GENOCIDE PACT AND GRUESOME

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jun 072014
 

I was in a death metal mood this morning and spent some time exploring music from death metal bands I hadn’t heard before. From that foray, I surfaced with two offerings that I’d like to recommend.

GENOCIDE PACT

Genocide Pact are from Washington, DC. Two of their members (Tim and Nolan) also play in a grind core band named Disciples of Christ, and the third (the drummer, Connor) is a member of other bands as well. To date, Genocide Pact have recorded a demo that was released in 2013 by Malokul, which I discovered because A389 Recordings is distributing it on 7″ vinyl with cover art by Joshy of DC’s Ilsa.

The four songs on the demo are stripped-down and devoid of frills or fads. They lumber and crunch like a phalanx of huge earth-moving machines that haven’t had a tune-up in decades, belching the smoke of distortion and periodically squealing with feedback as the gears come close to locking up. The rhythms alternately bolt forward in a d-beat-driven rush, chug like a hellish locomotive, and stagger like a dying giant, with the crash of cymbals and the vocalist’s hoarse growls cutting through the cacophony of this brute-force demolition project. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: 4SCUMS — “WE CAN RESIST”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  8 Responses »
Jun 062014
 

I had this little itching sensation in the back of my skull, a nasty little nagging voice buzzing in the brainstem, telling me: “You can’t end the week with that post about In Flames, Mastodon, and Opeth!!! Did you leave your balls in bed this morning??? Where’s the fucking filth?!?!?”

And right about then I stumbled across a link posted by a Facebook friend to a song by a Russian band named 4scums. Problem solved!

A little investigation revealed that 4scums have released a 2009 album named Пёс Войны and a 2010 EP entitled We Can Resist. Because the EP is available as a free download on Bandcamp and is streaming there, I gave it a spin.

We Can Resist serves up five songs that are best played as loud as you can stand it. They’re short, savage, and incendiary — and really well done. The music is a raucous high-speed rampage of metallic crust punk. The riffs are infectious as hell, the soloing is white hot, the drummer can fly, and the vocals (in Russian) are a howling spray of brimstone and grit. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ISHIMURA — TRANSITION: VOL. 1

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Jun 052014
 

(Andy Synn reviews the new EP by Ishimura.)

I’m mainly reviewing EPs this week it seems. You’ve probably already seen my write-up of the new De Profundis EP, and although I am working on a full-length album review it’s not going to be published until Monday. So in the meantime here’s a quick look at another short-but-sweet little number, with (fingers crossed) another one to follow tomorrow.

Now there’s actually two bands named Ishimura out there at the moment — a nasty Black/Death/Noise hybrid from Mississippi, USA, and a Progressive/Post- Metal group from Kaliningrad, Russia. And if the above image didn’t clue you in to which one I’m covering here today, let me clear it up – it’s the Russian one. Apologies to all the kvltists and grindwhores I may have disappointed.

Now although this Ishimura veer most closely to the Isis style of Post-Metal (something they freely admit to), they’ve managed to integrate some very interesting ideas and a wealth of their own identity into the mix in the process. Over the course of the EP’s three expansive tracks they flirt with a number of progressive touches, weaving in threads of fluttering electronica and unexpected, esoteric instrumentation amidst waves of shimmering sound and sweeping metallic ambience. Continue reading »

OCULUS INFERNUS: IN WHICH THE PROFESSOR INVESTIGATES ELECTROCUTION, FALCONER, SABBATORY, SAGE FRANCIS, AND MOODIE BLACK

 Album Reviews, Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Jun 052014
 

(We welcome the return of Professor D. Grover the XIIIth with the results of his latest musical investigations.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. It has been less than a month since my last missive, which makes the timing on this a bit of a surprise. However, the timing is just right, and so you are joining me for a look at 5 new albums from various artists with whom you may or may not be acquainted. In a bit of a deviation from form, I’m including three artists who have been covered here at NCS, but they have relevant new albums that need to be addressed. Without further preamble, we commence.

ELECTROCUTION

Our first artist, possibly one of the best-known of the previously-mentioned artists, is… wait, what? Electrocution has never been mentioned on No Clean Singing before?

Seriously? Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: MECHINA — “TO COEXIST IS TO SURRENDER”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jun 052014
 

(In this post DGR reviews the new single by Chicago’s Mechina.)

I feel like I’ve been spending a lot of time musically in Illinois lately, between (hopefully) getting a review done for Cimmerian’s January release Hollowing at some point (short version; listen to it, great album that plays in the same realm as Insomnium, Be’lakor, and Omnium Gatherum), and then Chicago in particular with the Watch_Dogs videogame, which has the city down in spirit but not so much in actual layout (a problem I’ve also run into with Infamous and Seattle, and Driver in San Francisco), and Warforged’s EP Essence Of The Land (which hit earlier this year and is still on pretty constant rotation as well). And now Mechina call me back again with another new song, a twelve and a half minute precursor — after the group’s already stellar January release Xenon.

The group’s new song “To Coexist Is To Surrender” is apparently the whole ignition point for the series of albums that have previously been released, all tied into one grand and overarching story — though I will fully own up to having no idea where it is at now, as I was initially operating off of old information when I penned my Xenon review.

