INFERNO FESTIVAL 2012 – DAY 1 – ANAAL NATHRAKH, THE KONSORTIUM, 1349, TRIPTYKON, BORKNAGAR

 Concert Reviews  9 Responses »
Apr 112012
 

(Our man Andy Synn attended the INFERNO FESTIVAL in Oslo, Norway, on April 4-7, 2012, and here’s his review of the first day’s inferno.)

Running a little late, the first band of Inferno Festival 2012 for me was, somewhat ironically, a band from just down the road from my own home. Anaal Nathrakh were, as always, a nasty proposition in the flesh, delivering some seriously abusive blasting accented by Dave Hunt’s tormented screams and regal singing voice. Definite highlights were the annihilating (and deceptively melodic) “Satanarchist” and the unforgiving mindfuck of “Pandemonic Hyperblast”, the band seemingly focusing on their more unrelenting material this time out.

Tonight’s show was noticeably (and unusually) sloppier than I’m used to, with a few obvious errors in timing and tightness evident to the familiar listener. This was all explained though, with Dave Hunt educating the crowd on the shittiness of US border control who had failed to allow his cohort Mick Kenney over to Oslo for the show, leaving them to conscript a last minute stand-in guitarist, whom the extreme pressure understandably left ill at ease.

Even more pissed off than usual, at one point the band’s ever-volatile frontman, responding to an ill-advised heckle from the crowd, verbally confronted his abuser, saying that although he didn’t “want to sound like Phil Anselmo”, he was in no mood to take shit from anyone after the band put all the effort into pulling together and making it over to Inferno despite these last minute setbacks. Despite its problems, this set proved that nothing short of total global extinction can stop the march of Anaal Nathrakh. Continue reading »

SHOW REPORT AND INTERVIEW: GOATWHORE – LIVE AT RAMALAMA RECORDS, TOLEDO, OHIO 3/7/12

 Concert Reviews, Interviews  6 Responses »
Apr 112012
 

(BadWolf and friends attended a special performance by Goatwhore in Toledo on March 7. This is his review, plus his on-site interview of Ben Falgoust and Sammy Duet. All photos accompanying this post were taken for NCS by Nicholas Vechery.)

I’ve had the most rotten luck with local shows lately. That awesome Black Dahlia Murder/Skeletonwitch/Nile tour was supposed to come through my hometown, as was the Faceless/Dying Fetus/Goatwhore tour. Both of those were cancelled. In fairness, the Black Dahlia Murder decided to headline a huge local metalcore festival—the Jamboree—instead, but I’m no huge proponent of skinny-jean deathcore. Thank god (or satan or wotan or whatever) for Goatwhore, who decided to play Toledo anyway—for free.

Ramalama Records

Goatwhore picked the perfect venue: Toledo’s finest record store, Ramalama Records. I have a long history with the establishment; it’s fair to say I would not be a metalhead were it not for the owner, Rob, and his clerk, Nick. A story within a story:

I rode into the store on bicycle on a Saturday afternoon at the age of 15. I was dressed in black jeans and a Master of Puppets tee-shirt—Nick said I was the first cool-looking guy to enter the store all day, and as such if I bought a record the second would be half off. A sick deal, but I had no idea what to get, so I just pointed at my tee shirt and said “Stuff like this.”

Nick picked out Municipal Waste’s Hazardous Mutation record. “What’s that sound like?” Nick threw it on the stereo.

“The good old days,” he said. Twenty seconds into ‘Unleash the Bastards’, I said he had himself a deal.

For my second buy I took a gander at the new releases shelf, and a  record cover caught my eye—some really great art of a ship being sunk by a whale. The band was called Mastodon. The album, obviously, was Leviathan. Nick let me listen to “Blood and Thunder”, and that was the end of normalcy in my life. $20 or so later, I was in metal for life. Continue reading »

SUFFOCATION / CATTLE DECAPITATION / BLOOD RED THRONE / SADIST / CEREBRAL BORE / CARCERI – THE OLD BELL, DERBY, 14/03/12

 Concert Reviews  7 Responses »
Mar 302012
 

(Andy Synn witnessed the Derby, England stop of the Reborn of Death Tour and apparently was so skull-rattled by the experience that he thought he was at the movies.)

