NO CLEAN SINGING

AN NCS PREMIERE: BODE PRETO — “WRAITH / THE STAGE AND THE MEADOW”

Dec 152015

On January 2 of the impending New Year, Iron Tyrant will release Mystic Massacre, the second album by the Brazilian horde Bode Preto — which in English means “Black Goat”. As a sign of what Mystic Massacre holds within its bottomless crypt, today we bring you the premiere of the album’s ninth track, “Wraith/The Stage and the Meadow”.

On this new song Bode Preto succeed on several fronts:

They unleash the kind of bestial, barbaric fury that summons the spirits of forbears such as Sarcófago, Holocausto, and Impurity (some of whose members have themselves been part of Bode Preto at one time or another). They create an unsettling atmosphere of ominous peril with grim melodies saturated in darkness and with ravenous vocal savagery. They deliver a powerful sound driven by thundering drum and bass rhythms that will get heads moving. And… they’ve written and executed a song with razor-edged riffs that are catchy and memorable as well as pestilential. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VESANIA — “NOTION”

Premieres 9 Responses »

Dec 152015

In advance of the 2014 Metal Blade release of the latest full-length by Poland’s Vesania, our writer Andy Synn concluded his review of the album with these words:

“As darkly dramatic as it is devastating, Deus Ex Machina, if pushed hard enough and marketed right, could be a real game-changer for Vesania. It demonstrates their songwriting, and their skills, at their absolute sharpest, and takes their sound and vision to the next level.”

Today we are privileged to bring you the debut of a video for a song from Deus Ex Machina named “Notion”, a track Andy characterized as “half blackened blitzkrieg, half glorious symphonic majesty,” a song that “for all its orchestral excess and metallic thunder, takes time to reveal its secrets, telling a story through sound and verse, shape and colour, which unfolds naturally and organically as the song progresses”. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015: A YEAR-END LIST FROM JONNY PETTERSSON (WOMBBATH, ASHCLOUD, JUST BEFORE DAWN, and more)

LISTMANIA 2015 12 Responses »

Dec 152015

(We invited Jonny Pettersson — vocalist and riff-maker at Wombbath, Lieutenant General at Just before Dawn, and vocalist/guitarist at Ashcloud (among many other projects) — to let us share with our readers his year-end list for 2015, and we are grateful that he agreed!)

I started this list thinking that this year it would be easy to pick the top 10. Halfway through I realized that, as always, there are too many good releases to make easy choices. Continue reading »

“METALHEAD”: AN ANALYSIS OF MEDIA CULTURE CLASH

Mosh Pit 8 Responses »

Dec 152015

(This post is by Grant Skelton, and he will explain what it’s about.)

After several years, I’m finally back in school finishing out a Bachelor’s. This was an essay I wrote for a journalism class called “Mass Media & Cultures.” In a nutshell, the course covered communication of news messages between (or about) different cultures and how those messages are framed.

My assignment for this essay was to “select a commercial movie that deals with either a culture clash or attempts to depict another culture and discuss the effect this film and its message might have on an average adult viewer.”

I chose the 2013 Icelandic film Metalhead, directed by Ragnar Bragason. One of the class textbooks I refer to is Jaap van Ginnekin’s Understanding Global News: A Critical Introduction. I include these details just to provide some context for the assignment. I really enjoyed writing this paper, because metal culture is still largely misunderstood by the public at large. Most of that misunderstanding has been informed by media platforms that frame heavy metal culture as something that is an antagonistic, subversive art form that directly contributes to acts of violence. But that’s a topic for another day.

A fair warning, this essay does contain some spoilers about Metalhead. It isn’t my intention to ruin the film for anyone who hasn’t seen it, but the paper would have been impossible to write without revealing some of the elements of the film’s plot. You can rent “Metalhead” on Amazon for $3.99. The DVD looks to be about $13. I haven’t seen it on Netflix or Hulu.

And now for the essay. Continue reading »

2015 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE GOOD ALBUMS

LISTMANIA 2015 20 Responses »

Dec 152015

(This is the second of Andy Synn’s 5-part year-end series this week. To see his list of the “Great Albums” of 2015, go here.)

Now, depending on how you interpret it, I realise that the word “Good” can be a bit of a… loaded term.

On the one hand it can be entirely positive. “This is really good!” and so forth… and on the other it can be used in a much more grudging manner. “This is good enough, I suppose”.

So rejoice my friends, because the majority of the albums on this list definitely fall into the “Really good!” category, and many of them just missed out on getting on the “Great” list by the skin of their teeth. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: RIPPER, RIPPING DEATH, BRUTALITY, TEMPLE BELOW, GOAT CAROLS

Eye-Catchers, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 14 Responses »

Dec 142015

You may have noticed that we’re now hip-deep in year-end LISTMANIA, and that tide will continue to rise from now into the New Year. This means that we won’t have quite as many new-music round-ups as we usually do, but I’m still going to try to squeeze a few in as time permits — including this one…

… which includes lots of eye-catching artwork as well as ear-catching music, but not many of my usual descriptions (because I’m hurrying).

RIPPER

The Chilean band Ripper turned a lot of heads last year (including mine, wherever I left it) with their debut album Raising the Corpse, and now they’ve got a new one on the way named Experiment of Existence. The advance track from the album that premiered today is a superior ass-kicker. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015: YEAR-END LISTS FROM EXCLAIM!, APPLE MUSIC, AND ANTI-GRAVITY BUNNY

LISTMANIA 2015 12 Responses »

Dec 142015

As part of our annual LISTMANIA series we re-publish year-end lists of metal from selected print zines and a group of cross-genre web sites with large audiences. We have two more of those in this post (and we’re only waiting for one or two more of those before we’re finished for this year).

We usually don’t re-publish year-end lists from other metal sites and blogs, because we figure you already know about the ones you care about and because, where would we stop? But this year, for the first time, we’re making a few exceptions to that policy.

One of those few exceptions is Angry Metal Guy. Whenever he gets around to posting his year-end list, I’m going to share it here. Among the reasons, AMG is one of the few surviving metal blogs out there which was born in the same year (2009) as our own putrid site. Plus, although we don’t always see eye-to-eye about music, the writing is top-notch. And then, there’s also this little item that recently appeared on the AMG Facebook page: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VOIDCRAEFT — “UNDER THE SUN” AND “I AM NOTHING”

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Dec 142015

In February of next year, I, Voidhanger Records will be releasing the third album (and the first on this label) by the one-man German black metal project known as Voidcraeft. Its title is Ἕβελ and it’s unusual in many respects, not the least of which is that all of the lyrics are in either Biblical Hebrew or Koine Greek. There’s a reason for that, which we’ll come to in a moment, but here’s the main point of this post: We’re giving you the chance to listen to two songs from the album, the English translations of which are “I Am Nothing” and “Under the Sun“.

For people who follow our site (religiously), Voidcraeft will not be a new name. Our man Andy Synn featured the band in a post here in October, recommending the music to fans of Deathspell Omega, Ævangelist, and Portal, while noting the experimental nature of the music and its creator’s tradition of writing his own self-critical analysis of his prodigious output. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015: A YEAR-END LIST FROM AUSTIN LUNN (PANOPTICON)

LISTMANIA 2015 30 Responses »

Dec 142015

(We are grateful that for the third year in a row Austin Lunn accepted our invitation to share his favorite releases from the year that’s about to end. He is, of course, the man behind one of ours: Panopticon’s Autumn Eternal.)

First off, sorry for the excessive length of my list this year. There was a lot of to choose from and a lot of records to listen to this year. I am sure that I have forgotten some excellent records, and immediately after this is published it’ll hit me. Please keep in mind that there is no particular order or ranking on this list… it is simply a list of records I really enjoyed this year, and I hope that others have, too.

Best wishes,
Austin Continue reading »

2015 A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE GREAT ALBUMS

LISTMANIA 2015 29 Responses »

Dec 142015

(Here’s the first of Andy Synn’s annual five-part, year-end round-up of metal.)

Well, well, well… it’s already that time again, is it? Time to look back on the year in Metal and take stock of all the Great, Good, and Disappointing albums that the past twelve months have produced.

As you may have gathered, I’ve once again elected to split the year into the usual three categories:

The “Great” – the albums which I honestly consider the top tier of this year’s crop.

The “Good” – albums which vary from “solid” to “really good”, but perhaps don’t quite reach the bar of true greatness (though most of them still kick a major amount of ass).

The “Disappointing” – albums which I honestly think could/should have been better (though that doesn’t necessarily make them “Bad” albums).

Now I’ll go a little bit more into the rationale of each one in detail at the appropriate time, but let me just specify that these lists should NOT – I repeat, NOT – be considered comprehensive. There’s just so many albums that have been released this year that there’s almost no way for one person to get to them all. Continue reading »

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