SOILWORK (Conflicted)

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Jul 152010
 

We named this site NO CLEAN SINGING for a reason, which is spelled out in excruciating detail on the “ABOUT” page. In a nutshell, the personal tastes of myself and my two sometimes-collaborators veer toward the more soul-shakingly cathartic side of the extreme metal continuum. And for us, that tends to correlate with the absence of clean singing. But from the beginning, we’ve admitted that there are Exceptions to the Rule.

To be brutally honest (which is the only kind of honest we know how to be), there are some songs by some bands that live with us in our memories precisely because the melodies are so unforgettable — particularly when paired up with adrenaline-laced rhythms and blowtorch power. And sometimes those songs have featured clean singing. Sometimes the clean singing is part and parcel of what makes the songs so unforgettable.

There might be a better example of what we’re talking about than Sweden’s Soilwork, but if there is, it ain’t coming to mind. The first notes of songs like “Exile”, “Black Star Deceiver”, and “Stabbing the Drama” start playing, and the whole, epidemically infectious songs immediately come tumbling out of our corroded mental databases like the vivid images of old, close friends.

At the same time, Soilwork has been capable of harder-edged, melodeath marauders like “Needlefeast”, “Follow the Hollow”, “Like the Average Stalker”, and “The Chainheart Machine”. Those songs, and others like them, have tapped into the reptile parts of our brains that just want to headbang, windmill, and slam into shit.

Soilwork’s hallmark ability to straddle that divide between melodic death metal and metalcore, between mayhem and epic melody, is exactly what’s made them an NCS favorite despite all the clean singing.

So, what are we to make of the new Soilwork release, The Panic Broadcast? As a group, the three of us are conflicted. (what we mean? follow along after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

HIGH COLONICS

 Album Reviews  16 Responses »
Jul 132010
 

A “high colonic” is an alternative-medicine procedure that involves injecting large volumes of fluid into the colon in order to flush out decaying fecal matter (and any small animals that may have taken up residence). Certain kinds of health nuts believe this procedure avoids the build-up of toxins, promotes effective digestion, and improves general well-being.

Usually, your NCS perpetrators don’t put down stuff we haven’t experienced for ourselves, but we’re making an exception here, (a) because there’s no fuckin’ way we would ever try this, and (b) some things we don’t feel the need to try in order to conclude they’re moronic.

Besides, some people are so full of shit they could detonate a depth charge up their rectums and it still wouldn’t make a dent. (If by some remote chance there’s an NCS reader out there who’s a devoted believer in the benefits of colon hydrotherapy, then you’re a fucking cretin we do apologize for our insensitivity.)

As ridiculous and uncomfortable as this procedure sounds, the idea of cleansing through purging makes some sense to us in the context of a different human organ much higher up the body. We’re talking about the organ that does your thinking for you, at least when you’re sober. To be clear, for the benefit of the dudes out there, we’re talking about the big head.

Over time, your skull fills up with massive amounts of shit — from the often empty babble of your friends, family, and co-workers, to the absolute dreck that passes for pop culture, to the ghastliness that greets your eyes whenever you read the news, to your own hare-brained ideas and ill-informed opinions.

It’s a good idea, every now and then, to just clean all that shit out — just irrigate the fuck out of your skull to remove the toxic build-up and start fresh with complete emptiness. And today, we’ve got international music from three bands that will give you a good skull-flushing: Embryo (Italy), Lost Dreams (Austria), and Amagortis (Switzerland).  (more after the jump, including songs to stream and videos to watch . . .) Continue reading »

NORMA JEAN

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jul 122010
 

Norma Jean‘s new album, Meridional, will be released tomorrow on the Razor & Tie label. Before listening to my advance copy, I didn’t plan to write about it. For one thing, purely as a matter of personal taste, I’ve only been a moderate fan of the band’s previous releases. For another thing, it was predictable that the album would be the subject of plenty of critical attention from print and web media, and our focus here at NCS tends to be on bands that mostly fly under the radar screen.

Those preconceptions and plans went by the wayside after I listened to Meridional, after I saw the album art, and after I heard and read the lyrics. As a complete artistic creation, Meridional is nothing short of brilliant.

My personal tastes haven’t changed, and Norma Jean hasn’t suddenly vaulted itself into my personal pantheon of extreme metal divinity, but this album is worth the critical attention it has already been getting, and will continue to receive. And whether you’re already a Norma Jean fan or not, it’s music you should hear. It has certainly impressed the shit out of me.

Meridional is a deep, dark, dense listening experience, and it resists any meaningful attempts to summarize or classify. You’ll find experimental, largely instrumental tracks like “Septentrional”, “Occidental”, and “Oriental” that feature moody, borderline-demented collections of electronic noise. And you’ll find barely controlled mathcore freak-outs and injections of hardcore viciousness guaranteed to stir the mosh pits into mayhem. And you’ll hear punishing, sludgy, down-tempo guitar leads along with convulsive thrash riffs and bruising drum fills.

