SEEN AND HEARD: HORNED ALMIGHTY, HYPERIAL, CONDUCTING FROM THE GRAVE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jun 202014
 

In this round-up I’ve collected a few new songs and videos I noticed over the last 24 hours from a variety of metal sub-genres. I really like all of ’em. Hope you will, too.

HORNED ALMIGHTY

This Danish black metal band have recorded their fifth album, and the first since 2010’s Necro Spirituals. The new one is named World of Tombs and it’s projected for release waaaay down the road on September 1, 2014, by the band’s new label, Scarlet Records. Yesterday brought a stream of one of the new tracks, “Diabolical Engines of Torment”, and it kills.

It kills in two ways — with electrifying thrash riffs and punk rhythms (which will grab you by the neck right from the first second), and with a down-paced pounding so irresistible that heads cannot help but bang. The vocalist alternately sprays acid and roars like a death metal beast, and the production makes the music sound especially powerful (and clear). Continue reading »

KEYBOARD WARRIORS: KEITH SPILLETT (THE TYRANNY OF TRADITION)

 Interviews  7 Responses »
Jun 192014
 

EDITOR’S NOTE

In this post, Dane Prokofiev returns to NCS with the first new installment in his Keyboard Warriors series in more than a year. But what a comeback it is. Here, he interviews Keith Spillett — history teacher, basketball coach, father, and the man behind The Tyranny of Tradition, the best satirical metal site on the web and one of the best satire sites you could find regardless of focus. Not surprisingly, his responses to Dane’s questions are more literate and twisted than the average interview we post at this sinkhole.

 

***

Interplanetary Manhunt for Devin Townsend Impersonator

Tyranny of Tradition founder Keith Spillett impersonates Earth’s operatic extreme metal musician Devin Townsend in an online acceptance speech.

 

By DANE PROKOFIEV

ZILTOIDIA 9 — For the first time ever, Earth’s FBI has issued an interplanetary manhunt for a keyboard warrior. Keith Spillett, founder of metal satire website The Tyranny of Tradition, is the intelligence agency’s target.

Spillett, 109, is wanted for impersonating operatic extreme metal vocalist extraordinaire Devin Townsend in an online acceptance speech after winning the Metal Hammer Golden Gods first-ever “King of the Internet” award.

FBI director Leonardo CiDaprio said, “Never before has a keyboard warrior been so bold. Whenever keyboard warriors impersonate metal musicians online, like whoever was posting as “Tim Lambesis” on MetalSucks.net, the FBI used to do a Nick Fury and let them off. But this is the first time one has actually dressed up as the one and only Devy, imitated Devy’s voice pitch-perfectly, and filmed himself giving an acceptance speech for some dumb award. It has taken cyber identity theft to a new level.”

Inhuman entities have also expressed anger at Spillett’s crime. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SPAWN FROM DECEIT – “NEW THRONES”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Jun 192014
 

(DGR catches up with the latest offering of grind from Finland’s Spawn From Deceit.)

Sometimes, you want some music that you can not only scream along with but also scream at in a white-knuckle rage. I went through this a huge amount last year, and the feeling has been sticking around since then. It sent me on a massive grind kick (of the loud, banging, DIY Punk style, about as close to Nasum and Rotten Sound as I could get with every band) and wound up covering a variety of bands.

Finland’s Spawn From Deceit were probably the most punk of the grind bands that I covered when I launched that vast swath of reviews in the genre late last year. Since then though, I haven’t done my due diligence to see what the guys have been up to. Should’ve known better, because grind is a genre that lends itself to fairly prolific releases, and lo and behold, Spawn From Deceit have another six-song face-to-the-grinding-wheel release out called New Thrones — though I don’t think there is any way to get your hands on it at the moment. Continue reading »

MUSIC FROM THE BLISTERING EDGE: FALLUJAH, EATEN, OMNIHILITY

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jun 192014
 

I’ve collected here new music from three bands. As suggested by the title of this post, the songs have something in common, though they are different in other respects: They all include certain instrumental elements that are very, very fast. Your hair may be singed. The skin on your face may bubble like a broiled fetus. You may void your bowels. I myself only experienced the last of these effects, but I thought it best to provide a complete set of warnings.

