YOUR METAL INSPIRATION FOR THE DAY: DEATH METAL ANGOLA

 Metal News  8 Responses »
Nov 152013
 


Wilker Flores

A friend sent me a link to the story that I’m about to summarize. I thought it was inspirational. Maybe you will, too.

It’s about an orphanage in the war-ravaged town of Huambo in the Republic of Angola, a country in southern Africa. After a decimating 30-year civil war that ended in 2002, Angola was left with among the worst standards of living, life expectancy rates, and infant mortality rates in the world. The orphanage (named Okutiuka) is run in a bombed-out milk factory by a young woman, a native of Huambo, named Sonia Ferreira and her boyfriend Wilker Flores. According to the article I’m summarizing, “The Okutiuka orphanage isn’t funded by the government, and subsists on private donations and a mix of embassy-gifted funds.”

Apart from caring for more than 50 orphaned and abandoned children in Huambo, Ferreira and Flores are the ringleaders of an ongoing effort to encourage and promote heavy metal as a vehicle for young musicians throughout Angola to give voice to the pain and deprivation their country experienced over the last 3 decades. Against tremendous odds, they helped organize the first national rock and metal festival in 2011 and have continued it each year since. And their story is now the subject of a documentary film entitled Death Metal Angola, which has already garnered a lot of critical praise.

The story of how the film came to be made is itself a fascinating one. It was directed by a Detroit native named Jeremy Xido, and here’s the description of how the project began and came to fruition: Continue reading »

A BEHEMOTH UPDATE

 Metal News  3 Responses »
Nov 152013
 

We know that next year Poland’s Behemoth will be bringing us a new album named The Satanist. Now we know that on December 4 a Behemoth EP will be released. Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel will come in a limited 180-gram 12-inch vinyl edition, hand-numbered and signed by the band. The title track will be the first single from the album, and the EP will also include two non-album tracks — “If I Were Cain” and a cover of a song by a Polish post-punk/new-wave band named Siekiera. That should be interesting.

The 12″ EP can be pre-ordered now via Behemoth’s webstore as well as at www.indiemerch.com/metalbladerecords and www.nuclearblast.de. There will be no digital or CD version of the vinyl edition, but the single from the album will be released on iTunes.

We also now know that on December 4 the band will be releasing a music video for the “Blow Your Trumpets Gabriel” song. Two teasers for the video have been released so far, with the second one coming yesterday. You can see both after the jump.

And finally, the band have also announced that on December 4 they will be unveiling the album’s cover art, which is a painting by the Russian painter Dennis Forkas, whose work we have featured on other occasions at NCS. For this piece, Nergal’s own blood was mixed with the paint. Yum. Continue reading »

AM I EVIL? NO, I’M NOT…

 Mosh Pit  61 Responses »
Nov 152013
 

(Andy Synn wrote these thoughts. Your humble editor selected the accompanying images.)

Ok, so it’s time for another one of my stream-of-consciousness pieces of rambling thoughts and ill-defined points. I’ve had this one on my mind for a while now, and finally got round to putting [metaphorical] pen to paper today. I wrote this all in one go, and have tried not to over-think or self-censor too much. Hopefully that way you’ll get more of a grasp of the thought processes behind things.

Ready? Then I’ll begin…

“Evil” is definitely one of those words that crops up pretty frequently in regards to Metal. Whether it’s coming from the fearful/ignorant majority who (let’s be honest, sometimes understandably) view the varied collection of beards, pentagrams, and profanity with more than a certain amount of trepidation — or from the deluded “kvlt” types who somehow think that their pretensions to “evil” make up for their complete lack of personality – it’s a word that’s often synonymous with the aesthetic (both musical and visual) that our favourite bands cultivate.

