NO CLEAN SINGING

REFLECTIONS IN THE VOID: THE PAPER

Sep 172013

(A long-time NCS supporter who calls himself Utmu has written a paper for a college course about metal. We’re already somewhat involved, having published three previous pieces by Utmu that were sort of groundwork for the paper (here, here, and here). So we’ve decided to post the pay-off, especially because it’s likely to be controversial. Please do give us and Utmu your reactions in the comments.)

I’ve been excited about this for some time now, as my Facebook friends can attest (just ask them, I wouldn’t shut up about it for a week or two). I realize that this paper tends to go against what NCS is about in that it is somewhat bleak, but I think this needs to be said, and discussion is always important.

I’m not sure how much context I put in this paper, but if any of you have any questions about anything in this I’ll do my best at answering them. I also realize that this is a pretty divisive topic insofar that I’m on one side and virtually everyone else is on the other. But it’ll be interesting hearing your comments and concerns.

It should be noted that this is my informed opinion, and although I believe that there could be some objectivity to art, I’m skeptical of objectivity in relation to some of the topics discussed in my paper.

I will ask one thing of you all, I’d like to try an uncommon form of argumentation (if any of you feel like debating this). Try to use argumentation in the form of proofs. For more information on this form of argumentation, please listen to Daniel “Awesomebeard” Cohen at 2:32: Continue reading »

PYRE AND JESU

Sep 162013

Over the last 36 hours, your humble editor has been preoccupied with matters of both great importance and trivial insignificance, i.e., one being Seahawks football and the other being the demands of my paying job, and of course you know which is which, am I right? While these matters were distracting me from the glorious world of metal, it turns out that a flood of new things swept through the byways of the interhole. At this point, I don’t have time to collect everything of interest that I found, but I thought I’d at least throw two of them your way, selected in order to provide contrast. I’ll round up the rest for a post tomorrow morning.

PYRE

In June I reviewed (here) a new split by Pyre from St. Petersburg, Russia, and Entrapment from The Netherlands. That was only the second release by Pyre (it followed their 2012 EP, Ravenous Decease), but I was mighty impressed. And now I’m impressed all over again.

Today they released a new 2013 demo track called “We Came To Spill Thy Blood”. So far, I haven’t found that any of my own has been spilled, but the song certainly did accelerate its transit through my veins and arteries. The song reminds me of Wolverine Blues-era Entombed. It has that old school guitar tone, riffs galore, and rhythms that will get your head nodding and your feet moving. The vocals still remind me of LG Petrov. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: AARON EDGE (LUMBAR)

Interviews 4 Responses »

Sep 162013

People who regularly spend time at this site know that although the music we cover is usually heavy as hell and often very dark, most days the tone of the posts is pretty light-hearted. This isn’t one of those posts.

What you’re about to read is an interview with Aaron Edge, a very talented, very articulate, very experienced musician with a lot of credibility in the underground. I first learned about him through his work on the early albums of Himsa, and you’ll see the names of other bands mentioned in the interview. In addition to his musical endeavors, he’s also a graduate of The Art Institute of Philadelphia and has designed hundreds of CD/record covers, posters, and t-shirts for musical groups all over the world.

Later this fall, Southern Lord will be releasing the first album, and possibly the last, by a band named Lumbar that he formed along with Mike Scheidt (of YOB and VHÖL, among others) and Tad Doyle (of TAD and Brothers of the Sonic Cloth), both of whom contributed vocals to the instrumental music that Aaron recorded.

Aaron was also diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in March of this year. The diagnosis followed months of unexplained pain and increasing numbness in his hands and feet that nearly prevented him from completing recording of the songs that would eventually become the music of Lumbar. There is no known cure, and the treatments themselves can be severely debilitating. These experiences, and the shadows that now cloud Aaron’s future, have made Lumbar’s debut into a concept album unlike any other you’re likely to come across this year.

Last week Aaron agreed to “talk” with me through an exchange of messages on Facebook. He was very open in discussing what has happened to him, as well as the experience of writing and recording Lumbar’s album. I’ll warn you in advance that things get very heavy. As you’ll see, there are reasons to expect Lumbar’s album, First and Last Days, is going to be very fucking heavy, too. Continue reading »

TOURISM: AMON AMARTH, ENSLAVED, AND SKELETONWITCH!

Metal News 15 Responses »

Sep 162013

I wet myself a little bit when I was informed of this tour, announced not long ago. Okay, to be honest, my bladder completely loosened and I’m now swimming in the processed fluids of last night’s beer. It’s such a good feeling, because seriously, look at that line-up.

Amon Amarth, Enslaved, and Skeletonwitch will be touring fortunate parts of the U.S. during January and February of 2014. Tickets are on sale now at this location.

My bladder-loosening enthusiasm is tempered only by the fact that neither Seattle nor any other city in the Pacific Northwest are on the schedule. Looks like San Francisco is as close as this bladder-loosening extravaganza will come. Fuck, there may be an SEA-SFO plane ticket in my future, though the airline would have to upholster my seat in plastic, or maybe I’ll finally have to splurge on some personal care products.

