LISTMANIA 2014: LEPERKAHN MADE ANOTHER LIST

 LISTMANIA 2014  19 Responses »
Jan 092015
 

 

(Well, this is it. The final list in our 2014 LISTMANIA series. And it comes our way from Leperkahn. On Monday, I’ll have a wrap-up that collects final thoughts and links to every list in the series.)

Hello once again, my fellow NCS comrades. This list comes a lot later than I had planned, considering I’ve been off school since the 11th of December. It seems I get better at procrastination with age.

Speaking of school, 2014 was a bit of a big year in that regard. This time last year, I had just submitted my last college applications; now, I’m one quarter deep into my first year at The University of Chicago. Having this massive transition right in the middle of the year, much more drastic than the between-grade changes I’d become accustomed to the past 12 years, made it really hard to make this list. January 2014 might as well have been the Dark Ages, in my mind.

The demands of school also cut into, and continue to cut into, my writing time here. You may have noticed that it’s been a bit patchy (if you noticed it at all), beyond that 10-day stretch where I decided to impersonate Islander with the round-ups. Nevertheless, I still got some reviews and such out in my first full year as a guest writer. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2014’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 14

 Exceptions to the Rule, MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2014  8 Responses »
Jan 082015
 

 

Today we bring you Part 14 in the continuing rollout of our list of 2014′s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. For the other songs we’ve previously named to the list, go here.

Some of you might question the appearance of today’s two songs on a list whose title includes the words “extreme” and “metal”, appearing on a site whose name abjures clean singing. I have a simple answer for you: It’s my list, and there’s no fuckin’ way I’m leaving these songs off of it.

SÓLSTAFIR

Last month Iceland’s Sólstafir paid a visit to Seattle and performed a show at a cozy venue called Barboza, and I watched it from the second rank of people in front of the stage. I’d seen the band’s amazing set at MDF last year, but it was this show that made me realize something I hadn’t yet admitted to myself — that they are, right now, my favorite band on the planet. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: UNBEHELD — “UNBEHELD”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  5 Responses »
Jan 082015
 

 

(DGR reviews the debut EP by a Canadian band named Unbeheld.)

And so, a new year dawns. We’re already close to a week into it and honestly things don’t seem that much different, other than the fact that we are still releasing a massive spate of lists as well as beginning to hammer our way through the seemingly never-ending and always growing list of infectious songs, eventually creating a huge playlist that will hopefully help people discover a huge batch of new bands when all is said and done.

Normally, around this time, you find all sorts of garbage floating around about resolutions, promises to be better people, “new year, new you”, like the fact that accidentally writing ’14 on all your dates for the next half month is going to somehow change you at the sub-atomic level and some brand new, fresh being is going to be borne of it.

I can’t make too many promises on that front, and given that I already got my scientifically accurate horoscope this year, I can consider that crossed off the list. What I can promise you is a grand NCS tradition of always poring over underground pages, trying to find new bands, writing reviews that are way too long for their own good, occasionally posting utter blasphemy in the form of clean-sung music on this site because it’s so good that people should be able to look past that, and discovering groups and discs far too late to be relevant to the initial burst that comes from a just-released new EP/album. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: THORR-AXE — “GATES OF WINTER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  17 Responses »
Jan 082015
 

 

MetalSucks and American Aftermath have premiered individual tracks from Gates of Winter — the second album by Indiana’s Thorr-Axe — and those were tasty appetizers, but now we serve you the main course: a full-album stream.

When I first saw the cover of Gates of Winter, and coupled that with the band’s name, I’m afraid I got the wrong impression. I was expecting tongue-in-cheek, Viking-themed folk metal, with extra cheese. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

There is indeed a narrative concept that gives the album its structure — a tale loosely based on Norse mythology, with some high fantasy thrown in. As the band’s vocalist/guitarist Tucker Thomasson has said (here), “It’s full of frost giants, shit talking, a magic sword forged by a smith producing an incessant stream of f-bombs, and a metric fuckload of ice and snow.”

But the music, the music is something else again. It is no joke. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2014: BADWOLF’S TOP NON-METAL ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

 LISTMANIA 2014, That's Music -- But It's Not Metal  14 Responses »
Jan 082015
 

 

(BadWolf provides his annual list of personal favorites among not-metal albums released in 2014.)

I’ve never written so few lists at the end of the year. During my first year at No Clean Singing, I wrote three separate lists. Many writers compose even more, and I have no idea how they do it. However, each year my format has changed as I think of new ways to think about music. As time goes by, I simplify, I erase boundaries.

There’s only one meaningful distinction in my list this year: metal vs. not-metal. My metal list is currently up at Invisible Oranges, and it serves as my unified vision of 2014 in heavy metal. However, this is my favorite list—my favorite piece of copy that I write each year. There’s something about writing about mainstream music on an underground metal blog that strikes me as fun and transgressive.