Metal is, for me, one of the few genres where many [of the more intelligent] artists are actually able to confront some of the darker, grimmer realities of the world. Few other forms of “popular” (and I use the term loosely) music deal with genocide, murder, cannibalism, political strife and oppression, loss of faith, occult philosophy… in quite the same way. Continue reading »

KATAKLYSM: “WAITING FOR THE END TO COME”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Nov 142013
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Canada’s Kataklysm.)

So here we are finally, Waiting For the End To Come.  When I reviewed the entire Kataklysm discography, it was an interesting exercise, not only for myself but I hope for our readers as well, to rediscover what the band had produced over the course of their long career  Now here we are, with what the band claims is their most technical, most punishing album yet.  Does it deliver?  This is the question that nagged at me after having listened to Kataklysm’s admittedly up and down catalogue.

Quite simply, this may be the band’s best effort of their current, mostly melodic death, direction.  With less groove, more blast beats and blackened scathe, and of course their blistering death metal brawn at work, Kataklysm appear to have crafted an album solely to start pits, invoke murderous thoughts, provoke raised fists in defiance of life itself.  Some of the best songs the band have ever written are on this disc, not to mention that this is the first Kataklysm album I’ve actually had the compulsion to buy in physical form. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: MYGRAIN, HEAVEN SHALL BURN, SAILLE, AND ALGHAZANTH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Nov 142013
 


Welcome brethren and sistren to this morning’s round-up of new music and videos that caught my attention over the last 24 hours. Metal makes everything better.

MYGRAIN

A day without Finnish metal is like a day without sunshine. And since we will have no actual sunshine here in Seattle today, we must brighten it with this new offering by the Helsinki hellions in MyGrain. Their latest album, Planetary Breathing, was released by Spinefarm in September, and today they’ve showered us with sex, beer, and rock ‘n’ roll via a new video for the song “Waking Up the Damned”.

Okay, to be honest, I didn’t see any actual sex in the video, unless you count some nice tongue action on the beer-drenched keyboard. And everyone else was pretty well drenched in beer as far as I can tell. And there sure as hell is some fine rock ‘n’ roll. Nothing grymm or frostbitten in this here music, just a load of groovy, head-nodding, body-moving, mosh-inducing, virally catchy fun — all captured extremely well in the video you’ll see next. Continue reading »

CLOUDKICKER: “SUBSUME”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Nov 142013
 

(Here’s DGR’s review of the latest album by one-man phenom Cloudkicker.)

For those of you not in the know, Cloudkicker is a solo guitar project of one Ben Sharp. At this point the project has quite a few releases under its belt and all of them have been available for “name your own price” for some time now. Subsume, which hit this year, is the latest in a long line of excellent releases.

When Cloudkicker released Beacons back in 2010, it was a heavy contender for album of the year. In an explosion of solo basement/bedroom/wherever-they-could-hook-up-their-recording-gear guitarist experiments, Beacon seemed like something different and fresh – even if it bore the same signatures of the scene from which it was born. The whole outbreak of guitarists suddenly showing their skill and technicality seemed amazing, but over time they had all started to blur together, and eventually would feel as if they were coalescing into one big, blob of stuff that took years of practice but had started to matter only to those who also played that style.

Cloudkicker was able to weave into that style a sense for ambiance and mood, using a guitar to paint pictures to go along with long, descriptive song titles (which have now proven to become a signature). Beacons told a story without words, and with every release since then Cloudkicker has sought to accomplish something similar, even when completely shying away from all the technicality, time signatures, and endless scales, and instead sticking with melodic, acoustic pieces that fell way more into the post- and prog circles than they did the metal ones. However, we have proven as a community that we can recognize and appreciate good music regardless of style, and so seeing this project embraced, as one of the fans who got to do so with the zeitgeist around Beacons, has been great.  Continue reading »

HELP A BROTHER OUT? (We Need Yore Songs)

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  67 Responses »
Nov 142013
 

It’s getting to be that time of year, the time when we dive head first into the polluted sea of year-end listmania. Our listmania extravaganza comes in four parts. First, we re-print assorted lists of the year’s best albums, leeched from other web sites and magazines. Second, we collect our readers’ lists of the songs they enjoyed the most from the year that’s rapidly drawing to a close. Third, we post the year-end lists of our own staff and assorted guest writers. And fourth, we roll out our list of the year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.

