BEGGING FOR INCEST: “ORGASMIC SELFMUTILIATION”

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Mar 012012
 

My motivation for reviewing this album by Germany’s Begging for Incest is of course obvious: In our continuing effort to increase site traffic, I’m making a play for people who google-search incest and self-mutilation sites (and thanks go to DGR for this creative marketing tip). That, and I figured that this album would go a long way to balance the NCS scales this week after we loaded up Sunday’s posts with reviews of Lacuna Coil, Brand New, and Giant Squid.

I wasn’t wrong, at least about the scale-balancing thing. Only time will tell whether we get the incest and self-mutilation pervs — though I have high hopes. But on the scale-balancing, this album should sit like a lead weight on the rancid side of the balance arm. If you couldn’t guess from the band name and the album title, it’s a vat of thick, brutal death/slam stew with bones and fresh guts gurgling on the surface and something worse churning down on the bottom.

I have to lead off the description with the vocals, because they’re such a dominant feature of the band’s sound: You get the sound of the pig’s entire life (often within the span of individual songs) — from the frantic squeals of the young piglet wriggling to get to momma sow’s teets, to the rutting young piglet’s first grunts of pig-fucking and orgasmic release, to the belching daily feeds at the slop trough, to the mature pig’s straining groans over a shit that just won’t come easy, to the last shrieks of extremity when his throat gets cut in a jugular spray of gore after he’s been suitably fattened up for the slaughter.

Oh, but it doesn’t stop there. You get the afterlife, too . . . Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: PLAGUE WIDOW

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Feb 292012
 

Yesterday we sang the praises of MaxR’s Metal Bandcamp blog as the go-to window into what’s happening in the metal part of Bandcamp’s world. No sooner had we done that than he proved the point again by featuring a three-man Sacramento band called Plague Widow, whose new self-titled EP is now up on Bandcamp.

The band’s name rang a bell that reverberated in my hollow head, and I remembered that DGR (himself a Sacramento denizen) had recommended this band to me  in January. I have a bad habit of forgetting to follow up on music tips if I can’t do it immediately, and that’s what happened with DGR’s tip. But with MaxR’s reminder, I finally dived into Plague Widow’s music.

I’m inclined to presume that any band with the word “plague” in their name is going to be my kind of thing, especially when the cover art is as tasty as that skull-dominant rendering you see at the top of this post. The presumption proved correct.

Despite the fact that the band is very new, having been formed only this past winter by former members of other Sacramento outfits (guitarist Hal Rotter from Slaughterbox and drummer Danny Hynes from Cowboykiller) and vocalist Marc Dickson, Plague Widow have found themselves a winning formula. Continue reading »

MESHUGGAH: “KOLOSS”

 Album Reviews  30 Responses »
Feb 292012
 

(BadWolf reviews KOLOSS. Need I say more?)

Meshuggah’s career boggles the mind. Now 30-plus years into their tenure, their ubiquitous style of polyrhythmic metal has crossed as many genre boundaries as it has informed — death, thrash, groove, industrial, ‘post-‘. . . Meshuggah fits all of these containers, but never completely.

If you never have, I dare you to listen to their discography front-to-back. Witness their awkward beginning in And Justice For All... worship; the solidifying identity of Destroy Erase Improve and Chaosphere; the cryogenic sound of Nothing (itself as far ahead of its time as AJFA was); the cybernetic experiments of I and Catch Thirtythree; and finally the culmination of all that experimenting with even tighter songwriting in ObZen.

ObZen. There’s the rub — or rather the rub lies in its tour. Meshuggah toured behind that album with Cynic and The Faceless. I predicted [here] just weeks after seeing it that the ObZen tour would spawn a new era of metal. As far as I’m concerned, I was right: Djent started its ascent shortly thereafter. Sure, Tesseract, Textures, and Periphery existed before, but their major breaks and endless legion of imitators followed after.

What was Meshuggah to do, having inadvertently created a new vision for what Heavy Metal could be?

They took the ball in the opposite direction, and created Koloss. Instead of a new vision of metal, these ten tracks aspire to the traditions of classic metal records—punchy riffs, structural songwriting. For the first time since Chaosphere, Meshuggah sound like five men in a room together, not disembodied entities conjuring sound from a digital hell. Continue reading »

BLACK SUN AEON: “BLACKLIGHT DELIVERANCE” (TAKE TWO)

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 282012
 


(We welcome hard-to-please NCS reader KevinP, who provides this guest review of the new album by Finland’s Black Sun Aeon. This is the second of two reviews of this album that we’re publishing today. For the first one, use this link.)

Some of you are saying, “Hey look, another Tuomas Saukkonen album. Does this guy ever take a break?” Well apparently not, as this is the third album he released in 2011 (FYI, he has written, produced, and played all the instruments on nine other full length albums since 2003).  But I digress…

This is also the third album in the Black Sun Aeon catalog in a three-year span.   Thankfully, it took me a few months to sit down and actually write this review, though.  Based on my initial impressions, this one was my least favorite of the three.  But as the months went on, it grew and grew on me.  I’m still not sure exactly why or how that came to pass, it just has.  Now, I‘m completely comfortable saying it’s their finest work yet.

