NO CLEAN SINGING

AN NCS PREMIERE: SCIENTIST — “THE LIGHTHOUSE”

Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres 8 Responses »

Nov 232015

The experimental, Chicago-based metal band Scientist have recorded a follow-up to their self-titled debut album. This new album includes more vocals than the debut (contributed in part by some notable guests), but that doesn’t mean the music is any more conventional. It simply adds more dimensions to music that is still fascinatingly difficult to pin down.

The album’s title is 10100II00101, and it’s scheduled for digital and CD release on December 11 (with vinyl coming later from Hell Comes Home). For those who haven’t yet encountered Scientist, it’s the collaborative vehicle of these talented musicians: guitarist, vocalist, and founder Eric Plonka (Yakuza), guitarist/vocalist Patrick Auclair (Taken By The Sun), drummer Justin Cape (Taken By The Sun), and bassist Mathew Milligan (Making Ghosts).

I’ll also mention up-front the names of the guest vocalists: Stavros Giannopoulos (The Atlas Moth), Andre Almaraz (Pale Horseman), Anthony Cwan (Without Waves), and James Clayton Bowman. Aw hell, I might as well mention a few more notable names who are associated with this unpronounceable new album: Continue reading »

BENEATH THE NCS RADAR (PART 4)

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 9 Responses »

Nov 232015

(Here’s Part 4 of our Norwegian friend Gorger’s entertaining multi-part feature on bands we seem to have overlooked at NCS. Part 1 is here; Part 2 is here; Part 3 is here. And be sure to check out Gorger’s Metal.)

With Islander back in the saddle, I felt no hurry to complete this fourth part of Beneath the NCS Radar.

This was initially intended as the last episode of the series, but then the producers decided to give Season 2 a chance. I’ve discovered more music that deserves a larger audience. This leaves me with a question, though.

If this were to become a regular feature, the name would sort of bite its own shiny metal ass. If it’s presented on NSC, than it’s no longer off the NCS radar, and thus the very title becomes contradictory. Perhaps this minute dilemma is so
small it is negligible. Moving on… Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: EXTREME COLD WINTER — “PARADISE ENDS HERE”

Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET 4 Responses »

Nov 232015

Everything about Extreme Cold Winter’s debut EP is massive, frigid, and pitiless. Compared to what I’ve heard from the music of founder AJ van Drench’s previous death/doom band Beyond Belief, Paradise Ends Here is slower, more desolate and forbidding, and more brutally staggering in the force of its impact. The word DOOM belongs before “death” this time, and it deserves all the capital letters.

In keeping with the band’s name, the song titles and the apocalyptic lyrical themes are devoted to the extinction of heat, joy, and life. The music and the words — which can be heard clearly in the well-rounded and monstrous growls of vocalist Pim Blankenstein (Officium Triste, The 11th Hour) — conjure feelings of desperation and dread. When Blankenstein roars, “We came from far, from raging worlds to kill again the sun and moon!”, you can easily imagine that he’s talking about the band, even though he’s not. Continue reading »

ARKAIK: “LUCID DAWN”

Album Reviews 6 Responses »

Nov 232015

(DGR reviews the new album by Arkaik.)

The idea of a “tentpole” band is something that has been playing on the darkest reaches of my mind lately. Like an idea that has its claws slowly wrapping around you, so the tendrils have slowly wormed their way into my thoughts over the course of my album listenings for this review.

I’m definitely the most unqualified person in the world to opine about how the record label business is conducted, but I’ve always been under the impression that a lot of many label’s rosters often don’t exactly generate tremendous amounts of money, and under some business models there are usually two or three fairly huge bands that happen to bring in most of the money, and that tends to get kind of spread out amongst the rest of the label.

If it isn’t the profit factor, sometimes these bands I’m thinking of just happen to be the ones that seem to define the ethos of the label. In other words, there will usually be a band or two per label that seem to define what much of the roster sounds like, or they embody huge swaths of the sound — the exemplaries of the label, so to speak. In my mind, this is the case with Arkaik and their label Unique Leader. Continue reading »

SPAWNING ABHORRENCE: “THE WRITHING RHETORIC”

Premieres 4 Responses »

Nov 222015

Spawning Abhorrence from Leeds in the UK have finished work on their second album, The Sleepless One, and they’ve just released one of the new songs (“The Writhing Rhetoric”) for streaming. Even though we’re a few hours late to call it an actual premiere, we’ve decided to help spread it around because it’s an obliterating listening experience. And what better way to close out the weekend and get our game faces on for the new week than by getting obliterated?

I could probably just leave it at that, but I can’t resist adding a few more words of introduction, just so you have a better idea how the obliteration will proceed.

