HIGH ON FIRE: “DE VERMIS MYSTERIIS”

 Album Reviews  15 Responses »
Apr 162012
 


(Our guest groverXIII (ex-TNOTB) reviews the new album by High On Fire, which is out now on eOne Music.)

I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to review High On Fire’s De Vermis Mysteriis for a couple of weeks now, ever since Islander asked me to take a crack at it. I’m not really sure why it’s taken me so long. I mean, I loved Snakes For The Divine, this album’s predecessor, and really, High On Fire are probably the biggest name in stoner metal nowadays. And yet, something about De Vermis Mysteriis just failed to grab me the way that Snakes For The Divine did.

It’s fair to say that this album will be a bit of a divisive one for High On Fire’s fanbase, perhaps even more so than the previous one. Let me backtrack a bit. High On Fire was formed out of the ashes of stoner/doom legends Sleep by guitarist Matt Pike, while Sleep’s bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius went on to form Om. High On Fire developed a pretty solid following with its first four albums: The Art Of Self Defense, Surrounded By Thieves, Blessed Black Wings, and Death Is This Communion.

2010’s Snakes For The Divine, however, brought a change in labels (from Relapse to E1) and in sound, courtesy of much-maligned producer Greg Fidelman, best known for his clip-tastic contributions to Metallica’s Death Magnetic. Fidelman brought a new clarity to High On Fire’s sound, clearing away some (but not all) of the fuzz and dividing the fanbase between those who disliked the new sound and those who liked it. Snakes was certainly the album that took High On Fire’s profile to new heights, bringing in a large number of new fans, all of whom had to be heavily anticipating its follow-up.

And that brings me back to De Vermis Mysteriis. Continue reading »

NATRON

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Apr 132012
 

(TheMadIsraeli is treating his sick self with sick music. And why the fuck not?)

For some reason, whenever I’m sick I’m compelled to listen to the messiest, filthiest, nastiest, most obscure death metal I can find.  Maybe I feel like I need music that fits my physical state, in order to exist in equilibrium with the universe, but either way, it’s just a compulsion I have.

Enter Natron.

I had no idea who the fuck Natron were nor why I had never heard of them before.  It turns out that they are tech-death veterans of Italy (and I do mean vets — we’re talking a consistent lineup since ’94) who’s latest album is this year’s Grindermeister.  I’m not here to talk about that one, though, although this review is very much related to it.

Instead, this is about Natron’s 1996 full-length debut, Hung Drawn And Quartered.  Why is this relevant to their new album Grindermeister?  Well, 8/10 of that album was used to re-record songs from Hung Drawn And Quartered.  And by that I mean that all of the songs except one on the new release are re-recordings of the debut.  The reason for doing this?  I’m sure it’s because Hung Drawn And Quartered suffers from some absolutely ghetto-ass, dank-dungeon-recorded-in-a-rehearsal-room-with-a-mic-in-the-center-of-the-room style elbow grease.  I’m not gonna lie, that album sounds like utter shit.  BUT THE MUSIC IS SO FUCKING GOOD I COULD CARE LESS. Continue reading »

IMAGINARY FLYING MACHINES – PRINCESS GHIBLI II

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Apr 132012
 

(I got this post by e-mail from DemiGodRaven, with this message from him: “I’m going to post about heavy metal Japanese movie theme songs. Let’s see how NCS readers handle that. Come at me, bro.” So go ahead, come at him . . .)

Holy crap, they made another one of these.

That’s literally the only way I can describe my sense of somewhat wild bewilderment at the fact that there’s another Princess Ghibli disc after the last one. Princess Ghibli is a project by Imaginary Flying Machines, a moniker taken up by a bunch of different groups in order to release a compilation of metal versions of various Studio Ghibli movie theme songs.

Studio Ghibli is a legendary animation house over in Japan. They’ve made some incredibly beautiful and incredibly popular movies over the years. In some senses they’re a cultural landmark in the same way something like Disney is over here. I studied Japanese for three years in High School (I remember fuck all, don’t ask) and that is where I was exposed to a large chunk of these songs and films.

Given Japanese artists’ usage of hair-metal and glam-metal styled music to open their various anime programs, the concept of something like this isn’t too far of a stretch. Then you actually listen to the first release and you realize the whole “this” is off-the-wall nuts. None of the groups really change their style in order to match the songs; instead, the songs are filtered through each specific band. Thus, you wind up with stuff like Claudio from Disarmonia Mundi screaming a bunch of Japanese at the top of his lungs and having at best, a very rough idea of anything that he is saying. When I interviewed him for TNOTB, he admitted to this, saying the whole project was crazy. That is why I am somewhat shocked that there is another one. Continue reading »

IN MOURNING: “THE WEIGHT OF OCEANS”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Apr 122012
 

(Yesterday, Sweden’s In Mourning began a limited-time streaming of their new album. Today, TheMadIsraeli has a review.)

Fuck me for forgetting about this.

