NO CLEAN SINGING

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 3

Oct 042014

(In this latest installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory forays through the underground. The first installment is here and the second is here.)

ANTHROPOMORPHIC SOUL

This release came to my attention by way of my good friend Corey Jason, also known as the sole force behind The Conjuration, whom I’ve covered here at No Clean Singing several times. So it’s fitting that what he sent me was also a one-man death metal band.

Anthropomorphic Soul is a Portugal-based projected led by sole member Nuno Lourenço, with a few guest solos and guest sax playing added for good measure. Seed Of Hate is certainly experimental death metal, yet always interesting, wrapped in a mechanical sheath of industrialized buzzing, giving it a very different, demented, horrifying feel. The skronky saxophone embellishments on “Anthropomorphic Soul” and “A New Beginning” add another flavor of mania into the mix, especially since they are not quick sax solos but extended soundscape additions — much like the quirky orchestral/choral overlays that also rise to the surface from time to time.

Seed Of Hate is hard to categorize, as it doesn’t really fit within one kind of death metal, nor is it clearly inspired by a single source. The problem I usually have with one-man death metal is that, minus Necrophagist and a handful of others, the songwriting often falls flat in favor of technical performances that are highly derivative. Fortunately, Anthropomorphic Soul does not succumb to that pitfall. For that reason alone, Seed Of Hate is worthy of your time. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: EMIT — “BENEATH CARVINGS LINGER”

Premieres 2 Responses »

Oct 032014

According to Metal-Archives, UK-based Emit put out its first demo in 1998, and almost every year afterward the band released something new — demos, splits, an EP, an album — until 2007, when things went dark. Five years later Emit surfaced with another album-length demo, Spectre Music of an Antiquary, and an altered sound. It was a very limited cassette release brought forth by Glorious North Productions.

Fast forward to 2014: Crucial Blast Records plans to re-issue Spectre Music in remastered form later this month as both a digital download and in digipak format, with the new cover art you see above. To help spread the word of this event, we agreed to premiere a song from Spectre Music named “Beneath Carvings Linger”.

The cover art could hardly be more fitting, given the sounds on “Beneath Carvings Linger” and on the album as a whole. That’s not to say that all the songs are cut from the same cloth — they aren’t — but one constant is the sense that you’ve left the physical world and have been set drifting in a black ether inhabited by phantasms. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: RAW BLOW — “DON’T TRY”

Premieres 3 Responses »

Oct 032014

Every now and then I’m induced to veer off our usual beaten paths like a staggering drunk, and when that happens it tends to be because my head gets turned by some punks. And when the punks are named Raw Blow and their new EP is named Slow Choke, it’s even harder to resist. So here I am, premiering for you a song named “Don’t Try”.

I’m told that the members of Raw Blow have paid their dues over a decade of Boston brawling in bands named Now Denial, Furnace, Bravo Fucking Bravo, and Luau. They’ve got three vocalists, and the one who gets the most time actually sings — so there’s another step even farther off our well-worn path. On the other hand, the voices snarl and shriek, too.

Slow Choke fuses together clanging guitars, rambunctious drumming, poppy melodies (one more step), punk rhythms, and a few sharp, math turns that you don’t see coming. Continue reading »

TORCH RUNNER: “ENDLESS NOTHING”

Album Reviews 4 Responses »

Oct 032014

Endless Nothing is good for one thing and one thing only: Caving in your damned skull, crushing all of your vertebrae, spilling your guts, and setting them on fire. Or maybe that’s four things.

Thirteen songs, most of them short, all of them tremendously heavy and brutally destructive — that’s what the new second album by North Carolina’s Torch Runner delivers. The riffs alternately hammer like giant mallet blows or roar like smoking concrete saws, and at all times they vibrate with radioactive levels of distortion. The percussion follows the same kind of tag-team format — pounding with enough force to split asphalt or blasting away like heavy artillery.

And my god, the bass — the bass is absolutely staggering. You don’t believe me, just check out the opening minute of the album’s longest song, the catastrophically bleak “Circle of Shit”. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 2

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 2 Responses »

Oct 032014

(In this latest installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory forays through the underground. The first installment is here.)

VEILBURNER

Veilburner are a two-man death/black band from Pennsylvania whose strength lies in oddball mania, conjuring an unearthly interstellar feeling. Veilburner burnish an esoteric atmosphere throughout The Three Lightbearers as they dig in dissonant ditches, arising frequently with technical guitar-led passages, some of which bring Gorguts and Obscura to mind. Veilburner often back up their aggressive core with experimental soundscapes of an industrial and occult feel that is oddly psychedelic in nature.

Simply hellish stuff, and damn fun to listen to death metal infused by a cold clinical black metal embrace. This album is killer from start to finish, and to me, frequently sounds like a black metal companion to the immersive insanity Gigan conjure — rife with psychedelic inclinations and robotic/reverb heavy vocal effects amid a massive mix of horrific undulating riffs and spine-shattering drum work. I recommend listening to the whole album at once, but if you need a starting point, go with “Nil Absolute”. The Three Lightbearers rips wormholes open in your mind, leading to self-collapse from within. Get your mind explosion on! Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SPENCER PREWETT (ARCHSPIRE)

Interviews 1 Response »

Oct 032014

(In this post we welcome metal interviewer Karina Noctum to NCS, and happily present her discussion with Spencer Prewett, the phenomenal drummer of a Vancouver band we’ve been following since early days — Archspire.)