It will happen in a torrent of furiously writhing, viciously jabbing, and mercilessly grinding death metal riffs, accompanied by hyper-speed drumming and ghastly roars. And in the second half of this barrage, some interesting things will happen as the band give the song added texture, when a brief moment of near-silence paves the way for a combination of percussive blasting and dark, shimmering melody. Continue reading »

SUNDAY SELECTIONS: NACHASH, GEVURAH, MALENCONTRE, SEROCS, ABYSSUS, THE CORONA LANTERN, GRGA

Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET 6 Responses »

Nov 222015

As you can see, I decided to give the “Seen and Heard” title a rest for today, but that’s still what this post really is — another selection of music I’ve come across in recent days that I thought you might enjoy as much as I have. Most of what’s in here is new, some of it only newly discovered by yours truly. As is usually the case, the featured music is stylistically diverse. And because this is a birthday weekend at NCS, I decided to really load up this post with a lot of listening.

NACHASH

We’ll start this collection of music with the debut EP from Norway’s Nachash, a four-track offering entitled Conjuring the Red Death Eclipse. Though it was released in February of this year (through Unborn Productions), I only discovered it recently, and what a discovery it has been.

The four long songs on the EP are rich and multifaceted. The final track “A Necromancer’s Lament”, which is set to play first on Bandcamp, is like a melding of stoner doom and black metal; the riffs are so goddamn delicious that I got pulled headfirst into the rest of the EP as if I’d been sucked into a whirlpool. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THIRD SOVEREIGN — “SAKEI AI HLA / GRAVE OF HUMANITY”

Premieres 3 Responses »

Nov 222015

India’s Third Sovereign released their debut album Destined To Suffer eight years ago. In the intervening years, the band relocated to a remote state named Mizoram in the northeastern part of the country and have now recorded a new album named Perversion Swallowing Sanity that’s due for release by the Transcending Obscurity India label in January of the coming new year. Today we bring you the album’s opening track, a two-part manifesto named “Sakei Ai Hla / Grave of Humanity”.

The song’s exotic introductory section builds an atmosphere that’s sinister and brooding, while introducing a skull-pounding riff that then quickly accelerates into a thrashing charge of death metal ferocity. With the vocalist barking and snarling at high speed, the band inflict a sonic beating that jabs hard and fast and then rides right over the listeners’ prone bodies in a gallop. The rhythmic grooves in the song are damned infectious, and the band take the music through its dynamic paces without ever sacrificing the overarching aura of malevolence and morbidity. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (NIRVANA 2002)

THE REARVIEW MIRROR 5 Responses »

Nov 222015

I wasn’t listening to underground metal in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Years later, when I began to discover what I had missed, Entombed’s Left Hand Path and Dismember’s Like An Ever Flowing Stream were among the albums that first really hooked me and started me down my own musical left hand path. Once I realized that I was at the tip of an iceberg, I began reading to try to get better educated about the early Swedish death metal scene, and it wasn’t long before I came across the name Nirvana 2002.

The band’s original name was Prophet 2002, and the members then later changed the name to Nirvana. After discovering the existence of Seattle’s Nirvana upon the release of that band’s first single, they took the “2002” from the first name of the band and tacked it onto the new one.

Nirvana 2002 were only active from 1988 to 1991, releasing a quartet of demos and a 1990 split with Appendix, Authorize, and Fallen Angel. But the band had a lot to do with establishing the signature sound of what we would now call “old school Swedish death metal”, though the school was just getting started when Nirvana 2002 were alive. Daniel Ekeroth, the author of Swedish Death Metal, wrote that they were “one of the purest examples of that typical fat Swedish death metal, with crushing guitars and straightforward song structures.” Continue reading »

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO US

Birthday Posts, Metal News 82 Responses »

Nov 212015

We have survived another year. And when you get right down to it, sheer survival is the reason any of us celebrate birthdays. We are six years old today, having made our first post on November 21, 2009.

Measured by the lifespan of your average Galápagos tortoise, six years isn’t so long. Measured by the lifespan of your average metal blog, a species that tends to fall victim to accelerated decrepitude, I guess we’re almost ready for a nursing home.

For something that has never been a business and to this day relies on purely volunteer effort, it would have been entirely understandable if the vagaries of life had moved all of us on to other things and left NCS behind as just a fond memory. The fact that we are not only still here, but somehow more widely read than ever, makes me shake my head in wonder. We surely have defied the odds, even if we now need help going to the bathroom. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: EXPANDER — “EXPANDER”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 5 Responses »

Nov 202015

Last weekend I came across an EP named Laws of Power that was digitally released in July by a band named Expander from Austin, Texas. It seized me by the throat so fast and so firmly that I spilled some words about it on Monday of this week (here), while noting that it would be released on tape by Caligari Records. Little did I know at the time that I would be ending the week as I began it — with more music from Expander.

It turns out that this past summer the editors at Metal Sucks selected Expander to be one of 10 unsigned bands who would be given the chance to record new music at Converse Rubber Tracks — Converse’s free recording studio — in either Brooklyn, NY, with producer Will Putney (The Acacia Strain, Suicide Silence, Exhumed), or in Boston, MA, with producer Kurt Ballou (Converge, High on Fire, Torche). Expander did their thing with Kurt Ballou, and while Metal Sucks earlier premiered one of the two songs they recorded with him, the band have just today released both tracks via Bandcamp. Continue reading »

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