It seems even when sick, there is to be no rest for me.  I completely forgot that the new opus of melodic death doom metal masters In Mourning, The Weight Of Oceans, was to be out soon.  As you can imagine, when they started streaming this album yesterday I immediately had to get on that shit.  It’s a vital part of the new movement of melodic death metal that mixes powerful melodies, pedal-point riffing, and drama with doom metal’s macabre melancholy and profound slower tempos.

In Mourning made quite a splash with their debut, Shrouded Divine, an album I love to this day.  Their second release, Monolith, was a good album, but they tried to go for a more energetic approach that, both in tempo and in melody, had fewer connections to doom.  Something about it just didn’t sit right with me; it just didn’t feel like In Mourning to me.  Thankfully, The Weight Of Oceans is a return to In Mourning’s doom-intertwined roots.

In Mourning, for the uninitiated, incorporates the typical influences of this new style of melodic death metal at their core, essentially combining the slow tempos and proggy song structuring of old school Opeth with Insomnium’s poignant, to-the-point melancholic melodies and sense of melodrama and dignity.  The band are also obviously influenced by the spearheads of this new style of melodeath, Daylight Dies.

In Mourning definitely have their own sound though.  Their attack is precise and intricate, and their sense of melody focuses less on complex transitions and more on straight-forward, mournful melodic progressions.  The complexity of the composition is more in the realm of how the guitars play with one another, creating some quite dazzling walls of melody.  Björn Pettersson and Tim Nedergård are one of my favorite current guitar duos in metal right now.  Their sense of compositional teamwork is absolutely astounding, acting as one in generating an intricately woven overcast of despair and agony that just consumes the listener. Continue reading »

JEFF LOOMIS AND THOSE RIFFS

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 102012
 

(TheMadIsraeli dragged himself out of his phlegm-soaked sickbed to write this retrospective about one of his guitar idols and to provide a brief review of Plains of Oblivion.)

I’m going to share something personal and meaningful about myself with you NCS folk.

I want to be a musician, in a band, and doing the albums-and-touring deal for a living.  If I were, I wouldn’t be doing this music journalism bullshit [editor’s intrusion: I’m sure he meant that in the nicest possible way].  It’s pretty much my alternative as a means of remaining close to something I love.  I’m a guitar player. I’ve played the instrument for over 10 years now (13, to be precise), trying my best to hone my skill and technique.  I’m all too broke to realize any of these dreams though — so broke that I can’t afford to buy a suitable PC, camera, or other gear necessary to produce anything of respectable quality.  So I sit here, wishing, waiting.

I like to think I’m a guitarist first and a music journalist second, as much as it seems The Good Lord doesn’t want to arrange the cards in that order. But even though that’s not the hand I’ve been dealt, it doesn’t change a simple fact about me . . .  I love metal, and I love the fucking guitar.

We guitar players hold onto our idols — those people who for each of us were the inspiration, the people who are our personal golden standard of WHAT IT IS to be a badass riff-writer or shredder.  For myself, I’m unable to pick one favorite, but I can tell you the 5 definitive icons in my evolution as a guitarist:

Chuck Schuldiner, Christofer Malmstrom, Per Nillson, Jeff Loomis, and Alex Skolnick.

If you’ve been paying attention to news in the metal world lately and know what day today is, you would probably know who this piece is going to be about even without the post title and photo. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: MAGENTA HARVEST – “APPARITION OF ENDING”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 092012
 

We seem to be living in an era where extreme “technicality” has infiltrated almost all genres of extreme metal. Rapid riffing and picking and barely human drum assaults seem to be a formula of choice employed by many bands to “modernize” their sound, almost regardless of the sub-genre in which they dabble. I’m not complaining, because I happen to enjoy bursts of flash and thrash, but it’s a refreshing change of pace, in a way, to find a newer band who create appealing music without resorting to pyrotechnics, acrobactics, and contortion and rely instead on the ability to write good songs and perform them capably. Magenta Harvest are one such band.

This Finnish group is composed of current and former members of Finntroll, Chthonian, Mygrain, and …And Oceans. They released a debut EP, A Familiar Room, in February 2011, which I really enjoyed — reviewing it here and including one of the EP’s songs in our list of 2011’s “Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs” here. Late last month, they self-released a second EP, Apparition of Ending.

Stylistically, it’s in the same vein as A Familiar Room — a dark form of melodic death metal that’s both viciously heavy and massively infectious. The changes from the first EP to this one are not huge — the most noticeable change is in the sparing but effective use of keyboards, courtesy of Finntroll’s Aleksi Virta. But the band’s songwriting flair is still very much in evidence, and in only four songs the band offer a lot of variety. Continue reading »

FLAY YER COCKMEAT ON MY HAMMER

 Album Reviews, Phro's Posts  4 Responses »
Apr 082012
 

 (Get your favorite blankie and read Phro’s review of the forthcoming album by Flayed Disciple, the first song from which we premiered here.)

You remember that blankie or teddy bear or giant horse cock you had when you were a kid that you wouldn’t let go of no matter how much your mommy begged for a turn? How you’d snuggle with it at night when you went to sleep and carry it around with you when you were running from bullies? It was warm and familiar and it just felt…right?

