FIVE BANDS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT FOR SAN ANTONIO’S “RITES OF DARKNESS” FESTIVAL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Apr 162011
 

(Thanks go out to NCS reader/commenter Surgical Brute for today’s guest post, which focuses on five bands that may be new to you; they were certainly new to me, but I’m damned glad I know about them now: Anatomia, War Master, Grave Ritual, Adorior, and Ilsa. I’m also happy to learn about the Rites of Darkness festival that, to date, has confirmed appearances by 41 bands, including the likes of Behexen, Demonical, Interment, Mitochondrian, Sargeist, Valkyrja, and Vasaeleth, in addition to the bands that are the focus of this post.)

Okay, as you know, Islander was looking for some articles to use as fill-ins so he didn’t lose any days on the NCS website. I stupidly said Id try to put something together for him, and…well… here we are.

I guess I should start with a little bit about me. My name’s Rob, but I usually use the tag SurgicalBrute (no there’s no story behind it . . . so don’t ask). Compared to a lot of you, I’ve only been into metal for a very short time, but after dabbling with metalcore a little bit I found Amon Amarth’s Twilight of the Thundergod. I couldn’t stop listening to the title track, and I’ve been devoted to the metal gods ever since. I listen to most of the different styles (grindcore being the exception), but I prefer either old school death metal or folk/viking metal.

Now, I’m not much of a reviewer; frankly, I suck at it. So I was trying to figure out what I should write about. Well, as some of you may know, I try to stay pretty tapped into metal’s underground.  So I figured I’d make a suggestion list of bands most of you may not have heard about. I’ll also include a brief description of theses bands

This isn’t just any list though. No . . . I’m going to tell about 5 lesser known bands you should check out at Rites of Darkness 3, which is happening in San Antonio, Texas, on December 9-10.  (continue reading after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

UNCOVERING HIDDEN GEMS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Apr 152011
 

(Today we’re happy to feature another guest post. This one came to us from NCS reader Rob K., and includes thoughts about some of his recent discoveries among bands both new and not-so-new — plus music, of course.)

When it comes to hobbies, people look for fulfillment. Something that centers you, relieves stress, provides mental clarity and peace of mind. A place you can escape to where no one else can bother you.

Everyone has their niche, be it wine connoisseurs, beer enthusiasts, foodies, stamp and/or coin collectors, Star Wars collectors, what have you. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the aforementioned things (save for maybe the Star Wars memorabilia and stamp collecting). For me, it’s music. More specifically metal.

“But Rob,” you say, “how does metal bring about peace of mind and mental clarity when it’s all over the place?” Well friend, it’s all in your perception. It’s controlled chaos. It’s not for everyone, no doubt, but there’s a level of challenge to this music that appeals to people like us. Metal culture is also notorious for it’s trolling and general flaming, mano a mano, directed against bands whose genre ends in “-core”, for example. But I digress. It’s also a HUGE, pulsing underground community where you’ll see a strong bond of brotherhood, sharing, and the occasional grab-assing and bad hair cuts.

Star Wars pr0n anyone?

From the lyrics to the thundering double bass and faster-than-light guitar solos, there’s an art in metal. It’s about anti-culture, facing the world head-on, against the grain. Metal rarely gets enough limelight to be considered mainstream. Yet it thrives in the underground. Negate all the stupid scene kids and retarded fashions, and dig deep to the hardcore fans of EVERYTHING metal. disregarding the suffixes of “core” or whatever the fuck “shoegaze” is.

One of my favorite things to do is to scour the interwebs for new/old, exciting, unheard of (even in the relatively small community of metalheads) bands. By searching, I stumble across some really obscure and occasionally EXTREMELY talented bands that I may not have otherwise heard, plus some not-so-obscure bands who are new to me. Check them out after the bump (that is, if you’re still reading this).

Continue reading »

A TETRAHEDRON FOR THURSDAY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Apr 142011
 

As expected, I haven’t had the time lately to do anything in-depth for NCS (and thanks again to all our guest post-ers for bailing me out) but I still do have time to put together quick items every now and then, just to keep the new metal flowing along its molten path from our ears to yours.

My original title for this post was “A Trio For Thursday”, because I’d heard new songs from three bands over the last 24 hours that got me excited. But then, as I was finishing this up, I came across a brand new fourth one that I just had to include. Not wanting to abandon my affinity for alliteration, I tried to think of a word beginning with “T” that means four of something.Voilà! In geometry, a tetrahedron is a shape composed of four triangular faces, three of which meet at each vertex — like a pyramid.

