NO CLEAN SINGING

TEMISTO: “TEMISTO”

Jan 152016

(Allen Griffin provides this review of the debut album by Sweden’s Temisto.)

Pairing the word “Swedish” with the words “Death Metal” will certainly lead to certain listener expectations, and while the duo Temisto manages to check all the appropriate boxes on their self-titled debut, there is much more to their sound than expected.

Due out on February 26th on Pulverised, the album does an excellent job of keeping pace with its wide-ranging ambitions. “Above Sacred Ground” and “Descent Into Madness” start things off in a straightforward manner, but with the introduction of the vocals the music quickly becomes more labyrinthine. Whirlwind riffs crash into each other as drum beats and tempos rapidly change on a dime. Somehow, Temisto seem to simultaneously channel both pre-Entombed Morbid and Nihilist while also invoking more technical acts such as Atheist. At their fastest and most brutal, Temisto nearly reach Angelcorpse levels of kinetic violence. Continue reading »

AGAINST THE PLAGUES: “PURIFIED THROUGH DEVASTATION”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Jan 152016

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Against the Plagues.)

Here in the great and glorious republic of No Clean Singing we’ve been watching the career of Chicago-based multi-national metallers Against the Plagues with an appraising eye for some time now. Though their debut album (so good they named it, and released it, twice!) didn’t exactly set the world on fire, there was still enough potential inherent in it to ensure that the group deserved a second look when the time finally came for them to release their follow-up The Quaternion (reviewed HERE), which was most definitely a major step-up for the group (if not exactly a step outside their comfort zone).

However, not long after the EP’s release the band’s line-up effectively imploded, leaving drummer Varyen as the last man standing in the aftermath. Thankfully, he refused to give up on things and, over the course of the next three years, recruited an entirely new line-up in order to work on what would eventually become the group’s second full-length album proper, Purified Through Devastation.

Now, some may feel slightly short-changed by the fact that Purified Through Devastation re-records the entirety of The Quaternion (all four tracks) – which would be wholly understandable, to an extent. However, I’d like to reassure those people that the versions present on this album far exceed those originally put out on the EP, as the entire album itself positively crackles with a real sense of vitality and energy over and above anything the band have done before.

Granted, it doesn’t exactly break the mould, or reinvent the wheel… or whatever other cliché you might be thinking of… but then again, it doesn’t really have to. Against the Plagues are clearly more focussed on being (to paraphrase a certain Canucklehead) “the best there is at what they do”.

And while they’re not quite there yet… they’re definitely on their way. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PLATEAU SIGMA, WITTE WIEVEN, OLD THUNDER, HOLYARROW, ETERNAL FIRE

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 2 Responses »

Jan 142016

It’s been one of those weeks when I haven’t had as much time as I would like to write about newly discovered music. As a result, I find myself with an enormous backlog of new and not-so-new songs, EPs, and albums that I’d really like to mention. In such circumstances, I generally just throw mental darts at my mental to-do lists, and that’s what I’ve done here. However, despite the largely random nature of this selection, the music I’ve chosen to recommend presents some nice genre diversity. Hopefully, you’ll find something below that rings your chimes.

PLATEAU SIGMA

I must thank KevinP for urging me to listen to this first song. The name is “Palladion” and it comes from Rituals, the forthcoming second album by Italy’s Plateau Sigma. Like all the bands whose music I’ve collected in this post, I was unfamiliar with Plateau Sigma before listening to the song, and therefore didn’t know what to expect.

The massive, groaning riffs and beguiling melody grabbed me almost instantly — and then the vocals began. At first I was downcast; I was hoping for some cavernous growls. And then something strange and wondrous happened. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015: THE TOP 10(ISH) OF 2015 AS COMPILED BY ANGRYMETALGUY.COM

LISTMANIA 2015 6 Responses »

Jan 142016

Unless I’ve forgotten something, which is always a distinct possibility, this will be the final installment of the LISTMANIA 2015 series that we began back in December. Tomorrow I’ll prepare a wrap-up with links to all of the many lists we posted this season. If there was anything worth a shit that was released last year, I’m betting you will find it somewhere among those lists.

This year I made an exception to my usual practice about posting lists from other web sites or blogs. In past years, I only re-published lists from cross-genre “big platform” sites, in part for the fun of seeing what people who don’t eat, sleep, and breathe metal are being told is “the best metal” of the year. There are many other excellent metal sites and blogs out there that lurk in the narrower crevices of the interhole like we do. If I started trying to re-post all of their year-end lists, it would be hard to find a stopping point.

But here on this final day of LISTMANIA 2015 I decided to make a couple of exceptions — by posting a year-end list from Brutalitopia (because I’ve gotten personally shit-faced with those guys at a metal festival and they were nice enough not to post any pics) and now by posting a year-end list from AngryMetalGuy.com (because both our site and theirs burst forth from foul wombs in the same year and somehow we have both managed to survive and prosper since 2009). Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LATITUDES — “ALTARPIECES”

Premieres 2 Responses »

Jan 142016

As last year gasped its final breaths we had the pleasure of premiering an amazing song called “Body Within A Body” from Old Sunlight, the new album by the UK’s Latitudes, which will be released by Debemur Morti Productions on January 22. Today we bring you another track from the album, this one named “Altarpieces“.

