Sep 012010
 


THE ACACIA STRAIN – THE HILLS HAVE EYES

THE ACACIA STRAIN (WORMWOOD IN STORES NOW!) | MySpace Music Videos

Who needs fancy production values, special effects, acting, arty story lines, animation, serious themes, or hot models pretending to be the vocalist’s girlfriend?

Yeah, just fuck all that shit. When three of the four members already look like they belong in prison, you just set the thing in what looks like a dusty prison yard, dress up some dudes to look like guards and give ’em shotguns, figure out which of your friends will play the prison bitch, throw in a big cucumber and some fence-pissing, and have a riot.

Helps to have a heavy-ass deathcore song from a heavy-ass band like Acacia Strain to provide the soundtrack. The song is off their new album, Wormwood.  Yuck it up.

Aug 282010
 

Saturday mornings have to be the least memorable mornings of the week. If you remember anything about Saturday mornings, it’s usually just the fallout of whatever you did on Friday night, and the fallout usually isn’t worth remembering. In fact, sometimes all you want to do is forget.

If you’re like me on a Saturday morning, your ass is dragging and your brain feels like it’s swimming through a pool of rapidly cooling tar. All you want is to be left alone until you recover your senses in the fullness of time.

Well, fuck that shit. You may think that’s what you need, but your friends here at NCS are trained medical professionals, and we know better. We have a prescription for what ails you on this Saturday morning. We think what you need is the aural equivalent of a stun gun to the back of the head. Y’know, something that will jolt you into the world of the living.

Of course, if you really outdid yourself partying last night, this prescription could seriously fuck you up. That’s why we’re taking a page from the playbook of the pharmaceutical companies that run those obnoxious TV ads for drugs you don’t need: We’re giving you a warning:

In rare cases, people who listen to the music you’re about to hear on a Saturday morning will bleed from the ears and nose, develop uncontrollable convulsions, experience explosive diarrhea, and/or fall into irreversible comas. If you’re pregnant, listening to this music may lead to spontaneous abortions or cause your child to come into the world with its eyes permanently crossed. Do not listen to this music while driving, or while sitting, standing up, or laying down. If you are in the middle of a vicious hangover, you should induce vomiting now, in the privacy of your own bathroom, instead of risking a spew down the front of your shirt once the music begins.

By clicking past the jump to listen to the music that follows, you and your heirs and assigns agree to irrevocably release and hold harmless NO CLEAN SINGING from all resulting claims of damage, past, present, or future, whether currently known or unknown, anticipated or unanticipated, minor or fatal, and you assume all risk of paralysis, impotence, rectal bleeding, facial boils, hair loss, necrotizing fasciitis, seeping mouth ulcers, and chronic ventricular dysrhythmia.

Continue reading »

Aug 192010
 

Do you ever feel that you’re caught in some cosmic game of whack-a-mole? You’re in a dark place, maybe one you put yourself in, maybe one somebody else put you in. You’re trying to climb out, and just as you get your head into daylight, a big rubberized mallet whacks you in the skull, and down you go falling again.

You try to climb out another way, and just as you struggle above the edge of the chasm, wham! It happens again. And again. It continues to the point when all you can do is cry out to the deity of your choice, “How ’bout a little mercy for a brother?!”

If you’re caught in that game, take heart. Eventually the wielder of that cosmic mallet will get bored and move on down the carnival midway to torment some other poor schlub in some other game of chance. Unless of course you’re hammering yourself in the head — in which case you’re fucked until you figure out that you’re the one that needs to put down the mallet.

If you’re caught in that game at the moment — and it does happen to all of us with varying frequency — music can sometimes help bring a little peace, or at least a little distraction from that shooting pain in your head while you wait for the torment to pass.

Our distraction of choice is metal, and for those of you who are currently caught in a whack-a-mole loop, we’ve got offerings from two bands with new/recent releases: Equilibrium (pictured above) (Germany) and Nattsol (Norway).   (there’s music after the jump — that’s the point, ain’t it?) Continue reading »

Aug 142010
 

We don’t exactly run like a well-oiled machine here at NO CLEAN SINGING. We run more like a three-legged mule.  But today we’re running particularly late.

We do have a post in the works, but it won’t be finished for a couple hours. We just didn’t want you to think we had finally failed to live up to the commitment we made when we started this site — that we would have something new for you every day.

To tide you over, here’s a video from a Swedish band called Canopy — about which we’ll have more to say in today’s main post when we get the fucking thing finished. This song is called “For the Sickened Voice to Hear”, and it’s from the band’s 2009 album, Will and Perception. This song is very cool. And this is just the tip of the Canopy iceberg . . . .

(Thanks to ElvisShotJFK for tipping us off to this video.)

Aug 132010
 

The last couple of days my day job has had my head in a fucking vise. I’ve barely had time to create posts for this site, but haven’t had much time to browse other metal sites I usually frequent in order to keep up with what’s happening in the metal cosmos. I did a little catching up last night, and found two stupendous videos that have just been released over the last 48 hours.

Because I’m a little slow to find them, you may have seen the videos already, but I’ve got to put them up anyway because they’re both so cool — in very different ways. Both of them made me exclaim “Holy Fuck!” (hence, the really imaginative title of this post).

The first one is a video of “Alas, Lord Is Upon Me” from Behemoth’s most recent album, Evangelion. I saw a censored version of this video on a couple of other metal sites, but this morning I found an uncensored version that’s now out. The only difference from the censored version is that there are a couple of flashes of nudity (as a priest in his vestments has sex with a naked woman in a church). The images in this slick video (even when they don’t involve nudity) are striking.

The second video is a live pro-shot performance by the reconstituted Polish death-metal band Decapitated. I got excited about this one mainly because Decapitated’s heavy-grooved, technical music is just so damned awesome, and this performance appears to be the first since the awful 2007 van accident that killed the band’s drummer and left its vocalist in a coma.

In fact, the only original member of the band still left is guitarist Wacław “Vogg” Kiełtyka. But based on the evidence of this video, Decapitated can still kick your ass into the stratosphere.  (both videos are after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

Aug 112010
 

The human brain, if left to its own devices without a lot of external distractions or things to focus on, and if not previously saturated with intoxicants, will jump around from place to place in all sorts of unpredictable ways. That’s kind of what happened to me and my tiny brain last night. Except I was mildly intoxicated. By the end of this post, you may think I’m still intoxicated.

It all started with a fan-filmed video of a U.K./Australian band called Pendulum playing a song called “Self Versus Self” on stage at the U.K. edition of the Sonisphere festival, which took place on July 30 – August 1. I’d never heard of Pendulum. They’re not a metal band. According to the Blabbermouth blurb that featured this video, they’re a drum-and-bass band.

What caught my eye was that, according to the blurb, Anders Fridén of In Flames joined Pendulum on stage for the  performance of that song.

As it happens, all of us here at NCS are big In Flames fans.  We’re still fans despite the slagging the band has suffered from some In Flames purists over the musical direction of their last few albums. So, I decided to watch the video, while at the same time wondering, “What the fuck is Anders Fridén doing on stage with this Pendulum band?”

The quality of the video isn’t that great, but I liked the song. So, after a little research, I found out that the song is on a Pendulum album released earlier this year called Immersion — and it turns out that In Flames recorded the song with Pendulum. Which led to another “what the fuck?” moment.

We’re clearly late to this party, because we discovered that lots of other metal blogs tumbled to this strange collaboration months ago. So we’re not just a little late to the party, we’re the kind of late where you show up and all that’s left is a bunch of people passed out in their own piss. But hey, better late than never, right?  (more unpredictable jumping around, including video and music, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »