THE HOWLING WIND

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May 142010
 

The Howling Wind are brilliant, like shards of splintered ice gleaming in the sun of a wintry sky.

If we had any sense, we’d stop the review of the band’s second album, Into the Cryosphere, right there and call it a day. But we can’t remember the last time anyone accused us of having any sense. So, onward and upward! The who, the what, the why . . .

The Who: The Howling Wind are a two-person band. One of the two is Ryan Lipynsky (formerly known as Killusion). He lives in Brooklyn and has made something of a cult name for himself in bands called Thralldom and Unearthly Trance. He plays the guitars and the bass and provides the vocals.

The other is Tim Call (a/k/a Parasitus Nex). He lives up in our neck of the woods, in Portland, Oregon. He’s involved (or has been involved) with other bands, including Aldebaran and Hail. He also runs a cool on-line music store called Parasitic Records. He plays the drums.

The What: This bi-coastal duo has melted down blocks of classic black-metal, death ‘n roll, psychedelia, doom, and sludge, mixed that slurried slush together, and then re-frozen it into a killer listening experience. (more after the jump, including a track to stream . . .) Continue reading »

ARES KINGDOM

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
May 132010
 

With damned few exceptions, we only write about bands we like. So if you come here often, you’re used to reading compliments about this band or that one. If we only give compliments — even when we really mean every one of them — maybe it starts to get difficult to make an impact with our praise. What do superlatives really mean when everything you say is a superlative?

Some people say that about us, but we really don’t fucking care. We ain’t changing our ways. Plus, we think we know how to make clear when a band really throws us out into an abyss of awesomeness that’s deep and wide — when a collective of musicians truly caves in our skulls in an irreparable way. Today is one of those days, the band is Ares Kingdom, and the album is aptly called Incendiary.

This is one of those instances when we feel especially challenged in our ability to accurately describe in words a sensation produced by powerful sounds. Obviously, we’re gonna try, but all we can hope to achieve is rough justice. You gotta listen for yourself to really understand what these dudes have pulled off.

How to sum this up? What’s striking about this band is their ability to connect deeply to the roots of thrash and death metal and make those sounds come alive with the same power and authenticity that have caused the genres to live as long as they have, but at the same time to create something new and amazing.  (continue reading after the jump, and listen to an awesome song from Ares Kingdom . . .) Continue reading »

THE RODEO IDIOT ENGINE

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May 112010
 

The Rodeo Idiot Engine is a metal band from the Basque Country (Euskall Herria) — that cultural region that spans the border between France and Spain on the Atlantic-coast side of the Pyrenees Mountains.

Man, you gotta love the name of this band. It describes so many human phenomena, and so many people. It metaphorically captures that device inside lots of homo sapiens (mainly the ones with testosterone) that makes them want to do ridiculous things like climb on red-eyed bulls and try to hang on for just a little while — and avoid getting stomped to death in the process — or play in extreme metal bands.

In addition to having an eye-catching, creatively freaked-out name, this band plays some ear-catching, creatively freaked-out metal.

They’ve just finished their debut EP, The First Fall — six songs of barely controlled mayhem clocking in at about 15 minutes total. The band’s influences shine through the music (at least as we hear it) — The Dillinger Escape Plan, Converge, and Coalesce — except not even a hint of clean singing.

If you can wrap your mind around an amalgamation of those sounds, The First Fall is something you might want to check out. It’s an audio onslaught of mathcore tempo jaunts, insanely furious vocals, and a distorted, thud-heavy low end that sets up a harmonic vibration in your lower gut.  In two words, it’s fucking cool.  (more after the jump, including a song to stream . . .)

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ARMA GATHAS

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May 092010
 

Arma Gathas is a riff machine. Seriously, we’ve seen it. It’s got these big slots where you feed in raw materials — guitar strings, fret boards, rusty nails, the severed claws of Black Forest wolves, barbed wire, well-oiled jackhammers, a hive of hornets that’s just been lit on fire, a gassed-up chainsaw — and on the other end are these giant fucking speakers, out of which come one blistering riff after another.

Actually, we saw the Arma Gathas riff machine in a dream. But we still think it was real, because we’ve got confirming evidence: the band’s debut album on Metal Blade, Dead To This World.

The members of Arma Gathas have honed their craft with some bands you’ve probably heard of. Guitarist and riff-genius-in-residence, Simon Fuellemann, was also a founding member of Cataract (among others). Vocalist Ché Snelting used to front Born From Pain. Lead guitarist Marc Niedersberg played with Machinemade God and Cornelius. And the resume of drummer Max van Winkelhof includes Disloyal.

You could draw a few correct inferences about the sound of Arma Gathas from the lineage of its members, but that wouldn’t give you the whole picture. To fill out those images of metal-infused hardcore, you’d need to sketch in some jolting guitar solos, some splashes of thrash and punk, a hailstorm of power grooves, some moody instrumentals, and even passages of melodic death metal.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

UTOPIUM

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May 082010
 


If you visit this site for more than a few days, you’ll realize that our interest in extreme metal spans a pretty broad range. On any given day, if we happen to be writing about a style of metal that isn’t your cuppa tea, just wait a day or two, because we’ll have moved on to a band that plays in a very different genre.

But sometimes in the course of listening to new music we coincidentally find ourselves in a groove. This week, by random chance, we’ve stumbled across bands that play in the chaotic sandbox of grindcore. Yesterday we wrote about Early Graves, a Bay-area band whose music includes grind among its influences. Today our fixation is a band from Portugal called Utopium, and their sound is even more strongly rooted in grind — though they’ve also added some other elements to the mix (just as their name appears to be an amalgamation of Utopia and Opium).

We first heard Utopium a few months ago on a A Tribute to Nasum, a compilation of Nasum covers by bands from all over the world, including the likes of Coldworker, Misery Index, Leng Tch’e, Rotten Sound, Mumakil, and Total Fucking Destruction. Within the last month, Utopium self-released their first album, Conceptive Prescience, and they’ve just made it available for download on that marvelous Bandcamp platform that we wrote about here.

Conceptive Prescience has some rough edges — though some would say that’s exactly what grind is all about — but Utopium has definitely got enough raw talent on display that we’re going to watch their future trajectory with interest.  (more after the jump, including a song to hear and info about where you can download the album . . .) Continue reading »

PAINTED IN EXILE

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May 042010
 

Let’s conduct a little survey. Which of the following styles of music do you like?

a) Math metal
b) Metalcore
c) Technical death metal
d) Progressive metal
e) Cool jazz
f)  Rap
g) All of the above

If you picked (g), then have we got a band for you! Long Island’s Painted in Exile self-released a three-song EP last year called Revitalized that includes all those genres — not from song to song, but within each song. Okay, we’re exaggerating a little. Only one of the EP’s songs includes rap, and it’s a brief bit at the start.

We can guess what you’re thinking — that if these dudes are any good, they must be showing off; that this high degree of schizophrenia can’t possibly maintain coherence; that you’d like to see world peace in your lifetime but aren’t hopeful about it.

To which we say: These dudes really are good; they may be showing off a little, but if you got it, flaunt it; the songs do hang together amazingly well; and we’re not putting any money on world peace either (those have got to be the longest odds in Vegas, hands down).

We’d like to have been flies on the wall while Painted in Exile were writing the three songs on this EP. But however they worked out when and how to shift from one style of playing (and singing) to another, Revitalized is a creative fireball of attention-grabbing music.   (more after the jump . . .)

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CORROOSION

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May 032010
 

My NCS collaborator IntoTheDarkness listens to all sorts of metal, but he’s got a particular weakness for deathcore — and he’s not embarrassed to admit it. There might be a deathcore band somewhere in the world he hasn’t heard yet, but I wouldn’t bet money on it. So when he told me that Italy’s Corroosion (pictured above) was really worth checking out, I couldn’t ignore that.

