EYE-CATCHERS (Part 3)

 Album Reviews, Eye-Catchers, Metal News  6 Responses »
May 292010
 

If you’ve been visiting this site regularly, you know that we’re suckers for cool album art. In fact, we’ve been engaged in an experiment, off and on, to test the completely illogical hypothesis that if album art is eye-catching, there’s usually something about the music that’s worthwhile, too. You can see our last test cases here and here.

Today’s example is that mind-bending motherfucker up above. The art is by Kenneth Fairclough, whose MySpace page is at this location. It’s the cover for the first EP of a New York metal band named FXZero.

It seems to be a twist on iconic images of the Madonna and Child, except this conception wasn’t immaculate and Mary don’t look too thrilled about daddy’s visitation, or about the offspring of their not-so-blessed union. Looks like the rest of the world isn’t too happy about the visit either, given the destruction that surrounds this bizarre trio. The beret is a nice touch, too.

This thing is so eye-catchingly strange that it’s worth a closer look. Let’s blow up part of this image. Bigger is better, right?  (after the jump . . . and we’ll get to the music, too) Continue reading »

“I’LL HAVE MY BRAINS SCRAMBLED, WITH HASH BROWNS AND TOAST”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
May 282010
 

A few days ago, we started a post by saying, “Sometimes when we listen to metal, we just want to get mentally pulverized.” If you never feel that way, well, please go on about your business and come back tomorrow when we’ll probably be writing about something else.

But today, we’re in that mental-pulverization mood. And in case you’re also in the mood to have your brains scrambled, have we found the right short-order cooks for you: Aeon and Exhale. Coincidentally, both bands are from Sweden. They each employ different techniques on the grill, but their new albums both get the job done in masterful fashion.

AEON

With a few of the inevitable line-up changes, Aeon (pictured above) has been playing for more than a decade, and Path of Fire (released on Metal Blade) is their third full-length album and the first since 2007. The album was mixed by Erik Rutan and mastered by the ubiquitous Alan Douches.

The name of the game is technical death metal, and it’s as sweet as it is punishing. With few exceptions, the songs depend on low-end, driving riffs and hammering double-kicks that put us in mind of an inexorably charging train, scattering sparks and belching smoke. The picking is fast and dynamic, yet there’s no flash-for-the-sake-of-flash going on here — each song is built around a defined rhythmic structure designed to burrow heavy grooves into your skull.  (more after the jump, including songs to stream . . .) Continue reading »

SEMARGL UPDATE

 Album Reviews, IQ Subtraction  1 Response »
May 272010
 

Well, fuck, we knew we’d feel guilty about having some fun at the expense of Ukrainian metal band Semargl in our post a few days ago about their latest video, and sure enough: The band was nice enough to leave a comment on our MySpace page complimenting our post.

Gotta hand it to ’em for having a sense of humor about themselves (and about us). And the truth is, we’ve had that song “Credo Revolution” stuck in our heads for days — so much so that we started listening to samples from three other tracks off the band’s new album that are streaming on their MySpace page.

It’s a mix of divergent styles — some death metal, some groove-oriented power metal, some hard rock (as on “Credo Flaming Rain” — with guest vocals supplied by Nera (Darzamat), who’s pictured above with the band). This is definitely not the kind of thing we usually listen to here at NCS — but confession is good for the soul, and we confess that we’ve now ordered Ordo Bellictum Satanas.

Not sayin’ you should, just sayin’ we did.  We’ll probably feel guilty about that too.

MARTRIDEN

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
May 262010
 

Sometimes when we listen to metal, we just want to get mentally pulverized. Sometimes we want to get lost in something sweepingly complex that requires serious attention. Sometimes we want to be transported by something that’s beautiful as well as powerful.

Rarely, we find music that accomplishes all those objectives at once. Martriden‘s latest album Encounter the Monolith pulls off that hat trick.

One of our faithful readers (the always astute Andy Synn) recommended Martriden to us, and man are we glad he did.

This music (released in February) puts us in mind of a Pacific storm surge assaulting a rocky coastline. Waves of “symphonic” black metal crash with explosive force against jagged stone (as at the outset of “The Three Metamorphoses”), and then the wave-front recedes in passages of relative calm, and the band shifts into prog-metal instrumentals reminiscent of Opeth.

The intensity builds again to full force as storm clouds roll inexorably overhead, heavy rain batters down (with Meshuggah-like pummeling, as on “Heywood R. Floyd”) and megatons of power explode with brute force.

