SUNDAY SLAUGHTERING: BARBARIAN, AURORA BOREALIS, HELLCANNON, ADRAMELECH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  24 Responses »
Feb 162014
 

For yours truly, it has been a great weekend for the discovery of song debuts from new and forthcoming metal releases. In this post I’ve collected five of them. With luck, I’ll write another post today with more of what I’ve found since Friday. Get ready for some old school slaughtering.

BARBARIAN

I have a tip from our brutish friend SurgicalBrute to thank for this first discovery. The band is Barbarian. They are located in Italy and they released their self-titled debut album in 2011. In late January, Doomentia released the band’s second album, Faith Extinguisher, with a kickass piece of cover art by Shagrat of Acid Witch. It’s available on CD now (at this location), with vinyl coming soon. Looks like it will be available digitally on Amazon mp3 later this month, and perhaps Doomentia will offer it on Bandcamp, too.

Two songs are now streaming on Bandcamp — “Inhale the Dead” and “We Are the Profane” — and they are sooooo damned good. It’s a glorious kickback to the primordial spawning ground of all sorts of extreme metal genres, binding together the undead spirits of bands like Celtic Frost, Bathory, Venom, and Motörhead. Vomit-spewing vocals, tremendous drumming, and black, thrashing riffs to kill for. Continue reading »

MY AFTERNOON WITH JEFF LOOMIS AND KEITH MERROW (CONQUERING DYSTOPIA)

 Interviews  15 Responses »
Feb 162014
 

Last July I wrote about a crowd-funding campaign that had been launched by Conquering Dystopia — the band created by guitarists Jeff Loomis of Seattle and Keith Merrow of Portland, which also includes bassist Alex Webster (Cannibal Corpse) and drummer Alex Rüdinger (The Faceless, Ordinance). That campaign was wildly successful. I splurged on it myself, with a donation that offered a very enticing perk — a meal in Seattle with Loomis and Merrow. And yesterday that happened.

We met at the Hard Rock Cafe at 3:00, and what followed was an extremely enjoyable 2 1/2-hour conversation that ended only when the two needed to hit the road for the drive to Portland, where Jeff is helping Keith and his wife move into a new house (I think we can all agree that there are few truer measures of friendship than one dude helping another one move).

It wasn’t intended to be an interview, but I can’t resist sharing some impressions of the people and some news about both Conquering Dystopia and the future plans of both men. First, the news…

The Conquering Dystopia album is nearly ready for release — perhaps a matter of two or three more weeks. But the guys want to be definite before announcing an official date, and they’re not quite to that point. They are both clearly delighted with the way it turned out and excited for people to hear it. Jeff described it as a “guitar roller coaster, with hills and valleys, cinematic soundscapes, and some experimentation”, and he said it’s very heavy. Continue reading »

CONFUSION: ANDY WINTER AND WHISPERED

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Feb 152014
 

It’s the middle of a Saturday morning here in the great Pacific Northwest. I woke up much later than usual, in a state of confusion. This was the result of a very late Friday night, not enough sleep, and the after-effects of mixing intoxicants. I do not regret any of that — I saw one hell of a live show in Seattle last night by Abigail Williams (with the new line-up of Ken Sorceron, Jeff Wilson, John Porada, and Charlie Fell) and Erimha. But still, my head hasn’t been firing on all cylinders this morning.

And then I saw and heard the two things you’re about to see and hear. I’m now even more confused — but I’m coming around to the view that it’s a pleasant kind of confusion, sort of like waking up in someone else’s pants and realizing they’re nicer than the ones you were wearing the night before. Not that I did that. Just a figure of speech.

ANDY WINTER

I came across this first video through the following post by my beloved Agalloch on their Facebook page: “A video from our friend Andy Winter. This track features Agalloch members: JWW (bass), Anderson (guest gtr solo). Also features Jan Axel Blomberg/Hellhammer (drums), Mirai Kawashima (vocals) and Winter on guitar.” The video premiered 10 days ago on Stereogum, and there’s a lot more info about Winter at that Stereogum link.

