THINK LOCAL, SOUND GLOBAL: DAGON

 Album Reviews  13 Responses »
Nov 152010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Today’s guest post is from a Midwestern dude who will become a regular guest contributor to NCS, and his NCS nom de plume is BadWolf.]

Michigan is known for many things: the automotive industry, cherries, astronomical rates of violent urban crime. To this list I would add excellent melodic death metal bands that routinely sound straight out of northern Europe. The most well known of these bands is The Black Dahlia Murder, but the underground scene in Michigan is filled with bands that sound quintessentially Swedish. The best of these bands might be Michigan’s best-kept secret, Dagon (there’s a HP Lovecraft reference right in the name — of course they’re quality).

Dagon play melodic death metal reminiscent of NCS favorites Arch Enemy and Amon Amarth, full of big chunky riffs and anthemic choruses—this is hook salad, not riff salad. So what? Melodeath bands dealing in earworms are a dime-a-dozen. Where Dagon excels is in the sheer number of subtle neoclassical and prog nuances they add to the formula.

Twin lead guitarists Chris Sharrock and Briant Daniel employ NWOBHM-style guitar harmonies to create a thicker, meatier guitar sound than most (read: over-produced) bands emulating the Gotheburg sound. Bassist/Vocalist Randy Ladiski is the band’s MVP—his prog-tinged six-string basslines propel their songs with an impressive gallop while deepening the melodies and occasionally dipping into funk territory. Randy’s co-vocalist is drummer, Truck Batterbee.

That’s right, singing drummer. Batterbee and Ladiski share vocal duties about 50/50, with Ladiski providing low gutturals and Batterbee handling Abbath-sounding black metal shrieks. Their voices are intense but audible. When listening to Dagon, even a metal novice can easily decipher the lyrics (completely focused on ocean-related topics), which are well-written and poetic if not incredibly insightful. That’s fine, melodic death has never been the genre of choice for stupendous lyricists anyway.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

WITHOUT ME, WHO WILL KEEP THINGS NORMAL?

 Album Reviews, Phro's Posts  20 Responses »
Nov 102010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Here we go — the first of the guest posts we’re running while I’m on vacation. And our first installment comes from our tentacle-loving bro, Phro, now stationed in some Japanese backwater and surviving on a diet of metal, Japanese poetry, and other things we’d rather not know about. He has some music to share with you.]

At first brush, Lizard Skynard might seem like a gimmick.  The name alone is absurd and evokes entirely the wrong image for the band.  After all, you are probably imagining lot lizards putting their frothy mouths on the short nubby ends of truckers right now.  But!!!  Perish that thought (you sicko) and let’s talk about something completely different.

You obviously know how to use internet, so I can assume that, like all internet denizens, you are probably a mentally deranged individual.  I will also assume you know who the Lizardman (http://www.thelizardman.com/) is.  If not, that link right there will enlighten you.  We’ll wait.  Have fun.

Okay, so now you know pretty much everything you need to know before we begin this review of the band’s self-titled debut.  The Lizardman (or Erik Sprague, if you want to be pedestrian) is the frontman for the band.  I would go so far as to say that he is the personality of the band, but we personally haven’t seen any live performances, so we’ll reserve judgement for now.  Needless to say, it is his voice that dominates and informs the songs.  And his voice is, for lack of a better term, the madness of modernity.

Okay, enough literary theory horseshit, let’s talk music!  What does it sound like? (more after the jump . . . including eels) Continue reading »

DAN DANKMEYER

 Album Reviews  12 Responses »
Nov 082010
 

My experience with one-man bands — the subgenre I’ve seen referred to (pretty loosely) as “bedroom djent” — is damned narrow. About a week ago, it was limited to a universe of one: Cloudkicker. I had ignored some positive references to Cloudkicker on other metal blogs because I just stupidly assumed it wouldn’t be my thing. Then my NCS co-founder IntoTheDarkness insisted I listen to Cloudkicker and I relented. Damned good thing I did, because (as I wrote here) I thought Cloudkicker’s music was excellent.

Then I got this further e-mail from IntoTheDarkness: “ok so i know how much i raved about cloudkicker but i just found someone who outdoes him. and his name is dan dankmeyer. FUCKING AMAZING. HOLY SHIT. I can’t rly describe how good he is. just check him out.” As you can see, ITD doesn’t believe in capitalization, except for emphasis.

IntoTheDarkness and I don’t always see eye to eye, but I always check out the music he recommends (and that goes for the other co-founder of this site, Alexis). So I checked out Dan Dankmeyer, denizen of Frederick, Maryland, despite having read a mixed review of his latest release by Niek on one of my favorite places for discovering new metal, Death Metal Baboon (though he did give it a 7.5 out of 10 rating).

