GOATWHORE: “FBS”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
May 292014
 

I’ve not been paying much attention to new song and video premieres or metal news since leaving town for Maryland Deathfest last week and I’ve fallen way behind. But I did just see what you’re about to see in this post — a pair of brand new goodies from NOLA’s Goatwhore relevant to their new album Constricting Rage of the Merciless.

First, we have the cover art created by Jordan Barlow. Very nice.

Second, we have a lyric video for an advance track from the album named “FBS”. It is also very nice (I’m pretty sure I heard them play this on the recent Metal Alliance tour). It’s a nasty, thrashy stun-gun of blackened speed metal with riffs galore and an off-speed instrumental break that’s just as cool as the pedal-to-the-metal parts. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FALL OF THE ALBATROSS — “LIMERENCE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 292014
 

(Austin Weber provides the following introduction to our premiere of a new track by Fall of the Albatross from Queens, New York.)

The bewildering experience of taking in Fall Of The Albatross is overwhelming at first, as they are masters of splicing chaos and calm to form intricate dynamic webs and make every bit of it fit together perfectly. For those who’ve missed my previous posts here regarding the band, they are a highly eclectic instrumental metal band with a focus on blowing your mind. The June 24th release of their new full-length, Enormous Cloud, draws ever closer, and thus another song premiere is in order.

Which brings us today to the adventurous journey contained within “Limerence”, a song that churns out planet-smashing math core, stuffs it with a fluffy jazz filling, and sneaks in sublime swelling post-rock builds as well. They arrange the opposing styles expertly to split-second ping-pong off each another brilliantly. From vicious tempo changes to unwinding solitude, this song encapsulates the essence of the record — no boundaries. Continue reading »

GENOCIDE GENERATOR: “I”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
May 292014
 

(DGR wrote this review of the debut album by Germany’s Genocide Generator.)

Late last year I went on a bit of a grind kick and found myself exploring a wide variety of bands — a huge chunk of which I eventually reviewed here at NCS. I was not, however, finding them through the usual channels. Instead, I was discovering them through links posted by other bands whose music I was initially listening to — and that’s how I recently discovered Germany’s Genocide Generator.

Distaste were one of the bands whose music I reviewed late last year, and since then I’ve been keeping an eye on the band as well as its various members’ other projects, just to get some idea of what they’ve been up to — as well as catching the occasional really good recommendation. A surveillance practice like this really lends itself to the discovery of very good bands from groups’ local scenes, ones that may not be covered too often in the metal website world. For instance, Mastic Scum (reviewed here) was one of those recommendations from Distaste.

Since then though, I’ve found myself traveling through concentric circles on Facebook via a variety of bands and recently found myself doing so with Distaste once again — with supplemental help from Metal-Archives to get an idea about the bands I was clicking on and looking at. Continue reading »

MARYLAND DEATHFEST: A TRAVELOGUE (Part 4)

 Mosh Pit  16 Responses »
May 282014
 

Diocletian at Rams Head Live — MDF XII

So far I’ve written about two of the venues at Maryland Deathfest XII – The Edison Lot and Soundstage. Today I’ll cover two more and begin discussing more of the bands who provided, for me, the musical highlights of the four-day event.

My two Seattle friends and I arrived in Baltimore in the early evening of last Wednesday after a long cross-country flight to D.C. and then a numbing crawl through rush-hour traffic from there to Baltimore. It was a steady 20 miles per hour all the way, except for the times when it wasn’t moving at all and about 10 minutes when we accelerated all the way up to a blistering 40 mph.

We hooked up with my NCS comrade BadWolf at the hotel (he had driven all the way from Toledo), and since all of us were feeling hungry and sort of beat to shit, we had some food and drinks at the hotel after checking in and before making our way to the Ottobar for the pre-fest show on Wednesday night. Continue reading »

A NEW SÓLSTAFIR ALBUM COMING IN AUGUST

 Metal News  5 Responses »
May 282014
 

Just last week, Iceland’s Sólstafir absolutely floored me (and hundreds of other fans) with their performance at the 12th  edition of Maryland Deathfest. Hot on the heels of that trump, Season of Mist has just announced that the band will be releasing a new album named Ótta on August 29 in Europe and September 2 in North America.

According to the press release, “As the name suggests, Ótta will include eight songs, which titles will be unveiled later in June.” Pre-orders will start at the SoM e-shop (here) on June 10.

And that’s about all I have to say about that.  I have to go now and change my shorts.

WOMANOWAR: THE ARGUMENT FOR BALANCE & EQUALITY — AN INTERVIEW WITH HELMS ALEE DRUMMER AND VOCALIST HOZOJI MATHESON-MARGULLIS

 Interviews  2 Responses »
May 282014
 

(We welcome the return of guest writer Alain Mower and the fourth in his series of interviews of women in metal. In this edition, he talks with Hozoji Matheson-Margullis, the drummer/vocalist for Seattle’s Helms Alee, whose latest album Sleepwalking Sailors was released earlier this year and whose new split with Young Widows is coming next month.)

This series is dedicated to creating discussion and awareness by expressing the observations, thoughts, and opinions of current prolific metal musicians who, in their spare time, also happen to be women. This is in direct response to the few stragglers in the community who think that there is still a place for misogyny in metal.

If this results in you punching some loud-mouth, drunk sexist at the next show you go to or calling someone out when they question the attendance, attire, or musical capabilities of a woman at a show, then that’s all I could ever ask, and then some. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT, PART 47: OV HOLLOWNESS

 THE SYNN REPORT  9 Responses »
May 282014
 

(In this 47th edition of THE SYNN REPORT, Andy Synn reflects on the discography of Ov Hollowness, and we have Bandcamp streams of all the albums, as well as Andy’s suggested songs from each one.)