So, here we go — four songs, and I can guarantee you’ll like at least one of them, or your money back. The first is yet another new track from the UK’s Xerath from their forthcoming album II. The second is another track from Malfeitor, a Swedish death metal band whose new music we’ve already featured more than once recently. The third is a song by a group of Norwegian death-thrashers called Exeloume. And last, but not least, we’ve got a new song from a UK band called Detrimentum who we’ve been pumped about for a while.

Feast your ears on the tunes after the jump. Or, more accurately, allow the music to feast on your ears. Continue reading »

FILTH, VITRIOL, AND FREE MUSIC!

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 142011
 

(In yet another of this week’s guest posts, The Artist Formerly Known As Dan joins us again at NCS with a special piece on hardcore music — which is a genre we don’t often cover at this site.)

I sometimes get the vibe that hardcore is misunderstood, especially by self-proclaimed metalheads – not that I’m an expert, but just that a lot of good music is filtered out because of the label. In fact, that statement is true for many genres, but is a debate for another day. I know I personally used to avoid anything labeled “hardcore” like the plague, because I assumed it was going to be some tough-guy bullshit fest that was basically punk with drop-tunings. How ignorant I was. Anyway, the point of today’s post is not to highlight the differences or start debates, but to introduce you to bands you may have slept on that I believe can be classified as hardcore or have hardcore roots (again, subjective, but Islander gave me the podium).

Swamp Thing

For fans of: Maylene and the Sons of Disaster, thrash

These guys fucking rule. If you like your music raw, straight-ahead, and visceral, Swamp Thing is for you. Just filthy hooks and catchy rhythms all over the place. Hailing from Richmond, VA, you can hear just the slightest hint of southernness to the music. It’s great, I tell you. Disclaimer – MetalSucks premiered their EP last month, and that’s where I first heard about them – gotta give credit where credit is due. (more after the jump, including tracks to stream . . .) Continue reading »

DEPTH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 132011
 

From the beginning of this site, we’ve tried to shine our dim, flickering, low-wattage spotlight on bands from all over the world, in addition to the metal that’s being created in the U.S. and Canada. The Middle East is one of the regions to which we’ve paid attention. With very few exceptions, bands from that region don’t get nearly the notice they deserve here in the U.S.

One of our guides to Middle Eastern metal is a first-rate blog called Metality, which is the brain-child of a dude from Egypt who goes by the name iRoar. Metality is on the verge of releasing a new compilation of music (their second) that will include songs from at least 50 different bands. Yes, that wasn’t a typo — 50 bands, including several we’ve featured at NCS in the past. We’re proud to be a co-sponsor of that comp — and you’ll see more details about it in the near future.

One of the bands whose music will be included on the comp is a melodic death metal band from Kuwait called Depth. A couple days ago, Metality featured a song by the band called “Necropolis” that’s really impressive, and I wanted to share it with you. Even better, it turns out that Depth is making its full-length, self-titled album plus its recent EP, Memento Mori, available for free download. After the jump, you can check out the song and get info on the downloads. Continue reading »

A BEST OF THE DECADE LIST

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  25 Responses »
Apr 132011
 

(Today we’ve got another guest post for you, this one from an NCS reader and a metal vocalist and lyricist who goes by the handle “.jh“. His band suggestions in our Comments section and in his “Best of 2010” list, published at NCS here, have reliably steered us to lots of music we’ve gotten hooked on, so we were curious to see the list you’re about to see.)

A few weeks ago TNOTB ran a story where they were promising to crown the 100 best songs of the past decade and asked people to contribute 15 to 20 albums, and they’d talley the votes up and post the resulting top 100 albums. Now who doesn’t like a good list? So I diligently carved up a list of all albums I own that were released between 2000 and 2009. For the record, I ended up with roughly 4000 songs / 400 albums. Picking just 5% from the list was hard, and I’m sure that if I were to revisit this list a year down the road, I might pick differently, but this is here and now, so what follows is the list, plus sample songs. After the list are a few thoughts about some of the albums, and also a list of albums that might have made the cut.

(in alphabetical order)

1349 – Hellfire


Continue reading »

DEMONICAL IS RAVENOUS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Apr 122011
 

It was the second day of this year. We posted a collection of music organized around the objective of musically detonating a couple canisters of napalm in your head, as a way of clearing out the post-New Year’s Eve/Day cobwebs and preparing everyone to resume their “normal” lives.

We began the napalming process with a video from a Swedish death metal band we had just discovered by the name of Demonical. At that point, Demonical had produced two albums, and the video was for a kick-ass song from the second album called “Baptized in Fire”.