And once again, I’m glad I listened to ITD, because I’m diggin’ the shit out of Mr. Dankmeyer’s latest album, X, despite the fact that it omits the kind of larynx-shredding vocals I usually enjoy. If I had to classify the style, it would be guitar-driven Northern European instrumental melodic death metal, with a dash of prog thrown in for good measure. Whatever you call it, it’s damned good — and it’s free.  (more after the jump, including a couple songs to hear . . .) Continue reading »

CEREBRAL BORE

 Album Reviews  28 Responses »
Nov 062010
 

For the last week we’ve gone off the NCS rails, focusing on long songs with either no singing at all or nothing but clean singing, plus offerings of “bedroom djent” and post-rock/post-metal (whatever the hell that means). And we’re not through. We have at least one more band that’s out-of-the-NCS box to write about before we disappear on that non-blogging vacation we wrote about earlier this week.

(Speaking of which, don’t forget our open invitation to send us your own blog posts so we won’t have to let NCS go dark during the hiatus.  We’ve received three so far, plus promises that more will be coming — but don’t wait too much longer if you want to do this. Details are here.)

But, as much fun as we’ve had exploring metal that’s not our usual fare, we do miss the kind of metallic extremity that shoves egg-beaters through the skullbone and proceeds to whip the gray matter into a fluffy merengue. So, we decided to take a little break from our adventures outside of NCS land and come back home for a helping of mind-fuckery.

The devilish cooks we found are a band from Glasgow, Scotland called Cerebral Bore (apparently named after a weapon in a video game) and their recently released debut album, Maniacal Miscreation. Oh yes, this is just the kind of cerebral drill-job we were looking for. Our brains are now satisfying disassembled and chopped up into the consistency of dog food. Awesome.  (more after the jump, including a song and a video . . .) Continue reading »

LONG SONGS: RADIANCE

 Album Reviews  10 Responses »
Nov 052010
 

[Following our posts on Akelei, Agalloth, and Hull, this is the fourth installment of our mini-series on longer-than-average songs from recent releases by some über-talented musicians.]

In the minds of the three co-founders of this site, Necrophagist occupies a golden throne in the pantheon of technical death metal. On our metallic island, we regularly sacrifice annoying children in their name while ritually reciting Beowulf passages from The Nowell Codex.

Among Necrophagist worshippers, the blazing technicality of frontman Muhammed Suiçmez is usually the center of attention. But he’s not the only guitar wizard in Necrophagist. Sami Raatikainen, the Finnish guitarist who joined the band in 2006 following the departure of Christian Muenzner (Obscura), is also a dextrous 7-string wonder to behold.

The extent of Necrophagist’s global following is amazing, given that the band has only produced two albums in the last 11 years, and that six years have elapsed since the second one (2004’s Epitaph). At one point, a new album was scheduled for release in the spring of this year, but that turned out to be a false hope, and there’s no current timetable for release of the third album.

Sami Raatikainen joined the band after Epitaph and therefore hasn’t added his name to the Necrophagist discography. But that doesn’t mean he’s been sitting around twiddling his thumbs since 2006. Far from it. In addition to touring with Necrophagist and working on the band’s own version of Chinese Democracy, Raatikainen has been putting in the weeks, the months, the years on his own side project, called Radiance.

The debut album from Radiance is now available. It’s called The Burning Sun. It sounds nothing like Necrophagist. It’s also one long song — 49 minutes worth of song. Part Iron Maiden, part Dream Theater, part Meshuggah, and almost all Sami, it’s a beautifully constructed, superbly executed work that’s worth the time required to hear it straight through.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

CLOUDKICKER

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Oct 312010
 

Yesterday we tossed up a teaser on this site, just a single song for you to hear with no information about the band (other than the mp3 tag that I didn’t know how to eliminate from the file). We did promise to reveal more about the music today, and we don’t lie.

The song we featured yesterday is called “The Discovery”. It’s the seventh track on a debut album that’s also called The Discovery. It was released in July 2008 by a “band” called Cloudkicker, which turns out not to be a band at all.

Cloudkicker came to my attention via a message from my occasional NCS collaborator IntoTheDarkness, which was worded as follows: “Ok, so I know ur not much for instrumental stuff, but i’ve been listening to a lot lately and you need to check these guys out. They are called Cloudkicker and they are hands down the best instrumental band I have ever heard next to AAL. Especially check out the song ‘the discovery.’ Fucking incredible.”

So that certainly got my attention, particularly because “AAL” is Animals As Leaders, and I’ve made quite plain my slavish devotion to that band. I tracked down the song, listened to it, and quickly decided that yes, it is indeed fucking incredible. And it turns out that Cloudkicker has generated a lot more music that’s equally awesome.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

LONG SONGS: HULL

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 292010
 

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes had it right: life is nasty, brutish, and short. In much of the world, living conditions have improved in the 360 years since he wrote those words, but still — too many people are no damned good, bad things happen to the best among us, and the truly wicked get away with murder. On the other hand, living does have its compensations, and the immense and constantly evolving variety of music is one of them.

As with life in general, the kind of metal I tend to prefer is also nasty, brutish, and short. This suits my attention span, which is somewhere between that of a hummingbird and a rhesus monkey.