(more after the jump, including a track to hear, and a montage of eye-popping album art . . .) Continue reading »

HUNGERSNOT, DAMMIT!

 Album Reviews, Metal News  11 Responses »
Jul 102010
 

We spent most of the past week picking through the sonic wreckage of North African metal and finding all sorts of exotic gems. It was one more reminder (as if we needed one) that the world of metal encompasses an immense variety of music, and the sound continues to evolve all over the world. What other musical genre can match it?

In celebrating the diversity of metal, it’s a fitting way for us to cap off the week by bringing Trollfest to your attention. This Norwegian band is sort of a global village unto themselves. Try wrapping your mind around this concept: speed metal plus oompa music plus Balkan folk tunes plus middle eastern melodies plus Converge-style hardcore shrieking plus more speed metal plus beer and vodka plus more speed metal.

Sound tempting? No? Well, see if this recent press release increases your interest:

When a band that defines its music as “true Norwegian Balkan metal” chooses to debut a track from its new album on July 9 so that it can celebrate the Constitution Day of Palau (an island lying in the Pacific, and one of the world’s youngest and smallest sovereign states) it is going to be a safe bet that the album will cross geographical boundaries in sound and influence.

Getting more interested?  How ’bout this: That debut track is called “Die Verdammte Hungersnot”. We’re pretty sure “verdammte” means “damned” in German. What do you think “hungersnot” means?  (more after the jump, including musical dementia for your consumption . . .) Continue reading »

METAL FROM NORTH AFRICA (Part 3): ODIOUS

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Jul 092010
 

Sadly, we now come to the end of our 3-part post on Metal From North Africa, though we will revisit the subject in the future. To close this out, we’re back to Egypt, where we started, and a band called Odious.

Odious has been around since 1998, and as best we can tell, they were one of the first Egyptian extreme metal bands to release a professional album — 2007’s Mirror of Vibrations. Before that, they self-released and distributed a demo EP called Summoned by Night, which led to their signing in 2005 by a Greek label called Sleaszy Rider Records and the release of that 2007 album.

Of all the music we’ve reviewed in this survey, it’s probably the most challenging to hear, but it may be the most interesting. It’s the most uncompromisingly faithful to traditional black metal, but also the music that most heavily incorporates not only oriental music but also traditional instruments.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

METAL FROM NORTH AFRICA (Part 2): SAWLEGEN AND BARZAKH

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Jul 082010
 

Today we present Part 2 of our three-part series on North African metal. Yesterday we explained that we started down this dune-swept road by looking for Egyptian metal. Somewhere along the way, we stumbled across bands from some other North African countries, including the subjects of today’s post — Sawlegen and Barzakh.

SAWLEGEN

Sawlegen is a Moroccan band. The first of their songs I heard was an instrumental called “Streets of Agrabah”, and it dropped me in my tracks like I’d been shot through the skull with a nail gun.

I tracked down the rest of the songs on Sawlegen’s sole album (2007’s Stories From An Old Empire), and I’ve never heard anything quite like them. “Streets of Agrabah” remains my favorite, but the whole album is a fascinating mix of contrasting styles, and on the whole it’s a riveting experience.

If I were to attempt a high-level description (which I guess I’m now doing), I would say it’s an amalgamation of folk metal and symphonic black metal, but with an infusion of exotic oriental melody and song structures that build to ever-more feverish crescendos. Staying at a high level, and relying on Western idiom, I would also say this album fucking rocks.  (more after the jump, including a song to hear . . .) Continue reading »

METAL FROM NORTH AFRICA (Part 1): SCARAB

 Album Reviews  14 Responses »
Jul 072010
 

On July 5, we tried a little experiment. Indulging in the same kind of presumptuousness that motivates people to tweet about their latest meal or the last time they washed their underwear, we just described the music we’d randomly checked out that morning — whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. None of the bands was known to us, and we didn’t actually like everything we found, but we wrote about all of it anyway — just because that’s what we heard.

A few readers actually seemed to like the idea, and we’re desperate for approval, so we’ll do it again. But not today. Today, we’re doing something that’s a little more focused and we’re exercising a bit more judgment. But in a way, this post started just as impulsively as the one on July 5.

We were over at Steff Metal‘s blog and got into a sick mixtape she had created (here), the subject of which was music with an ancient Egyptian theme (though not played by bands from Egypt). That got us to thinking (always a dangerous pastime) and we realized that we knew very damned little about Egyptian metal bands.

So, we started exploring, and the path we wandered hooked us up not only with some really good Egyptian metal, but also with metal from some other North African countries — Tunisia and Morocco, to be precise. We found enough interesting shit that we’re dividing this post into three parts: One band today (Scarab) and the next three over the two following days.

