A YEAR-END LIST FROM ALEX RISE (TYRANT OF DEATH, PSYCHOTIC PULSE)

 LISTMANIA 2013  6 Responses »
Dec 162013
 

(Alex Rise, the man behind Tyrant of Death and also a member of Psychotic Pulse, kindly agreed to tell us about his favorite listening during 2013. As you’ll see, not all of it was actually released this year.)

Though an aficionado of musical extremity and heaviness, I can’t really express thoughts about these bands I’m about to list in a professional, representative manner. I do enjoy listening to them often and think about mass murder on a subway, bus, or WHENEVER when I do! I know one thing: when they arrive in this miserable city called Toronto, I shall drink and mosh with these fellow bastards when they come over. One, please excuse my terrible English. Two, lets get started with this fucking list. Continue reading »

2013 — A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE GREAT ALBUMS

 LISTMANIA 2013  50 Responses »
Dec 162013
 

(Today, we begin rolling out the year-end lists of our site’s regular staff with the first part of Andy Synn’s annual five-part reflection on the past year. Of course, we will also continue posting Listmania columns by guest writers. Look for additional installments in Andy’s series every day this week.)

So here’s the deal, for those of you who haven’t experienced my massively over-involved and over-thought end-of-year round-up process before (and a reminder for those of you who have forgotten):

At the end of every year I spend some time listing all the albums and EPs which I’ve listened to enough to feel like I’ve formed a solid opinion on them. Then I break them down into three categories.

The Great (the ones I feel like I can legitimately defend as examples of the pinnacle of what the genre has produced this year), The Good (which vary from simply solid to almost awesome, some missing out on greatness by the merest hair’s breadth), and The Disappointing (which aren’t necessarily bad albums… they’re just… well… disappointing in some way!)

There’s definitely going to be some albums missing (for example – there’s no Amon Amarth or Chimaira, as I simply haven’t had the time to listen to either properly), and some that I’ve simply forgotten about, but overall I think it’s still a pretty formidable collection. Case in point, the “Great” section – by far the longest – is 53 albums long, which I think reflects the overall stellar quality that 2013 has brought us.

But enough of that… on to the first list.. the albums which I think are the best examples of this past year in the world of metal. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: RED FANG, CARCASS, CHROME DIVISION, COLISEUM, AWAKENING SUN, ACHERON

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Dec 162013
 

For various reasons, including a long vacation, a buttload of work and work-related travel that confronted me in my day job upon returning from said vacation, and the dedication of space to our ongoing year-end LISTMANIA series, I’ve not been doing a very good job of spreading the word about new music and videos. Much new music and videos of interest have been accumulating. I’m collecting five of the recent videos and one new song in this post. Many of them lean more toward hard rocking that the kind of extreme metaling I usually feature in these round-ups, but it’s all good stuff.

RED FANG

Red Fang have consistently produced videos that are sure-fire chuckle fests. Their new one is no exception. Directed by Whitey McConnaughy, it’s for “Blood Like Cream”, one of the songs on the band’s latest album Whales and Leeches. It’s a twist on the zombie theme. These undead monsters want PBR instead of brains — but it is fuckin’ Portland, so that’s not a total shock.

Yeah, there’s clean singing in the song, but it’s crunchy, it rocks out, and it gets its hooks in your brain meat. Chug-a-lug, chug-a-lug. Continue reading »

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: DOWNLOAD FESTIVAL 2014 TO INCLUDE SIKTH AND AEROSMITH

 Metal News  16 Responses »
Dec 162013
 

Are you like me? Do you shake your head in quasi-disbelief when you see the ordering of band names on posters for hybrid rock/metal festivals like the one above, which provides the latest line-up updates for the 2014 edition of the UK’s DOWNLOAD FESTIVAL? Way up at the top, you see that the headliners include the octogenarians in Aerosmith — and then only down below, almost buried in the fine print, you see the name SikTh.

