, and found the following three pieces of music, two of which are brand new releases by Nightrage and Dirge Within and the third of which is a recent live video of Landmine Marathon kickin sumasss.

NIGHTRAGE

Nightrage will be releasing their fifth album, Insidious, via Lifeforce Records on September 27 (one day earlier internationally). To whet appetites for that release, the band have made the title track available for streaming on their facebook page. It features the band’s former vocalist Tomas Lindberg (At the Gates, The Crown, Lock Up). That was enough to make me listen, though the interesting album art by Gustavo Sazes helped, too.

The song is quite nice, too, with an unexpected acoustic outro. Lindberg is in good voice on this headbanging thrasher, which is to say naaaasty. I’m all in favor of your visiting the Nightrage facebook page, but it happens you’ll also find the song stream after the jump. Continue reading »

DARKANE UPDATE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Aug 092011
 

How many Darkane fans do we have in the audience? Well, let’s see, I can count at least two — myself and Israel Flanders, who tipped me to this bit of recent news that I missed. It will actually be fairly significant news to long-time fans of this Swedish band.

Darkane’s debut album, Rusted Angel, issued in 1999, with vocals provided by one Lawrence Mackrory. But by the time the band released their second album, 2001’s Insanity, Mackrory was gone and Andreas Sydow was in. Two more albums followed with Sydow behind the mic, and then 2008 saw the release of the band’s latest album, Demonic Art, with yet another new vocalist, Jens Broman.

Last week, it was announced that Broman has decided to leave, and guess who his replacement is? Yes, Darkane have come full circle, back to Lawrence Mackrory. Since his departure from the band, he has been the vocalist for another Swedish outfit called F.K.U. (for whom he’ll continue to be a member) as well as the vocalist for Scarve (France) since 2009. He will be making his live comeback with Darkane on September 20 in Strasbourg, France at the opening show of the band’s headlining European tour, with support provided by Destinity and Devastating Enemy.

When you’ve been away from a band for roughly 13 years and are about to rejoin them for a big tour, what do you do? Well yes, you fucken rehearse. And as it happens, Darkane have released a video of the new Darkane rehearsing two songs from their discography — “Fading Dimensions” from Layers of Lies (2005) and yes, a throwback to Rusted Angel, “July 1999”. Mackrory has got a versatile voice, which you’ll get a sense of on this video. I presume we’ll get more evidence of that in the near future, since Darkane also reports they’re working on a new album. For now, check out the video after the jump. Darkane’s facebook page is here. Continue reading »

MORS SUBITA PUTS ANOTHER HOLE IN MY HEAD (AND A SMILE ON MY FACE)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Aug 082011
 

We stumbled across a terrific unsigned Finnish band called Mors Subita at the end of May. They had just released an official video for a song called “The Sermon” from their debut album (then unreleased) called Human Waste Compression. I was so damned taken prisoner by the song that I immediately posted about it (here).

Turns out that I wasn’t the only one taken by the music. This morning, Violent Journey Records announced the signing of Mors Subita and an official release date for Human Waste Compression: September 21. I have to admit, it was cool to see words from our earlier post quoted in the Violent Journey release. But I would have been very happy for these dudes anyway.

As icing on all this good pancake, I also discovered that last Friday the band released an official video for a second song from the new album, called “Burden”. I like the song as much, maybe even more, than “The Sermon”. It’s yet another heavy-grooved blast of compulsive rhythms and catchy melody that punched another hole right through my head. It was really fucken tough to resist headbanging, but I was afraid something would come out through the holes if I did.

Check out Mors Subita’s latest sonic missile after the jump, and start counting the days until Sept 21. Suomi perkele! Continue reading »

DRINK WITH THE LIVING DEAD!

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Aug 062011
 

A big thank-you to the lovely Fireangel from the wonderful Finland-based Night Elves blog for her e-mail alerting me to this serving of Saturday awesomeness-ness.

Ghoultown is a Texas-based “hellbilly” band whose music is a metal-tinged, ghoul-themed amalgam of cowpunk and rockabilly. I don’t claim to be an expert on the band’s lengthy discography, but I do like the catchy bit of cautionary storytelling embodied in their song “Drink With the Living Dead”, which appears on the Life After Sundown album. And I especially like the brand new animated video produced for the song.

The artwork in the video was entirely created by Finnish artist Juha Vuorma, who is both a comic-book artist and a creator of album covers, including the art for the first three Kalmah albums as well as covers for records by Usurper and Altars of Destruction, among others. The video’s storyline (and the song) were written by Ghoultown frontman Count Lyle, and the final animation and directing for the video were completed by LA-based Laume Conroy.

Regardless of whether the music sounds like your kinda thing, the video is absolutely worth watching. After the jump, I’ve got a few more thoughts and then the video. Continue reading »

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