We have been steadfast fans of Minnesota’s Amiensus for years, and so we are very pleased to bring you year-end lists from four of the band’s members.
These lists include metal, of course, but also albums from other genres as well , and two of the members have also listed some favorite individual songs.
If you haven’t heard the music of Amiensus before, go HERE and get acquainted (they’re on Facebook at this location). Continue reading »
Before we get to the new music, now that the holidays are over I thought I’d check in and give you a forecast of what lies ahead at our site in the first full week of the new year.
As you may have noticed already today, we’re still in LISTMANIA 2015 mode. I haven’t counted how many year-end lists we’ve posted already, but it’s a big number. However, we have more coming, and since I’ve seen them, I can tell you that we still haven’t exhausted all the great releases that 2015 brought our way. My plan is to post two new lists every day this week, and here are some of the authors whose lists will be in that group, including musicians, members of our own staff, and other invited guests:
Amiensus (the band)
Semjaza Shade (Thy Darkened Shade)
Spectral Lore (the band)
Professor D. Grover the XIIIth
Grant Skelton
DGR
TheMadIsraeli Continue reading »
(Comrade Aleks somehow snuck into our own backyard and interviewed Bobby James, vocalist/guitarist of Seattle’s Wounded Giant.)
As it seems that I’ve managed to escape from the Italian doom mafia, I had some time to reveal something new for our loyal readers who have enough patience for slow and heavy stuff. Wounded Giant came from Seattle (Hey! Islander! Is it true?!), and they are about slow, dark, heavy, and a bit psychedelic horror doom metal.
Drums are played by Alex Bytnar, bass is played by Dylan A. Rogers, and Bobby James displays fantastic skill singing and playing the guitar at the same time. What does he sing about? About Clive Barker sadistic nightmares, Lovecraftian horrors, and other things that mostly lie between those two mentioned above. So Bobby is here, and he has something to say. Continue reading »
(KevinP weighs in with his year-end list of top EPs and albums.)
441 albums. That was the total amount of metal I consumed this year. Easily the most I’ve ever listened to and almost double last year’s consumption. Even though most of these are from my Albums of the Month columns (if you have followed that, GOOD, if not, get with the program in 2016), there are 3 that made my final list that I either overlooked initially or grew on me enough over the course of the year to warrant inclusion.
All 12 number one albums from the monthly series made the list (naturally), but not all of them held up, as 3 albums in my Top 10 were not ‘Best Of’ their respective month. Anyways, enjoy the list. Hopefully, there’s some new music you overlooked that I put on your radar. Feel free to discuss what albums tickled your fancy in the comments below. Continue reading »
(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new 20th anniversary EP by Belgium’s Aborted.)
I fucking love Aborted, especially their last two albums. It’s no secret that here at NCS we were foaming at the mouth like a horde of ravenous hyenas and cackling as we ripped apart the carcasses of Global Flatline and The Necrotic Manifesto when they came our way. To my ears, The Necrotic Manifesto, compared to Global Flatline, signified a departure from the sound the band had always been semi-attached to. Until then, every Aborted record had included the more technical, more tempo-dynamic flare reflected on Global Flatline, although I think most would agree that Global Flatline was their sound taken about as far as you were going to get.
The Necrotic Manifesto was even more aggro than any Aborted release before it. It was streamlined, grindier, noisier, faster, and more belligerent, while largely ditching the more dynamic song-writing of previous Aborted albums. And in between those two albums, Aborted had acquired guitarist Mendel bij de Leij, whose solo project we have covered before (along with his and vocalist Sven’s side project, System Divide — which appears to have transformed into the band Oracles).
So where does that leave Termination Redux? When it comes to EPs, I see them as serving one or more of three specific purposes nowadays: You use them to introduce your craft; you use them to tide people over with some goodies before the next big release; or you use them to plant the flag — to sow the seeds of a new direction and sound in a digestible format, or sometimes to make a defiant statement of said new direction and sound.
I do believe that Termination Redux is the third of those types of EPs, signifying an interesting evolution in the band’s music, capped off by the gesture of re-recording the opening song of one of their most praised early records, Engineering the Dead. Continue reading »
(This year we had the pleasure of premiering two songs from the wonderful new album by New Jersey’s Windfaerer, along with a review — all of that can be found here — and now we bring you a diverse year-end list from Windfaerer’s vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Michael Gonçalves.)
This year has been an insane year for metal and I had a hard time catching up with everything. The damn year has flown by so fast that I still think it’s 2014. Here’s to 2015 and all the wonderful releases it has brought us! The following list is in no particular order. Continue reading »
The first two albums by Sweden’s Dissection are among my all-time favorite metal albums. They proved to be enormously influential, and they have had enormous staying power. It’s about time that we featured them in one of these Sunday look-backs at past releases.
In April of 2011 we published a guest post by “Kazz” in which he identified some other bands that were contenders for the heirs to Dissection’s throne. It’s still a really good read, and I recommend it to you:
https://www.nocleansinging.com/2011/11/04/heirs-to-the-throne-dissection/ Continue reading »
Our LISTMANIA 2015 series isn’t over yet. In fact, we have more year-end lists coming your way over the next two weeks from our own staff, from old friends, and from invited musicians. And I’ll also continue rolling out my list of 2015’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. All of that will resume on Monday. But having said that, we’re also looking ahead to what 2016 will bring us.
I spent a couple of hours yesterday assembling a list of 2016 releases (by band name) that I’m interested in, most of which are expected during the first quarter of the year. This isn’t a comprehensive list by any means — I have no doubt I’ve forgotten or overlooked a lot of things — but it’s a massive list nonetheless. Continue reading »
I don’t know how many actual mothers actually stop here, but we welcome them. At the same time, what I really wanted to say in the title of this post was…
… “Happy New Year, All You Motherfuckers”, because that’s what Frank the Tank would say. (Hail Suffocation.)
But some small percentage of our visitors will find this post via a status I’ll post on Facebook, and our Facebook overlords get their buttholes in a pucker when you use a word like “motherfucker”, at least if you have even one douchebag follower whose life is so bereft of meaning that they report people who use words that would cause the children they will never have to turn cross-eyed, at least until those fictional children get older and realize the true meaning of the word “motherfuckers” when contemplating their parents. Continue reading »
I was going to add these songs to our Most Infectious list eventually, but it seemed like posting them this week, on the last day of the old year, was the right thing to do — especially the first song.
This list is supposed to be devoted to infectious extreme metal songs, and the first two below don’t really fit that description. But just about every year I’ve bent the rules a few times, and today is one of those. To see the other songs on the list so far, use this link.
MOTÖRHEAD
With Lemmy’s death this week, Motörhead has perished as a band as well. But obviously the music will never die. Though the band couldn’t have known for sure that Bad Magic would be their last studio album, they went out strong. Continue reading »