OBSCURE BRUTALITY NO. 3: IRON MONKEY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Nov 292013
 

(Our supporter xBenx has compiled a series of guest posts, this being the third installment. Each one focuses on a different band that he fears may have been overlooked by the masses, and today the spotlight is on Iron Monkey.)

These barbaric English lunatics gave the world a severe beating in the late 90s. Had it not been for the unfortunate passing of Jonny Morrow (RIP) in 2002, they may have even returned to take on Eyehategod for the sludge crown. I know that’s fighting talk, but Iron Monkey were a genuinely fierce up-and-coming contender, underpinned by glistening layers of deliciously thick riffs and Morrow’s tortured vocals. They even made the songs memorable, albeit as sadistically as possible.

I think the artwork from their second album Our Problem encapsulates their putrid spirit majestically; obnoxious, provocative, deliberately vulgar, but so enticing that you cannot restrain yourself from gazing a little longer. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL” — BUT IT’S NOT METAL?: DARKJAZZ

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, That's Music -- But It's Not Metal  11 Responses »
Nov 292013
 

(We are delighted to present to you this guest post by Alain Mower, which takes us off the rails of our usual course and onto a very different line.)

Have you ever found yourself sitting in your dimly lit, Victorian Dining Room, listening to your Burzum/Sunn O)))/Dark Space 1st pressing vinyl in the background, sipping only the finest of that last cask of ’73 lambs blood sitting across from your man/woman/android and thought to yourself, “I wish this could be classier, but I don’t want to sacrifice any of my soul-damning resolve to do so.” Well you, classy reader, are in luck, for I present to you ‘Noirjazz – or Darkjazz for you laymen.

No I’m not talking about Shining (Norway)’s brilliant album from this year, I’m talking about atmospheric, soundscape-driven, foreboding and looming, downtempo (old man’s) jazz. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: REDUX (Part 2)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Nov 282013
 

(NCS contributor Austin Weber has delivered unto us a three-part introduction to new and forthcoming releases by 7 bands. In this second part, he focuses on Beaten To Death and Inanimate Existence. Part 1 can be found here.)

The end of the year is usually a slower time for new music releases, a time when much alcohol is consumed and countless amounts of money are wasted on bullshit soon forgotten. But fortunately I’ve got plenty of releases and new songs to catch up on and spread the word about.

BEATEN TO DEATH

I first heard about Beaten To Death in the way I have for many a band, by scanning the always handy Metal-Archives.com. I was re-visiting She Said Destroy’s page and noticed that their vocalist Anders was in this group. Intrigued, I bought their 2011 debut, Xes and Strokes. What I got was a no-frills grind record that was killer from start to finish, even if they weren’t doing anything anyone else wasn’t. They just recently dropped their second album, Dødsfest!, and like their last record, it sonically benefits from the raw intensity gained from being recorded live in their practice space. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2013: AN INVITATION FOR YOUR LISTS

 LISTMANIA 2013  156 Responses »
Nov 282013
 

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates the holiday, and condolences to everyone who feels they have nothing to be thankful for.

Thanksgiving used to be a pivot-point in the year in the U.S. — it marked the end of normal life and the beginning of the Christmas onslaught. Now, however, the onslaught begins before Thanksgiving, though I guess Black Friday will be as black as it ever was. Thanksgiving also sort of begins a countdown to the end of the year, and in the world of metal, we’ll start seeing more and more lists of the year’s best albums.

Back in 2009, when this site was just a few days old, I wrote a post about year-end lists and why people bother with them. The best reason still seems to be this: Reading someone else’s list of the albums they thought were best is a good way to discover music you missed and might like.

We don’t do an “official” NCS year-end “best albums” list. However, we publish the picks of each of both our regular staff writers as well as  guest writers (which we’ll start doing in December), and we also publish the year-end lists that major metal publications and “big platform” web sites are compiling; we started doing that yesterday with DECIBEL magazine’s list of 2013’s Top 40 Albums (and you probably forgot, but we also posted MSN Entertainment’s list of the Top 50 metal albums back in September (?!?)).

But the Thanksgiving Day tradition here at NCS is also to invite our readers to share their lists. If YOU have made your own list of the best metal albums or EPs you heard this year, we want to see it. (details about this invitation are after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

SHIT YOU MAY HAVE MISSED IN YOUR METAL TRAVELS

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Nov 282013
 

(In this post guest writer DiabolusInMuzaka provides reviews of three recommended albums, with full music streams for each one.)

With the internet providing a platform for even the most obscure Indonesian-black-death-drone-ambient-progressive-neo-folk project (recorded entirely in analog in a cave in mono of course), a lot of music understandably slips by under our metal radars. That, and we’re oversaturated; too many bands to check out, too little time. My aim in this post is to provide a good description of the music offered by the bands here, so that you, as the reader, can judge whether or not this band would be suited to your tastes. Full streams of each album are present in the article, so if anything piques your interest, click play and give it some of your time. You just might find a particularly refreshing drop in the vast, ever-expanding metal ocean. So, without further ado, here is some shit you may have missed in your metal travels.