So what changed since the double disc Routa in 2010? Tuomas still handles the growls (with guest dark vocals on “Brothers” and “Wasteland” by Mynni Luukkainen) and Mikko Heikkilä the clean male vocals, but Janeca Lönn (female vocals) plays a much more prominent role this time.  All three styles get their time in the spotlight, sometimes overlaying each other and used wonderfully, without feeling shoehorned-in just for the sake of being there. Continue reading »

BLACK SUN AEON: “BLACKLIGHT DELIVERANCE” (TAKE ONE)

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Feb 282012
 

 

(DemiGodRaven reviews the new album by Finland’s Black Sun Aeon. This is the first of two different reviews of this album that we’re publishing today. Check out the second one here.)

Projects featuring Tuomas Saukkonen have a pretty bad habit of coming out of nowhere to little or no fanfare, only to be found later and leave people wondering why they hadn’t noticed it when it was first released. Such is the case with Blacklight Deliverance, which saw release in late 2011. Black Sun Aeon is now three albums deep, yet it seems that very few people have noticed them.

Tuomas is one of those people who seem to involve themselves in an almost infinite number of projects. Whenever some new band pops up, I half-jokingly wonder to myself if either he, Christian Älvestam, or Ripper Owens is involved in it, one way or another. Those guys have basically become the Samuel L ‘Motherfucking’ Jackson’s of heavy metal. They’re not going to limit themselves to any one project and instead have chosen to just never turn down any work. Between Dawn Of Solace, Before The Dawn, and now Black Sun Aeon, there is a vast amount of material featuring Tuomas — and those are just the three I’ve named off the top of my head.

Black Sun Aeon’s last release, Routa (2010) (also my jumping-on point), was an album that had a lot of potential but also some flaws. It seemed like maybe Tuomas was spreading himself a little thin with this project. Even though he had a friend along for the ride who contributed a large amount of the work, it still found itself in the shadows of both its own genre and Tuomas’ other, more mainstream band Before The Dawn. The melodic doom that it did tease at was enough to keep some people (including myself) eager to hear a follow up, and on the new album, the group have definitely delivered. Continue reading »

SIGH: “IN SOMNIPHOBIA”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Feb 282012
 

(groverXIII reviews the new album from Japan’s Sigh, which will be released in North America on March 13 by Candlelight Records. The cover art is by Eliran Kantor.)

I don’t listen to a lot of black metal. That is, I don’t listen to a lot of straight-up black metal. I like my black metal to be experimented with, diluted, wrapped around electronic melodies (Thy Catafalque) or folky weirdness (old Finntroll) or prog (newer Enslaved). So, although I am a big fan of In Somniphobia, the newest release from Japanese black metal weirdos Sigh, my experience with them to date only goes back to their Gallows Gallery album.

I’ve been meaning to go back further, as I understand that they really started to experiment with their sound fairly early on, but I have too much music to listen to as it is. What I have heard, I have greatly enjoyed, and the three albums that I’ve listened to previously have all had their own interesting sounds, from the eclectic jazz-and-power-metal-influenced Gallows Gallery to the orchestral thrash of Hangman’s Hymn to the all-out orchestral insanity of Scenes From Hell.

Considering how different all of those albums are in relation to one another, I had no idea what to expect from In Somniphobia, but I suspected it was still going to be pretty fucking good. And I was not disappointed.

My biggest concern for In Somniphobia was the production. Scenes From Hell was a great album filled with real symphonic instrumentation, but it was hamstrung by an awful mix, where everything was compressed and flattened all to hell. It was still a well-written, interesting album, but what should have been an open, dynamic album instead felt somewhat lifeless. Thankfully, In Somniphobia does not suffer from the same problem. The mix isn’t perfect, sure, but it’s still a major improvement, and the album is that much the better for it. Continue reading »

COBOLT 60: “MEAT HOOK BALLET”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Feb 282012
 

(Andy Synn reviews the first and only album by Norway’s Cobolt 60 — who now have a new album in the works for the first time in 10 years.)

Cobolt 60 is another project from Daniel Olaisen, AKA Død, also of Blood Red Throne, which sees him teaming up with original BRT vocalist Mr Hustler (handling both drums and vocals) with the sole aim of tearing the world a new one with a vicious brand of industrial-strength blackened thrash. The fruit of their unholy labours was the album Meat Hook Ballet, which whipped up a storm of controversy and critical acclaim, before the project was put on hold due to the increasing pressures and responsibilities of the pair’s regular endeavours.