What a line-up, am I right? It’s like a 6-round pummelling before that final knock-out blow. Each band softening you up for another vicious beating by the next. So, still feeling a little punch drunk from the experience, how am I going to manage to review the show for you fine folks?

Through the works of one Mr Sylvester Stallone.

Chronologically speaking, Carceri are the Rocky Balboa (Rocky 6, for those not in the know) of the evening. Definitely the newest act on the block, with a large legacy to live up to. Thankfully, much like their filmic counterpart, they manage to take familiar elements and give them just enough of a modern shine to justify their position. Playing cuts from their new album The Good Must Suffer The Wicked, with a backdrop of dizzying, morbid imagery scrolling and warping behind them, the group deliver an electrifying blend of punchy, mechanical riffage, bone-rattling blast-beats and massive death growls that deftly bears up under the weight of their Oscar-winning legacy.

Unfortunately, the position of Rocky 5 is occupied by Cerebral Bore tonight, as their brain-mangling death-grind has all the familiar elements and hits all the expected story-beats, but somehow lacks the inherent character and heart in its delivery. The vocals are utterly monstrous, but the drums have an overly-triggered sound that robs them of their brutality, and the bass and guitar never fully lock in correctly. The actors are all present, but something about the story is lacking. Close to the end of the set, however, the band debut a new song that shows real promise, picking up the pace in time for the closing credits. Continue reading »

SHOW REVIEW: MARCH 23 AT THE BOARDWALK

 Concert Reviews  2 Responses »
Mar 292012
 

(DemiGodRaven checks in with his review of last Friday’s show in the Sacramento, California, area headlined by Conducting From the Grave and featuring a slew of other Sacramento bands, and his review is accompanied by lots of video.)

Marking the first time in a while that I’ve made the trip out to the Boardwalk in Orangevale, last Friday’s show was going to prove to be an interesting one. We had Sacramento hometown heroes Conducting From the Grave (it seems like every band opening for them holds them in some sort of reverence), who were going on a small headlining tour before they made the jump onto the monstrous All Shall Perish/Fleshgod Apocalypse and other-bands-that-have-floated-my-mind tour, playing with a bunch of scrappy local groups and Fallujah.

Unfortunately Fallujah couldn’t make it due to some difficulties and likely ongoing troubles stemming from their van situation, so another group out of my old hometown area of Hayward/San Leandro (according to their band profile) was brought in as a last minute replacement, making this a show consisting largely of a bunch of scrappy underdogs. John Abernathy of Conducting fame would find himself playing a double set that night as part of a new, semi-all-star group (in terms of the local scene) — a blackened death project known as Soma Ras.

I was initially worried that I would make it to the show late after some traffic horseshit on the way there since the show was supposed to start at 6:30 and I came barreling into the door at 6:48.   And the place was empty. Continue reading »

REVIEWING SHOWS THAT HAPPENED TWO WEEKS AGO FOR YOU TIME TRAVELERS

 Concert Reviews  4 Responses »
Mar 022012
 

(DemiGodRaven provides this review of the Testament-headlining show in Sacramento, CA, on Feb. 17. Except for a drag-ass job of posting by your humble editor, the interval between the show and the review would have only been one week.)

Two weekends ago kicked the everliving fuck out of me. I went to two shows over the span of two days and basically spent Sunday in a coma because of them. Saturday was a huge local band party at the lovely venue out here known as The Boardwalk, and while I would love to review that one, my weekend was so hectic and tired that to be honest with you, the whole experience feels like a fever dream.

I will admit that’s probably shortchanging the dudes in Bispora (whose first show it was), Journal, GBAA, and Slaughterbox, but I know that I will be presented with other chances to talk about those groups at length. All I can say for now is you should look them up, they’re all really good.

The picture that you see above is the reason why I found myself in such a state. Friday, February 17th, I flew solo to a show for the first time in a while and went and fucking saw Testament. If I had to sum up my position on Testament as a group, it would be that they have been one of the most consistent thrash bands out there to date. When rumors of a big thrash tour would begin circulating, I was the one asshole who was secretly hoping that Anthrax would drop off and Testament could take their slot, or that the promoters would at least put Exodus and Testament on the bill as a bigger Titans Of Thrash-style tour.