I mean, considering that SikTh were an influential band who have been defunct for more than five years, the fact that they have reunited seems like the kind of news that deserves a little more prominence, such as perhaps placement on the same line as… uh… Fall Out Boy? Okay, maybe that’s asking for too much. How about SikTh on the same line as Jake E Lee’s Red Dragon Cartel? And no, I have no fucking idea what Jake E Lee’s Red Dragon Cartel is, though if they include actual red dragons, I’d be interested in seeing them.

In other news, it appears Linkin Park will be performing Hybrid Theory at DOWNLOAD. I might pay to see that, if only for nostalgia reasons, as long as Linkin Park promise not to play anything they’ve recorded since 2003.

Also, it appears the festival will also include Battlecross, Dillinger Escape Plan, Dying Fetus, In Flames (appearing on the same line as those red dragons and a rhino that needs to be fed), Thy Art Is Murder, and The Black Dahlia Murder (who just barely made the poster before they ran out of room). Not too shabby. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: EARTH CONTROL — “DEAD WRESTLER”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Dec 162013
 

(DGR reviews the latest EP by Earth Control from Tacoma, Washington — the band formerly known as Owen Hart.)

When I reviewed Ovid’s Withering’s recent release Scryers Of The Ibis a few days back, I mentioned that there were some discs that I could not in good conscience let the year end without discussing in some form, if only to explain why they may be appearing on certain year-end lists from seemingly out of nowhere. Earth Control’s Dead Wrestler EP is not one of those discs. Instead, it is something of an old touching of bases for me — in part because I had just recently rediscovered them after curiosity got the best of me and I wondered what happened to the group Owen Hart, only to discover that they had received a cease and desist order from the WWE/Hart Family (which, let’s be real, was probably the only way this was fated to go) and the band had to change their name.

They chose the name Earth Control, after the title of the CD Owen Hart had put out earlier — but by that point I had long since lost the thread with this Tacoma, WA based grind band. I discovered the Earth Control disc in part due to another writer at one of the sites I was at. She described them as sounding like Converge (of whom she was a huge fan, and thus a huge fan of the Earth Control disc) and she was partly right. Owen Hart (now Earth Control, in case you’re losing track) have a very chaotic sound, reminiscent of how Converge sound sometimes — 70% noise/30% music, buried in all the reverb, feedback, and static that they could produce and just hammering away at their instruments. Owen Hart do the same thing, but they sound like Converge if Converge were to throw their instruments off the side of a building and record the impact.

Thus, when I found out they had taken the name Earth Control and in the summer of this year released an EP entitled Dead Wrestler… — at least I think they released it this summer — I had to check it out, if only to reconnect with the band who had given me the songs, “Fuck Morrisey, Fuck The Smiths, Fuck The Cure” and “Welcome to Worthless Piece Of Shit-ville Population: You”. Continue reading »

FORK TONGUE’S BEST DEMOS OF 2013

 LISTMANIA 2013  17 Responses »
Dec 152013
 

(We continue with our year-end Listmania series by presenting this list by NCS reader Fork Tongue.)

One part of music I love is wading through bullshit to find treasure. Whether it be digging through used CD’s and vinyl bins or sampling shit online, nothing quite matches that feeling of finding a bargain or finding the band you can attach yourself to as the guy who discovered them among your peers. Yea, I’m that guy.

In 2013 I found quite a few bands from whom I’ll be patiently awaiting more material. Now, I know this is “No Clean Singing”, but I’ve included a couple awesome clean singing demos in here. Let’s get to it. In no particular order…

Kêres – The Wanderer’s Path Demo XX

This is their third demo (according to Metal Archives) and I’m not sure how they haven’t landed something with one of the underground Black Metal labels like Fallen Empire. Regardless, I’m hoping past and future material becomes more readily available soon because Kêres are on par with any other good Black Metal band out there. Continue reading »

KATZENJAMMER

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  18 Responses »
Dec 142013
 

Bear with me — there’s some metal at the end of this.

