. . . AND STILL MORE VICIOUSNESS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 282011
 

I don’t think two posts’ worth of viciousness are enough to ameliorate the suckitude of this Monday. We need one more. Unless of course I come across even more slashing metal before this vicious Monday turns into a moderately less vicious Tuesday.

This next offering is a brand new song from Samael, a Swiss band whose experimental brand of black metal will be known to many of you. After almost three years of work, their new album, Lex Mundi, will be released on April 29 in Europe and May 3 in North America via Nuclear Blast Records.

The cover art is by Patrick Pidoux, who is also the drummer for a band called Sludge. It’s apparently intended to be shiny black imagery on a matte-black background. When I first saw it on other sites, it just looked like a solid black square (which may have something to do with the settings on my computer). Anyway, to bring out the imagery, I enhanced the exposure of the image on a photo program, and the result is above.

As for the song, it’s awesome. I’m not terribly well-versed in Samael’s extensive discography, but it doesn’t sound quite like anything from the band that I’ve heard before. It features tribal rhythms and scorching guitars, and it’s just massively infectious. You listen to this, and in addition to whispering “Fuck Mondays” under your breath, you may be moved to start pounding any nearby flat surfaces with both fists. Go past the jump and stream this mutha . . . Continue reading »

MORE VICIOUSNESS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Mar 282011
 

Monday is still vicious. We’re still not willing to suffer in silence. Now we have one more piece of music to keep us company. If we’d seen this before finishing off our first post of the day, we would have included it there — but actually, it just became available a few hours ago. Good fucking timing.

It’s a new music video from Sweden’s Evocation. Their 2010 album Apocalyptic was one of our hands-down favorites of that year. We included one of the tracks (“Sweet Obsession”) on our list of the year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs (check that here).  The music is a smoking chainsaw of death metal from a band who recorded one of their first demos at Sunlight Studios in 1992, so yeah, they know what the fuck they’re doing.

The songs are varied in their pacing, but usually fast, with a vibrating wash of melody-tinged, ass-grinding riffage; scarred, banshee-style vocals; and some sweet, flickering, weaving guitar solos that will put a big fucking smile on your face. They do a very effective job of immediately triggering the headbang reflex and rattling your skull  . . . viciously.

This new video is for a song called “Psychosis Warfare”, which is pretty much what Mondays are all about, right? It was directed and produced by Iwona Kusion and that most awesome album cover artist Michal “Xaay” Loranc, who also did the cover for Apocalyptic. Go past the jump and watch it. Fuck Mondays. Continue reading »

MONDAY IS VICIOUS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 282011
 

Almost no one likes Mondays. What you have to do is usually so much worse than what you did on the weekend. But almost no one likes to hear you complain about Mondays either. They’re suffering, too, and hearing you bitch doesn’t make it better. Still, something must be done. Complaining doesn’t help, but suffering in silence is still suffering.

You could just gut up, accept your fate, and soldier on, but fuck that stoic, stiff-upper-lip mentality. Let’s try an alternative: wallow in your suffering, but don’t do it in silence. Instead, do it with musical accompaniment that’s just as vicious as you feel. In fact, let’s kick our Monday squarely in the gonads with some music by a band that’s just perfectly named for the occasion — Vicious Art. And then let’s follow that up with some Sumerian thrashing black metal, as inflicted (viciously) by Melechesh in a brand new video.

Are you ready? But of course you are — why else would you be here? So let’s get to it.

VICIOUS ART

The members of this Swedish band paid their dues playing in the likes of Grave, Entombed, Dark Funeral, and Obscurity. We’ll save the rest of the background info about Vicious Art for just a few minutes, just long enough to get you in a properly vicious frame of mind, with this brand new song called “Chaos Confirmed”:

[audio:https://www.nocleansinging.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Vicious_art_chaosconfirmed.mp3|titles=Vicious Art: Chaos Confirmed]

Of course, there is more after the jump . . . Continue reading »

TROLLS COME OUT TO PLAY!

