AN NCS PREMIERE: WATCH THE SUN THROUGH A TELESCOPE (“YOU CAN’T KILL ME”)

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Oct 012013
 

“Moody noise-rock cranked through a piss machine/ Beauty in soundscapes torn up by a synth ogre/ Toes dipped in a bowl of cold dog piss/ Clapping forever and no sound smiles/ Hooked on good music for miles and miles.” Three weeks ago I read that come-on for a forthcoming album by a one-man Canadian band named The Sun Through A Telescope. Didn’t know anything about them/him, but after seeing those words I had to find out. And that album, I Die Smiling, lit me up like a Roman candle. I hadn’t heard anything like it all year, or maybe ever.

I pleaded for a chance to premiere something — anything — from the album. This isn’t my usual behavior. We love to premiere music, but almost never ask for the opportunities (too afraid of rejection). Turns out those glory hogs at Invisible Oranges premiered the whole album. But I got my wish anyway, as you’re about to see.

What I got was the chance to premiere an official video for “You Can’t Kill Me”, the album’s opening track. Not just any old video, this one was made by David Hall of Maryland Deathfest the Movie fame, whose Handshake Inc. label is how I found out about I Die Smiling (get it here). It’s such a fitting marriage of imagery and music. Hall takes what appears to be a clip from a wholesome TV show and turns it into something strange and unsettling. The Sun Through A Telescope takes aspects of black metal, drone, post-metal, and sludge and turns them into something hypnotic and arresting. Continue reading »

FELIX MARTIN: “THE SCENIC ALBUM”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Oct 012013
 

(Austin Weber returns to the site with a review of the new album by Felix Martin, released last month on the Prosthetic label.)

Among passionate music fans there is a real desire to hear the sonic unknown, to find until now unheard of amalgamations of styles and sounds. For me, Felix Martin encompasses that thrilling aspect of musical discovery, and in particular the mixing of a widening divergence of styles with metal. His forward-thinking approach to combining jazz and metal into legitimate jazz-metal impressed me from the first time I heard his 2010 debut, Bizarre Rejection, which I bought on Itunes but is no longer available there.

Since that time he was signed by Prosthetic Records and released a live album that contained four songs from his debut and a few new originals that showed even further depth in his crazy eight-finger tapping and the use of a unique 14-string guitar that allows him to play things no one else can. Now in 2013, a new Felix Martin release has dawned, this time entitled The Scenic Album.

The Scenic Album reveals continued evolution and growth in Felix Martin’s songwriting while also featuring three tracks from his previous live album. It starts out strong with the three-song “Tango” suite, which, as the title suggests, integrates Felix’s love for Latin rhythms and world music into his signature style of tapping. Where these songs diverge from those genres is in some oddly phrased metal riffs and Felix’s use of his instrument to create hybrid slap/pop-fueled rhythms and to intersperse soft yet powerful excursions into playful jazz. His sparingly used introduction of Meshuggah-inspired rhythms into his music also adds a new dimension not found on previous efforts. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ELIRAN KANTOR AND ICED EARTH, DEICIDE, VALKYRJA, HOWLING, AND BLOODSHOT DAWN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Sep 302013
 

I haven’t attempted to compile a round-up of noteworthy findings in several days, so I’ve had to ruthlessly cut what interested me or this post would have been longer than a reticulated python. Even truncated, it’s as long as a boa constrictor. And everything in here is awfully bloodthirsty, right up until the final item.

ELIRAN KANTOR AND ICED EARTH

Is that a fuckin’ brutal album cover up there or what? It’s the latest cover art by Eliran Kantor, who I watch like a hawk because he’s so damned good, and it graces the 11th album by Iced Earth, which is planned for release by Century Media in January 2014. With a grisly cover like that and song titles such as “Democide”, “Cthulhu”, and “Parasite”, in addition to the title track, this could be very interesting.

Speaking of brutal, how ’bout a new Deicide track? Continue reading »

LISTMANIA HAS BEGUN: THE MSN ENTERTAINMENT TOP 50 (SERIOUSLY?!?)