You can tell these guys are icons in their own right, so all I really would’ve been pushing for would be to pull out the fans who went to those Big Four shows because they thought Metallica’s Black Album and the ones that followed have been fucking masterpieces.

That said, there are advantages to Testament being a bit on the underrated side, and one of the big ones is that I got to see them up-close and fucking personal at Sacramento’s Ace Of Spades. That to me is fucking incredible, because even though the Testament crowd is now much, much older than it used to be, it still felt like I was part of the burgeoning Bay Area thrash movement . . . which I missed because a) I hadn’t been born yet, and b) by the time a lot of these bands were gaining steam or simplifying their stuff for radio, I was a whopping three. Continue reading »

THE INAUGURAL METAL SUCKFEST, DAY 2 – 11.05.2011

 Concert Reviews  5 Responses »
Dec 082011
 

(The METAL SUCKFEST that took place in NYC on Nov 4 and 5 was a milestone event — the first U.S. metal festival organized and co-sponsored by a metal blog, and Metal Sucks pulled together a fucktastic line-up to boot. So, NCS decided to document the event up-close and personal by sending two emissaries — NCS writer BadWolf and photographer Nicholas Vechery.  They returned intact, and this is BadWolf’s report of the festival’s second day, along with Nick’s photos. We’ll have interviews to come in the days ahead.)

Photographer Nicholas Vechery and I returned for the second day of Suckfest even more hung over and disgruntled than on November 4th—we wanted to look and feel our best.

I learned about the sad passing of GWAR’s Cory Smoot earlier that day, so I was all frowns… until we walked into the Grammercy and found it bustling. Tickets to the second day must have outsold the first two-to-one.

What’s more, people seemed excited. No one is very visibly excited about anything in New York except exiting a subway train (especially the Green line, ugh!). A mass of goat-throwers chit-chatted, drank, acted like an honest-to-god community—something rare for me, the Midwestern Metalhead.

Community, people coming together—that’s what makes festivals amazing. Continue reading »

THE FIRST INAUGURAL METAL SUCKFEST – DAY 1, 11.04.2011

 Concert Reviews  8 Responses »
Dec 072011
 

(The METAL SUCKFEST that took place in NYC on Nov 4 and 5 was a milestone event — the first U.S. metal festival organized and co-sponsored by a metal blog, and Metal Sucks pulled together a fucktastic line-up to boot. So, NCS decided to document the event up-close and personal by sending two emissaries — NCS writer BadWolf and photographer Nicholas Vechery.  They returned intact, and this is BadWolf’s report of the festival’s first day, along with Nick’s photos. BadWolf’s Day Two report will be tomorrow, and we’ll have interviews to come after that.)

Blogs will control the entertainment industry within our lifetimes (if the industry lasts our lifetimes). TMZ will overtake Entertainment Tonight. In some ways, Pitchfork has already taken Rolling Stone’s place.  Case in point: MetalSucks just threw the first (to my knowledge) blog-driven extreme music festival on US soil, Suckfest, and NCS was there to cover it.

On November 4, 2011, suckalos—yours truly included—flocked to the Grammercy Theater in Manhattan for seven hours of thrash. NCS photographer Nicholas Vechery and I rolled in sleep-deprived and sore after a 20+ hour bus trip from Ohio. The venue –the Grammercy Theater—was indeed a theater once and remains dark and sparse.

Initially, I thought the Grammercy would be too small to fit a decent crowd, but the first day was poorly attended.  Attendees shouted “Occupy Grammercy!” between songs, but otherwise behaved themselves too well by my standards. New York headbangers seem more reluctant to mosh than when I lived in the Big Apple. I smelled a division between lineup and audience—the first day’s bands all shared a background in hardcore punk, but in general MetalSucks caters to a more technical/progressive metal loving audience. The lineup was strong, but perhaps suited for a more intimate venue. After all, who wants to see Magrudergrind behind a security barrier?

