THINGS THAT WILL MAKE YOU SMILE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Dec 312010
 

Now that I have your attention . . .

In the post below this one, we’ve got the next two additions to our list of 2010’s most infectious extreme metal songs, but I thought I’d add this post just for the hell of it.

The only organizing principle is that these items made me smile, and I thought maybe they’d give you some smiles, too, seeing as how tonight is New Year’s Eve and you probably won’t be capable of smiling tomorrow because you’ll be in massive pain recovering from your shit-faced, knee-crawling, sidewalk-smashing, pissing-in-the-sink, over-indulgence with all manner of inebriants and you won’t read anything we post tomorrow because reading is difficult when your eyes are crossed and imaginary demons are hammering your head with ball-peen hammers while cackling mercilessly and imaginary alien spawn are trying, slowly, to gouge their way out of your stomach like a crew of miners hacking their way through a seam of coal.

Where was I?  Oh yeah. Smiles. Smiling now because you won’t be able to smile tomorrow (and neither will I).  After the jump there is music, and video, and more arresting artwork . . . Continue reading »

BADWOLF’S 10 MOST METAL NON-METAL ALBUMS OF 2010

 Listmania, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Dec 302010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Our regular contributor BadWolf has one more 2010 list. To show how broad-minded we are, we’re posting it. It’s not about our usual music, but it’s worth considering.  And below this post is the third installment in our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs.]

So it’s the end of 2010, and finally the unstoppable torrent of mostly useless end-of-year lists is beginning to come to a close. As always, finding some consensus within the metal community isn’t that difficult—the same albums show up on lots of lists in different places over and over again to remind readers that yes, they should probably go pick up that new Deathspell Omega album and now’s as great a time as ever to get into deathcore or post-sludge or whichever genre those readers have not indulged in yet . . .

But aren’t we all missing something?

It’s been my personal experiences that metalheads as a whole can be slow to appreciate some genres outside our collective approximate comfort zone. I can be that way, at least. Fortunately for me, I have friends and fellow music lovers who expose me to tons of great not-metal records.

There are entire worlds of other genres of music that we haven’t even touched upon. And normally we would continue to not touch upon them, but it’s the end of the year and a great time to add just one more album to your download list in the interest of trying something new and exciting.

So, just for the sake of variety, this is my list of 10 unranked not-metal records that deserve a little love from our community. Every one of these is a good album, but they all have something or other that as a metalhead I find very compelling—a post-punk/dance band with grim, frostbit symphonic arrangements, a tremendous slice of guitar loving hardcore-influenced prog, the most brutal lyricist I’ve ever heard, and so much more await below.  (after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS DAN WANTS TO EXPAND YOUR HORIZONS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Dec 272010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Back in November when I was away on an undeserved but still enjoyable vacation and unable to blog, lots of good people stepped up and contributed posts of their own so that NCS wouldn’t have to go dark while I was gone.

One of those contributors, The Artist Formerly Known As Dan, took a running head start on year-end album lists and became one of the first writers in metal blogdom to stake out a position on the year’s best metal (here). That post scored a massive number of hits, no doubt due in part to the fact that it was featured on MetalSucks.

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, we asked Dan if he had made any revisions or additions to the list he prepared a month ago. What we got from him was this.]

So, I hope all the NCS readers aren’t bored with me after my first list. I thought my picks for the best of 2010 were pretty solid, but reading lists can get old, so now I’ll try to focus my attention on one subject. That subject is potential musical recommendations for my NCS brethren that are outside the realm of metal.  I have a pretty wide range of tastes, but I thought that at least some of my “other” music might interest a few of you, specifically because it generally follows the NCS manifesto:

-it’s not pop music

-it has at least one or more of the following characteristics: fast, punishing, cathartic, dark, powerful, crushing

-there is no clean singing

So let’s get started.  (after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

LONG SONGS: BURZUM

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Dec 262010
 

Despite all my humbuggery about Christmas, yesterday was a good day, spent with family, unmarred by even one Christmas song. In what little time I spent listening to metal, I wandered back to a long song I’d discovered only the day before and have been listening to repeatedly. It’s called “Glemselens Elv” and it’s by Burzum. In other words, it’s by Varg Vikernes, from the 2010 comeback album called Belus. It’s an amazing piece of music, and so I decided to add another chapter to the mini-series on long songs that I thought I’d finished weeks ago. (What I thought was the last post in the series is here.)

According to Vikernes, Belus is “the name of the ancient European solar deity of light and innocence”, a more ancient name for Baldur — the “White God”, which was the original name planned for the album until it stirred up such controversy that Vikernes abandoned it. He further explains on the Burzum web site:

Belus is not a religious album or an anti-religious album, nor is it a political one, but an attempt to explore the myths about Belus and unveil the oldest roots of our cultural heritage. The album deals with the death of Belus, his sombre journey through the realm of death and his magnificent return. In essence the album and the story of Belus is meant to be an entertaining story about something that once upon a time played a major role in the forming and shaping of Europe. . . .