Gorelust – Reign of Lunacy (PRC Music – reissue; New World Symphony – original pressing)

As the name would imply, Gorelust is death metal. Reign of Lunacy, released originally in 1995, was the Quebec band’s debut and only full-length album. The album is short (clocking in at just under 30 minutes) but absolutely refuses to relent for its entire running time. Being released in 1995, this album presents an interesting form of death metal: it sounds like the missing link between Cryptopsy’s 1996 masterpiece None So Vile and their much more tech-death oriented 1998 beast Whisper Supremacy (it’s worth noting again that this was released in 1995). The production sound is close to Whisper Supremacy as well, which makes sense, as Cryptopsy’s frequent partner-in-crime Pierre Remillard engineered this album. Continue reading »

OBSCURE BRUTALITY NO. 2: MORTAL DECAY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Nov 272013
 

(Our supporter xBenx has compiled a series of guest posts, this being the second installment. Each one focuses on a different band that he fears may have been overlooked by the masses, and today the spotlight is on Mortal Decay.)

This one feels appropriate given that New Jersey’s Mortal Decay are about to release a new album (which is pretty good). Whilst they have undoubtedly improved as musicians, especially from a technical perspective, I don’t think they’ll ever top the feel, atmosphere, and sheer brutality of their early material. Assembled in their 1999 compilation, A Gathering of Human Artifacts, those three early symphonies of sickness are utterly putrid in their composition and completely addictive.

Pivotal to their sound was undoubtedly John Paoline, someone so far ahead of his time vocally that his clairvoyance is almost creepy when listening to these older songs now. Why this man isn’t heralded as being one of the catalysts for spawning the gazillions of guttural lunatics currently spewing rancid diatribes is a mystery, but I do know this: He was definitely one of the most distinctive “vocalists” in the realm of brutal death metal. He was also one of the most insane in terms of range and tone. Continue reading »

BLACK CAP MINER: “THE FORMATIVE YEARS”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Nov 272013
 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews the debut album of Black Cap Miner, the solo project of Byzantine’s Chris Ojeda — and some notable friends.)

Respecting your elders IS important, even in metal.  A lot of venerable bands had a creative spark that a lot of modern bands seem to lack.  Whether this was due to them leading the first wave of something important or simply being in the right place at the right time, the sounds of legacy musicians warrant frequent revisits.  It’s for the better of the music that we do this, otherwise we lose sight of who we are.

No one knows this better than Byzantine’s Chris Ojeda.  Numerous conversations with the man about music, bands we love, and whether they made favorable or distasteful evolutions, have given me pretty good insight into how he thinks.  Ojeda’s a man of the old school for sure. While he definitely investigates what’s on the scene in the here and now (it seems he pays far more attention than most metal musicians his age), he still has a grasp on his musical roots that verges on zealotry.  As a consequence, it really makes sense that Ojeda decided to pay rich tribute to the music that made him who he is as a musician.  Black Cap Miner is Ojeda’s battle cry to revisit the days of old, and The Formative Years is his testimony as to why. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2013: THE DECIBLE TOP 40

 LISTMANIA 2013  44 Responses »
Nov 272013
 

There it is, the cover of Issue #111 of DECIBEL magazine, with a cover date of January 2014, because how in good conscience could you create a list of 2013’s best albums before 2013 is actually over?

Ha!  I kid. I take this shot every year — but I’m only half-kidding. I do wonder what would be wrong with having all Best of 2013 lists appearing in January 2014 instead of November 2013 when those poor bands whose albums were released in the last quarter of the year simply get overlooked in the year-end chase. But that’s not the way the world of metal journalism works. We start seeing year-end lists now, and we talk about them even if they’re a tad premature.

DECIBEL’s list of the year’s Top 40 albums appears after the jump. As you may have read already, the comeback album by Carcass got Album of the Year honors. And Tribulation and In Solitude are in the Top 10, along with Gorguts and Inquisition. But Melt Banana and SubRosa are in the Top 10, too. Continue reading »

OBSCURE BRUTALITY NO. 1

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Nov 262013
 

(Our supporter xBenx has compiled a series of guest posts, numbered 1 through 5, though with luck we may receive more. Each one focuses on a different band, beginning with Aftershock.)

I don’t know how or why it happened, but since the age of 16 I have been consumed by the urge to unearth genuinely head-crushing obscure brutal gems that have been overlooked by the masses. Fourteen years later, this impulse still runs through every fibre of my being. Of course, this premise is entirely subjective, but in my best estimation, you may have been unaware, or unwilling, to submerge yourself in a band’s brand of brutality because of their cursed obscurity. These posts will look to put an end to that.

We’ll start with one of my first loves: metallic hardcore, And I mean the fierce chug-fests that underpinned the mid- to late-90s and very early 2000s. Some of those bands have battered my eardrums for nigh on a decade, and will probably do so until I can hear no more. Principal among these is Aftershock, a fire-breathing behemoth from Boston, Massachusetts, who had one Adam Dutkiewicz in their ranks. Whereas Killswitch have become increasingly enamoured with melody and straightforward song structures, Aftershock were the antithesis, the blackened yin, weaving dense labyrinths of riffs and tortured vocals that forged metal’s potent heaviness with hardcore’s grit. Continue reading »

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