 LISTMANIA 2013  32 Responses »
Sep 302013
 

Near the end of every year since this fetid site sprang to fecund life in the fall of 2009, we’ve done two things (and we’ll do them again this year): We’ve compiled a list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs, and we’ve published lots of lists of the year’s best albums. Our best-album lists come from our regular staff, assorted guests, and many readers, but we also have a tradition of re-publishing lists announced by what I call “big platform” web sites, most of which don’t limit their content to metal (which is why they’re big).

One of the “big platform” sites whose lists we’ve regularly published is MSN Entertainment, which boasts over 23 million unique visitors to the site every month, narrowly edging out NCS in audience size. Since we started paying attention, the MSN lists have been compiled by seasoned metal writer Adrien Begrand. Last year MSN rolled out his Top 50 in segments during the week that ended December 21. This year, they appeared in one fell swoop — today.

This may have something to do with the fact that Begrand is leaving MSN Entertainment, and today marks the end of his “Headbang” column over there. On the other hand, he confidently states: “Although it’s two months early, we music writers are already very nearly through the year, and of the few releases I haven’t heard, they won’t alter my list dramatically at all, especially the top 30, which is ironclad.” Continue reading »

BLODSGARD — “MONUMENT”: A REVIEW AND A FULL-ALBUM STREAM

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Sep 302013
 

I’ve been waiting for Blodsgard’s debut album for a long time. When I saw the title and the fantastic cover (conceived by the band and executed by Mark Cooper), I smiled. I wanted something monumental, and it seemed this was Blodsgard’s intent, too.

All told, the album is the result of five years’ of work that included extensive re-writing, re-arranging, and re-mastering. Four of the songs originally appeared on the band’s superb 2011 EP Solve Et Coagula (reviewed here), though they have been re-mastered for the album. Under a different name (“Mitt blod flyter”), the closing track also appeared in 2011 as part of a special limited release that we helped distribute (informally labeled A Taste of Future Darkness), though it has been changed in subtle ways. As far as I know, the other three tracks haven’t previously been made publicly available.

Even if you’re familiar with Solve Et Coagula, Monument will surprise you in its variety and in the extent to which Blodsgard’s sound has continued to evolve. And if this will be your first exposure to Blodsgard, something very special is waiting for you. Continue reading »

BLODSGARD — “MONUMENT”: A REVIEW AND A FULL-ALBUM STREAM

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Sep 302013
 

I’ve been waiting for Blodsgard’s debut album for a long time. When I saw the title and the fantastic cover (conceived by the band and executed by Mark Cooper), I smiled. I wanted something monumental, and it seemed this was Blodsgard’s intent, too.

All told, the album is the result of five years’ of work that included extensive re-writing, re-arranging, and re-mastering. Four of the songs originally appeared on the band’s superb 2011 EP Solve Et Coagula (reviewed here), though they have been re-mastered for the album. Under a different name (“Mitt blod flyter”), the closing track also appeared in 2011 as part of a special limited release that we helped distribute (informally labeled A Taste of Future Darkness), though it has been changed in subtle ways. As far as I know, the other three tracks haven’t previously been made publicly available.

Even if you’re familiar with Solve Et Coagula, Monument will surprise you in its variety and in the extent to which Blodsgard’s sound has continued to evolve. And if this will be your first exposure to Blodsgard, something very special is waiting for you. Continue reading »

THRASH POWER HOUR: CRISIX, VIOLATOR, DEATH ANGEL, HAVOK, AND ANNIHILATOR

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Sep 302013
 

(TheMadIsraeli is in catch-up mode, reviewing five albums in this one post. You’ll find music from all the albums at the end.)

Welcome to power hour, the thing I do when I try to catch up on shit I should’ve reviewed long ago. It’s called power hour not because it’s an hour of music, but because it’ll take you a fucking hour to read the shit.

