NO CLEAN SINGING

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (THE CHASM)

Jan 172016

In this Sunday’s look back at songs from the past, the band I’ve chosen to feature is The Chasm. Unlike most of the bands featured in this series so far, The Chasm are alive and kicking, though their history is a long one.

Metal Archives tells us that the band originated in Mexico City in 1992, “when vocalist/guitarist Daniel Corchado left his previous band (Cenotaph) to pursue his own musical vision.” The band released a demo in 1993 and a debut album (Procreation of the Inner Temple) in 1994. They would go on to release two more albums, 1995’s From the Lost Years… and 1998’s titanic Deathcult For Eternity: The Triumph, before relocating to Chicago, where they’ve been ever since. Continue reading »

BANDCAMP FAKERY

Metal News 24 Responses »

Jan 162016

THIS IS A FAKE

In recent days I’ve learned that fake band pages have been set up on Bandcamp by people whose aim is to defraud bands and labels of money that rightfully should go to them. As I looked into this a bit further, I realized this has happened before — and so some of you may already be aware of it. But for those who aren’t, here are a few examples of what’s happening.

Today one of our readers (thank you Sidney) alerted me to the fact that he was about to buy Aborted albums at https://aborted.bandcamp.com — but something about it looked fishy to him. He then contacted Aborted’s band management representative (as identified on the band’s Facebook page) and was told that the Bandcamp page was indeed a phony.

I’ve not found any links to a Bandcamp page on Aborted’s social media, and their current label Century Media does not put its releases on Bandcamp as far as I can tell. Aborted’s previous label (Listenable) does have a Bandcamp page that includes Aborted releases — but it’s a different URL (this one) than the one above.

Yesterday, the following announcement also appeared on Abbath’s official Facebook page: Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015 WRAP-UP

LISTMANIA 2015 7 Responses »

Jan 152016

Andy Synn alleges that he still intends to deliver his annual list of favorite songs, but with that exception, I think our 2015 edition of LISTMANIA has finally drawn to a close. Unless I’ve forgotten something, in which case we’ll have to supplement the series with whatever I’ve forgotten. We’re not running a very well-oiled machine here.

But however rusty it may be, we’re damned sure running a list-making machine here. Our 2015 series of lists was more extensive than in any previous year — we posted more than 50 lists (!) with accompanying commentary this time.

As usual, some of these were lists that appeared at “big platform” web sites and print magazines, and others were prepared by our own cadre of writers. But once again the largest group of list posts came from NCS readers, band members, and assorted other guests, including fellow metal bloggers/writers. Plus, we’ve also received many lists in reader comments on THIS POST. Continue reading »

THE REISSUE OF OPPROBRIUM’S “SERPENT TEMPTATION”: A TRACK-BY-TRACK COMMENTARY BY THE BAND AND FULL-ALBUM STREAM

Interviews 1 Response »

Jan 152016

In the middle of 1982 two young brothers, Moyses M. Howard and Francis M. Howard — moved with their parents from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to New Orleans, Louisiana. It didn’t take long for them to be caught up in the energy of music — joining bands, playing shows… exploring. By 1986 their interests had turned to underground metal, and they formed a band named Incubus with Scott Latour as vocalist. They released a demo in 1987, and then a debut album in 1988 named Serpent Temptation.

A blistering onslaught of death/thrash, the album has been hailed as an underground classic, and it led to a deal with Nuclear Blast, who released the band’s next two albums —Beyond the Unknown (1990) and Discerning Forces (2000) — both of which were recorded by the Howard brothers as a two-piece band, with Francis as vocalist. By the time that third album was released, the band had changed their name to Opprobrium. Eight more years would pass before the band (now based in Tampa) released their fourth album (and most recent to date), Mandatory Evac.

Today, Relapse Records is re-releasing that 1988 classic, Serpent Temptation. It has been remastered for this release by Brad Boatright (Sleep, Obituary, etc.), and it includes four bonus tracks from the band’s 1987 demo, plus an extended booklet. What we’ve got for you on this release date is both a full stream of the remastered album and a track-by-track commentary by the Howard Brothers. Continue reading »

TEMISTO: “TEMISTO”

Album Reviews 1 Response »

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 »

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