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 272011
 

It’s a well-known fact that trolls live under bridges, and in caves, and in your basement if you’re not careful. But we now have actual video evidence that trolls come out to play every now and then.

These are Norwegian trolls and they play metal, too. They call themselves Trollfest. We wrote about them last July (see this post) when they released a single from an album they were then starting to shop around to labels. The song is called “Die Verdammte Hungersnot”. The official NCS translation of the song title is “Hungersnot, Dammit!” However, it actually seems to mean “the damned craving” or “the damned hunger”. Kick-ass song, whatever the title means.

Because we’re lazy, we’ll use the description of the music we concocted for that previous post: “speed metal plus oompa music plus Balkan folk tunes plus middle eastern melodies plus Converge-style hardcore shrieking plus more speed metal plus beer and vodka plus more speed metal.”

That was then, this is now. And in the here and now, Trollfest has found a label (NoiseArt Records), and that album (En Kvest For Den Hellige Gral) will finally be released on April 29. To help promote the release, the band are uploading weekly videos between now and the release date. The first one just went up. It’s a “tour diary” of a German tour that Trollfest did last December with fellow Norwegians Pantheon I and Germany’s Finterforst.

The video is shocking, I tell you, simply shocking: It appears that there is snow in Germany during the winter! And European airlines don’t work any better than U.S. ones. And it appears that Norwegian bands never stop drinking, ever. It also appears that they know how to fucken party, both on and off-stage. Check out the video after the jump, plus music, plus other shit, including a picture of a snot otter . . . Continue reading »

THANKFULLY, SCUM WILL RISE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 262011
 

Okay, I’m fully awake now. I was getting there rapidly after listening to that new song from Tombs (see immediately previous post today). And then I saw this new video from California’s Nails, and that brought me to a state of full alertness, or at least as alert as I ever get, which come to think of it is only about as alert as a pupa in a chrysalis.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the new video from Nails. It’s for the song called “Conform/Scum Will Rise” from their killer album Unsilent Death on Southern Lord. It’s about a minute-and-a-half of rancid grindcore with a nice little change of pace at the end. It will tear the skin from your face. What a nice way to wake up (thank you Metal Injection).

TOMBS: VERMILLION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Mar 262011
 

I’m still barely awake after a very late night at Seattle’s El Corazon partaking of Rotting Christ‘s current headlining tour of the U.S. I have a very sore neck, in addition to still being half-asleep. If I ever fully wake up, I will put up some photos of that show.

In the meantime, I did perk up when I saw the news that within the last 24 hours, Tombs began streaming a new track from their next album, Path of Totality, which is scheduled for release by Relapse Records on June 7. This is the follow-up to the Brooklyn trio’s February 2009 album, Winter Hours, which I thought was a fucking killer — a virtually non-stop vortex of grim, hateful, teeth-chattering, blackened doom.

The new song is called “Vermillion”. From the beginning, it crashes over you in a surging wave of tremolo guitar and not-quite-what-you-expect drum progressions — and it doesn’t let up. As on Winter Hours, all the hostility is leavened with ringing guitar melodies, but it’s mainly heavy as fuck, and Mike Hill is in prime, roaring, vocal form. My only complaint? This jam could easily have gone on for twice its actual length without losing one whit of interest. Jump past the jump and listen to “Vermillion”. I feel more awake already. Continue reading »

THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMIN’: SONS OF AEON AND ANOTHER NEW ONE FROM ALTAR OF PLAGUES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Mar 262011
 

Seems like everywhere I turn these days, I run into more good metal. I ran into the music in this post yesterday and was just too damn busy to get it up on the site on a same-day basis.

Taking my enthusiasm with a grain of salt, which of course you should do because I seem to get enthusiastic so often, I will still tell you that I thoroughly enjoyed what I’m about to dish up. The first offering is music from a Finnish band of veteran musicians called Sons of Aeon. The second is yet another debut track from the forthcoming album by Ireland’s Altar of Plagues. It’s an unusually long song, but a stunning one.

