Tomasz Alen Kopera – “Ascension”

(TheMadIsraeli has some ideas and invites some feedback….)

So I haven’t written much lately, and I’m sure you all have noticed that.  The last year was really rough for me personally, and it sapped away a lot of my energy and passion over time.  I’ve come back swinging in a huge way all the way from the brink of a bad place last year, and now the current delay in my writing is due to me trying to get my life together and moving in a way I never have before.

With this new commitment to reshaping myself, I also want to recommit myself and redefine my tenure here at NCS and write the absolute best stuff I can for the site, provide the best content I can possibly muster, and I hope get back to my old borderline inhuman output.  For now, instead of trying to churn out piece after piece, I am focusing on making what I write count and be super-substantial.  I want to recommit myself to my original goal of writing about music that is nothing short of borderline perfect for me, and I have been recapturing my passion for metal quite quickly as of late. Continue reading »

Every November here at NCS we renew a few year-end traditions that have been a part of our site since the early days, and I thought now would be a good time for a reminder, since we depend on our readers for help in rolling them out.

First of all, we’re approaching another birthday for our putrid site. We made our first post on November 21, 2009, and by resorting to higher math with the aid of a calculator, I’ve determined that in 10 days we will be five years old! We won’t need your help with that celebration when the blessed day arrives — we’re capable of patting ourselves on the back all by ourselves. We do accept presents; cash is preferred.

Second, we will soon be starting our year-end LISTMANIA series. There are three parts to that endeavor:  We publish year-end lists of metal’s best albums that we find on certain “big platform” websites and zines; we publish year-end lists by our own staff writers and by special guests; and we provide a platform for our readers to post their own lists of favorite releases from the year that’s nearing an end.

We’ll need your help on that last part, so put your thinking caps on and start winnowing down what you’ve heard into the best of the best — we’ll invite you to start sharing your lists in about 2 weeks. Continue reading »

(We welcome our guest Jeff from Life In the Vinyl Lane, who will be reporting on the Iceland Airwaves festival in the near future.)

This is Jeff from the Life in the Vinyl Lane blog, coming to you from the land of the midnight sun and black metal, Oslo, Norway. I’d asked Islander if I could send a dispatch from this year’s version of Iceland Airwaves, which is just around the corner, and while I was at it I figured I’d tell you a bit about what’s out there for metal fans who might be visiting Oslo, since we stopped off here prior to the festival.

Now, to be fair, at least 99% of the No Clean Singing readers are probably bigger and/or more knowledgeable metal fans than I am. Let’s get that out there right from the start. I came of age in the early 1980s, back when you couldn’t turn on MTV without seeing Quiet Riot and Mötley Crüe videos in regular rotation, before metal was ghettoized into “Headbangers Ball”. So while I discovered the genre in the 80s, I didn’t advance too much past there — the hardest stuff on my shelves are the classics like Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Slayer, and most of the bands featured on No Clean Singing are new to me, with the notable exception of Iceland’s Sólstafir. Maybe that makes me a tourist here. I don’t know.

Be that as it may, I knew that since we were spending a few days in Oslo prior to Iceland Airwaves this year, I owed it to myself to check out Norway’s black metal scene, and some quick research indicated that the one “must visit” stop on the trip was Neseblod Records. Continue reading »

Artwork by Jeffrey Smith (for Judd Madden’s Everything In Waves).

You’re going to see some temporary changes here at NCS over the next 10 days, and I thought I’d explain why.

I’ve finally accepted the fact that I’m trying to do too much. Partly because of increasing demands on my day job, and partly because NCS has just gotten way busier than it used to be, I can’t do everything at the site that I’d ideally like to do. Something has to give.

I spend a big chunk of time every day reading e-mails and scouring the internet for metal news and for new song and video premieres, and then every day (or every other day) I spend more time writing about at least a few of the new discoveries that I think are worth sharing. I also write about new songs or videos that we ourselves have agreed to premiere. And I do other shit that doesn’t involve my own writing at all.

All of this has left me little time for reviewing new albums and EPs. My NCS comrades do their part, but we don’t make review assignments here — everyone writes about what they want to write about. And we’re diverse enough in our tastes that what I want to write about often doesn’t get reviewed at all if I don’t do it. Continue reading »