At the same time, he pushed me to check out a band from Long Island called Painted in Exile, which had been recommended to him by one of the dudes in Long Island’s Ever Forthright (a kick-ass band in their own right).

In both cases, IntoTheDarkness proved to be as reliable as ever. Both bands are worth some attention. Today we’re giving it to Corroosion, and tomorrow, Painted in Exile. (And by the way, these bands sound nothing alike.)

CORROOSION

Yes, we wondered about that name too, and no, it’s not a typo. This band is from Turin, and after releasing EP’s in 2007 and 2008, they put out their first album (on Rising Records) in 2009. Called Punish the Mind, it’s indeed a punisher — but in a good way. Now, if you’re dead set against deathcore, this album isn’t going to convert you. But if you’re a fan of the genre when it’s done right, or you’re still trying to make up your mind, this is a damned fine example of deathcore’s visceral appeal.   (more after the jump, including songs . . .) Continue reading »

INFERNAL WRATH

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May 022010
 

We’ve got so damn much new music to hear, it’s ridiculous (and so much of it is ridiculously good). At the same time, we’re also trying to explore new metal horizons — and in doing that, we continue to discover that extreme metal is truly a burgeoning global phenomenon. A case in point: Metal from India.

Not so long ago we stumbled across a couple of really good bands based in Mumbai called Demonic Resurrection and Bhayanak Maut, and wrote about them here and here. In response to those posts, we received lots of comments and e-mails from NCS readers in India, not only praising those bands but also recommending others. We’re still working our way through those recommendations as time permits — and we definitely need more fucking time!

One name popped up continually in the tips we received — Infernal Wrath — and once we hit that music on the list of bands to check out, it brought us to a full stop. And we went back and listened again. And again. And again.

Their 2009 album Inside of Me is a remarkable blend of musical styles and traditions that’s a real attention-grabber. It’s a serious, meticulously planned and superbly played work that by turns is exotic, beautiful, headbangingly compulsive, and brutally heavy. Trust us on this — it’s definitely worth your time.  (more after the jump, including a song to hear . . .) Continue reading »

AOSOTH

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Apr 292010
 

We have a pile of new, unheard releases stacked so high on the “Incoming!” table at the NCS Island that it’s in serious danger of collapsing into a heap of digitized rubble. So what are we listening to?

Well, of course, in our usual ass-backwards fashion, we’re listening to, and writing today about, an album by a French black-metal band called Aosoth that came out in December of last year. Why? Because Ashes of Angels is just so fucking raw and nasty that we can’t help but dig the shit out of it.

Of course, cats in heat are also raw and nasty, but that doesn’t mean we like listening to the noise they make. But Aosoth brings more to the cat fight than sharp claws and hair-raising howls.

Every song features a vehement blend of barn-burner blast beats and rapidly whumping double-bass (like a helicopter’s rotors whirling up to speed), high-energy tremolo-picked guitars that sound like a plague of mutant locusts, and serrated shrieking vocals. Those are the primary tools in the tool box. But what Aosoth does with those tools from song to song is unpredictable, and addictive as hell.  (more after the jump, including a song to stream . . .) Continue reading »

GUS DRAX: IN SEARCH OF PERFECTION

 Album Reviews, Interviews  No Responses »
Apr 262010
 

Three months ago we stumbled across a young Greek guitar virtuoso named Gux Drax, and based on the evidence of a few instrumental songs that were then available from a forthcoming solo album, we wrote a short post saying how blown away we were by what we were hearing.

The complete album is now out, and we’ve had it on heavy rotation since it arrived from Greece. It’s called In Search of Perfection, and as far as we’re concerned Gus can ease up on the search — because it’s nearly perfect.

We’ll tell you about that album and why you definitely should track it down, we’ll give you a song to stream from the album, and you can read our interview of Gux Drax — all that after the jump. Continue reading »

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