MYSTERIES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  20 Responses »
Mar 232011
 

I decided to fuck with you a little bit today. Not in the carnal sense, of course. I mean fuck with your minds.

Below are two songs I discovered yesterday and am diggin’ mightily. I not telling you what they are. The first one is by a band I bet you haven’t heard of. The second one is by a band you’ve definitely heard of, but unless you’re one of the few people who have already heard the song, I bet you won’t be able to guess who it is, because the song doesn’t sound quite like anything they’ve done before.

If I lose either of these bets, I will send you $100.

Wait, that was ridiculous. Let me amend my offer. If I lose the bet, I will send you a picture of $100, plus a picture of a cookie.  If I win the bet, you send me an actual $100. I’m relying on the honor system here. The mysteries will be revealed after the jump — but don’t jump until you’ve listened.

MYSTERY NO. 1:

Mystery No 1

[audio:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3595267/Mystery%20No%201.mp3|titles=Mystery No 1]

MYSTERY NO. 2:

Mystery No 2

[audio:http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3595267/Mystery%20No%202.mp3|titles=Mystery No 2]
Continue reading »

A TRIO OF SONGS FROM SUIDAKRA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 222011
 

We first discovered German’s SuidAkrA (damn, that’s hard to type) with the release of their 2009 album, Crógacht. Their blend of melodeath and Celtic-flavored folk metal proved to be appealing, and we went backward and became even bigger fans of Caledonia (2006) and Command To Charge (2005). Of course, that doesn’t exhaust SuidAkrA’s discography, since six more albums preceded Command To Charge.

The band’s tenth album of original music — Book of Dowth — is on its way, scheduled for release on March 25 via AFM Records. Within the last day, the band have made a total of three songs from the album available for streaming on their Facebook page, but we also have them for you here, in addition to the album’s eye-catching cover art up above. Belgian graphic artist Kris Verwimp created the cover, and is also credited with developing the album’s lyrical concept.

Speaking of that, the band has explained that the concept of Book Of Dowth “chronicles the mythology of a mysterious race of demonic beings known as the ‘Fomor.’ Starting with the discovery of an ancient book at the excavation of Dowth (a Neolithic passage tomb in the Boyne Valley, Ireland), it unveils the yet untold story of the rise and fall of the Fomorian horde throughout history and far, far beyond . . . .”

Man, yet another race of demonic beings we hadn’t heard of! Demonic beings must breed and inter-breed like rabbits, yet they seem to keep to themselves. However well-hidden, this race now has an album to memorialize their perfidity. After the jump, you can check out the new tracks and our take on them, plus a video of one of them, if you haven’t already seen it. Continue reading »

EXPERIMENTATION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

We are consumed, body and mind, in a never-ending search for ways of improving the NCS experience for you, our beloved readers, who thankfully have way too much time on your hands.

Actually, to be brutally honest, which is the only kind of honest we know how to be at this site, we don’t think much about improving anything around here because that would involve . . . well . . . it would involve thinking. Which is why almost nothing has changed since we started NCS, except on those rare occasions when someone else has basically done all the thinking for us, like when groverXIII (TNOTB) just up and re-designed our site banner out of the goodness of his black heart.

Well, recently we found out that some of you have been experiencing delays in streaming or downloading song files when we include a song-link in our posts instead of an embedded audio player. This could be explained by network congestion or your own bandwidth limitations, but I suppose it could have something to do with our file-hosting service. 

So, we decided to experiment and see what happens when we use a different service. We randomly picked two songs as the guinea pigs. Can you guess which album one of them came from? (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MONDAY METAL: MALFEITOR, MACHINAE SUPREMACY, AND MARGIN OF ERROR

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

When things come together in a way that makes an an alliterative post title possible, it’s just awesome, don’t you think?

In the course of catching up on metal news over the weekend, we came across three items that caught our bloodshot eyes. Apart from the fact that they all concerned bands whose names begin with “M”, the music has nothing in common.

