FALLS OF RAUROS / PANOPTICON SPLIT: A REVIEW AND AN NCS PREMIERE

 Album Reviews, Premieres  11 Responses »
Apr 032014
 

I first learned that Falls of Rauros and Panopticon would be joining forces for a split release back in December 2013, when Panopticon’s Austin Lunn accepted our invitation to write an article about his favorite releases from 2013. It’s a natural pairing. There is, for example, a deep mutual respect between the two bands. Austin Lunn wrote in that same article that Falls of Rauros are his “favorite current American band” and that their forthcoming 2014 full-length (Believe In No Coming Shore) “may be my favorite record ever”, and Falls of Rauros have called Panopticon’s forthcoming album “absolutely massive and stunning on all levels”.

Beyond the respect they have for each other, both bands have earned the respect of both critics and a dedicated following of fans: they are both quintessential American black metal bands, and not just because they happen to be based in Maine and (at least temporarily) Minnesota, respectively. They have successfully incorporated American folk traditions into their powerful and emotionally resonant music, so much so that you could call them American folk metal bands instead of black metal bands and I wouldn’t argue with you.

Yet you may be surprised by what you hear on the new split, as compared the sounds captured on each of the bands’ last albums and on the albums to come. Panopticon’s tracks are unquestionably an homage to Norwegian black metal traditions, while Falls of Rauros have, if anything, brought even more vibrant life and light into their songs. You’ll get a chance to hear both styles of music on display as we premiere one song by each band from this excellent split. Continue reading »

CROWDFUNDERS: NERO DI MARTE, TALANAS, DERELICT EARTH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 032014
 

Almost every day we read about new crowdfunding campaigns by metal bands. We don’t try to mention even a small fraction of the ones we see; there’s just not enough time or space. But there are three in this post we wanted to spotlight, in part because all three involve bands we’ve supported in the past — because they’re damned good. And to remind you of that, music is included.

NERO DI MARTE

This first appeal for funds was spawned by a tragedy involving two Italian bands. One of them, Nero di Marte, delivered a self-titled 2013 album that our reviewer Andy Synn called “a phenomenal debut” — “an unusual form of technically twisted death metal with a taste for sudden, erratic explosions of extremity, and a progressive streak a mile wide.” (The review is here.) The other, Void of Sleep, are a sludge-rock band whose 2013 album was Tale Between Reality and Madness.

On Sunday, March 23, after playing a show in Rome, both bands were robbed of all their instruments and gear. Here’s their statement of what happened:

In less than 30 minutes someone broke into our van and was able to take everything. It happened in broad daylight near a police station in Rome, despite there being a massive amount of police forces surveilling the area but, alas, no security cameras.

Guitars, amps, pedalboards, drums, merchandise and personal belongings… a total amount of 25.000€ was stolen from both bands. They took everything. A full list can be found here:

The sad reality of this situation is that without any instruments we cannot continue as a band. We can’t play, rehearse, tour, record a new album.

It took us years to buy our gear, and to start from absolutely nothing, without any help, means paralyzing anything we could do for a long time or seriously put ourselves into debt beyond what we can afford.

Continue reading »

METAL FASTING: DAY 2

 Off Topic  15 Responses »
Apr 022014
 

(NCS guest contributor Leperkahn decided that for a school project he was going to spend a week without metal. He received a lot of suggestions from our readers, and this is his report on Day 2 of his experiment.)

As I forecast in my Day 1 post, Day 2 was an excursion into the vast world of jazz. Copious amounts of studying in the wake of finals simultaneously pushed me to wit’s end and gave me a lot of time to listen to a lot of jazz.

I started the day with a band that is perhaps not entirely jazz, but is awesome nonetheless: Steely Dan. They and Aja were perhaps the most recommended band and album throughout the various mediums on which I solicited non-metal suggestions. The album seemed to be right in the middle of classic rock and jazz, reminding me of The Eagles or Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young in places while staying jazzier (with a faint Kenny G vibe hanging in the air) elsewhere.

It was a great start to the day for my ears, and is a band and album I foresee myself revisiting quite a bit (especially considering that I just saw a show listing for them at Humphrey’s By the Bay, which might be one of the coolest places to see live music). Continue reading »

JUST BEFORE DAWN’S “THE AFTERMATH” — NEW ALBUM DETAILS AND MUSICAL TEASERS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 022014
 

The debut album by Sweden’s Just Before Dawn — Precis innan gryningen – was one of the best old-school, Swedish-style death metal albums I heard last year. I attempted to explain why in this review. In a nutshell, it delivered lethally infectious riffs and grim melodies that gave each song a distinctive and memorable personality; the production made it sound massive; and the top-shelf instrumental chops of mastermind Anders Biazzi (Blood Mortized) were matched by the horrible roars of an impressive line-up of guest vocalists. And today I’m delighted to report news about Just Before Dawn’s next album — The Aftermath — and to give you a taste of the new music.