However, “To Coexist Is To Surrender” continues the Mechina trend of making their long songs absolutely awesome, and this one in particular provides them with an epic. Not only does the song include narration, radio broadcasts, and extended instrumental sections, it also includes multiple vocalists and an intense and passionate closing section provided by longtime co-conspirator and solo singing artist Mel Rose. Continue reading »

WRETCHED: “CANNIBAL”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Jun 032014
 

(DGR reviews the new album by Wretched from North Carolina, and at the end we have a brand new video from the album.)

My history with Wretched is a spotty one at best. I discovered The Exodus Of Autonomy way too late for my own good, on the insistence of a fellow writer at a previous website, and really enjoyed it — but it was one of those situations where I felt I had really missed the zeitgeist on the band. Thus, when Beyond The Gate hit, that was my legit starting point with Wretched and I found a group who had gone really far into the melodeath spectrum of things, which I still feel was so odd given Victory Records’ slate of artists at the time.

In fact, they still feel like they were then one of the more intense groups on Victory’s roster, not prone to overindulgence on breakdowns and instead an intensely guitar-heavy, straightforward band who bounced between the various spectra of death metal at the drop of a hat. They were a band who were hard to pin down, moving between a variety of genres and landing them with tags like “progressive death core”, “tech-death”, “thrash”, and everything else that could have “death” suffixed or prefixed to it.

Son Of Perdition, on the other hand, is the brand of Wretched that I absolutely fell in love with. Joined by new vocalist Adam Cody (of Columns, Vehemence, Glass Casket, and a handful of other bands), the group took a turn for the absolutely manic. Continue reading »

ARSAFES: “RATOCRACY”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Jun 032014
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by the Russian artist Arsafes, whose work with Kartikeya and other projects we’ve covered frequently at NCS)

I WAS going to review the new Crowbar, but something much more exciting to me (no insult to Crowbar, it’s fucking good) landed on my proverbial desk. It would be accurate to say that Arsafes and I are friends to some extent. We talk a good deal, we share music with each other, and I’m constantly nagging him about when Kartikeya’s gonna release Samudra. But right now, what matters is that he’s decided to revisit the idea of solo material.

There is one previous EP under the Arsafes moniker (discussed here), a blistering EP of industrial death metal with some Meshuggah-isms that was really impressive. Now he’s decided to revisit this idea and do a ful- length album. Not only has he decided to redo all the songs from the mentioned EP, he’s gotten quite a bit of new material together as well. Continue reading »

ENABLER: “LA FIN ABSOLUE DU MONDE”

 Album Reviews  10 Responses »
Jun 022014
 

(BadWolf reviews the new album by Enabler.)

“We all pay for life with death so everything between should be free.”

So begins “Balance of Terror,” one of the many tracks I adore on La Fin Absolue Du Monde, the newest album by midwestern metalcore outfit Enabler. It’s a direct, ideological and emotional piece of language—the kind that vocalist/guitarist Jeff Lohrber excels at. Every well-articulated roar that issues from his maw feels anthemic. Which is funny, considering that Enabler’s particular brand of crusty, noisy, grind-length metalcore doesn’t typically focus on recognizable words, or songs at all for that matter. Lohrber doesn’t conform to expectations. He’s an honest-to-god songwriter in a genre that praises drive-by firebombings over experiences that one wants to dissect and revisit. His songs, each a cry for some sort of justice or sensibility, convey a genuine emotionality that much extreme music lacks.

Enabler is every bit his baby, and what a baby it is. 2012’s All Hail The Void would have been a high point of my year-end list had I given it a spin the year it came out. Last year, Enabler released two EP’s, Shift of Redemption and Flies, both of which produced at least one incredible song (“Live Low” and “Sickened by the Wake”, respectively). To say I was excited for La Fin Absolue Du Monde, would be an understatement—but I had no idea I would love it this much this quickly. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: DE PROFUNDIS — “FREQUENCIES”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jun 022014
 

(Andy Synn reviews the forthcoming EP by the UK’s De Profundis.)

De Profundis have always been one of the more… unique… bands on the UK metal scene. And that’s something that’s been both a blessing and a curse for the band, as their diverse and distinctive style of Progressive Extreme Metal has long been both instantly recognisable and yet frustratingly hard to pin down.

Over the years the band’s sound – doomy, progressive, blackened, deathly – has changed and mutated in a number of ways, yet their artful amalgamation of disparate influences – coupled to an always impressive, intricate instrumental flair – has always remained constant. Despite this, though, many people, myself included, have struggled to define or describe the band in any useful way, without simply resorting to an array of vague references to a multitude of other bands.

And trying to fully elaborate and elucidate precisely what it is that makes the band so special, without falling back on the crutch of these predictable, often ill-defined, comparisons, has been a problem for a while now.

But I can confidently say that Frequencies solves this problem with aplomb, and it does so without sacrificing any of the band’s carefully crafted identity or hard-won credibility. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: FEVER SEA — “FEVER SEA”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
May 302014
 

(Andy Synn reviews the new self-titled EP by Fever Sea.)

A band that I’ve been keeping a rather close eye on for a while now, Progressive/Post- Black Metal troupe Fever Sea, recently released their second, self-titled, EP for ‘Pay What You Want’ over on their Bandcamp page, and I thought it about time we covered this strangely compelling, always intriguing release here at NCS.

While the band’s previous EP The Deluge (reviewed by Islander here), still stands out as a phenomenal debut release by a band full of nascent, blackened promise, their self-titled EP somehow manages to be even better, weaving together moments of angular post-hardcore and atmospheric blackened sorcery into a seamless, multifaceted tapestry of light and shade. Continue reading »

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