Long songs tend to try my patience, perhaps because the length so often seems forced — as if bands were taking shorter songs and artificially padding them to achieve a certain length rather than because the bands really needed more time to express what they were thinking and feeling.

But in the last few days I’ve come across some long songs that merit every minute of the attention they require. And when I say long, I don’t mean 6 or 7 minutes. I mean loooong — as in, the shortest one is 16+ minutes. And that’s the one we’ll start with today. It’s called Viking Funeral, it’s by Hull, and it blows my fucking mind.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

REST IN DISGRACE

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Oct 262010
 

On our metallic NCS island, speed is usually king. The metal we usually prefer is fast and overhwhelming in its power. The closer it comes to producing feelings of delirium and dementia, the better. Catchy rhythms and memorable melodies are nice, too — we find that those elements in a song tend to bring us back for repeat listening. Even in those instances, however, we still prefer that the hooks be embedded in music that zooms along like a machine on a fast track.

But every now and then, though infrequently, the king takes a holiday and turns the island over to slower moving creatures. On those days, we might spend a few somewhat more tranquil hours in the Lorisarium — which unfortunately exists only in our minds, because our duplicitous pen-pals in Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, and Burkina Faso have still not followed through on their promises of wealth so that we might make our Lorisarium dreams a reality.

Off and on over the past couple of weeks, the king has been edged into a forced absence by the music on a debut EP called As Beauty Springs From Mud . . . that we received from by a band called Rest In Disgrace. On first impression, the seven songs on the EP seem simple. The pacing varies, but never arches into the red zone of mayhem. There’s very little blazing fretwork or techie song construction, and the drumming didn’t cause our jaws to drop in amazement at its dexterity.

But the more we’ve listened to this EP, which is built around lyrical themes from Buddhist and Hindu philosophy, the more impressed we’ve become. It combines mid-paced death metal with elements of doom and prog and melodeath, with mood shifts implemented by dreamlike instrumental interludes. It’s not as simple as it seemed at first, and even in its simplest moments, it exerts a primal attraction.

As Beauty Springs From Mud expertly combines the heavy with the sublime, and has won us over despite our usual preference for blazing catharsis. And there’s one song on the EP in particular that has pulled us back again and again like few songs we’ve heard this year.  (more after the jump, including that song . . .) Continue reading »

IN-QUEST

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Oct 252010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we have another album review from our UK guest contributor Andy Synn about a band called In-Quest . . . ]

For those of you unaware of this band, here’s a quick summary… In-Quest are a Belgian death metal band, vaguely comparable to Decapitated and Meshuggah in terms of dry, futuristic technical death metal, and who formerly featured Aborted singer Sven De Caluwé amongst their ranks. They’ve so far produced 5 albums of ever-increasing quality, and although the early stuff is woefully out of print (and not quite as good), the EP Destination: Pyroclasm, and the albums Epileptic and The Comatose Quandaries are all still available and highly recommended.

The latest album [released in December 2009], Made Out Of Negative Matter, has definitely seen the band refine their approach to its sharpest yet, both in terms of speed and overall intensity, by partially scaling back the melody to make way for a more dis-harmonic approach that famously recalls “I” by the mighty Meshuggah. Moreover there’s a depth to their sound that seems lacking in much of “modern Death Metal”, allowing the crafty listener to peel back layer after layer of music and structure in order to truly appreciate the craft involved.

For the more suspicious/jaded amongst you, the band’s mixture of low slung, grooving death metal riffs, poly-rythmns and haunting lead lines might bring to mind any number of today’s aimless Meshuggah clones, yet whilst the influence is clearly there, In-Quest are amongst the special few bands who can take this influence and wield it well without ever coming close to being derivative.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

SVART CROWN

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Oct 202010
 

“Svart” is the Norwegian and Swedish word for black. Svart Crown is the name of a black/death-metal band from France. Formed in 2005 by guitarist/vocalist J.B Le Bail, the band released a debut album called Ages of Decay in early 2008. They’ve now completed their second album, which is scheduled for release by Listenable Records on November 1. It’s called Witnessing the Fall, and we took advantage of the chance to hear it before the official release.

Witnessing the Fall is, above all else, an extreme musical tribute to the wonders of the electric guitar. Le Bail and Clément Flandrois exploit that instrument for all its worth, extracting from its inert mechanical potential a wide array of energized sonic weaponry. Layering the tracks with a multitude of picking and riffing styles, they splash the musical canvass with a pastiche of swirling, dark colors and shifting images of disturbing power. Listening to what they’ve accomplished is a completely engrossing experience.

As a matter of genre classification, the album is a mixture of black- and death metal stylings — like a joint venture between Immortal and Immolation — but with black metal as the dominant partner. However, rather than persistently using cascading waves of tremolo picking and fused blast-beats to create cold atmospherics, Svart Crown more often than not rampages like an unpredictable, marauding beast.  (more after the jump, including a song to hear . . .) Continue reading »

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