FALLUJAH

Damn, but I surely do love that album cover, don’t you? It’s a collaborative effort between Polish artist Tomasz Alen Kopera, whose work I’ve featured about a dozen times in the daily art posts on our Facebook page, and the band’s vocalist, Alex Hofmann. The album’s name is The Flesh Prevails and it’s due for release by Unique Leader on July 22.

What I heard yesterday was a new song named “Carved From Stone”. It’s an interesting song. Certain instrumental tracks are moving at about 1,000 mph. The kick drums eject shells at the rate of am M134 minigun, and the riffs whip like hurricane winds and pummel like a jackhammer. On the other hand, Mr. Hofmann growls his lyrics as if patiently telling a bedtime story, presumably to a brood of orcs. And the lead guitar carefully unspools an eerie atmospheric melody like a coil of razor wire. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: ALLEGAEON — “OUR COSMIC CASKET”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jun 182014
 

I haven’t yet listened to all of Allegaeon’s new album (Elements of the Infinite), but my comrade TheMadIsraeli has. He says it’s their best album yet. I’m not going to contradict him without hearing it, especially because the three songs I’ve heard so far tend to substantiate his claim. Those three are “1.618” (streaming here), “Threshold of Perception” (streaming here), and the one that debuted today in video form — “Our Cosmic Casket”.

The video for “Our Cosmic Casket” is Part 2 of a story that began in the video for “1.618”. There will allegedly be two more parts coming our way. Whereas “1.618” brought us the highly amusing Wheel of Sub-Genres, “Our Cosmic Casket” bring us the event horizon of a black hole approaching Earth, with the song’s instrumental pyrotechnics delivering the kind of adrenaline flow you’d get in the final minutes before the atmosphere got sucked into a wormhole, assuming you didn’t decided to beer up for the final cataclysm. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: DECEPTIONIST — “THE BEGINNING”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Jun 182014
 

(DGR reviews the new release by Deceptionist from Rome, Italy.)

Deceptionist are a band I discovered via the Hideous Divinity Facebook page a few weeks back. Hideous Divinity are one of the bands that grew off of the Hour Of Penance tree, and their vocalist Enrico H Di Lorenzo was posting about how he had provided guest vocals on Deceptionist’s song “Through The Veil” on their new EP.

Deceptionist are a new band hailing from Rome and consisting of Andrea Di Traglia on vocals (usually in a middle- to low-range growl), Antonio Poletti on guitars, and drummer Claudio Testini, who is frightening behind the kit and whose name must now be added to the ever-growing ranks of Italian blast masters. Di Lorenzo described them as being a tech-death band with a light electronic element, using them in an industrial form to add to their overall sound. He also mentioned that this new EP, their first, bears the name of The Beginning (Promo CD 2014) and that it was available at “name your own price” on Bandcamp.

To ballpark a comparison band, Deceptionist veer into the spectrum of tech-death that Spawn Of Possession seem to inhabit by themselves. Instead of going for the intensely low-end, humongous sound with all of the whirs and whistles on top of it, Deceptionist go with the knife-sharp, machine-typed-out and mathematically precise playing that Spawn dish out in spades. This means that their promo EP should be very familiar to fans of the latter group, because Deceptionist’s promo sounds like a swarm of angry insects being delivered into your eardrums via a tech-death funnel. Continue reading »

ARCHNESS: ARCHSPIRE AND ARCH ENEMY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jun 182014
 

Here are some arch-ie things I spotted this morning.

ARCHSPIRE

Spencer Prewett is the drummer for Canada’s Archspire, whose new album The Lucid Collective we reviewed here in April. On a superficial level, he appears to be human — two arms, two legs, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, realistic looking skin and hair. But appearances can be deceiving, because based on the video I’m about to show you he is clearly a Cyberdyne Systems model T-1000 cyborg. Fortunately, John Connor can rest easy because Spencer Prewett was sent from the future only to destroy drum kits.

