THE GEEK WORLD OF METAL

 Mosh Pit  74 Responses »
Apr 192014
 

You and your metalhead friends.

(photo credit: Rob Macinnis)

It’s time for some hard truth (I’m not stupid — I save the hard truth for Saturdays because our audience drops on Saturdays). The hard truth is that you are most likely a big fucking geek. I can say this with confidence for four reasons. First, you can read. Second, you are reading a metal blog. And third, in all probability you are a metalhead. I’ll come to the fourth reason in due course.

Actually, the third reason is the biggest clue. I haven’t conducted any kind of scientific study, because I am not a scientist and studying sounds like work. Instead, I base my conclusion on years of first-hand observation. And what I’ve observed is that most metalheads are big fucking geeks. Not all, mind you. Some are career criminals. But even the ones who look like career criminals usually aren’t — down underneath their scary exteriors, they’re just geeks.

I suspect this conclusion would be greeted with disbelief by most people in the straight world, i.e., the people who look away quickly and increase their speed when they drive past the outside of a metal venue, because they think we’re ALL career criminals. But you know what I’m talking about, don’t you? And if perchance you don’t, I’ll assemble some of the evidence. Continue reading »

INSOMNIUM: “SHADOWS OF THE DYING SUN”

 Album Reviews  13 Responses »
Apr 182014
 

(In this post DGR reviews the new album by Finland’s Insomnium.)

Taken at face value, the idea behind the title of Shadows Of The Dying Sun is an easy one to grasp. Poetically phrased, yes, but when the opening line of its titular song (and album closer) is, “We’re nothing more than shadows…”, you get a real quick understanding of what lies behind the title.

Very few things in the world can make me as pensive as an Insomnium disc, and Shadows Of The Dying Sun has had me thinking about the passage of time lately. It is a crazy thing to realize, but with this album Insomnium have been a part of my life for almost a decade, as I joined the zeitgeist like so many others did with the masterful Above The Weeping World. Since then, the band have been a hallmark of consistently great music, with Across The Dark representing an incremental jump forward and One For Sorrow feeling like another amazing disc as it grew on me.

I never could have told the past version of myself — who came to see Insomnium as such an important band, one who showed there is beauty in emotions such melancholy, depression, and frailty — that in later days I’d be reviewing their music and getting the opportunity to talk to guitarist (and one of the main songwriters) Ville Friman for a previous website. Insomnium are the band I go to for lyrical gems such as, “You can’t win always/but you can lose every time”, that absolutely take the wind out of my sails. So at face value, Shadows Of The Dying Sun should be more of that for me — another album that would let me roil in my melancholy and depression, allowing the group to overtake me with visions of cold and blue.

Yet this time it’s weird, because as far as messages are concerned, Shadows Of The Dying Sun is a surprisingly straightforward and hopeful disc… for Insomnium. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: FUCK THE FACTS, MASTODON, VADER

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 182014
 

Between pulling my hair out two days ago because our site was down and then frantically trying to catch up yesterday with posts we had promised to do on the day the site was down, I haven’t been as on top of new happenings as I’d like. So, to catch up a bit, here are a trio of new-ish things I’d like to share. There will be another round-up later today.

FUCK THE FACTS

My NCS comrade Austin Weber sent me the photo you see above. Hiding behind that absurdly large, absurdly metal mask is Mel Mongeon of Canada’s Fuck the Facts, putting on her metal face for a show in Chicago last night.

If you don’t know, the band have just begin a North American tour. Even without a mask of such epic qualities, Ms. Mongreon,  Topon Das, and their brothers in arms will still shake you to your core. Here’s the tour schedule as it now stands: Continue reading »

NUKLEAR FROST: “SUBJUGATION”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Apr 172014
 

Those of you who are sharp of eye, pointy of ear, and patient enough to wade through my last rant about Facebook’s business model will have already felt the chill of Minnesota’s Nuklear Frost. But simply using the hair-raising shriek from the intro track “Uranium Censer” to express my own contempt (and to reward the perseverance of readers) was hardly an adequate tribute to an album that I’ve listened to and enjoyed repeatedly since it came out in mid-March.

The album’s name is Subjugation, and I first found out about it through a Facebook link to their music by Amiensus, another Minnesota band who share a member with Nuklear Frost (guitarist Joe Waller). It proved to be a great discovery.

Nuklear Frost deliver riveting melodic black metal that hits like a maelstrom in full fury, yet the songs are so packed with righteous riffs and ominous melodies that the music exerts a strong magnetic attraction. The songs have identity and staying power; it’s an album that will draw you back again and again, and not simply for the pure rush it delivers to all good adrenaline junkies. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WAXEN — “HOLLOW EYES”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Apr 172014
 

Waxen is the solo project of Wyoming-based Toby Knapp, who has steered his prodigious talents in a multitude of different directions with different metal bands (as well as his own solo efforts) since the early 90s. Waxen’s debut album, Fumaroth, appeared in 2006, and after eight years Moribund Records is now poised to release its successor, Agios Holokauston.