First, we’re pleased to bring you one of the record’s two album covers, created by Benny Moberg, who also mixed and mastered The Aftermath (the second cover for an edition of the album that includes a different bonus track has yet to be revealed). As in the case of the band’s first release, The Aftermath’s lyrical themes are derived from the history of World War II, and the music is dedicated to the fallen heroes of all wars throughout the ages.

Second, Anders Biazzi has once again lined up a stellar array of vocalists to join their roars to his guitar and bass ferocity, as well as some noteworthy guest guitar soloists. Check out the track list and the vocalists who contributed to each song: Continue reading »

APRIL FOOLS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Apr 022014
 

My close friends and family members will tell you that I’m one of the most gullible people you could ever encounter. I prefer to think of it as an innately trusting nature, but my history of being duped is so long and rich that I can’t really quarrel with their judgment. Even on April 1, when I try to be on guard, I still get suckered like a carnival rube.

There were lots of metal-oriented pranks yesterday that were funny even though they were obvious — such as the 50 reviews that suddenly materialized on Metal-Archives for the ingeniously named Penis Metal by Hades Archer. At least I think that was a prank. Sometimes gullibility can work in reverse.

One prank I fell for, hook, line, and sinker, appears at the top of this post. I have such a hard-on for Oak Pantheon and Amiensus, and their 2013 split Gathering, that I took one look at that flyer — and the appearance of a Seattle date — and started marking my calendar and exclaiming enthusiastically about it on Facebook. I didn’t dwell on the logistical difficulty of a tour that would start on the US East Coast, jump to a bunch of European capitols, and then pick up on the US West Coast, all within the space of a month. I also completely missed the two tiny words in the lower right-hand corner of the flyer. Continue reading »

MALADIE: “PLAGUE WITHIN”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Apr 022014
 

(For our third review of the day, Austin Weber discusses the debut album by Germany’s Maladie.)

How does one accurately capture the essence of a brilliant work of musical art? Certainly there are many ways, a variety of different approaches, different attempts to quantify opinion, while hopefully eschewing the concept of good-because-it’s-good, and bad-because-it’s-bad. But at the end of the day, words are merely words, and what’s captured by the ear and experienced in the mind and soul from a truly brilliant piece of music is what matters. The following words only exist as a vessel with which to extend an invitation to agree or disagree with how I feel, in this case, about Maladie.

Maladie are a 9-piece German metal group, a band I came across a few months back when doing one of my usual deep searches within the bowels of Metal-Archives.com. But to be precise, only 6 people play on Plague Within, as they added, improved, and altered into a  9-man line-up after Plague Within was released. At first I only intended to include them on my “Remnants of 2013” article (coming soon!) with a brief write-up, but then I came to the conclusion that I wanted to write a full review after becoming obsessed with “1979” (which is basically the exact opposite of the Smashing Pumpkins song, lest anyone like me think of that initially as well).

The guitar-work here is damned impressive — and comes as no surprise, since one of their guitarists, Mark Walther, plays in Spheron and their other guitarist, Björn Köppler, is a member of Tombthroat. Their triple vocal attack is intense, with Alexander Wenz and Déhà scraping their throats performing a range of metal vocals and Bernd Wener stepping in at all the right points with triumphant, fitting, clean singing during both furious passages and also in the expected slower and progressive points. Continue reading »

FLAGITIOUS IDIOSYNCRASY IN THE DILAPIDATION: “WALLOW”

 Album Reviews, Phro's Posts  1 Response »
Apr 022014
 

(I’m getting all weepy remembering the days when our Tokyo-based comrade Phro used to write his inimitable reviews for NCS. But after something of a reviewing hiatus at his own web site — PhroMetal — the review you’re about to read appeared there a couple days ago. When I saw it, I convinced him to let me re-publish it here. And I’m not alone in having a shitload of fun reading it. The band liked it too.)

Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation (in close running for the label “greatest grindcore band in the world”) have a new batch of their 2013 EP Wallow ready for our hot, waiting ears. So, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write about it. The is what it sounds like (and, because pictures are fun, what it looks like, too).