And that last list is the subject of this post (we’ll be inviting you to give us your lists of the year’s best albums as we get closer to the actual end of the year — so start thinking about that).

In case you’ve forgotten, or you’ve become an NCS reader since this time last year, here’s what this is about:

To repeat, this isn’t a list of the best metal albums of the year. It’s not even our list of the best individual extreme metal songs of the year — though some of the songs might actually be among the best of the year. Instead, ours is a list of the most infectious extreme metal songs we’ve heard this year. We’re talking about songs that might produce involuntary physical movement, songs that have got catchy rhythms, memorable melodies, sweet grooves, or anything else that sticks the song in your head and makes you want to keep listening to it. Continue reading »

“GOVERNMENT PLATES”: NEW DEATH GRIPS ALBUM DROPS — WITH A FLOOD OF NEW VIDEOS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Nov 132013
 

Death Grips still takes the prize for not metal, but metal. And without warning they’ve just dropped a new album, for free download of course, entitled Government Plates.

But that’s not all. All at once they’ve also uploaded a flood of new videos, one for  each of the 11 new songs. That’s right — a new album and 11 new videos within the space of an hour. No fucking around.

It’s all so much, so fast, that I haven’t had time to process it yet. I’m just getting the word out there. A review may, or may not, come later.

After the jump you’ll find a full stream of the album and all the videos. Click THIS or THIS to download Government Plates (these are links provided by the band, though I can’t promise they will work at the moment). Continue reading »

BISMUTH / UNDERSMILE SPLIT

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Nov 132013
 

From out of the blackest pits of Groningen in The Netherlands, Tartarus Records will be co-releasing, along with Graanrepubliek Records and At War With False Noise, a split by two UK bands who deserve more exposure: Bismuth (from Nottingham) and Undersmile (from Witney). Each band contributes a single song to the split, but they are gigantic, collectively demanding more than 40 minutes of your time. It’s life and death in the low and slow lanes.

BISMUTH

Bismuth consists of vocalist/bassist Tanya Byrne and drummer Joe Rawlings. Bismuth released a debut EP last year by the name of The Eternal Marshes, and their contribution to this split marks their second release. It’s a 17-minute work entitled “Collapse”, and there could hardly be a better title for it — except this is not so much the sound of existence falling apart as it is the sound of existence being slowly dismantled in a titanic demolition project. Continue reading »

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: OCELOT OMELET, ARTEMIS AND TARDIVE DYSKINESIA, BLACK TRIP

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 132013
 

You really can’t accuse this site of being too narrow-minded, despite that thing about no clean singing, which we obviously don’t mean literally these days. We cast a wide net for our metal, catching all manner of shiny fish from a multitude of genres. But today I thought I’d feature new songs and videos I’ve come across in recent days that are outside even our expansive boundaries, or at least on the fringes. Before I mix my metaphors any further, let’s get to it:

OCELOT OMELET

Ocelot Omelet are a Seattle band whose music is difficult to describe. At one point they termed their sound “pseudo-retro tele-gothic psycho-hippie filth-punk”. Based on their first album, 2011’s Elliptical Optusion, that’s really not a bad description, as difficult as it may be to grapple with as an abstract concept. But based on their most recent recording, I think they’ll have to work the word “metal” into it some way.

Earlier this year, Ocelot Omelet recorded a new three-song EP by the name of Present In the Dark, with the legendary Jack Endino handling the engineering work. Two versions were mastered, one for vinyl and one for digital, and the band have now successfully completed a kickstarter campaign to finance pressing of the EP on 180 gram vinyl. I heard some of this new material performed live last summer, and I left with a severe case of headbanger’s neck. Continue reading »

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