Inspiration for the album has come from a variety of sources, and I find my inspiration from fairy tales and myths, from classical music, from memories of what once was, from traditional music, from fantasy, from the wind and weather, from deep forests and running water, from the sky and the sunset, from misty mountains and from yellow leaves falling from age old trees.

Vikernes recorded the song in 2008 in the Tromsø prison, the year before his parole after serving 15 years of a 21-year sentence for burning churches and for the murder of his Mayhem bandmate, Euronymous. (more after the jump, including the song . . .) Continue reading »

LIVING SACRIFICE: OVERKILL EXPOSURE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Dec 222010
 

Here, we have a little break from Listmania.

The 2010 release from Living Sacrifice, The Infinite Order, has been one of our favorite albums of the year. It’s an effective combination of death-thrash violence and heavy-as-shit groove. We won’t be giving too much away to reveal that a song from the album will be on our year-end list of 2010’s most infectious extreme metal songs (which we’ll be rolling out beginning next week).

Today, Noisecreep debuted an official music video for the song “Overkill Exposure” from The Infinite Order. The song is a killer, and the video captures the blunt force of the music. Director Michael Dalton told Noisecreep about the video’s thematic origins: “As [vocalist Bruce Fitzhugh] explained ‘Overkill Exposure’ to me, he wanted to make sure I understood the song dealt with some dark content. The message he was portraying on this song was that the dark/evil things we expose ourselves to open us up to more darkness and evil …”

Dalton continued, “When I set out to make this video, I wanted to make sure nothing was pretty and everything had a very eerie feel. What we ended up getting out of that was a story of a man being filled with images of substance abuse, suicide and murder, all heralded in by a raging Living Sacrifice.”

Whether you agree or disagree with the lyrical message — that when we watch movies or TV filled with violence and evil, we ourselves risk becoming infected by it — the video is a good one. You can watch it after the jump. Continue reading »

FINLAND TRIBUTE WEEK: WE’RE FINNISHED

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Dec 172010
 

Finland Tribute Week started on a lark, and then took on a life of its own. One week of Finnish metal turned into two weeks, and it could easily continue for many more days. But all good things must come to an end. Among other things, this good year for metal is coming to an end, and you know what that means: Year-end lists. We have some for you, beginning on Monday.

Looking back on Finland Tribute Week: Finland has produced a rich variety of metal, and we’ve done our weak-minded best to provide a sense of that. We’ve covered an array of melodic death metal, funeral doom, black metal, humppa metal, folk/pagan metal, battle metal, cello metal, monster metal, and more. Undoubtedly, we will have fucked up in the eyes of many of you by neglecting bands we should have written about. That’s to be expected: “Disappointing” is our middle name (one of many).

We’ve been scratching our pointy heads about what to do in this final post — our last chance before this series ends to highlight Finnish metal bands. We’ve been holding on to one well-known band that’s a favorite of your three NCS co-founders — Swallow the Sun. So,we’ll lead with that. Then we’ll move on to another band we didn’t know about before starting this series, but that many of you have recommended to us: Fall of the Leafe.

And then we’ll finn-ish off this series by doing what we’ve tried to do consistently since the beginning of NCS — tell you about bands you may never have heard of that hit our sweet spot, including promising bands just getting their start. The ones we’ve picked, somewhat randomly, for this wrap-up are Depressed Mode, Nation Despair, and -1 World. Lots of music to cover. Therefore, we will have few words (yeah, we know that will come as a shock). We will let the music speak for itself — after the jump. Continue reading »

FUCKING DEATH METAL: NOX AND DISPARAGED

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  37 Responses »
Dec 162010
 

Oh, the things I do as a result of my borderline OCD affliction. Earlier this morning, I posted the next-to-last feature in our Finland Metal Week tribute, and for the sake of being complete, we focused that post on Apocalyptica, Nightwish, and Lordi. Why did we do that? Because they’re globally popular (massively so), they’re sort of metal, and they’re from Finland.

But really, what were we thinking? This site is called NO CLEAN SINGING. Early on, we defined our main focus as extreme metal of the kind that’s fast, brutal, cathartic. Sure, we don’t limit ourselves to the core NCS musical style — as witnessed by lots of the bands we’ve featured in our Finland Tribute Week posts. But at the same time, we don’t want to give people the wrong impression. As far as music goes, most of the time, this is not a nice place to visit, and we’ve never let “popularity” define the music we feature.

We got a reminder of just how far around the bend we’ve gone from this comment yesterday by one of our long-time, bloody-minded readers, Aaron: “Jesus christ this week has been a fucking long one. I haven’t liked a single band you’ve talked about. Nope, not even Children of Bodom.” Man, that was a wake-up call — one we’re answering.

So while we’re featuring Apocalyptica, Nightwish, and Lordi today — for the sake of obsessive completeness — we need to give ourselves, and maybe some of you, a couple of shots of acid, with a paint-remover chaser. Y’know, just to cleanse the palatte.