More to the point, I always loved reading the opinions of metal heads and musicians about non-metal music. To people outside of the culture extreme music is what sets us apart. Inside the community, however, our tastes in other genres of music can offer interesting window into people’s personalities. I also wonder if the commonalities we find outside of the music reveal something about the threads that other artists and metal share. For example, my #1 album is, I know, fairly popular among metal bloggers, but you’ll have to wade through my bottom nine to get to it. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (SORT OF): BROTHERS OF THE SONIC CLOTH, COLD BLUE MOUNTAIN, CVLT NATION DOOM, ERYN NON DAE., MISÞYRMING, NEOLITH, ONTOGENY, TEKSTI-TV 666

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Jan 072015
 

 

Every now and then I feel the need to elevate myself to about 40,000 feet above the Earth so as to more clearly receive extraterrestrial emanations and special guidance from the cosmos itself. I happen to be doing that right now. Thanks to the marvels of modern technology I can snoop the web for news and new music and post what I find, even as I receive mysterious communications from entities far beyond our own sphere.

Actually, to be brutally honest, which is the only kind of honest we know how to be at this site, I’m cooped up on an airplane flying across the country for my fucking day job, and the only emanations I’m getting are from the whine of the jet engines outside my window; I can’t make sense of them.

Although there’s an internet connection on board, it’s not good enough for me to hear music streams or watch videos. So, I’ve picked all but one of the music streams in this round-up based on educated guesses that they will be good. Maybe you’ll leave a comment and let me know if I guessed right. Presented in alphabetical order: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SAMI RAUTIO (MY SHAMEFUL)

 Interviews  No Responses »
Jan 072015
 

 

(Our Russian contributor Comrade Aleks returns with another interview.  This time he talks with Sami Rautio of the band My Shameful, whose sixth album Hollow was released last fall by Moscow Funeral League Records.)

My Shameful is a pretty extreme death doom / funeral product of bitter and hateful inspirations from the daily life of its mastermind Sami Rautio. Its line-up has changed through the time, but mostly My Shameful works as a trio with Sami (vocals, guitars, keyboards) at the helm, Jürgen Frohling on drums, and Twist as the bass-guitarist.

The band’s followers got a full-length album Penance in 2013 after five years of silence; but Sami and the crew didn’t want to waste their time and they returned with the next record Hollow in 2014, and soon after that My Shameful took part in the split-album The Symmetry of Grief with Russian band Who Dies In Siberian Slush. Is it too much? That’s a good question, and I needed to ask Sami himself to know the answer. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: KEVIN QUILLIGAN (APOPHYS)

 Interviews  No Responses »
Jan 072015
 

 

I first discovered the Dutch band Apophys last June through a video about a visit by the band’s vocalist Kevin Quilligan to phoniatrician Enrico Di Lorenzo (who also happens to be the frontman of Rome’s Hideous Divinity) for a vocal assessment. That very interesting video (a short version of which is here) led me to search out music, and I found the band’s blast-furnace four-song 2013 promo (and frothed at the mouth over it in this post).

At the time I wrote that post in June, the band were working on a debut album — and then last month brought the surprising news that Metal Blade Records had signed Apophys and would be releasing that debut full-length to the masses. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2014’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 13

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2014  3 Responses »
Jan 072015
 

Welcome to the lucky Part 13 in the continuing rollout of our list of 2014′s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. For the other songs we’ve previously named to the list, go here.

I missed a day in the rollout yesterday because of my fucking day job. To make up for that, we’ll have an extra-strong, double-dose of ass-kicking to begin the day.

ABORTED

We posted not one but two reviews of Aborted’s 2014 album, The Necrotic Manifesto, one by BadWolf (here) that accompanied our premiere of a full-album stream and one (here) by TheMadIsraeli. We could have posted five reviews, because everyone among the longest tenured staffers around here (including me) agreed — and its rare for all of us to agree on anything — that the album was fantastic. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: STEVE SHERWOOD (OF WOLVES)

 Interviews  2 Responses »
Jan 062015
 

 

In the summer of 2013 I came across an album named Evolve by a Chicago band named Of Wolves, and it spun my head clean around. I had more “what the fuck?” moments than I had experienced with any other album during the year up to that point. There was something unexpected lying in wait around every corner, and the album had more corners than a roller-coaster ride. As I wrote in my review:

These three working men in Chicago are fed up, frustrated, and pissed off. They vent their fury at everything from churches to governments to pervasive greed to the treatment of Native Americans to the mass of their fellow citizens (aka “sheep”) who allow themselves to be brainwashed, duped, and distracted from protecting their own self-interests — and they don’t mince words about it. As they say, “Life has been rough, the music is therapy.”

Apparently, the therapy consisted of taking a whole kitchen sink’s worth of musical influences and interests — from punk to crust to metal to garage rock to backwoods mandolin melodies —  and letting them spill out in a flood of exuberant creativity.

After I wrote the review, I talked with the band’s vocalist/guitarist Steve Sherwood about doing an interview. Almost eighteen months later, it happened, via e-mail. There’s a reason why the slow loris is the mascot of this site. All live photos accompanying this interview were taken by John Mourlas.

Continue reading »

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