THE BYSTANDER CHRONICLER: SE7EN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Aug 062011
 

(NCS contributor Siddharth Darbha has become The Bystander Chronicler . . .)

INTRODUCTION

Back at the Man Cave, a.k.a., NCS HQ, we were doing the usual shit; plumbing, repairing cars and teaching Don Draper how to drink Scotch. Somewhere between the overdose of Methylenedioxymethamphetamine and the disproportionate ratio of LSD in our jam toast, a flash of light told us we have to feature seven bands that haven’t appeared on NCS yet, and pretty much blur the sense of reality we create for ourselves. We followed to the word. We are weak at math, but added roman numerals to compensate.

Most of the artists here don’t give a fuck about being metal enough. You have been warned. Also, somehow, through the alignment of all the planets from the CQ34R system, all except the first turn out to be instrumental bands, fitting nicely into our basic rule welded into the URL itself. Why did we chose these artists? We fear most of you are turning into serial necropedophilic rapists, and we need to calm you down. *Hypercool Dr. Evil grin*

I : THE HAARP MACHINE

We listen to a good amount of technical metal, and can tell when we hear a good one. Though their debut album is yet to release this year under Sumerian Records, we will hold our panties in a bunch until these Britishers (pictured above) throw those discs at us. Excellent note choices, good grooves and a weird middle eastern-ish ambient touch; they know what they’re doing. Here, to reinforce our opinion, we feature their track “The Escapist Notion” (immediately after the jump): Continue reading »

VADER RELEASES A DECAPITATING NEW SONG

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Aug 052011
 

All of you know how very, very stoked we are here at NCS for the release of the new album from Poland’s Vader, Welcome To the Morbid Reich. About a month ago, we got the first song from the album, “Come and See My Sacrifice”, and now we have a second one: “Decapitated Saints”, which appears to be a re-recording of a song that first appeared on the band’s 1989 demo, Necrolust.

I’m so damned excited to share this with you that I’m not even going to waste time trying to describe it to you. Fuck, you’re going to listen to it anyway, right? (If the answer to that question is No, please keep it to yourself.) After the jump, stream “Decapitated Saints”, but first be sure you’ve tied your head down firmly to your neck and shoulders. Continue reading »

GIANT SQUID

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Aug 052011
 

Our metallic bro BadWolf e-mailed me late yesterday with news that NorCal’s Giant Squid has a new album on the way, with a new song posted for streaming. On the one hand, Giant Squid’s music isn’t my usual kind of thing. If you amalgamated various genre tags that the band itself uses, I think that would be a fair description: post-metal-art-doom-rock-sludge. I also have trouble with Aaron John Gregory’s quirky, high-pitched, occasionally screechy style of clean singing.

On the other hand, the music on the band’s last album (the only one I’ve heard) — The Ichthyologist — was original, unpredictable, and uninhibited, and I can respect that, even if it hasn’t seen many plays on my iPod. Plus, I do like the band’s use of down-tuned sludge-chords in juxtaposition with airier melodies. Plus, there’s that album cover for the new one, Cenotes, which is due for release on October 25 on Translation Loss Records. Fucking great, weird piece of art, also created by Aaron John Gregory. Plus, we’ve already gone off our usual beaten path today with that deathstep thing.

After the jump, you’ll find a player that will stream the first song to be released from Cenotes, “Figura Serpentinata (Pycnopodia sapien)”. The track list for the new album, plus streams of the band’s previous discography can be found at their Bandcamp page or their facebook. Continue reading »

THE ERLANDSSON BROTHERS TEAR IT UP AT TUSKA

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Aug 042011
 

Adrian and Daniel Erlandsson are brothers, both of whom started playing drums at an early age in their home in Malmö, Sweden. Adrian went on to become the drummer for bands such as At the Gates, The Haunted, and Cradle of Filth, and currently plays for Brujeria and Paradise Lost. Daniel has been almost as prolific. His work includes drum duties on In Flames‘ Subterranean album, and he’s been the drummer for Arch Enemy since 1998.

By all accounts, both are considered very good at what they do. I’ve admitted before that I’m not a good judge of technical ability; I tend to fall into a state of slack-jawed wonder when I watch almost any capable extreme-metal drummer performing live. I can’t wrap my mind around the stamina, the physical coordination, and the memory skills required to play such intricate rhythms at such high speed for such a long time. But I do know what I like to hear, and I like to hear the Erlandsson brothers at work.