Just a couple of quick shots to scour out the inside of our craniums (and yours) and make the blood run in crimson rivulets from our ears and allow us to rage at the skies. Just a couple of songs from the likes of NOX and Disparaged.  (after the  jump . . .) Continue reading »

FINLAND TRIBUTE WEEK: APOCALYPTICA, NIGHTWISH, AND LORDI

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  32 Responses »
Dec 162010
 

We’re down to our last two posts in this Finland Tribute “Week” series. Today, for the sake of completeness, we’re betraying the title and thematic focus of this site. Of the three bands we’re writing about today, only one — Apocalyptica — is a band whose music is on our personal playlists, and none of them fits our definition of extreme. But in terms of global appeal, they’re certainly among the most popular quasi-metal acts to come out of Finland in the last decade. So, we’re paying respect to them through this post. While gritting our teeth. For the sake of completeness.

APOCALYPTICA

Apocalyptica started in 1993 when four classically trained cellists at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki started playing Metallica songs on their cellos. They released a debut album in 1996 (Plays Metallica by Four Cellos), consisting entirely of Metallica covers. Their second album, Inquisition Symphony (1998) included more Metallica covers, plus songs by Faith No More, Sepultura, and Pantera. As fun as it was to hear metal songs covered by cellists, many people (including us) thought this would be a one-and-done novelty act.

We couldn’t have been more wrong. The third album (Cult, 2000) included mainly original songs, and the fourth one (Reflections, 2003) was nothing but original tunes and included drums along with the cellos (with Slayer’s Dave Lombardo providing the drum tracks). Guest vocalists began to appear on the band’s albums, which led to even greater heights of sky-rocketing popularity. Now, with nine albums in their discography (including a couple of “best of” releases), the band has sold over three million records worldwide and has played somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 concerts in 50 countries. Some novelty act.

We’ve seen Apocalyptica in concert twice, and their shows are massively entertaining. The live productions are slick, but these dudes work their butts off on stage, and the fun they have while playing is irresistibly infectious. And yes, a lot of their music legitimately qualifies as metal, despite the hard-rock feel of most of those songs with guest vocalists. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

THE MAN-EATING TREE: A NEW SONG

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Dec 152010
 

We’re not doing a Finland Tribute Week post today because we’re working on the final two posts in the series for tomorrow and Friday. We tried to bribe your patience with a THAT’S METAL! post. Can’t hurt to sweeten the bribe, though. So here’s news about a new song from The Man-Eating Tree.

The Man-Eating Tree are from Finland, so we do have that connection to our ongoing tribute. They feature former Sentenced drummer Vesa Ranta plus current or former members of Poisonblack, Reflexion, and Embraze. We first listened to their music for a MISCELLANY post we did back in August (here), and liked what we heard, even though their brand of atmospheric, cleanly sung metal isn’t what we usually consume. When we started the Finland tribute series, we found out that a lot of you really like this band.

So, you might be interested to know that Century Media is making available a new song from the band available for free download. It’s called “Vultures”, and it post-dates the music recorded for the band’s September 2010 debut, Vines. If you want to get it, go here. But be forewarned — you have to share a link on Facebook or Twitter to get the download, i.e., help Century Media publicize the band. The download link will be active until December 31.

If you’re not crazy about the terms of exchange for that download, just wait a few hours, and someone will surely put the track up on YouTube. In the meantime, all you tree-like man-eaters out there might like the video we’ve got after the jump.  Continue reading »

FINLAND TRIBUTE WEEK: SENTENCED, STONE, AND OMNIUM GATHERUM

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
Dec 142010
 

We’ve learned a thing or two about Finnish metal in the course of writing this series. For example, we learned about two home-grown bands who were especially influential in the progression of metal in Finland, even though they are no longer active: Sentenced and Stone. Those are two of the bands we’re focusing on today. (In other words, it’s time for all Finnish metal nerds to geek out.) The third is a somewhat more recent player in the scene that your NCS co-authors really, really like: Omnium Gatherum. (We are not geeks — at least not all the time.)

SENTENCED

Sentenced released their debut album in 1991. In the decade and a half, or thereabouts, that followed, the band produced seven more albums before announcing in 2005 that The Funeral Album would be their last. They played their final show on October 1, 2005, in Oulu, and the concert was filmed and later released on DVD under the title Buried Alive.

Guitarist and founding member Miika Tenkula died less than three years later, his premature death brought on by a congenital heart condition. The surviving members of Sentenced have continued their careers in other bands, including Poisonblack, KYPCK, and The Man-Eating Tree.

Particularly in their earlier years, Sentenced played an important role in the creation of melodic death metal, paving the way for bands like Children of Bodom by conjoining death-metal aggression with irresistible melodic (and often melancholy) passages. And yet, many people would say (and have said) that their 1995 album Amok is the band’s crowning achievement, and it’s debatable whether “melodic death metal” is a fitting label for it.

(more after the jump . . .)

Continue reading »

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