SEEN AND HEARD: FUCK THE FACTS, MASTODON, VADER

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 182014
 

Between pulling my hair out two days ago because our site was down and then frantically trying to catch up yesterday with posts we had promised to do on the day the site was down, I haven’t been as on top of new happenings as I’d like. So, to catch up a bit, here are a trio of new-ish things I’d like to share. There will be another round-up later today.

FUCK THE FACTS

My NCS comrade Austin Weber sent me the photo you see above. Hiding behind that absurdly large, absurdly metal mask is Mel Mongeon of Canada’s Fuck the Facts, putting on her metal face for a show in Chicago last night.

If you don’t know, the band have just begin a North American tour. Even without a mask of such epic qualities, Ms. Mongreon,  Topon Das, and their brothers in arms will still shake you to your core. Here’s the tour schedule as it now stands: Continue reading »

NUKLEAR FROST: “SUBJUGATION”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Apr 172014
 

Those of you who are sharp of eye, pointy of ear, and patient enough to wade through my last rant about Facebook’s business model will have already felt the chill of Minnesota’s Nuklear Frost. But simply using the hair-raising shriek from the intro track “Uranium Censer” to express my own contempt (and to reward the perseverance of readers) was hardly an adequate tribute to an album that I’ve listened to and enjoyed repeatedly since it came out in mid-March.

The album’s name is Subjugation, and I first found out about it through a Facebook link to their music by Amiensus, another Minnesota band who share a member with Nuklear Frost (guitarist Joe Waller). It proved to be a great discovery.

Nuklear Frost deliver riveting melodic black metal that hits like a maelstrom in full fury, yet the songs are so packed with righteous riffs and ominous melodies that the music exerts a strong magnetic attraction. The songs have identity and staying power; it’s an album that will draw you back again and again, and not simply for the pure rush it delivers to all good adrenaline junkies. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WAXEN — “HOLLOW EYES”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Apr 172014
 

Waxen is the solo project of Wyoming-based Toby Knapp, who has steered his prodigious talents in a multitude of different directions with different metal bands (as well as his own solo efforts) since the early 90s. Waxen’s debut album, Fumaroth, appeared in 2006, and after eight years Moribund Records is now poised to release its successor, Agios Holokauston.

Today we’re bringing you the premiere of a song from the new album named “Hollow Eyes”. It’s a bit of an unusual choice for a premiere — and to be clear, we chose the song. Much of Agios Holokauston is a raging black metal conflagration, a firestorm of 6-string guitar pyrotechnics married to compelling melodic hooks, neck-snapping rhythms, and sulfurous vocal assaults. But after bouncing back and forth among our premiere choices, the haunting beauty of “Hollow Eyes” proved so compelling that it’s the one we wanted to share with you first. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: RECIPROCAL — “ILLUMINATI”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Apr 172014
 

Late last fall Southern California’s Reciprocal self-released their second album, New Order of the Ages. It was an 11-track, 67-minute monster that drew the attention of Lacerated Enemy Records, which will now be releasing the album on CD this coming June 6, with new cover art by Jon Zig.

I missed the album when it first made the rounds last year, but because of this expanded label release I’m getting the chance to find out what I missed. And if you missed it, too, we’re giving you a chance to make amens — because today (along with Terrorizer in Europe) we’re helping to spread the word about a stream of the album’s fifth track, “Illuminati”.

Listening to “Illuminati” is like being unceremoniously parachuted into the middle of a war zone on some distant world where the weaponry is beyond our understanding and the combatants assault each other in highly accelerated time. All the instrumental performances are simply off the hook and tightly integrated despite the jet-fueled pacing and the dizzying course changes. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VALLENFYRE — “ODIOUS BLISS”

 Premieres  6 Responses »
Apr 172014
 

We were early and avid supporters of A Fragile King, the 2011 debut album by the all-star UK group known as Vallenfyre. It was a very personal album for all involved but especially the band’s founder Greg Mackintosh (Paradise Lost), who started the band after the death of his father. It could have been a one-off kind of project, but the reception to A Fragile King was so positive and the experience was obviously pleasurable enough for the band members that they have come roaring back with a second album — Splinters (produced by Kurt Ballou of Converge). Here’s a hint: it’s even better than the debut.

We wrote about the first advance track from the new album (“Scabs”) last month, and today we’re happy as hell to premiere another new song — “Odious Bliss”. After a massively heavy doom-shrouded opening, it begins to rumble and rush like a demon freight train with the throttle wide open, driven by Adrian Erlandsson’s jolting drumwork and a load of skull-splitting riffage. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SERDCE — “QUASAR / NEWBORN”

 Premieres  6 Responses »
Apr 162014
 

As anyone who has spent any time at our site well knows, I get enthusiastic about new musical discoveries on almost a daily basis, but rarely am I left pop-eyed and gape-mouthed in genuine wonder at a band’s achievements. But that’s what happened when I heard the two songs that we have the privilege of premiering today. And it didn’t happen just once — it has happened every time I’ve heard this music (I’ve heard one more song from the same album — and the same thing happened when I heard that one).