Well, that’s Flayed Disciple’s Death Hammer for me. It’s kinda old school but new school enough to avoid sounding so old school that you go “Oh, hey, another old school death metal band. Yah.” I’m assuming this is a result of their death-thrash sound (as the Wikipedia calls it). It’s familiar, but not trite. It hits that sweet spot that you didn’t even know you were missing and then massages that spot until you feel all warm and satisfied. All of this sounds like a horrible way to describe a death metal album, but this album is like a security blankie that demands blood sacrifice.

The first real, full song is called “Westboro Massacre” and it is littered with the holey (heh) corpses of the faithful. (To be honest, I have no idea exactly what the lyrics are, but the song ends with audio clips of screaming, punching flesh, and machine guns.) It’s a full steam ahead, let-me-rub-my-dick-and-awesome-solos-in-your-face monster of a track. The vocals are heavy and distorted and gravelly like a gangster Cookie Monster who’s been chugging napalm. They’ve strewn a few shorter solos throughout the song in addition to a longer one towards the end, so you don’t get the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-HOLY-SHIT-A-SOLO (non)surprise composition. (Though it does end up with quite a bit of soloing, but they are solos with more balls than wankery.) Continue reading »

TYRANT OF DEATH: “RECONNECT”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Apr 072012
 

(For the fifth day in a row, DemiGodRaven serves up a review. Today, the subject is the new album by Canada’s Tyrant of Death.)

Tyrant Of Death has been one of my favorite solo guitar projects since I came across it. I don’t think many in the blog-o-sphere have waved the ToD flag harder than I have. The combination of noisy-as-hell distortion on the guitars and wall-of-sound production scratches the exact same itch that made Strapping Young Lad one of my favorite bands.

The project has seen a new lineup addition over time in the form of a vocalist who snarls his way through quite a few songs, So if you’ve known Tyrant Of Death as the goddamn guitar project that asshole DGR always posts about, then you may be surprised with some of the stuff that has emerged since early 2011.

Tyrant Of Death put out an incredible mass of material over the past year, and the fact that most of it has been released for free has been a fantastic bonus. Reconnect marks the first release of 2012 and it also marks an interesting change: It is the first ToD disc that you’re being asked to pay for. That means instead of saying, “Hey, this is excellent free music” and talking about it from a critical perspective, we now have to make a value judgement about this release as a whole. That is where things get interesting.

Having spent much time with the variety of material available under the Tyrant Of Death banner, I can say this: There seem to be two somewhat interlocking phases represented in the Tyrant Of Death discography. One of them is very electronics-focused and guitar-assisted. The music comes out sounding very computerized and includes hefty elements of electronica beats. Those releases aren’t as heavy as most of ToD’s stuff and they’re not my personal favorites, but they’re still interesting. Continue reading »

THE ALGORITHM: “TR0JANS”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 062012
 

(As you may have noticed, DemiGodRaven has gone on a reviewing spree, and this is his latest, with thoughts about the new EP from The Algorithm.)

Can I feasibly post about an album on NoCleanSinging if it contains NoSinging at all? Is it even an album if the whole thing is just a three-song EP with only one really new song on it?

For those of you who don’t know about The Algorithm, a quick intro. The Algorithm is a one-man electronica project (Frenchman Rémi Gallego) whose mastermind uses a variety of elements of heavy metal as part of it. The whole thing is a wildly spastic experiment. One second he could be using something that has been characterized as djent-step, and another second continually hammering on a bass drum sample over and over. The result is something that The Algorithm has, perhaps a bit self-indulgently, begun referring to as ‘mindfuck’.

While I’m not sure about the shelf-life of that label, I do think that almost everything The Algorithm has done has been absolutely amazing. He recently signed with Basick Records and soon after released a quick EP known as Tr0Jans. It contains one new song, which is the aforementioned title track, and then two songs that were previously attached to other releases and then reworked for this one. Basick Records have been asking for 2.49 in British funny money, which calculates to around four or five bucks in American dollars for the three songs. Continue reading »

ACEPHALIX: “DEATHLESS MASTER”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Apr 062012
 

Deathless Master, the titanic new album by San Francisco’s Acephalix, is the best blast of old-school death metal that 2012 has yet delivered, and it’s difficult to conceive of anything else topping it by year end.

The formula for the album’s success is relatively simple to state, but if translating the formula into reality were easy, the album wouldn’t be such a noteworthy addition to the year’s phalanx of new metal:

  • write songs that grab the listener by the back of the neck and slam heads into hard surfaces without any possibility of resistance
  • tune the guitars and the bass so low that they’re communing with the core of the earth
  • max out the distortion to the point where guts churn with cancerous tumors and listeners can smell the suffocating fumes of that giant chainsaw sound so vividly that their nose hairs burn
  • step up the gain and raise the tuning to produce guitar solos that ignite like phosphorous bombs in a black night
  • shift all the sound with a reverb effect so that it echoes like the inside of a tomb
  • configure the drum patterns into a mix of d-beats, blast-beats, and straight rock rhythms that carry you back to the genesis of Swe-death circa 1991 (and throw in some cowbell for good measure)
  • add vocals . . . add vocals like . . .well, fuck, damned few people can sing like Dan . . .

Continue reading »

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