And then at times, as in the beginning and middle of “Death and Transfiguration,” and unexpectedly in other songs, we can imagine the storm passing and glorious rays of sunshine piercing the clouds, when quiet instrumental passages take over or clean guitar leads emerge with soaring melodies.  (more effusiveness follows after the jump, plus a song to stream . . .) Continue reading »

MUSICA DIABLO

 Album Reviews, Metal News  4 Responses »
May 242010
 

Musica Diablo is a relatively new band based in São Paulo, Brazil, with a self-titled debut album due for release on May 28. Three things grabbed our attention. First, the band’s vocalist is Derrick Green, who’s been the frontman for Sepultura since 1997.  Second, the band describes its music as “extreme fast thrash metal, with with the characteristic Brazilian style and a strong root into the 80’s veteran veterans.” Third, the forthcoming album features a cool cover (above) by Gustavo Sazes, who has also done album art for Arch Enemy, God Forbid, and Old Man’s Child.

That was enough to draw our attention to the music. We’ve been listening, and let’s just say it will kick your ass all the way up to your shoulder-blades. The music is blistering in its intensity and speed and features some cool dueling guitar solos — and Derrick Green’s raspy howls and guttural growls are skull-scrapingly vicious.

Musica Diablo was started by guitarist Andre NM (of Brazilian hardcore band Nitrominds) in early 2008, and the rest of the line-up consists of drummer Edu Nicollini (also of Nitrominds),  second guitarist André Curci (Korzus, Threat), and bassist Ricardo Brigas.  The band’s new album is currently streaming in its entirety at a Brazilian internet site called Radio UOL, which you can find at this location.

But you don’t have to go there just yet, because after the jump, we’ve got a widget that will allow you to listen to five of the album’s 11 songs right here at the NCS site. Seriously, you owe it to yourself to check this shit out.  (more after the jump .  .  .) Continue reading »

ARISE

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 232010
 

Fetching album cover, isn’t it? It’s for the The Reckoning, the latest release (on Regain Records) from Sweden’s Arise. Arise has been around for almost 15 years, though the band was significantly re-formed in late 2006, with three new members joining the two remaining original members (drummer Daniel Bugno and guitarist LG Jonasson). The Reckoning is the band’s fourth album and the first since the 2006 makeover.

Regain publicized the album for a late-March 2010 release, so I thought it was new. But it turns out the album was also released in the spring of 2009 — or so it seems, because lots of metal blogs reviewed it last year. Puzzling.

At any rate, between the 2009 “release” and the 2010 release, The Reckoning has been reviewed quite a bit, and while most reviewers found things to like, a common snooty critique runs through the write-ups like a monotoned thread: That what Arise is doing has been done before by other, better-known bands in their early days, like At the Gates or Dark Tranquillity or In Flames.

I suppose there’s some truth to that criticism. I just happen not to care, because I’m having too damned much fun listening to this music. It’s thrash-paced death metal embedded with devilishly catchy grooves, seamed with melodic leads and solos, enhanced by razor-sharp modern production, and played quite capably by people who know what they’re doing.  (more after the jump, including a track to stream . . .) Continue reading »

DISENGAGE

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
May 222010
 

In yesterday’s post, we focused on recent news about Cameron Argon (a/k/a “Big Chocolate”), a dude that our bonded-in-blog bros over at Metal Sucks aptly called a “Renaissance Man.” What prompted our feature was Argon’s separation from Burning the Masses, a death-metal band with whom he’d recorded a forthcoming album and toured throughout Europe earlier this year. But at the tail-end of yesterday’s post, we also mentioned that in his “Big Chocolate” persona, he had remixed a Suicide Silence song called “Disengage”.

Century Media has released that remix, along with the original song, as a “single.” It’s available in two formats — as a digital download from iTunes and as a 7″ blue vinyl from CM Distro. Joshua Andrew Belanger created the cover art for the single, which you can see above.

Off and on yesterday, we listened to the original song and the remix back-to-back. The more we listened, the more we got into both versions of the song. The original Suicide Silence track shifts back and forth between a pulsing distorted riff and a dissonant, squealing guitar lead, and then up-shifts the tempo before crashing the pace down into a broken-down crawl. Following the breakdown, the tempo continues to shift back and forth, and throughout the song Mitch Lucker growls and shrieks mercilessly until the track finishes with 15 seconds of solitary drums.

In the remix, Big Chocolate has done more than separate and reshape the sounds present in the original. He’s applied a variety of electronic effects to distort and change the vocals and instrumentation, injected samples, added scratching and electro drums, messed with the rhythms so that they generate more of a dance-beat, and done a hundred other things that we’re not expert enough to figure out or describe.

The resulting music is drenched in wild sound effects, more aurally dense than the original, but still recognizably “Disengage” and still recognizably metal. I don’t listen to electro house or dubstep, but one of my collaborators (IntoTheDarkness) is getting into those genres and I’ve heard a few things he’s recommended. Snatches of the “Disengage” remix sound like those styles, but I really don’t think a genre name has yet been invented for the results of what Big Chocolate did with the Suicide Silence material. Anyone out there have a suggestion?