The song is “Uncountably Infinite,” and it appears to be a new single; Winter’s last album was 2013’s Incomprehensible. Almost everything about the video (and the music) is incomprehensible. There is so much whatthefuckedness in them that, unlike oil, we can now safely say that we will never run out of whatthefuckedness. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 29

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  39 Responses »
Feb 142014
 

At last we’ve arrived at the final installment of our list of 2013’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. I could have gone on, but since we’re half-way through February it seemed time to stop and spend more time on what 2014 is bringing us.

I want to thank my fellow NCS writers and our readers for suggesting songs from albums that I missed last year; this list has included a lot of those recommendations. I also beg your forgiveness for not including other recommendations, and for otherwise omitting or simply overlooking other great songs from last year.

On Monday I’ll have a a post with a few more concluding thoughts and a complete list of every song in this series, collected in one place. (For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the three songs I’m announcing today, click here.)

DARK TRANQUILLITY

I suppose there’s some irony in my choice of this next song (and the one that follows it) for our concluding installment — it includes a lot of clean singing. Beyond that, it is one of the more mellow, more pop-oriented songs DT have ever done (of the gothic/doom variety), one of the songs on 2013’s Construct that links arms with the style that DT explored in Projector. But Mikael Stanne’s clean singing is emotionally resonant, and the song also delivers his equally emotive harsh growls, along with some hammering Gothenburg riffs. Continue reading »

A VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE: THOU, NECRONOMICON, HULL, VESANIA, DEATH GRIPS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Feb 142014
 

This has been one hell of a week for new songs and videos. I have a list of good new things as long as my… arm… and although I’ve been doing my best to round up the best of what I’ve noticed, I’m still coming up… short. Although I won’t be able to cover everything before the week ends, I do have this one final collection of head-wreckers. Happy Valentine’s Day motherfuckers. If you’re sad about being alone on V-Day, just gaze into the eyes of that cat, and remember… we love you.

THOU

Heathen — the forthcoming album by Thou from Baton Rouge, Louisiana — is on my list of highly anticipated 2014 releases.  It is due to arrive from Gilead Media on March 25 and is now available for pre-order here. I discovered this morning that while I wait for that apocalyptic monstrosity, I will have something else from Thou to while away the hours. Specifically, Thou have made available for free on Bandcamp a compilation entitled Ceremonies of Humiliation. It collects all of the band’s musical output from split releases prior to the release of 2010’s Summit.

Ceremonies of Humiliation will also be released as a triple-LP set, though I haven’t yet seen a projected release for that. After the jump, you can gaze upon the Ceremonies cover and stream the entire collection. There is no love in it. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COLOSSUS – “ENDLESS TORMENTS”

 Premieres  4 Responses »
Feb 142014
 

Deathcore is not dead, but it is evolving, and branching in different directions. With their forthcoming debut album Lobotocracy, the French band Colossus show us the direction they have taken, and we’ll be giving you a glimpse of it through our exclusive premiere of the album’s seventh track, “Endless Torments”.

Lobotocracy is non-stop warfare — a maiming, vicious, often technically acrobatic assault that’s far closer to Aborted-style death/grind than Colossus’ deathcore roots. It brings the punishment with pile-driving grooves, a plethora of guitar leads that squirm, skitter, and swarm, and rapid-fire, start-stop riff bursts that will leave flesh in tatters. The album reveals a noticeable step-up in technical proficiency, and the band infiltrate their brutal hammering with an array of bleak, insidious melodies that leave no room for hope.