SONS OF AEON

Sons of Aeon (pictured above) is a fairly new metal collective based in Jyväskylä, Finland. It includes former Swallow the Sun drummer Pasi Pasanen, plus two members of Ghost Brigade (guitarist Wille Naukkarinen and  Ghost Brigade guitarist Tommi Kiviniemi on bass), vocalist Tony Kaikkonen from Code for Silence, and guitarist Tapio Vartiainen.

They have a 3-song EP in circulation that’s available for free download — and things this good don’t usually come as gifts.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

AGALLOCH: LIVE FILMAGE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 252011
 

Agalloch – Into The Painted Grey / In The Shadow Of Our Pale Companion from (((unartig))) on Vimeo.

I finally got to see Agalloch play a live show in Seattle on the Winter Solstice last December. I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I frothed all over the place in an NCS post. Among other frothy things, I wrote: “I’ll say it briefly, but from the heart: I’ve never heard live metal better than Agalloch’s performance. A very few shows I’ve seen are in the same league, but none has been better. It was a long set — one that began at midnight and lasted almost an hour and a half, but I still wasn’t ready for it to end. I was dazed for long after the show ended.”

If you haven’t had the chance to see this band yet, you can at least watch some very high-quality footage of their show on March 22, 2011, at the Poisson Rouge in NYC. This clip includes two long jams, “Into the Painted Grey” and “In the Shadow of Our Pale Companion”. The clip is more than 20 minutes long. Worth every minute.

NEGURĂ BUNGET: NEW MUSIC

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Mar 252011
 

In the spring of 2009, undisclosed disagreements led to the departure of two of the three members of Romanian black metal band Negură Bunget. But although founding member Hupogrammos and Sol Faur were on their way out the door, they finished working with co-founder Negru on a re-recording of the band’s 2000 album, Măiastru Sfetnic. The new work, called Măiestrit, was released last year, and as we wrote in our review, it’s a remarkably impressive work.

With Hupogrammos and Sol Faur gone, drummer Negru set about recruiting a new line-up, including a guitarist and vocalist called Corb and a guitarist called Spin. In all, the new Negură Bunget is a six-piece band constructed to give even more attention to traditional folk instruments. And the new line-up also released its debut album last year — Vîrstele Pămîntului. We reviewed that one, too (here), and found that it was “a passionate and entrancing combination of extreme metal and traditional folk melodies and instruments.” It also appeared on several of our guest contributors’ Best of 2010 lists.

With that background, we’re very fucking pleased to report that Negură Bunget is set to release an EP (MCD) of new music on April 25 via code666 Records. The name of the EP is Poartă de dincolo (which means “a gate from the above” or “carrying from the other side”). To whet our appetites, the band have just released a wonderful preview track from the EP. You can hear it after the jump . . . Continue reading »

A MISHMASH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  21 Responses »
Mar 242011
 

The word “mishmash” popped into my head when I was thinking about a title for this post. I thought I knew what it meant, but to be sure, I checked the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. It defined “mishmash” as “hodgepodge, jumble”. That was really fucking helpful. I hate it when a dictionary defines one word by using other words that are just as opaque.

The same source explained that the word could have derived from the combination of two Middle English words (mysse and masche) or perhaps from the “reduplication” of the Yiddish word mishn, meaning “to mix”. That made me wonder what the difference is between “duplication” and “reduplication”. REduplication sounds REdundant, but what do I know.

Anyway, I gave up on Merriam-Webster and tried another dictionary, which proved more helpful. It defined “mishmash” as: “A messy or confused mixture of different things.” Which explained why the word popped into my head, since my head is itself a messy and confused mixture of things. That definition did confirm that I’d come up with the right post title, because the music I’m serving up today is definitely a messy and confused collection. It could also be a hodgepodge and a jumble, but I’ve lost patience looking up word definitions at the moment, so I don’t know for sure.

Today I won’t make you guess about the music. The songs on offer are from Torture Division (Sweden), Hellen (Arizona) (pictured above), and Vile (California). I recommend them. They are a mishmash of innervating metal. They will also turn the organ you think with into a mishmash. You may even be reduplicated. (songs after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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