Recommended for fans of: Abigail Williams, Nachtmystium, Sólstafir

After the one-two punch of brutality of the last two editions it’s about time for something a little more… nuanced.

Ov Hollowness is the name of an atmospheric/progressive/post Black Metal project masterminded by Mark Rafferty of Edmonton, Alberta (that’s in Canada, for you less geographical types). Since the project’s genesis in 2009 it has produced 3 albums of driving, blackened riffs, thundering rock beats, and cold, haunting ambience.

Though primarily a guitar-driven affair, the vocals are also of prime importance and add their own vital character to the mix, blending bloody, blackened rasps and passages of portentous spoken word with moments of piercing clean-sung melody and clarity. Even the drums, electronically-programmed though they might be, are written and incorporated into each overall song in a way that seems both fluid and natural.

Over time the sound of the project has undergone a slow, organic evolution, moving from a raw, yet fluid early aesthetic, to a grandly melodic, deeply atmospheric, powerfully passionate vision that takes the building blocks of Black Metal and uses them as a foundation upon which to construct something altogether more ambitious. Continue reading »

MARYLAND DEATHFEST: A TRAVELOGUE (Part 3)

 Mosh Pit  33 Responses »
May 272014
 

photo by Kusha of Theories

One of the most striking aspects of Maryland Deathfest XII was something that hit me even harder after I returned home to Seattle: As one of my new MDF acquaintances put it on Facebook today, it was a place “where EVERYTHING in totality, literally, everything in a 360 degree view, was ‘metal’ oriented in some way or another.”

You get that feeling at just about any metal show, but it’s a feeling that usually only lasts a handful of hours and then you’re back in the world. At MDF, it went on for days. Everywhere you looked, at almost all hours of the days and nights, even on the streets of Baltimore, you saw and heard the sights and sounds of metal. And especially at the Edison Lot, it was like being transported to another planet populated solely by metalheads. I’ve never seen so much black (or so many patches) in one place in my life.

People-watching was definitely one of the primary MDF spectator sports, second only to watching the bands on stage. Given that this was like a metal homecoming party (or, as Kim Kelly put it, “metal’s version of Spring Break”), lots of people obviously put a lot of thought and care into their selection of finery — including the dude in the horse-head mask pictured above, just after he had successfully crowd-surfed over the barricade at Edison Lot’s Stage A.  And of course the official mascot of MDF, Chicken Man: Continue reading »

VADER: “TIBI ET IGNI”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
May 272014
 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews the forthcoming new album by Poland’s Vader.)

Can we just agree at this point that Vader is the Clint Eastwood of death metal? Clint Eastwood, in all of his films where he has appeared as an actor, has basically put out nothing but awesome movie after awesome movie. They have only varied in degrees of how good they are, but if I were to think in terms of a personal one-to-ten scale, Eastwood has never scored below an eight, even at his worst, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that his on-screen persona rarely changes very much. I view Vader in the same way; they have that Clint Eastwood trait of never changing dramatically, merely showing different shades and sides of themselves.

I mean yeah, the band have had their The Bridges of Madison County (The Beast in their case, which strayed into some slightly different territory), but the fact remains that Vader have been a band who are metal, war, and imperialism incarnate. They’ve done this consistently for years with inhumanly good results.

At this point, that history also makes Vader albums pretty difficult to review. Not because they are hard to describe, but because “It’s a Vader album” tells you what you need to know. It’s almost as if there is no point in reviewing their music any more because it has proven itself so remarkably consistent in quality, and it’s not as if they’ve ever taken a huge step outside of their box either. With that said, though, I’m enthusiastically rabid for Tibi Et Igni. It has been on never-ending repeat since we got the promo for it. Continue reading »

LEVEL MATCHING YOUR LIFE

 Mosh Pit  11 Responses »
May 272014
 

(This is a follow-up to a widely read piece we published last month about The Loudness War by guest writer Alex (the co-founder and chief editor of Metal-Fi and an audiophile who has been listening to metal for more than 20 years).  This article is also being cross-posted at the Angry Metal Guy blog as well as at Metal-Fi.)

“But I like my metal loud. It just sounds better to me.”

This is bar none the number one reaction I get from fellow headbangers, who after they read one of our articles, go off in a frenzy and measure all their record’s dynamic range only to discover they almost always prefer the hyper-compressed albums over the dynamic ones.

Not surprising. In fact, most of the time their results only reinforce why the Loudness War exists in the first place. Let me explain.

From a strictly Darwinian standpoint, the ability to hear is critical to your survival. It allows you to perceive the natural sounds in your environment, find food (as well as avoid becoming it), keep your balance, and most importantly in this day and age, communicate with your fellow headbanger more effectively. Consequently, your ears have developed into a highly sensitive instrument. You have the ability to hear a whisper in a sound-proofed room as well as detect the loudest scream at a Pig Destroyer show. Putting that into numbers, the human ear has about 140dB of dynamic range (the CD is only 96dB) and can hear up to three orders of magnitude in frequency (20Hz – 20kHz).

However, the perceived response of human hearing is not linear with respect to frequency. In English, the apparent loudness of a sound depends on its frequency and intensity. As I stated in my previous article, the study of how our ears perceive sound with respect to volume was first researched by Fletcher and Munson back in 1933. They came up with the first Equal-loudness contour, a plot that shows how your hearing changes depending on a sound’s intensity (sound pressure level or SPL). The curves are measured in Phons, which is the value of SPL that has constant apparent loudness for average human hearing. Continue reading »

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