Ater the jump, you can listen to both songs back-to-back. And then after that, we’ve got a “mixtape” for you that was inspired by “Disengage”. Continue reading »

AS I LAY DYING

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 182010
 

As time has passed, we’ve found ourselves listening less and less to metalcore bands that really made a big impression on us a few years back. You could chalk it up partly to changes in our musical tastes and partly to our feeling swamped by the flood of generic metalcore bands trying to capitalize on what used to be the latest fad by combining chug-heavy riffs and growling with rancid emocore clean singing. In fact, we started this blog in part out of frustration with that phenomenon.

But listening less and less doesn’t mean no listening at all. There’s still something about metalcore (done right) that triggers the same positive feeling we had when the genre first emerged.

As I Lay Dying is one of those metalcore bands whose albums have consistently struck a chord with us — and in fact, we’re probably doing them an injustice with the metalcore label, because it’s become something of a bad word in our vernacular.

So, we’ll just toss that label aside and say this: The band’s new album, The Powerless Rise, is song for song their best one yet, and we’re really digging it.

The cool album cover by J. Bannon features a red-eyed skull exploding from below, and a similar image is on the fold-out CD insert, but with the explosion coming out the top of the skull. It’s a fitting image, because The Powerless Rise includes some serious skull-exploders — some of the most intensely aggressive music As I Lay Dying has yet produced. Take off your neck-braces and prepare to injure yourselves all over again, because this album overflows with music that will compel you to bang yo heads.  (more after the jump, including a track to stream . . .) Continue reading »

MONDAY MORNING MONTAGE OF MAYHEM

 Album Reviews, Metal News  7 Responses »
May 172010
 

Most of the music we write about here at NCS is the kind of thing you’d see in the dictionary as examples under the word “bludgeoning.” But for today, we were all set to write about a couple of new albums over on the more melodic side of extreme metal — with some actual clean singing! Ah, but you know what happens to the best laid plans of mice and men (to quote Robert Burns, they “gang aft agley”).

So, one of our readers (“death’s embrace”) had tossed out a few band recommendations over the last few days, and we thought we’d give ’em a quick once-over before starting on those reviews we had planned. We did that — just a wee taste to see what the music was like — and promptly veered right off the rails and down into a big brier patch of nastiness.

We’re still picking thorns out of our butts, so the melodic music will have to wait another day or two. Today, we have a montage of the mayhem we discovered courtesy of that thorny detour from our appointed path. If you’re looking for metal about (and possibly played by) cannibalistic zombies, read on.

FACEBREAKER

We knew what we were getting into with this band. If the name “Facebreaker” hadn’t been enough of a tip-off, we also had the following note from “death’s embrace” as a clue: “IMHO, a great death metal band from Sweden. Plus all the songs on their last album are about zombies.” Well, who could resist that kind of teaser? Not us!

The band’s latest album crawled out of the grave in 2008 with the title Dead, Rotten and Hungry, and the songs are indeed about zombies, with such mouth-watering titles as “Slowly Rotting”, “Night of the Burning Dead”, and Unanimated Flesh”. And the sound is indeed classic Swedish death metal, in the vein of Dismember and Grave. It’s punishing, but with meaty hooks — rusty chainsaws spinning at full speed and flinging gore in every direction, plus suitably demented guttural vocals. We like it!  (more after the jump, including music to stream . . .) Continue reading »

HOWL

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
May 162010
 

We like five things about the new Relapse Records release from a Rhode Island band called Howl: the album cover, the name of the album, the name of the band, the lyrics. Oh yeah, we like the music, too.

First things first — the album cover.

Now, we can hear some of you saying, who gives a shit about the cover art if the music sucks? Well, you’re entitled to your fucking opinion. But in our fucking opinion, this band could sound like a garbage truck backing up and this album cover would still stand the test of time. Plus, we saw the album cover before we heard the music, so it comes first.

Just gaze upon that sucker at the top of this post. It’s really only half of the full image. To see the full thing in all its hellish glory, you need the CD insert to unfold.  Looks like this:

The artwork is by Ryan Begley. He’s done artwork for Pelican, Clouds, Ruiner, Doomriders, and other bands, but we gotta say he’s outdone himself with this one. Skulls, flames, skeletal hand, glowing triangle, and plenty of eyeballs (you can never have too many eyeballs) — all rendered in appropriately hell-hot colors. And it meshes beautifully with one of those other things we like — the album title (Full of Hell). OK, now for the music: It’s devilishly good. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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