When I introduced the last premiere, I seem to have simply fountained forth a series of mental images that sprang to mind as I heard the song. It’s hard not to do that in listening to this music. It fires the imagination in a way that makes conventional descriptions of styles and sounds too mundane. “Altarpieces” produces the same effect. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015: BRUTALITOPIA’S TÖP 10

LISTMANIA 2015 3 Responses »

Jan 142016

(As part of our annual nearly complete 2015 LISTMANIA series, we present a year-end list assembled by some people we’re very fond of — Durf, Mick, Jack, and Tom from the Brutalitopia metal blog.)

Welcome to the Brutalitopia Töp 10, which has been so kindly hosted by our good friend Islander here at NCS. For those of you who don’t know us, we are a collective of 4 morons (3 in Chicago and 1 in New Jersey) who post reviews and do the occasional podcast every year or 2. We have recently started to use our general malaise to our advantage with our Brutally Short reviews where we piece together short reviews in a magazine-type format so as to say we produce something once in a while.

While painstakingly putting this list together I noticed that we happen to have collectively shed some light on some albums that some sites and magazines haven’t, so when going through the collective lists of Durf, Mick, Myself, and the yet-to-be-published (if ever) Jack, I have come up with a solid list of 10, whittled down from a collective of 39 albums total. You’ll find snippets from each of our lists to sum up our feelings on the albums if we thought it was worth a mention, or maybe several passing words from a list in progress (or pulled from Facebook messenger, but who can really tell). For now here are 5 albums that just missed the cut: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: HIGH PRIEST OF SATURN (MERETHE HEGGSET)

Interviews 1 Response »

Jan 132016

(Comrade Aleks presents his interview with Merethe Heggset, vocalist and bassist in the Norwegian band High Priest of Saturn, whose second album will be released next month.)

High Priest of Saturn is from our planet; actually this band was born in Norway about five years ago. Well, they’re from Norway and they don’t play black metal. They did a demo-record in 2011 and stole the heart of Svart Records’ boss, who helped the band with the release of the High Priest of Saturn album in 2013.

The core of the band are Merethe Heggset who sings and plays bass; Andreas Hagen who can easily deal both with guitars and drums; Martin Sivertsen (also Andreas‘ mate in the Resonaut band), also a guitarist; and Ole Kristian, organ player.

I already gave you a hint, but let’s clarify it: High Priest of Saturn perform a bit raw, a bit dirty, but overall psychedelic doom metal with hypnotic female vocals. If you like Acid King, then you need to check it. We had already started this interview with Merethe when suddenly I found a promo version of the band’s new album Son of Earth and Sky in my mail box and it took a bit more time to finish our discussion. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015: BADWOLF’S TOP NON-METAL ALBUMS OF 2015

LISTMANIA 2015 11 Responses »

Jan 132016

(In what has become an annual tradition as we near the finish line for our LISTMANIA series, our good friend and long-time NCS comrade BadWolf (aka Joseph Schafer) takes a break from his responsibilities at Invisible Oranges and brings us his year-end list of top non-metal albums from 2015.)

My duties as editor of Invisible Oranges keep me from writing on No Clean Singing as much as I’d like (that being, pretty much at all) but this site still feels like home. I think, for the first time, this is the only article I wrote for Islander in the past twelve months. That said, it’s still my favorite piece to write.

If you’re interested in my metal top 10, it lives here at Invisible Oranges. Look at the comment section for a little snark from our beloved Andy Synn. It’s ok, buddy, I don’t like most of the bands on your list, either.

Maybe Synn and I will have more in common outside the realms of metal. That said, some of these records are quite heavy — a couple made it into the metal top 10 lists at Invisible Oranges. I excluded them for the sake of having a more cohesive metal list of my own. Continue reading »

FESTIVITIES: HAMMERHEART OSTARABLOT

Metal News 9 Responses »

Jan 132016

Festival poster by Nate Burns

For the second year in a row, HammerHeart Brewing Company is putting on a metal festival. Bearing the name Ostarablot, it will be hosted at the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Friday, March 18 and 19, 2016. And man, it’s a hell of a line-up.

As many of you know, HammerHeart is a brewery and tap house located in Lino Lakes, Minnesota, that’s co-owned by Austin Lunn of Panopticon. He and his comrades have assembled an truly impressive array of bands for Ostarablot. Feast your eyes on this:

Day 1:
Wyrding
Wilt
Waldgefluster
Obsequiae
Falls of Rauros Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SKUGGSJÁ — “VITKISPÁ”

Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres 8 Responses »

Jan 132016

cover art by Costin Chioreanu

On May 17, 1814, the Norwegian Constituent Assembly at Eidsvoll signed the Constitution of Norway, which remains one of the oldest in the world. Inspired by the 200th anniversary of that event, Ivar Bjørnson of Enslaved and Einar Selvik of Wardruna joined forces to compose and perform a concert piece called Skuggsjá, which means “mirror” or “reflection” in the Norse language. Skuggsjá was first performed at the Eidsivablot festival in Eidsvoll on September 13, 2014, to commemorate the anniversary. But Bjørnson and Selvik decided that the Skuggsjá project should live on and be expanded.

Last fall the duo signed with Season of Mist, taking Skuggsjá as the project’s name. On March 11, 2016, Season of Mist will release their debut album, entitled A Piece For Mind and Mirror. Today we bring you the premiere of a song from the album named “Vitkispá“. Continue reading »

Older Entries Newer Entries