This post is about two things that happened to me yesterday as a result of my day job.  The first thing happened during a work-related lunch I had with someone we do business with. I was meeting with him for only the second time. At some point, making small talk, I told him that the place where I work was having its annual office holiday party last night at a restaurant and bar named Radiator Whiskey. It features one whole wall of nothing but the brown stuff — bourbon, rye, and scotch — all of which I like. After I told him that, he said, “I hope you don’t have major katzenjammer on Saturday morning”.

He pronounced “katzenjammer” in the German way (something like “kah-tsahn-yah-ma”), instead of the way a monolingual American like me would say it. After I asked him to spell the word, I realized I’d heard it before, oddly enough because somewhere I came across a stray bit of trivia that stuck in my head, about an old comic strip called The Katzenjammer Kids (I’ll come back to that). But I didn’t know what the word meant, so I asked him. Here’s what The Font of All Human Knowledge says about the word, which is pretty close to what the guy told me at lunch: Continue reading »

UNDER THE CHURCH: “BURNING”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Dec 132013
 

You know that time when you thought it would be a good idea to hitch a ride on a moving freight train because you like the power of big fuckin’ trains and you thought it would be a fine rush and you ran alongside as fast as you could, your head filled with the roar of the wheels on the tracks, and you made the big leap, thinking you had a good hold, but were instead pulled under the train and had your spine crushed in a dozen places and your head severed at the neck and then your head bounced beneath the wheels of the tank car carrying ethanol which was next in line and your skull was just hard enough to cause the tank car to jump the rails and explode like the Hiroshima weapon, leveling acres of surrounding civilization and incinerating your remains into such a fine ash that it was immediately blown away by the windstorm caused by the conflagration, leaving not even enough for your loved ones to put in a funerary urn? You remember that?

Well, that’s sort of what “Burning” sounds like, “Burning” being the new song by Sweden’s Under the Church, which will appear on their forthcoming EP and is now available for download on Bandcamp. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: “PROFANE” BY THE CONJURATION

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Dec 132013
 

(NCS contributor Austin Weber introduces our exclusive premiere of yet another advance track from the forthcoming album by The Conjuration.)

As I mentioned rather recently when talking about The Conjuration here at NCS, they have a new album entitled Surreal on the horizon. While I have been informed it may be a couple months before it’s released, sole band member Corey Jason wanted to give us a bad case of aural AIDS caused by metal in the form of a new track entitled “Profane”. If anyone else suffers a similar reaction, please let me know so we can swap pics!

As far as The Conjuration tracks go, this one is a bit more straightforward, yet it still gives off the same mentally deranged vibe I’ve grown to love in the band’s music. While largely an aggressive death metal number, the early slight instrumental pause builds up the tension wonderfully— especially when coupled with the unsettling raspy howl that creepily appears for a few seconds hiding under the music around the 1:32 mark. Continue reading »

A YEAR-END LIST FROM CHRIS GRIGG (WOE)

 LISTMANIA 2013  10 Responses »
Dec 132013
 


photo by Charnelle Stöhrer

(We’re pleased to bring you a year-end list of favorite releases from Chris Grigg, a man of many talents and the founder-vocalist-guitarist of Philly black metal band WOE, whose 2013 album Withdrawal is one of the year’s highlights.)

Carcass – Surgical Steel

I can’t stand Heartwork, no matter how hard I try, so I had no good expectations for their return album. Do you ever expect to hate something, or maybe even WANT to hate something, and then feel a sense of excitement when you’re wrong? It reminds me that the world is not always predictable and that even old dogs can learn the best fucking tricks they might ever perform. This album is unrelenting in its union of intense, memorable riffs and brutality. Sacrilege though it may be, I find it hard to argue that this is anything but the best work of their career. Continue reading »

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