BOMBS OF HADES AND PSYCHOTIC GARDENING

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Mar 302014
 

I’ve got some other goodies lined up for you on this day of rest, but while I finish messing with those I thought I’d bomb you to smithereens with some Bombs of Hades and then let Psychotic Gardening prune your vines.

BOMBS OF HADES

Bombs of Hades are one of the bands I included on a list of the best Swedish-style death metal being recorded by newer bands over the last five years, and if you haven’t heard them before you’re about to find out why they belong on that list. They have a new album on the way entitled Atomic Temples and yesterday they started streaming one of the new songs — “Omens” — and it’s great.

As many of you know, I have a long-standing love (some might call it a crippling weakness) for this kind of metal, despite the fact that it’s music that MUST fit a certain mold or it loses its identity. With other styles of metal, sub-genres can be spliced together, filigrees and embroidery can be added, experiments can be performed, growth and innovation can occur. But with this kind of old-school, d-beat-driven Swedish death metal, there’s simply a right way to do it or a wrong way. Bombs of Hades do it the right way. They keep the faith, they carry the torch, and it’s smokin’ hot. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CONDUCTING FROM THE GRAVE, BRETUS, DEATH I AM

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 292014
 

This is the second round-up of newly discovered music for this Saturday. One just wasn’t enough for what I found yesterday.

CONDUCTING FROM THE GRAVE

My comrade DGR rightly praised this Sacramento band’s self-titled 2013 album in a review last September. And how, we wondered, might the band follow up that monster of a disc? Well, now we have our answer: by covering a West Coast rap song from 1994 by Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. I’m not lying.

Actually, “Natural Born Killaz” is a pretty natural choice for a metal cover if you think about it. To quote The Font of All Human Knowledge: “The song has satanic and occult undertones and covers such subjects as mass murder, Sarah Connor from the Terminator films, Al Cowlings’ tight bond with O. J. Simpson, schizophrenia, Charles Manson, the attack on Reginald Denny during the Rodney King riots, strychnine poisoning, flagellation in Singapore, Jeffrey Dahmer, Kurt Cobain’s suicide and psilocybin mushrooms.” Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: VALLENFYRE, INFESTUS, ARCH ENEMY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 292014
 

Yesterday was a bonanza for me, like Santa got lost on Christmas Eve and wound up in a roadhouse in Amarillo and pulled out of his blackout drunk only yesterday, just long enough to drop these three presents down my non-existant chimney while he puked his guts out all over the reindeer. Or something like that.

VALLENFYRE

I get all tingly in my nether bits thinking about Vallenfyre’s new album, Splinters. A Fragile King (2011) was such an auspicious debut, and it’s such welcome news that this all-star band decided to follow it up with another album, which is now scheduled for release by Century Media on May 12 in Europe and May 13 in North America. Yesterday brought the premiere of the album’s opening track, “Scabs”.

The combination of screeching feedback, massive guitar and bass tone, and crisp, rapid-fire percussion grabs you within the first half-minute — and the song just gets even better from then on. The writhing guitar melody, the truly titanic chugging, the cavernous vocals, the obliterating drumwork — it all combines to exert a powerful, primal appeal, and an atmosphere drenched in bleakness. Fantastic song. Continue reading »

NEW ALBUM DETAILS: ANATHEMA, GOATWHORE, SEPREVATION

 Metal News  19 Responses »
Mar 282014
 

Here are a few notices sent my way by my NCS colleagues that we agreed were worth mentioning.  They concern forthcoming albums.

ANATHEMA

Following up on their well-received 2012 album Weather Systems, the UK’s Anathema revealed this morning that their new album will be named Distant Satellites and will be released by the Kscope label on June 9. The album art was created by Korean new media artist Sang Jun Too and was based on his “Distant Light” installation. Some of the songs were mixed by Steven Wilson. The band’s announcement also included these words:

“Distant Satellites is the culmination of everything ANATHEMA been working up to so far in our musical path. It contains almost every conceivable element of the heartbeat of Anathema music that it is possible to have. Continue reading »

A NO METAL POLL

 Off Topic  77 Responses »
Mar 282014
 

(NCS guest contributor Leperkahn has embarked on what appears to be a foolish endeavor. Against our better judgment, we’re helping him out by letting him solicit your suggestions for this hair-brained escapade. This will end in tears.)

Greetings, NCS comrades.

As a few of you may know, I’m still in high school (only for a couple more months, though). My elective class for this semester is a journalism class. For one of the capstone-y projects of the course, I am supposed to do an experiential blog. More precisely, I am tasked to alter my life in some meaningful (but feasible) manner, and write about the process as I go along.

