(We welcome our guest Jeff from Life In the Vinyl Lane, who will be reporting on the Iceland Airwaves festival in the near future.)

This is Jeff from the Life in the Vinyl Lane blog, coming to you from the land of the midnight sun and black metal, Oslo, Norway. I’d asked Islander if I could send a dispatch from this year’s version of Iceland Airwaves, which is just around the corner, and while I was at it I figured I’d tell you a bit about what’s out there for metal fans who might be visiting Oslo, since we stopped off here prior to the festival.

Now, to be fair, at least 99% of the No Clean Singing readers are probably bigger and/or more knowledgeable metal fans than I am. Let’s get that out there right from the start. I came of age in the early 1980s, back when you couldn’t turn on MTV without seeing Quiet Riot and Mötley Crüe videos in regular rotation, before metal was ghettoized into “Headbangers Ball”. So while I discovered the genre in the 80s, I didn’t advance too much past there — the hardest stuff on my shelves are the classics like Iron Maiden, Metallica, and Slayer, and most of the bands featured on No Clean Singing are new to me, with the notable exception of Iceland’s Sólstafir. Maybe that makes me a tourist here. I don’t know.

Be that as it may, I knew that since we were spending a few days in Oslo prior to Iceland Airwaves this year, I owed it to myself to check out Norway’s black metal scene, and some quick research indicated that the one “must visit” stop on the trip was Neseblod Records. Continue reading »