In this drum play through, the song you’ll hear is the new album’s first track, “Lucid Collective Somnambulation”. I dropped my jaw and the damned thing bounced somewhere I didn’t see because my eyes were glued to this video. You watch it while I go look for my damned jaw.

(thanks to DGR for linking me to this. He prefaced the link in his message with this:

“WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLOOD OF KINGU, HATE, CULT OF FIRE, TERROR OATH, CEMETERY FOG, YORBLIND

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Jun 182014
 

I never got around to posting a second round-up yesterday, as I had planned, so I’m loading up this one not only with what I had intended to feature yesterday but also with some other items I discovered last night. Yeah, that makes this a really long post, but what else have you got to do?

As you’ll see, I’m indulging my taste for blackness, death, and deathly blackness, though for those of you less interested in slaughter and depravity, you can skip to the more melodious song at the end. There’s actually a bit of clean singing in that last one.

BLOOD OF KINGU

Earlier this month I reported that Ukrainian black metal band Blood of Kingu (started by Roman Sayenko of Drudkh) would be releasing their third album via Season of Mist on September 2 in North America (and August 29 everywhere else). The title is Dark Star on the Right Horn of the Crescent Moon. Yesterday, thanks to my friend Vonlughlio, I learned that Terrorizer has now premiered the first advance track from the album, “Enshrined in the Nethermost Lairs Beneath the Oceans”.

The song wastes no time unleashing a torrent of blasting drums and rippling tremolo runs that carry a seductive melody behind gargantuan vocal proclamations. An aura of infernal darkness radiates from the music in waves, but man, it’s also highly infectious. You’ll need to go HERE to listen. Blood of Kingu have a Facebook page at this location. Continue reading »

BLACK PUNK: A SPLIT BY KRIEG AND RAMLORD

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jun 172014
 

If you google the phrase “black punk” you’ll discover a music genre known as Afro-punk, as well as a band named Death — not Chuck Schuldiner’s ground-breaking group, but a “proto-punk” band from Detroit formed in the early 70’s by three brothers, who happen to be the subject of a recent critically acclaimed movie. What you won’t find is any reference to the forthcoming split release by Krieg and Ramlord — at least not yet.

I’ve been listening to this four-song split once a day for the past week (while gazing fondly at its killer cover art), and my first impressions haven’t changed: At its core, this a fusion of black metal and punk. It would be tempting to file it away under the heading of “blackened crust” along with bands such as Young and In the Way and Martyrdöd, but to these ears the music on this split is an even more primal union of black metal and punk, and its primal appeal is strong.

KRIEG

Krieg has been kicking out releases since the mid-90s, with a steady flow of splits and EP’s to go along with six albums. This split with Ramlord is one of two scheduled for release this summer, the other being a split with Wolvhammer that I’ll also be reviewing very soon. For this release Krieg contributes one original song and a cover. Continue reading »

FALL OF THE ALBATROSS: “ENORMOUS CLOUD”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jun 172014
 

(Austin Weber reviews the debut album by Fall of the Albatross, which had its full streaming premiere yesterday.)

Fall Of The Albatross are pretty much the second coming of the style of music played by defunct experimental mathcore fusionists Lye By Mistake, although Fall Of The Albatross amazingly draw from an even wider palette of sounds than the aforementioned eclectic group, and they do so quite expertly. While the band previously had a vocalist, they decided to soldier on sans vocals after losing him, leading to their current instrumental incarnation and the self-recording of their full-length debut now before us — Enormous Cloud.

Enormous Cloud is a lot of things at a lot of different times. But to try and break it down into its elements, you could say that they smash together lots of wild tapping, heavy-as-hell moments of pure Dillinger rage, split-second grind bursts, just the right amount of post-rock builds, some grooves, and polyrhythmic chugging that’s always paired with different combinations of riff/leads/sweeps/tapping and is never overdone. Meanwhile some of their rhythms and melodies certainly remind of math-rock at times, while their forays into jazz, Latin, funk, blues, and fusion slide in and out of this ever-changing mass.

Jarring though some of the transitions are, the songs all manage to have a unique identity, flow, and structure. This is very progressive and dense instrumental metal indeed. Continue reading »

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