The band are from Belarus and their name is Serdce (a word that means “heart” in English). They released three albums between 2003 and 2009, and their fourth — entitled Timelessness — will be released for the first time by the cult Finnish label Blood Music this June. The album includes 10 songs, and what we have for you today are the 8th and 9th tracks — “Quasar” and “Newborn” — joined together as a single stream. Continue reading »

ARCHSPIRE: “THE LUCID COLLECTIVE”

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Apr 162014
 

(Austin Weber reviews the new album by a band we’ve been following for a long time — Canada’s Archspire.)

When Archspire burst out of nowhere with All Shall Align in 2012, it set a new benchmark for blazing extreme death metal, following in the footsteps of previous speed-, technicality-, and songwriting-pushers such as Cryptopsy and stretching the boundaries of death metal to a place that seemed to make a surprising number of people uncomfortable. Regardless, they impressed a lot of people, and their follow-up, The Lucid Collective, has been greatly anticipated. It certainly delivers, acting as a dream of death mirroring our often collective sleepwalking through existence.

Archspire have always flashed glimpses of a love for Origin and Spawn Of Possession, but they have also made the style their own, giving it brutal legs with which to stand and stomp angrily, and managing to give each track its own unique flow and structure. If Brain Drill was Origin-influenced death metal done to excess (in the opinion of some people), then arguably Archspire are a band who have learned all the things that Origin did right, while not being a rip-off of them at all.

An album like The Lucid Collective is not merely music, but a testament to the human will and ability to achieve incredible and nearly inhuman things through hard work, determination, and focus. Every member of the band performs at an astounding level, not in an effort to impress the listeners with vapid showboating, but with a purpose. Collectively, Archspire form an interlocking mass of arresting malevolence that looms large over the shredscapes and techdreams of noodlers everywhere. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: AGALLOCH, SEPTICFLESH, 1349, GOATCRAFT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 162014
 

Agalloch – photo by Veleda Thorsson

These are things I noticed over the last 24 hours that I thought you might want to notice as well.

AGALLOCH

When I found out that Agalloch was going to play a special show at Highline in Seattle on May 17 with YOB and Wounded Giant, I didn’t crow about it on our site. I can be pretty boorish when I want to be, and even when I’m not trying to be, but even I recognized it would be a dick move to express my joy about something I could see but the vast majority of our readers couldn’t. But now, finally, Agalloch has announced an official tour — Serpens In Culmination.

No doubt, the news will still be painful to fans who aren’t within reach of one of the stops, especially people who are also fans of Obsidian Tongue, Vex, and Jex Thoth, because those bands are also appearing at select stops on this tour. But on balance I feel okay about posting this news. Here’s the first part of the schedule, as announced late yesterday by Agalloch and Profound Lore: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PSYCHOTIC GARDENING — “ORIGIN OF THE INFECTION”

 Premieres  9 Responses »
Apr 152014
 

Little more than two weeks ago I discovered the existence of Psychotic Gardening — not the wildly popular pastime in many mental institutions but the band from Winnipeg, Canada. The occasion was the band’s release of a music video for their staggeringly heavy cover of Death’s “Open Casket” from the Leprosy album — and I frothed at the mouth about how good I thought it was.

One thing led to another, and here we are premiering an original Psychotic Gardening song named “Origin of the Infection”. Like the “Open Casket” cover, it will appear on the band’s forthcoming album Hymnosis, which is due for release on May 13.

Based on the interesting spin this band put on “Open Casket”, you could make an educated guess that they would be talented songwriters as well as skilled performers, but “Origin of the Infection” removes the guesswork. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ROCKET PROPELLED CHAINSAWS — “KILL THE DEMO”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  11 Responses »
Apr 152014
 

Metal is such a diverse genre of music that you would need an enormous number of axes to diagram the spectra of its manifold characteristics (I’m using “axes” as the plural of “axis”, not that electrified thing you use to shred up a storm of notes or the implements you use to cleave the skulls of your enemies). On one of these axes I imagine two extremes at either end:

At one end there’s deeply somber, glacially paced atmospheric music, with few if any riffs and a pall of gloom and grief hanging heavy like a fog. On the other end — well, that’s where you’ll find Rocket Propelled Chainsaws: the place where you party ’til you vomit and mosh ’til everyone’s on their way to the emergency room with sirens screaming.

I found out about this band because it includes guitarist Sean Corkum, who’s also in a band I’ve written before named Eldritch Flamethrower. Obviously, either Sean hangs out with people who’ve got a gift for coming up with awesome band names or he’s got the gift. Either way, Eldritch Flamethrower and Rocket Propelled Chainsaws are mighty fine names. Continue reading »

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