To be clear, we’re not pretending this is some kind of authoritative survey. We didn’t do in-depth research, and we didn’t listen to dozens of bands and then selectively whittle down the group. We’re way too half-assed for that. We just jumped into the fast-moving current of the internet and waited to see where we’d be washed up on shore.

And by sheer chance, we wound up with a little bit of everything — some death metal, some oriental black metal, and some progressive/folk metal — but what we found was awesome. So open your minds and your ears and we’ll show you what we found.  (beginning after the jump, of course . . .) Continue reading »

BYFROST

 Album Reviews  10 Responses »
Jul 062010
 

For the most part, Bergen, Norway’s Byfrost plays marching songs and battle music for orcs. There are exceptions, which we’ll come to, but their recently released debut album Black Earth is mainly about the inexorable stomp, the headlong charge, the baring of oily teeth, the spiked maces held high. Or at least, those are the images that come to our orc-brained minds as we listen to this riff-tastic new release.

Byfrost is a three-piece band, and as befits this stripped-down ensemble, the music is bare-boned and primal. It lives and dies by the almighty riff, and Black Earth is loaded with them, from both guitar and bass. The pacing and the mood change within the album, but those dissonant hammerblows are a constant.

From the blackened thrash of “Horns to the Sky” and “Wings of the Angel of Death” to the lurching, stutter-stepped march of the title track, to the doom-influenced interlude within “Desire,” Byfrost builds their songs in a verse-chorus-verse structure around deceptively simple chords and rhythms, and then propels them forward in massively powerful repeating loops. The hooks are so sharp and deep that it’s easy to get caught up by them.

The remorseless martial stomp of the music is relieved by guitar solos that vary from soulful arpeggios to heated gouts of pure shred and by down-shifted variations in the pacing. But throughout is the sensation of being shaken like a rag doll by giant, clawed hands in time to a hellish beat.  (more after the jump, including some tracks to stream . . .) Continue reading »

NOTHNEGAL

 Album Reviews, Metal News  7 Responses »
Jul 042010
 

Fair warning: This will be one extended session of spittle-flecked frothing at the mouth, because we haven’t been this blown away since stumbling into a full-fledged Seattle windstorm last winter. So get the safety glasses on and strap on sanitary masks if you got ’em.

The subject of our enthusiasm is Nothnegal. They’re a band from The Republic of the Maldives that now includes two non-Maldivian heavyweights — drummer Kevin Talley from Dååth and keyboardist Marco Sneck from those Finnish swamplords Kalmah. They’ve got a four-song EP to their credit called Antidote of Realism and they’ve just signed with Season of Mist for the release of their debut album early next year.

Oh yeah, they’re also playing with Arch Enemy this month and touring Europe in the fall with the likes of Rotting Christ, Samael, and Finntroll.

And we’d wager that most of you have never heard of them. Until earlier this week, we hadn’t either. But this band shows all the seismic signs of an impending Vesuvius-sized eruption onto the scene — and based on the band’s output to date, it would be well-deserved.

If you like technically immaculate, headbangingly compulsive, Scandinavian-style melodic death metal played at autobahn speed, stay with us after the jump. Among other things, we’ll stream all four tracks from that EP and we’ll show you how to download a cut from Nothnegal’s forthcoming debut album. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS (Part 4)

 Album Reviews, Eye-Catchers  14 Responses »
Jul 022010
 

Yes, it’s time again for another installment in our irregular “Eye-Catchers” series. In case you’ve forgotten, this is both an ongoing experiment and a vehicle for discovering new music. The experiment is designed to test the completely illogical hypothesis that cool album art tends to correlate with cool music. There’s really no reason why the two should go together, but in our experience, they do go together more often than not.

Of course, our experience is completely random and anecdotal, with no statistical significance behind it at all, and undoubtedly the day will come when we’ll see a cool cover and then run for the vomitorium after we start listening to the tunes. But since we started this experiment back in April, most of our test cases have validated the hypothesis.

This experiment also provides a way for us to explore new music that we otherwise might not discover. We see eye-catching album art, and based on nothing but that, we go listen to the music.

As we explained in an earlier post, as a way of picking new music, it’s like throwing a dart at a dartboard or putting a quarter in a slot machine and pulling the handle. It makes no logical sense, except there’s so much new music from so many new bands out in the world that randomization sometimes seems as good a way as any to make choices.

Today we’ve got two test cases — two bands we had never heard before. The first one is a band from Poitiers, France, called Klone. They recently released their third full-length album, Black Days, on Season of Mist. The album cover is at the top of this post.

The second one is an unsigned band from Oregon called Arkhum, and they’re on the verge of releasing their first album, Anno Universum, in August.

How did these bands fare in our Eye-Catchers test? Read on after the jump to find out (and, for your trouble, we’ll have some music for you to hear . . .) Continue reading »

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