Today we’re bringing you the premiere of a song from the new album named “Hollow Eyes”. It’s a bit of an unusual choice for a premiere — and to be clear, we chose the song. Much of Agios Holokauston is a raging black metal conflagration, a firestorm of 6-string guitar pyrotechnics married to compelling melodic hooks, neck-snapping rhythms, and sulfurous vocal assaults. But after bouncing back and forth among our premiere choices, the haunting beauty of “Hollow Eyes” proved so compelling that it’s the one we wanted to share with you first. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: RECIPROCAL — “ILLUMINATI”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Apr 172014
 

Late last fall Southern California’s Reciprocal self-released their second album, New Order of the Ages. It was an 11-track, 67-minute monster that drew the attention of Lacerated Enemy Records, which will now be releasing the album on CD this coming June 6, with new cover art by Jon Zig.

I missed the album when it first made the rounds last year, but because of this expanded label release I’m getting the chance to find out what I missed. And if you missed it, too, we’re giving you a chance to make amens — because today (along with Terrorizer in Europe) we’re helping to spread the word about a stream of the album’s fifth track, “Illuminati”.

Listening to “Illuminati” is like being unceremoniously parachuted into the middle of a war zone on some distant world where the weaponry is beyond our understanding and the combatants assault each other in highly accelerated time. All the instrumental performances are simply off the hook and tightly integrated despite the jet-fueled pacing and the dizzying course changes. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VALLENFYRE — “ODIOUS BLISS”

 Premieres  6 Responses »
Apr 172014
 

We were early and avid supporters of A Fragile King, the 2011 debut album by the all-star UK group known as Vallenfyre. It was a very personal album for all involved but especially the band’s founder Greg Mackintosh (Paradise Lost), who started the band after the death of his father. It could have been a one-off kind of project, but the reception to A Fragile King was so positive and the experience was obviously pleasurable enough for the band members that they have come roaring back with a second album — Splinters (produced by Kurt Ballou of Converge). Here’s a hint: it’s even better than the debut.

We wrote about the first advance track from the new album (“Scabs”) last month, and today we’re happy as hell to premiere another new song — “Odious Bliss”. After a massively heavy doom-shrouded opening, it begins to rumble and rush like a demon freight train with the throttle wide open, driven by Adrian Erlandsson’s jolting drumwork and a load of skull-splitting riffage. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SERDCE — “QUASAR / NEWBORN”

 Premieres  6 Responses »
Apr 162014
 

As anyone who has spent any time at our site well knows, I get enthusiastic about new musical discoveries on almost a daily basis, but rarely am I left pop-eyed and gape-mouthed in genuine wonder at a band’s achievements. But that’s what happened when I heard the two songs that we have the privilege of premiering today. And it didn’t happen just once — it has happened every time I’ve heard this music (I’ve heard one more song from the same album — and the same thing happened when I heard that one).

The band are from Belarus and their name is Serdce (a word that means “heart” in English). They released three albums between 2003 and 2009, and their fourth — entitled Timelessness — will be released for the first time by the cult Finnish label Blood Music this June. The album includes 10 songs, and what we have for you today are the 8th and 9th tracks — “Quasar” and “Newborn” — joined together as a single stream. Continue reading »

ARCHSPIRE: “THE LUCID COLLECTIVE”

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Apr 162014
 

(Austin Weber reviews the new album by a band we’ve been following for a long time — Canada’s Archspire.)

When Archspire burst out of nowhere with All Shall Align in 2012, it set a new benchmark for blazing extreme death metal, following in the footsteps of previous speed-, technicality-, and songwriting-pushers such as Cryptopsy and stretching the boundaries of death metal to a place that seemed to make a surprising number of people uncomfortable. Regardless, they impressed a lot of people, and their follow-up, The Lucid Collective, has been greatly anticipated. It certainly delivers, acting as a dream of death mirroring our often collective sleepwalking through existence.

Archspire have always flashed glimpses of a love for Origin and Spawn Of Possession, but they have also made the style their own, giving it brutal legs with which to stand and stomp angrily, and managing to give each track its own unique flow and structure. If Brain Drill was Origin-influenced death metal done to excess (in the opinion of some people), then arguably Archspire are a band who have learned all the things that Origin did right, while not being a rip-off of them at all.

An album like The Lucid Collective is not merely music, but a testament to the human will and ability to achieve incredible and nearly inhuman things through hard work, determination, and focus. Every member of the band performs at an astounding level, not in an effort to impress the listeners with vapid showboating, but with a purpose. Collectively, Archspire form an interlocking mass of arresting malevolence that looms large over the shredscapes and techdreams of noodlers everywhere. Continue reading »

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