Not long ago, we featured drum-cam footage of Fredrik Andersson of Amon Amarth playing at the recent Tuska music festival in Finland. Now we’ve got drum-cam video of the Erlandsson brothers at the same festival — Adrian performing with the legendary At the Gates, and Daniel with Arch Enemy. I had fun watching these clips, and only a couple of flies entered my open mouth while I watched. I thought you might like this shit, too, so after the jump you can check out the brothers Erlandsson doing what they do best. Continue reading »

FUCKING GOOD PANCAKE – Part 3

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Aug 032011
 

This post is devoted to the third of the songs I heard this morning that caused me to shout “FUCKING GOOD PANCAKE!!”, which caused my cat to spontaneously evacuate his bowels, undoubtedly because he is not conversant in Google Translate renditions of Finnish idiom into English. The fact that he is almost 20 years old and now seems prone to spontaneous evacuation may also have something to do with it. However, just to be safe, the next time I hear a song as hot as these three, I plan to whisper fucking good pancake.

This last, but not least, part of my morning discoveries is the latest pre-production track to be posted for listening by The Binary Code.  My admiration for this band goes back to a time when both NCS and the band were in their infancy, so to speak — though The Binary Code never seemed to take baby steps. In their music, they were fully mature from the outset, whereas I’m still breast-feeding.

Although we have written about The Binary Code frequently, reviewing all of their musical output to date, it’s been a while since we checked in with them. They haven’t exactly been sitting still since the release of their Priest EP last summer (reviewed here). Yesterday, they added to their Facebook band page the third of three new pre-production tracks. The latest song is called “Dark Meditations”, and it is indeed a dark, heavy, atmospheric instrumental. Part ambient cloudscape, part jolting, pneumatic riff-fest, part progressive guitar exploration, it’s just fucking good pancake from beginning to end. Cool bass line in this song, too.

Check it out after the jump, and we’ll throw in the first two pre-production tracks for your listening pleasure, too. Both of them are tremendously good. By the way, these may be pre-production tracks, but they sound pretty fucking finished to me. In fact, they sound like The Binary Code’s best work to date. Continue reading »

FUCKING GOOD PANCAKE – Part 2

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Aug 032011
 

As promised, here’s the second part of this morning’s 3-part series devoted to new songs I’ve just heard that qualify as fucking good pancake.

I came across this song in a typically randomized fashion. I know you’re dying to learn how that happened, and so I will tell you, because I don’t want you to die, because, y’know, your death would reduce our readership and site traffic, and that would reduce our advertising revenue from zero to some kind of negative number. Since we don’t advertise, I wonder who I would have to pay if you died?

Where was I? Oh yeah, how I came across this song. Well, I included a UK band called Anterior in this morning’s installment of MORE 2011 SICKNESS. I saw a news blurb about the band’s forthcoming album, and their name rang a bell with me — though I wasn’t sure why it did — and so I added it to that list of forthcoming albums. One of our readers, jeimssi, added a comment to the effect that it was the first time jeimssi had seen anyone writing about Anterior anywhere, and that caused me to think harder about how I knew this band and why I had lost track of them.

I have only one Anterior song on my iPod, and I can’t remember why it’s there. It’s called “Days of Deliverance”. While listening to that song for the first time in many moons, I did some net-snooping to find out more about what Anterior has been up to — and came across a squib from Metal Blade Europe from a bit earlier this morning announcing that Anterior had just premiered the second single from the new album. My machinelike mind, working at the speed of light, deduced that Anterior must have also released a first song from the album.

So, I tracked down both songs. The one that premiered today is called “Blood in the Throne Room” — and fuck, did it light me up from the first few notes. It’s a blistering, headlong gallop of melodeath pancake goodness, with a crazy-good guitar solo whipped into the batter. Listen after the jump (you’ll find a stream of the first song from the new album after the jump, too.) Continue reading »

NEW SONGS AND ART FROM SKELETONWITCH AND ACHREN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Aug 022011
 

Is that a fucking awesome album cover or what? It’s by Andrei Bouzikov (Municipal Waste, Holy Grail, Cannabis Corpse) and it appears on the forthcoming release by Ohio’s Skeletonwitch, who are themselves awesome. Mr. Bouzikov also contributed the cover art for the band’s 2009 release, Breathing The Fire.