Hello everyone! My name is Karina Cifuentes. I was born in Colombia, but I live in Norway and I’m here because of Black Metal basically. I had to live the BM dream with forests, darkness, and so on. I have been interviewing my favorite bands since 2008 and I do this because it really makes me do more research than I would otherwise and I get lots of knowledge that way. I’m also working with a Black Metal documentary called Blackhearts (https://www.facebook.com/blackheartsfilm) So here’s my first contribution, an interview with Spencer Prewett from my fav tech-death band Archspire.

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When did you start playing drums and what appeals to you the most about drumming?

The first time I started playing was when I was a kid. I was 8 years old when I first got my drum kit, but I didn’t actually start practicing drums until I got into metal and that was when I was 17. Now I’m 32, so I’ve been playing for quite a while. I find extreme drumming really appealing. I respect rock and blues drumming, but it doesn’t excite me the same way as Cryptopsy or Nile did.

Which drummer has inspired you the most and why?

Flo from Cryptopsy when I was younger, because when I was 17 I had a fake I.D. and I could go to my first Cryptopsy show. My first real metal show ever, and I didn’t know much about Cryptopsy. I was so blown away how fast the band and the drumming were, and that was probably what really affected me. So Flo was my biggest influence originally, but every year that goes by I discover a new band or I discover a new drummer or a new style. Continue reading »

METAL NOT PREVIOUSLY FEATURED ON NCS — PART 2

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 4 Responses »

Oct 032014

(We welcome back our Norwegian guest contributor Gorger, with Part 2 of an entertaining post that we began earlier this week.)

Welcome to Part Two of my little presentation of stuff I don’t think NCS has covered. If I’m mistaken about that, sue me. There’s a few dozens other releases I would like to shout about, but this seems like the best criterion to help me select by means of elimination. Part One can be read here. On we go, then.

NO RAZA – WHEN CHAOS REIGNS

Let’s start of with a trip to Colombia to meet four guys who have managed to put together an unusually solid death metal album. My impression is that this South American country is better known for cranking out brutal extreme metal with limited sophistication. Maybe I’m wrong. It has to happen sometime.

The band was apparently originated as early as 1997, but the first sign of life was the debut album from 2004. This was followed by a live album, video, and an EP before the sequel was released in 2012. I’m new to this band, and my enthusiasm for their death metal is due to several factors. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: TIM CHARLES (NE OBLIVISCARIS)

Exceptions to the Rule, Interviews 5 Responses »

Oct 032014

(In this post we present KevinP’s interview of Tim Charles, violinist and clean vocalist of Australia’s Ne Obliviscaris, whose new album Citadel will be released on November 7 (November 11 in the U.S.). You can listen to two of the new songs while you read, here and here.)

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K: So would this be the first interview you have done where the name of the site is diametrically opposed to your position in the band?

T: I guess so! But despite the name of the site, you guys have always shown NeO great support over the years regardless, and so I’m very happy to be chatting with you today about our new album.

K: We are coming up on the release of that album, Citadel, on Nov 7. What would you say is different and/or what were you able to accomplish this time around as compared with Portal of I?

T: When we first started writing Citadel we didn’t have any meetings to discuss the direction of the new songs. We simply just did what we’ve always done and write music until we were happy with the song. Personally we were very proud of Portal of I and we loved the songs, so when it was so well-received, that gave us a lot of confidence to forget about the outside world and just back our own judgement and have faith that as long as we love the new stuff then the public will enjoy it also.

We definitely noticed that there were some new sounds being explored, but honestly it wasn’t really until the end when it was completely done that we realised it was actually quite a bit different. It’s still very much NeO, but honestly I’m not sure we could create 2 albums the same if we tried! It’s always been in our nature to explore and move forward musically, and to me Citadel just sounds like another step forward.

I guess one other difference between the albums is that Portal of I was more akin to 7 separate stories, all related to each other, that when put together create an album. This new album, however, was created in a more conceptual way with the music largely flowing continuously from start to finish and hence is more one unified piece. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: MORDBRAND — “VASTATION”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 4 Responses »

Oct 032014

I think I’ve written about every release by Sweden’s Mordbrand after their 2010 debut in a split with Evoke, including their excellent 2014 album Imago. Since I only write about what I like and want to recommend, you can figure out that they haven’t disappointed me yet — and they still haven’t: Their forthcoming two-song 7″, Vastation, is another winner for fans of Swedish death metal.

The first song, “Failure of the Paraclete”, is loaded with a variety of big riffs — riffs that grind, gallop, lurch, and stagger — and a rhythm section that expertly matches the music’s shifting patterns, with rippling bass and tremolo chords surfacing at the end to close the song memorably. Continue reading »

BIG ASS ROUNDUP

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 14 Responses »

Oct 032014

(Leperkahn continues to pitch in during my round-up hiatus. Between what I sent him and what he found himself (of which there was quite an overlap), this is a monstrously large collection of recent, recommended goodies.)

Hey all! So a bloody lot of things got put up between when I sent in my last roundup and now, so this is gonna be a long one, since I’m not in the mood to separate them out. Strap in for a wild ride across the metalsphere.

BLUT AUS NORD

A few hours ago a new song named “Clarissima Mundi Lumina” from the new Blut Aus Nord album Memoria Vetusta III — Saturnian Poetry was made available for listening. This follows our own premiere of “Paien” right here. Islander says his review of the album will be posted on Monday, but he says there’s no point in waiting — just go pre-order the album in a special digipack CD edition here or on vinyl here. You can listen to “Clarissima Mundi Lumina” while you’re doing that:

https://www.facebook.com/blutausnord.official
https://www.facebook.com/debemurmorti Continue reading »

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