I have listened more or less exclusively to metal for a couple years now, with only a few conscious forays into other areas (by conscious, I mean outside of the pop music that cannot be escaped by any sociable person). Thus, I thought it fitting – difficult, but certainly feasible – to try and live an entire week without any metal in my life. None. At the many times I would usually listen to metal during the week, I will instead listen to another largely unrelated genre. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: LORD MANTIS, INVINCIBLE FORCE, YOUNG AND IN THE WAY, TARTHARIA, ATHANATHEOS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 282014
 

I spent some time last night searching for new music worth recommending. Found quite a lot. Damaged my ear drums in the process, but oh so worth it. (They were so screwed up beforehand that it didn’t really matter. As for you, play this stuff loud enough to cause pain, so I don’t feel lonely in my deafness.)

There’s a lot of music in here — I could easily have spread it across five posts today — but there probably won’t be many other posts on this Friday because I’m on the road again. So, take your sweet time with it.

LORD MANTIS

We already reviewed Death Mask. We’ve heard it all, but most of you haven’t. Some of you will want to run away from it, some of you will eat it up like whatever it is you can’t stop eating even when you know you should. I’m in the latter category — it has made an indelible mark, as deep as all the black tattoos that beautify my limbs. Continue reading »

SÓLSTAFIR ANNOUNCE FIRST-EVER “NORTH AMERICAN” TOUR

 Metal News  9 Responses »
Mar 272014
 

I don’t have the data at my fingertips. It’s possible that we’ve written about some other band more than we’ve written about Iceland’s Sólstafir over the years — but I’d be surprised if that were true. And so it’s a foregone conclusion that I’m posting the following announcement of the band’s first “North American” tour, even though some literary license has been taken with the term “North American”:

Icelandic rock heathens Sólstafir have announced a string of North American tour dates. The band’s first-ever North American trek starts on May 15 in Brooklyn, NY and will continue through the band’s stop at this year’s Maryland Deathfest on May 23. Support on these dates comes from JUNIUS. A full list of confirmed tour dates can be found below.

SOLSTAFIR North American tour dates
5/15 Toronto, ON @ Hard Luck
5/16 Brooklyn, NY @ Saint Vitus Bar
5/17 Philadelphia PA @ Underground Arts
5/18 Boston, MA @ Middle East
5/19 Springfield, VA @ Empire
5/23 Baltimore, MD @ Maryland Deathfest Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BARBELITH — “REBIRTH”

 Premieres  5 Responses »
Mar 272014
 

Following up on their self-titled 2012 EP, Baltimore’s Barbelith are poised for the release of an untitled two-song 7″ EP by Fragile Branch Recordings. One of the songs (“Caverns of the Mind”) has previously debuted and today we premiere the second track, “Rebirth”.

Barbelith’s dark, genre-bending music as displayed on this new release melds together eerie ambience, black metal vehemence, raw hardcore rage, and shimmering guitar melodies that cross into post-rock territory. The resulting music is bleak and depressive, but quite riveting — and “Rebirth” is a fine summing up of the band’s unusual blend of styles. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: AUTOPSY, LOUDBLAST, BLACK ANVIL, AND ARCHSPIRE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 272014
 

I’ll spare you the why’s and wherefore’s, but your humble editor has fallen behind in monitoring developments in the world of metal.  As a result, the collection of new songs is even more random than usual. Nevertheless, I think all the music is very good, and it’s diverse enough that it should please a range of tastes.

AUTOPSY

Tourniquets, Hacksaws And Graves is the name of the seventh studio excrescence by the mighty Autopsy. Ever since the Wes Benscoter album art and April 21 release date were disclosed by the Peaceville label back in February, I’ve been waiting for a taste of the music, and we finally got it yesterday, with the premiere of “The Howling Dead” at Noisey.

I’m not surprised at how good this song is, but I’m surprised at how wretchedly good it is. That driving beat at the beginning, shrouded in dense distortion, is just killer. So is the thoroughly horrific doom slow-down that follows it. So is the lurching, rocking stomp that comes next. And so on… Chris Reifert’s vocals have never sounded more horrific, the riffs are as putrescent and grisly as they’ve ever been, and the closing guitar solo oozes decay. Fantastic! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE (AND REVIEW): OWL — “INTO THE ABSOLUTE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Mar 272014
 

I discovered Germany’s Owl and their 2013 album You Are the Moon, I Am the Night through a guest post on our site last summer by KevinP. That was Owl’s second album, and I was hugely impressed by it. Now, this two-man band have completed a four-song EP entitled Into the Absolute, and I’m hugely impressed by it as well — so much so that we obtained the privilege of premiering its title track for you.

Owl’s Christian Kolf says that if that last album was drenched in the atmosphere of night, the new EP is “set right before dawn, when the first light appears,” with “a feeling of a new awakening”.  There are in fact moments of beauty in the music, most strikingly in the latter part of the long, stately closing track, “Unearthly Arcana”, but when these moments come, the atmosphere is one of deep melancholy. And if the EP as a whole stands on the brink of dawn, it is nevertheless still very much wrapped in the mantle of night. Continue reading »

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