Sometimes we miss things here at NCS, and often enough I feel like an asshole for doing it, especially when I’m the guy who would normally cover the stuff we miss. So this is my attempt to reconcile. Five reviews in one, baby, deal with it.

As such though, I thought I’d make this themed, so it’s the thrash power hour. Let’s start with a relative newcomer… Continue reading »

ARTIFICIAL BRAIN SIGN WITH PROFOUND LORE; NEW ALBUM COMING; GLOBAL SANITY THREATENED

 Metal News  7 Responses »
Sep 292013
 

This is a piece of news that warms my cold black heart, a true Cinderella story, except there’s nothing pretty about New York’s Artificial Brain — a New York space-death-metal band that includes vocalist Will Smith (Buckshot Facelift, ex-Biolich), Revocation guitarist Dan Gargiulo, and some other mutants who apparently still wish to remain nameless.

I’ve been following this band for more than two years, writing about their first three-song EP, their first music video, and their latest two-song offering that appeared last spring — about which I frenetically penned these words:

“Imagine an alien stew consisting of cutting/blasting black metal, pummeling death metal, cosmic guitar digressions, rubbery bass-lines, roaring grisly bears, and shrieking ice giants. Also, gang vocals and a bit of Gorguts-like tech frenzy. And unstable tempos.”

Last spring I had heard that Artificial Brain was going to record a full-length album with Colin Marston that undoubtedly would include additional manifestations of sonic dementia. Today I learned not only that the album has in fact been recorded but also that it will be released by Profound Lore. Details follow in this message we received from the band: Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 82)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  12 Responses »
Sep 292013
 

Welcome to another edition of THAT’S METAL!, in which we collect images, videos, and occasional news items that aren’t music but are nonetheless metal. We have nine items in this installment.

ITEM ONE

Let’s start with a couple of astronomical items. The first one (which is sort of an update to a December 2012 item) is staring at you from the top of this post. Nicknamed “The Rose”, it’s a photo of the eye of a gigantic spinning hurricane at the north pole of Saturn, taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on Nov 27, 2012. The eye of this storm has been measured at a staggering 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) across. Two planets the size of Earth could fit within the hurricane as a whole.

When the Cassini spacecraft arrived in the Saturnian system in 2004, this pole of the planet was tilted away from the sun and in darkness. The last time Saturn’s north pole was photographed in sunlight was in 1981 via NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, but at that time the observation geometry didn’t permit a detailed view of the poles, so this more recent imagery is a first.

Sadly, the colors in this photo are “false”, though they’re quite beautiful. Spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light were used, with red indicating low clouds and green indicating high ones. More information is available in the following April 2013 video, as well as at this NASA web page. Continue reading »

FŌR: “BLAKAZ ASKǬ HERTÔ”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Sep 292013
 

It would be very difficult to describe the attraction of FŌR’s new EP Blakaz Askǭ Hertô to anyone who is not already convinced about the power of blackened death metal and susceptible to the apocalyptic atmospherics that the style is capable of creating. It would be flat-out impossible to do that for anyone who is not already far along the left-hand path of extreme metal in general. Despite these challenges, I shall forge ahead.

Nothing played with a guitar and bass is truly devoid of melody — every string does represent a note. But FŌR have tuned the instruments so low, have so ramped up the distortion levels, and have made such abundant use of repeated tremolo-picked chords and feedback that what most people would call “melody” has been banished to some inaccessible netherworld. The songs are usually dominated by horrific grinding noise, occasionally segmented by massive hammering riffs that brutishly bludgeon like the ultimate hammer of doom.

The dense shroud of guitar and bass radioactivity is monolithic, impenetrable, suffocating, like a slow-moving mass of corrosive static. It’s a nearly relentless assault on the senses that reaches its apex in the 10-minute closing track “Lineage of the Amorphous”, in which one chord after another is struck in slow progression and the droning, fuzzed-out feedback just hangs there with the roentgen levels in the red zone until the the pick hand attacks again. Continue reading »

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