********

A deep growl explodes from the ground beneath me, vibrating the floorboards and sending shivers to the very roof of the house. The sound of furious bats with razor-edged wings and steel claws tear around beneath my feet, as they pound their wings, looking for escape.

“Since when did this house have a basement?” I wonder aloud before the floor erupts, a geyser of the demonic bats filling the room. Screaming like a little boy with his dick caught in a vice, I drop the bottle of Jack and fling myself to the floor.

Shredding the air, the massive creatures stir up a riotous wind, ripping books from shelves and dashing a mirror across the floor. A piece of the glass soars through the air and impales itself in my eye. I can just barely hear myself scream over the shrieks of the bats, their voices alternately shrill and deeply demonic.

Howling and rolling on the floor with my hands slapped across my face, I cry out, “Fuck, shit, cat anus sniffer! My goddamn eye!!” Continue reading »

PSYGNOSIS: “HUMAN BE[ING]”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Apr 022014
 

(In this post DGR reviews the unusual new album by the French band Psygnosis.)

Sometimes, when seeking out new music a name just happens to grab you. Such was the case with French group Psygnosis. Whilst doing the usual random band/Facebook surfing I spotted the name and saw that there was a new release out — allowing us to have the combination (if the music was good) of being relevant as well as getting to yell at people to check out a new band. While, sadly, not the developer of the beloved Wipeout and Colony Wars games, Psygnosis are an experimental death metal band — a really young group (in terms of releases) with scant little to their name, and what they have released has been free.

The band have a heavy electronic element as part of their sound, but not in the sense of some random conflagration of rave synths finding their way into the midst of things like some shoehorned-in musical experiment turned Lovecraftian horror. Instead, the band are playing with the multi-headed hydra of the current death metal scenes, combining many genres into one — like much of what the Subliminal Groove record label’s slate of artists are beginning to do. They are also a four-piece, meaning that things are kept relatively sleek as well.

At the end of March Psygnosis released a new disc known as Human Be[ing]. It’s a fascinating album, with many different things happening at once and pulling in many different directions, utilizing the dead space between musical notes to the fullest while being stitched together by furious blast runs and various multimedia samples, like a futuristic and industrial-fueled Frankenstein’s monster. Continue reading »

AGE AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MUSIC PREFERENCE

 Mosh Pit  56 Responses »
Apr 012014
 

(Guest writer Andrew Rumbol delivered unto us this interesting discussion of psychological research that attempts to identify the effects of aging on tastes in music.   Of course, there’s a metal angle to what he has to say… and invitations for your comments at the end.)

An interesting piece of research came out near the end of last year, from the department opposite the lab I work in. You can read the official press release here (which also links you to the primary research paper, if you’re interested in nerdy things like their sample selection or standard errors):

http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/the-musical-ages-of-modern-man-how-our-taste-in-music-changes-over-a-lifetime

This group of psychologists undertook two cross-sectional studies (looking at a group of people that varies in one particular aspect, but is similar in others such as ethnicity and socioeconomic status), to investigate how people’s music tastes change throughout their lives. They found a striking trend: our music tastes pass through 5 distinct ‘dimensions’ – intense in adolescence, contemporary then mellow as early adulthood progresses, sophisticated in middle age, and finally unpretentious. I’ll discuss these results in more detail later – but, being both a scientist and a cynic, I was curious to find out how (and how precisely) these categories were defined.

So, a brief history on the psychology of musical preference: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PUTERAEON, VANHELGD, MISERY INDEX, DAWN OF DEMENTIA, FALL OF THE ALBATROSS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Apr 012014
 

Here we have another round-up of new music to recommend for your aural pleasure. I’m splitting this quintet with one of our other writers, Austin Weber. I’m introducing the first three items, and he’s got the other two after that. Here we go:

PUTERAEON

I’ve massively enjoyed this Swedish death metal band’s last two albums, The Esoteric Order (2011) (reviewed here) and Cult Cthulhu (2012) (which I miserably failed to review). They’ve now completed another Lovecraftian-inspired album entitled The Crawling Chaos, which will be released by Cyclone Empire on April 25 and features chilling cover art by Christoffer Fredriksson. The band recently released an official video for the album’s third track, “Path To Oblivion”, and I caught up with that today. You should catch up with it, too.

The music is like a hard-charging phalanx of ghouls and golems, a ghastly and galvanizing gallop of gore-strewn gruesomeness. The crypt door has been flung wide open, and all manner of unholy, undead things are coming for your teeth. Continue reading »

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