ITEM ONE: The first item concerned a band from Sweden called Malfeitor. There’s a black metal band from Italy with the same name, and a couple of long-defunct bands from Norway and the U.S. that liked the name, too — but this ain’t any of them. This band had its genesis in Sweden back in the early 90’s and then dissolved in 1994. But it’s become apparent that Swedish death-metal bands are like vampires – they never die.

In 2007, two of the band member — Benny Moberg and Mattias Parkkila — started another death metal band called Blood Mortized (along with ex-Amon Amarth guitarist Anders “Hansson” Biazzi), which put out a debut album in 2009 and is about to release a 3-song EP on cassette. Last year Moberg left Blood Mortized to resuscitate Malfeitor, and he has now been joined by Parkkila and drummer Janne (Rudberg) Björkenfjäll.

Malfeitor have recently started streaming their first new song in 17 years, plus they’ve got a teaser track that includes instrumental snippets from five songs on an album they plan to release in 2011 (the vocals haven’t yet been recorded for those songs). After the jump, we’ve got the new song and that teaser.

ITEM TWO: The second item concerns another band from Sweden — Machinae Supremacy — but they’re pretty far over toward the other end of the metal spectrum from Malfeitor. What grabbed our attention about these dudes is the fact that they’re one of the three support acts for Children of Bodom‘s “Ugly World Tour”, which began this past weekend — the other two being Amon Amarth and Ensiferum.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MOUTH WATERING: ANAAL NATHRAKH, ALTAR OF PLAGUES, AND CRUACHAN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 172011
 

Seeing as how this is St. Patrick’s Day (in addition to being the anniversary of the patent for the rubber band), we thought you might like to hear a bit more Irish metal. To be precise, a bit more new Irish metal. A couple of new songs from bands you might have heard of, as teasers for albums they have on the way: Altar of Plagues and Cruachan.

But first, we want to make sure you’re aware that Candlelight Records has made available a new song from yet another forthcoming album — this one by Anaal Nathrakh. They’re not Irish. They’re British. But they’re fecking awesome, and we just discovered this new song, and it’s fecking awesome, so even though it seems to have been drifting around the webz for a few weeks, we’re still leading off this post with it.

ANAAL NATHRAKH

The band’s new album, called Passion, will be released in Europe on the May 23. On some other day, the rest of the world will presumably get their official shot at it. The new song now available from the album is called “Volenti Non Fit Iniuria”. That Latin phrase literally means something like “no injury is done to a person who consents”, but it’s also the name of a legal doctrine.  (more after the jump, including these three songs . . .) Continue reading »

SYSTEM OF AN AMON AMARTH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  20 Responses »
Mar 122011
 

Sometimes, the Internet is a very bad thing. It offers temptations, sometimes temptations that I find irresistible. And I’m not talking about porn. I’m talking about . . . what you’ll find in this post.

The backstory: Amon Amarth was one of the bands on that 70,000 TONS OF METAL cruise that we started making fun of more than a year ago. In fact, in the first of several posts about the cruise, as it was being announced and promoted, we said this on February 2, 2010, imagining what we would be asking a year later as the cruise ship limped back to port:

  • Is there anything left of the ship?
  • “70,000 Tons of Metal” — but what was the total tonnage of weed smuggled on board?
  • How many people went over the side, never to be seen again?
  • How many people were hospitalized along the way?
  • How many passengers are still in jail on Cozumel?
  • How many tourists signed up for this, thinking it was just a normal Caribbean cruise?
  • Did Amon Amarth eat any of those tourists?
  • Was the bilge big enough to hold all the projectile vomiting?
  • Did anyone actually go up on deck into the sunlight?
  • Have photos surfaced on the interwebs?

Well, the cruise is now over, and as far as we know, Amon Amarth didn’t eat any wayward tourists. But Johan Hegg did do a karaoke performance of the best song on System Of A Down‘s Toxicity album, “Aerials”. And yes, his performance did surface on YouTube, and it was, and is, a wondrous thing.

So wondrous, in fact, that Amon Amarth is including a cover of the song as an iTunes-exclusive bonus track on the forthcoming Surtur Rising album. Wanna hear it? Stay with us after the jump, then . . . Continue reading »

AND IF ANYTHING IN YOUR SKULL IS STILL UN-JARRED . . .

