(We all forgot that when DGR joined the NCS staff he was subjected to a mild form of hazing — we challenged him to review the entire discography of the Danish metal band Raunchy. He, however, did not forget, though he did take his sweet time on the follow-through. This is the third part of this raunchy hazing; the first review can be found here and the second review here.)

Raunchy continue to make big shifts in their careers by this point. We’re actually achieving something big here, because we’re starting to move into an era where the Internet really came into its own as a music-covering force, and I can actually try to dig deep into what happened without the wayback machine kicking out gibberish in the shape of a middle finger.

Death Pop Romance has a few things interesting in terms of Raunchy’s history:  This was their first release as part of a new contract with Lifeforce Records, their first disc that put them on the two-year album cycle, and their first disc with vocalist Kasper Thomsen. As usual, I tried to get some perspective from the various NCS hooligans in regards to this disc, in my own stupidity forgetting that this whole thing was supposed to be a joke on me. I got a singular “its pretty good” and my personal favorite response so far, which was just, “You’re seriously doing this?”. There were no dire “abandon all hope!” sort of messages, so even though the disc adheres to the Dimmu Borgir styling of “three words that sound good but make no sense together!” album naming, I’m curious as to what Death Pop Romance has in store.

As has been the case so far, some of this will be stream of consciousness and other bits will be written after a few listens. I made one cursory spin prior to typing this specific paragraph so I already have some minor thoughts but have yet to dig deep or even try to differentiate each song – it almost feels like I have a fifty-minute blank space, and no alcohol was involved to accomplish that. Continue reading »

(We all forgot that when DGR joined the NCS staff he was subjected to a mild form of hazing. He, however, did not forget, though he did take his sweet time on the follow-through.)

So, fun story: When I finally became an official writer for NoCleanSinging at the beginning of the year, fellow writer TheMadIsraeli was wrist deep (and at risk of losing a very nice watch!) in his Higher Criticism series – in which he took on a group’s whole discography for something that was part history lesson, part retrospective, part modern day discussion of a group’s music as they had gone through the years. At the time it was Kataklysm, and the idea seemed very sound. It would require a ton of work, but it seemed like a fun way to bring up old discs and expose them to a new audience. Thus, as luck would have it, there would be some joking about how “we should make the new guy go through Raunchy’s discography hurf durf hurr”, followed by repeated head slamming into the keyboard as a sign that the caretaker should probably give them their lunchtime juice box.

Now, I will admit that the name alone tended to cause me to recoil – despite never having listened to any of the band’s music. It always seems like the name Raunchy is the butt of a joke, like it should belong to an R&B boyband, or a nu-metal group. Hell, the name alone has always felt like it was literally (and figuratively, and ultimately) two steps away from either being Rawnchy or R4unchy. Thus, because the name alone is fuck-awful, I’ve always recoiled at the idea of listening to their music. There was a lone voice of support from fellow writer Andy Synn, who has always owned up to having something of a soft spot for the band. I ignored him, because RAUNCHY. Continue reading »