Audience aside, the first day’s bands exploded over the lower-east side with white-knuckle intensity. Continue reading »

AN EVENING WITH DIMMU BORGIR – NOTTINGHAM RESCUE ROOMS, Nov. 24, 2011

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 252011
 

(Stop the presses!  Andy Synn attended Dimmu Borgir’s performance in Nottingham last night and he’s already delivered this concert review, plus two videos he filmed of the show.  Further proof that, like killer whales during their first month of life, Andy does not sleep.)

“An Evening With Dimmu Borgir”, as this occasion was billed, saw the band performing two sets during the course of the evening. The first featured Enthrone Darkness Triumphant performed in its entirety, while the second, subsequent set, saw the group concentrate on its most recent quartet of albums for a more dynamically varied mix of material.

For the first two songs, “Mourning Palace” and “Spellbound (By The Devil)”, the guitars were annoyingly muted, resulting in a mix of heaving bass lines and rumbling drums which, although powerful, lacked much of the clarity and sharpened melody which the songs require to truly breathe their morbid magic.

Thankfully, the sound picked up just near the end of the second song, allowing “In Death’s Embrace” to spread its blackened wings with malevolent grace and majestic glory. With the sound levels thus balanced out and the guitars now slicing through the mix like razor-edged scalpels, the song provided an early high-point to the evening, the 6 members performing as one blasphemously tight unit to produce glorious swathes of blackened riffage and sweeping, evocative keyboard lines. Continue reading »

THE DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT – ADDICTED! LIVE AT ULU – 11/11/11

 Concert Reviews  2 Responses »
Nov 162011
 

(Andy Synn was on hand when Devin Townsend played ULU in London on November 11, and he provides this report of the show. This was one of four DT shows in London last week, each one devoted to the performance of a single Devin Townsend Project album from start to finish.)

Surprisingly, the venue for tonight’s epic extravaganza (epstravaganza?) was smaller than I would have anticipated, however still a decent size, with a large stage, high ceiling and spacious standing room for the sold-out capacity crowd. With more than a few Ziltoid puppets (mine remained behind to guard my car against interlopers) already waving in the air, it fell to Manchester prog-rock quartet Amplifier to warm up the already very receptive crowd with their brand of Brit-rock Tool-esque musical expressionism. Indeed, the band clearly had a reasonable fan-base of their own in attendance, judging by the impressively loud and clear response they received from those gathered in the front rows.

However, tonight was really about one man, or one band, depending on where one draws the already blurred lines between the two entities. As the crowd finally swelled to its full, massive throng, we were treated to an array of comical images and video stills superimposing Devin’s distorted face onto a series of film posters and movie montages, which kept everyone entertained during the inevitable lull in musical activity as the stage was torn down and set back up again for the night’s headline act. As things began to take shape we were “treated” (inverted commas to imply sarcasm there folks) to the joys of Ziltoid Radio, playing all the most terrifying and chipmunk-esque pop trash that could be mustered to prime the already expectant crowd. Continue reading »

FUCK YOUR POWER TRIP

 Concert Reviews  16 Responses »
Oct 212011
 

I just wanted to use my favorite word in a post title today. Actually, that’s only part of the reason for this. The other part is that I saw Chimaira last night, headlining a show in Seattle that included Impending Doom and Revocation. Chimaira played “Power Trip” and about 10 other songs.

[audio:https://www.nocleansinging.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/04-Power-Trip-Album-Version.mp3|titles=Chimaira – Power Trip (Album Version)]

After full audio immersion in the music of those three bands, my neck muscles were so destroyed when I woke up this morning that I had to strap on the custom-designed NCS neck brace, the one with the heated gel packs on the inside and the drinking straw attached to a pouch of chilled Stoli.

Chimaira had the strobe lights flashing and the smoke machine pumping and Sean Z (Daath) on keyboards, carpet-bombing the crowd with more bass drops than I’ve ever heard before and growling backing vox, and it was fucking glorious. A packed crowd on the floor was in non-stop mosh mode, and the Chimaira dudes looked like they were having the time of their lives on stage. And speaking of glorious . . . Continue reading »

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