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Mar 122011
 

In retrospect, I over-promised in today’s first post. Only three of the songs in that post qualify as skull-rattlers. I’m worried that the fourth one may have allowed your skull contents to settle back into their usual place. Have to fix that.

Lo and behold, I just saw two more videos that will finish the job I tried to start in the first post. One is high-quality footage of Deicide playing live in Denver on March 2. Clips of the entire concert have just been uploaded to YouTube. I picked footage of Deicide performing “Conviction” — one of the songs off the new album, To Hell With God. I’m so bummed I missed this tour when it came through Seattle last weekend. Death fucking metal! Fucking death metal! Metal fucking death!

The second video is for a song by an Albuquerque, NM, band called Noisear. The song is called “The Last Spark of Resistance”. It’s from Noisear’s second full-length, Subvert the Dominant Paradigm, which was released last month on Relapse Records. I haven’t yet heard the album, but this song will give your cranium a thorough death-grind drubbing. The video isn’t terribly original – scenes of natural and man-made apocalyptic occurrences – but as Hobbes said of the life of man in a state of war, the song itself is “nasty, brutish, and short.”

Both clips are after the jump . . . Continue reading »

JAR SOMETHING LOOSE IN YOUR SKULL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  18 Responses »
Mar 122011
 

To start your weekend off right — NCS style — I’ve got four songs for you. Two of them are old (and set to riveting videos) and two of them are brand new. They may seem like a random selection, but there are connections:

(1) The two older songs involve bands that have just cross-pollinated; (2) all four songs will jar something loose in your heads (you weren’t really planning on doing anything with your heads this weekend anyway, were you?); and (3) this music is perfect if you want to be part of the metal IN crowd, because the names of all four bands include the letters “IN”.

Okay, I didn’t say all the connections would necessarily be meaningful. Meaningless connections work for me, too. Anyway, the music I’ve collected is from Origin (U.S.), Skinless (U.S.), Insision (Sweden), and Insense (Norway). Rattle your head . . . after the jump. Continue reading »

AMON AMARTH: “FOR VICTORY OR DEATH”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Mar 102011
 

And our Surtur Rising watch continues . . .

Just hours ago, Metal Hammer debuted the third song from Amon Amarth‘s forthcoming album. This song is called “For Victory Or Death”. Amazingly, the song sounds like Amon Amarth, which means it’s another immediately recognizable melodeath gallop. I’m not quite as enamored of this one as I was of the first two (both of which we slapped up on this site as fast as humanly possible after their release), but I do like it, and it certainly does nothing to dim my enthusiasm for this album.

I couldn’t hack the Metal Hammer site in a way that would allow me to embed the song here at NCS — but I then discovered that the song made its way to YouTube about one hour ago.  So . . . click past the jump and you can hear “For Victory Or Death” without leaving the grasping claws of NCS. Continue reading »

NUNS IN THE NUDE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  39 Responses »
Mar 102011
 

NUNS, NUDITY, AND BLACK METAL.

Okay, now that I have your attention:

I have the kind of mind that’s made happy by serendipitous connections between random occurrences. Maybe it’s a deep-rooted desire for order in the chaos of life. Or maybe I’m just easily made happy. Either way, within a 24-hour period I discovered two new music videos by two somewhat out-of-phase black metal bands that involved . . . nuns and nudity.

Let’s be clear: I do not fantasize about nude nuns. No way, no how. Not me. I just thought it was an interesting coincidence. Plus, these aren’t your average nuns. And this isn’t your typical black metal either.

The first clip is a new single by our favorite Ukrainian party animals, Semargl. They may not be TRVE, but damn, they know how to get you shakin’ your booty. The second clip is from a New York horde called Imperial Triumphant. The song featured in their blood-drenched video is closer to BM-standard, but it also has some rock-the-fuck-out hooks in it and cello riffing. Granted, it’s challenging to focus on the music when your mind is distracted by what’s happening on-screen, but I liked both songs.

A word of “warning”: I’m not kidding about the nudity. Be careful about who’s peering over your shoulder when you watch these. Continue reading »

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