The new Witch album, Forever Abomination, won’t be out until October, but the teasing and the tempting have already begun with the unveiling of a song from the album called “The Infernal Resurrection”, which you can hear after the jump. As for how long you have to wait, here’s the release schedule for the album:

Mainland Europe: October 7
United Kingdom: October 10
North America: October 11
Japan: October 19

Pre-orders for the album are being accepted now, and there are some mighty sweet bundles being offered, which apparently will be limited to the pre-orders and will cease being available once the official release has occurred. More about that after the jump . . . plus we also have a killer new song and album art from a Scottish band we’ve featured at NCS before — Achren. Continue reading »

A SECRET RIDE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Aug 012011
 

I’ve been immersing myself in black metal today in preparation for writing the latest in our increasingly infrequent MISCELLANY posts, which will see the light of day tomorrow. I decided to give that post a black-metal theme, and so when I saw a press release an hour ago about Parisian black-metal band Glorior Belli, I stopped what I was doing and explored further — just to stay wholly within the blackened realm for a bit longer.

Glorior Belli could well have been included in the MISCELLANY post, because they’re a band whose music I can’t remember hearing before, though I’m certainly familiar with the name. They have a new album called The Great Southern Darkness scheduled for release via Metal Blade on September 27, and today they began streaming the first single from the album, “Secret Ride to Rebellion”.

The press release also gave me my first look at the cover art for the album, which as you can see, is a real eye-catcher. It’s by a Canadian artist named Alexandra Snelgrove. I like it very much. I like the new single very much, too. It charges from the launch with a blizzard of tremolo intensity, attacking drums, and raw, predatory vocals, but it’s got a grooving, swampy, rock style-beat, a catchy melody, and a very sweet bass track — which means (you guessed it), the production on this song is clean and sharp as knives. Have a listen after the jump. Continue reading »

IN SECT INFESTATION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  46 Responses »
Jul 312011
 

Raw In Sect is a Greek band formed in 2005 and now consisting of Kostas Diamandis (vocals, guitars), Jim Alexiou (drums), Bill Kranos (guitars) and George Vasilopoulos (bass, backing vocals). The more I think about the band’s name, the more I like it. It uses the word “raw”, which is a good sign if you have my kind of taste in metal, and then it has that play on words, “in sect”, which makes me think of both hooded, human-sacrificing, blood-worshippers and creeping, crawling, cannibalistic things with feelers and pincers and multi-faceted eyes. I suppose it’s possible that I have an over-active imagination.

Anyway, Raw In Sect produced a three-song demo in 2007 and have now signed to a label called Aural Music, Wormholedeath for the release of their debut album, Red Flows. More good names: Wormholedeath and Red Flows. Plus, the band is scheduled to play three shows in Ireland with Suidakra in September. That’s keeping some good company.

But a good band name and a flowing (red) album name will only carry you so far, i.e., right up to the brink of the music itself, and then you either fall off a cliff, crashing and burning, or you get into a good . . . flow . . . with something red and raw (and insectile) along for the ride. Which is it for this band? (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

RANDOM STUFF

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Jul 312011
 

(Our man Israel Flanders has a few words and musical teasers for the forthcoming albums by Textures, Evile, and Revocation, plus his plans for upcoming reviews.)

Alright, I decided it was time to do one of these “post random shit” deals.  Mostly stuff I personally care about, but things you all might be interested in, too.


If you aren’t aware of who Textures are, I’d wager you’ve been under a rock for some time.  One of the very first djent bands to emerge after Meshuggah, these guys, I would dare have the nerve to assert, have more to do with modern djent as we understand it than Meshuggah does. With their unique brand of polyryhthmic grooving, clean ambience, and a history that has included two obscenely talented vocalists in their fold (ex-vocalist Eric Kalsbeek) and now ex-CiLiCe vocalist Daniel De Gogh, Textures has made their mark in a way that can’t be ignored.

Their new album Dualism arrives in September, and I’m absolutely psyched.  After the jump, I’m including the three studio reports released for this album, as the song clips included in these sound really awesome.  Also below is a VERY GOOD high quality video of Textures playing one of the new songs live. Continue reading »

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