There’s no solace to be found in the band’s dual-vocal barrage either. Those hoarse roars and hair-raising shrieks match the destructive intensity of the rest of the music. Continue reading »

NIPPLE RIPPLE: BENIGHTED BANNED FROM FACEBOOK

 Metal News  25 Responses »
Feb 142014
 

This development is just so jaw-droppingly ridiculous that I felt compelled to report it. The following message appeared on Season of Mist’s Facebook page early this morning (Pacific Time):

“French death grind extremists BENIGHTED just had their Facebook account removed for displaying their new album cover. Everywhere else on this planet you can see that it depicts the breast of a woman. Maybe they should have shown an AK 47 instead as that seems to be more natural and acceptable. Let’s talk about blatant and ridiculous censorship, shall we… ?”

As you can see above, Season of Mist has changed its own Facebook banner to censor the image of Benighted’s new album cover (the title is Carnivore Sublime), apparently to preserve SoM’s own presence on Facebook (or at least to further drive home the point of that announcement quoted above).

Facebook hosts pages by porn stars. In fact, there’s a Facebook page called “pornstars” whose banner includes this photo: Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 28

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  2 Responses »
Feb 132014
 

Welcome to Part 28 of our list of 2013′s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the three songs I’m announcing today, click here.

We’re down to the last two days of this series, with three more today and 300 more tomorrow. Just kidding — but I’ll tell you, it’s awfully hard for me to let go of this series. There are so many great songs I’m going to have to omit if it’s ever going to end. As for today’s three, I’m not sure there’s any theme that would justify this grouping. I have simply found all three to be powerful, and powerfully infectious, and I need to have them on this list before it ends.

SUMMONING

It took seven long years for this fabled Austrian band to release a new album, but it finally came in 2013: Old Morning’s Dawn. Though I am most definitely a Tolkein nerd, I’m not a Summoning nerd, having only a passing acquaintance with only shards of the band’s previous discography. Therefore, I am incapable of intelligently debating (as many others have) whether Old Morning’s Dawn stands up to so many years of building expectations. I’m also incapable of debating whether those Summoning worshippers in Utah’s Caladan Brood out-performed their masters on 2013’s Echoes of Battle, because I’ve only heard one song from that album (and I’m mentioning that comparison only because I know some of you are going to bring it up). Continue reading »

YOUR FACE, IN SHREDS: LOST SOCIETY, BENEVOLENT, MAXIMUM THE HORMONE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Feb 132014
 

Here are three songs, two of which I just discovered and one (in the middle) that I’ve been meaning to write about for weeks. What they have in common you will find out soon enough.

LOST SOCIETY

I have our contributor Leperkahn to thank for this new discovery, which premiered today. It’s a song called “Lethal Pleasure”, and man, is that the truth. The band is Lost Society. They are from Finland, and Nuclear Blast plans to release their second album, Terror Hungry, on April 4.

I think it’s appropriate to disclose (again) that I’m probably the least appropriate of our writers to comment about thrash, because I’ve never been an enormous fan of the genre and have an even lower tolerance for the new wave of “re-thrash” bands. On the other hand, maybe my extreme pickiness when it comes to thrash will add weight to the enthusiasm I intend to express for “Lethal Pleasure”: It’s just a blistering, hell-on-wheels blast of speed metal, shot through with super-heated riffs and crazy soloing and some nice melodic hooks. It’s so damned much fun that the gang shouts make sense. Here you go: Continue reading »

THAT GUY

 Mosh Pit  43 Responses »
Feb 132014
 

NCS writer Andy Synn delivers a rant.  Discuss!

Have you ever noticed that some people just have better taste, and better opinions, than you do?

And no, I’m not just talking about the stunningly sexy, intellectually gifted übermensches who write for NCS.

I’m talking about that guy. You know that guy. No matter what you’re saying, or doing, or talking about, he’s always there, ready to jump in and tell you – in no uncertain terms – why your opinion, (cute though it is) is fundamentally wrong.

Now that guy comes in a lot of forms (the sniggering, puerile troll, the condescending “teacher”, the offensively arrogant “comic book guy”), but one thing’s always the same — he knows better than you do, he’s more “real”, and he knows a “sell-out” when he sees one! Continue reading »

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