Although Cobolt 60 actually predates Olaisen’s other endeavours, and the group has been inactive for over 10 years now, recently something has been stirring in its shallow, unmarked grave…

Thus it seems a perfect time as any to go back and inflict upon you all the chainsaw black thrash of their debut.

Right from the outset, the record pulls no punches, the menacing introductory bars of “Chainsaw Michaelangelo” finally exploding into a display of berserk aggression and air-tight guitar work. Revving and roaring as it bursts out of the gate, one thing that immediately sets the band apart from their thrashy-peers is their mechanical, almost industrial, guitar tone, one that is reminiscent of Zyklon’s trilogy of terror (for further comparisons in sound see The Wretched End) and makes each song grind and piston with atomic fury. Choppy, machine-gun riffage strafes the listeners, softening them up for the air-raid assault of warp-speed blasting and serrated tremolo guitars that pitch the track into full on extreme-territory. Continue reading »

LAMB OF GOD: “RESOLUTION”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Feb 272012
 

(DemiGodRaven reviews the new album by Lamb of God.)

I know this is probably the case for quite a few people, but Lamb of God were one of the groups responsible for getting me into really heavy music. I had always enjoyed heavy metal in general, but I was one of those people who didn’t like screaming. Then I listened to New American Gospel at a friend’s house and for some reason just loved it, despite the horrendous drum production on that disc. After that, all bets were off, and I basically descended into the troll cave from which I write now.

Lamb Of God have always been just crushingly consistent. Ever since Ashes Of The Wake, they haven’t really felt the need to make a massive shift in sound and instead have iterated upon it in the same way I imagine artists will continually add more and more detail to their sculptures despite already being confident about where they are in their work. Sometimes this works really well. I thought Sacrament was a great release and listened to that disc so much that I can’t listen to it anymore. I acknowledge that it is an excellent CD, but I spun that thing into the fucking ground. The reception which greeted that one was always really weird. I always got the sense that the band didn’t really enjoy it and felt like it was more of a lateral jump from Ashes Of The Wake than a move forward.

Wrath was supposed to be a tremendously huge release for them, but it didn’t quite click for me. It was the first time I had ever thought, “Yep, this is just another Lamb Of God disc”. Nothing really stuck for me. Strangely, I found the bonus tracks, “Shoulder Of Your God” and “Condemning The Hive”, to be the best things they accomplished.

Then there was the in between “Hit The Wall”, which came out for the Iron Man 2 video game, and while the game itself was fucking garbage, the song was a pretty good tease as to where Lamb Of God might be looking for the future. Continue reading »

GIANT SQUID: “CENOTES”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Feb 272012
 

(Gaia [ex-TNOTB] returns to our site with a review of the 2011 EP by Sacramento’s Giant Squid )

Cenotes – EP
Giant Squid
[Translation Loss]

Tracklist:
1. Tongue Stones (Megaptera Megachasmacarcharias)
2. Mating Scars (Isurus Metridium)
3. Snakehead (Channidae Erectus)
4. Figura Serpentinata (Pycnopodia Sapien)
5. Cenotes (Troglocambarus Maclanei)

35 minutes

Giant Squid’s music is as strange and rare and phenomenal as their namesake. Their works are subtle and nuanced, a delicate orchestration of oceanic sounds dancing lithely with the guitar’s heavy-handed jig. The band’s ecological philosophy deserts their urban surroundings of hometown Sacramento, California; you’ll be more likely to find them roaming a nature reserve or peering into rock pools by the sea.

It is that natural curiosity that shines through their body of work, most noticeably on 2009’s full length The Ichthyologist, where multiple guests leant their instrumentation to Giant Squid’s complex orchestration. Flutes, banjos, violins, cellos, trumpets, oboes, all additions that were explored to their limits and bent to main songwriter Aaron Gregory’s will. The Ichthyologist got them signed; it was that good.

Now Giant Squid return with the EP Cenotes (suh-noh-tees), a comparatively simpler record, the grandiose composition stripped away and no guests are involved. This is Giant Squid spouting their own black and inky concoctions. Continue reading »

“THAT’S MUSIC” – BUT IT’S NOT METAL (NO. 2): BRAND NEW’S “DAISY”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 272012
 

(BadWolf brings us another installment in his not-metal music series.)

I find myself  jubilant at the response from the first article in this column. You guys loved Death Grips — and I can’t blame you. However, many of those overwhelmingly positive pieces of feedback held a question: Do I only plan on covering new music? The answer is no. I spend too much effort on exploring metal’s cutting edge to give the same depth to other genres. I also spend next-to-no time scouting non-metal blogospheres, simply because I am acquainted with many wonderful music aficionados in real life who have no interest in heavy metal: consequentially I can basically order up excellent Indie and Hip Hop albums a-la carte. Frequently I find excellent non-metal albums years after the fact.

Case-in-point, quite possibly the most-loved contemporary album among my real-life friends: Brand New’s 2009 opus, Daisy.

Continue reading »

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