Demonical is now on the verge of debuting their third album, Death Infernal. Released by the awesome Cyclone Empire label, it will see the light of day on April 15. We’ve heard the album, and it’s stupendously good. Demonical continues to channel the undead spirits of Dismember and Entombed, with some updated flourishes of their own; we’ll have more in-depth things to say about this album in the near future.

For now, we have a video that the band released today for a song from the album called “Ravenous”. The song itself is a masterful rendering of remorseless old-school death, with its roots sunk deep in unconsecrated, blood-soaked burial grounds. It’s a grinding engine of down-tuned destruction, augmented by galvanizing beats and a whisper of dark melody. The video itself is also well-executed and fun to watch. Check it out after the jump. Continue reading »

WE ALMOST MISSED THIS NEW AMORPHIS SONG . . . ALMOST

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Apr 122011
 

I knew Amorphis would be debuting a new song from their next album yesterday. I meant to keep my eyes peeled for it so I could feed it straight onto NCS without delay. I fucked up. But I’m not beating myself up over that, because it’s the first time that I’ve ever fucked up. Ever.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement. To be more accurate, it’s the first time I ever fucked up . . . since the last time I fucked up. Which happened about a half dozen times yesterday before the missing-the-new-Amorphis-song fuck-up.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the new Amorphis song. It’s called “You I Need”. It’s going to be released digitally in Finland on April 20 and in other countries on April 22. It comes off the band’s new album, The Beginning Of Times, which is scheduled for release on May 27 via Nuclear Blast Records.

We already featured the album art (you remember the big egg hanging over the earth, on the verge of hatching something?), now we’re featuring this song, and because it’s Amorphis — one of our principal Exceptions to the Rule of no clean singing around here — we’re probably going to run a feature every time anyone in the band belches or farts between now and May 27. After the jump, we have the song and a few thoughts about it. Continue reading »

CEREBRAL BORE MANIACALLY MISCREATES A NEW VIDEO

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  17 Responses »
Apr 112011
 

Last November we happily discovered a band from Glasgow, Scotland called Cerebral Bore and their then-self-released debut album Maniacal Miscreation. In our typically eloquent fashion, we described the music as “the kind of metallic extremity that shoves egg-beaters through the skullbone and proceeds to whip the gray matter into a fluffy merengue” — as the kind of “cerebral drill job” that left our brains “satisfyingly disassembled and chopped up into the consistency of dog food”. A bit more from that review:

The music is on the brutal side of death metal. It’s almost unrelentingly fast — which suits us just fine. The guitar riffing is adrenaline-charged, finger-fast, and reliably hammer-stroked with big slams. We particularly liked the start-stop attack of the drums and the quite audible bass rhythms that unerringly root down deep into the part of the brain that acts without thinking and sends irresistible electrical impulses into the buried pleasure centers.

Barreling along in an unconstrained rampage is plenty of fun for the listener, but the icing on the cake are the passages in the songs when Cerebral Bore skid into a completely irresistible beat.

Since last November, it’s fair to say that Cerebral Bore’s global popularity has increased significantly and is now on the verge of erupting. They signed to Earache Records in December, which will be giving Maniacal Miscreation wider distribution (beginning with a European release yesterday and a NorthAm release on June 7), they’re scheduled to tour basically the whole fucking world in 2011, including dates in the U.S., and today they’ve released a new video for the album’s title track “Maniacal Miscreation”, which you can witness after the jump . . . Continue reading »

LOUDBLAST REDUX

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 112011
 

Only six short days ago I used the “exclusive” streaming of a new song by a French band called Loudblast as an excuse to go off on a selfish, petulant rant about the use of “exclusives” in metal marketing (here). Kind of embarrassing actually, but “Embarrassing” is one of my middle names, so what do you expect?

The song was/is called “Emptiness Crushes My Soul”, and I liked it, which was one of the reasons I got frustrated at my inability to embed the song right here at NCS. In the post, I mentioned that Loudblast had filmed a video for the song that allegedly featured a former porn star named Nina Roberts, though I saw no evidence of that in a teaser for the video that the band had released. Not that I give a shit whether music videos include former, or current, porn stars. If you want porn, you really don’t need to troll for metal videos to get it.

Well, now the video for “Emptiness Crushes My Soul” has been released, and sure enough, it includes nudity and flashes of sexual activity between Ms. Roberts and something that may or may not be a man, that may or may not have been created by the woman, and that may or may not represent her fantasy about a horse. In other words, I don’t have a very good idea about what’s going on, or what it has to do with the song. But the song is still good. The video is NSFW so be mindful of who’s peering over your shoulder.  After the jump . . . Continue reading »

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