In case you have trouble seeing the dates in the tour flyer, you can find them listed after the jump. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: ROBIN STAPS (THE OCEAN)

Interviews 4 Responses »

Sep 162013

Interview subject, with new friend Al Weiwei at The Ocean’s September concert in Beijing.

(Our man BadWolf had a long chat with The Ocean’s main man Robin Staps just prior to the release of Pelagial this year, and we have it for you here.)

Robin Staps comes across nothing like his music. Soft-spoken, and eloquent as he is lithe, Staps appears as some sort of scholarly outdoorsman. Which is true.

However, he’s also the composer/lyricist/lead guitarist and all-around mastermind behind cerebral genre interlocutors The Ocean, and in that capacity he is anything but soft. His early records, the instrumental Fluxion through the sprawling Precambrian, compose some of the strongest post-whatever music put to disc, mixing sludge, hardcore, and progressive metal with orchestral music and jazz. His subject matter—the food chain, the literature of Dostoevsky and the gradual cooling of the prehistoric earth’s crust—is arch as all get out. You could say he innovated the high-concept album. And what albums they are. The last two, conjoined twins, Heliocentric and Anthropocentric, form a literate, scientific, and absolutely burning indictment of Christianity.

“There is no alternative to the theory of evolution.” Staps insists through frontman-as-avatar Loïc Rosetti.

Those albums may present a larger existential threat to organized religion than the entirety of black metal put together. Witchcraft destroys minds, but The Ocean changes them.

Earlier this year, Staps released his followup to the -centric albums, Pelagial, and it’s another doozy—a one-hour trip from the surface of the ocean to its floor. It begins delicate and ends crushing, and along the way dabbles in new territory. Hell, parts of “Mesopelagic: Into the Uncanny” sound almost like a down-tuned Queen, but still work in the album’s greater context.

From his music’s time signature to its instrumentation, conceptualization, packaging, and presentation, Staps pushes every aspect of his art to the extreme. He Skyped me just prior to the release of Pelagial to talk about what drives him, the way Pelagial was made, and the source of his inspiration—the ocean. Yeah, the interview took a while to get up. Sorry, Robin. Continue reading »

SEROCS: “THE NEXT”

Album Reviews 5 Responses »

Sep 162013

(NCS contributor Austin Weber delivers this review of the new second album by a multinational collective who call themselves Serocs.)

With the advent of the internet, a number of quality metal bands have emerged where members individually contribute and collaborate with the help of the internet to form groups that would otherwise not be possible. Among this new breed of bands comes the frenetic grinding insanity of Serocs.

Technically speaking Serocs is based in Guadalajara, Mexico, which founder and guitarist Antonio Freyre calls home, and originally he played and wrote everything; their first two releases are solely him. Over time Serocs evolved into a full band with members scattered across different nations. Besides Antonio Freyre on guitar, the group currently also consists of Mike Poggione (Monstrosity/Capharnum/etc) on an often audible in the mix six-string bass, and Jason Hohenstein (Lecherous Nocturne) churning out sickening bellows and growls. Rounding out the lineup is Finnish drummer Timo Häkkinen (Kataplexia), who covers the songs in an endless stream of blast-beats and furied fills.

Serocs are quite fond of guest spots too and spice up The Next with six guest contributions. They don’t fit into one subset of death metal neatly, but to break it down, they basically mix old school death metal influence with technical death metal, supplemented by a brutal death metal side, all deconstructed through a deathgrind approach. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 81)

That's Metal -- But It's Not Music 7 Responses »

Sep 152013

Welcome to another edition of THAT’S METAL!, in which we assemble photos, videos, and/or news items about things we think are metal, even though they don’t involve metal music. Today, we bring you a smorgasbord of eight items.

ITEM ONE

The first item is metal on many levels. It came my way thanks to a tip from GemmaD (whose wonderful blog is here). It concerns an artist from Mexico City named Pedro Reyes. Among many displays of creative exuberance, Reyes has been creating collections of musical instruments made from the remnants of weapons that the Mexican army seized from drug cartels and destroyed. The most recent collection is entitled Disarm and was made in collaboration with a team of musicians and Cocolab, a media studio in Mexico City.

The concept of creating instruments from weapons is itself brilliant, but get this: These mechanical instruments made from pistols, rifles, and shotguns can actually be programmed and operated via computers, making them capable of performing concerts. You can see photos of Disarm over at Lisson Gallery in London where it debuted earlier this year; I’ve included a few of them here. Many of the Disarm instruments will also be on display at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh starting October 5, 2013. After the jump, I’m also including a video interview of Reyes that allows you to see some of the instruments in action. Continue reading »

SUNDAY SAVAGERY: DICHOTOMY, WARCALL, DEMONICAL, CVINGER, AND PSEUDOGOD

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 8 Responses »

Sep 152013

I took a rare break from metal for most of yesterday, but not a complete break. I did spend time last night checking out new music and found a handful of savage items that I thought were worth featuring in this post. So here we go:

DICHOTOMY

Dichotomy are a band from Dublin, Ireland, who self-released their debut album Paradigm last month. I haven’t heard it, but I did catch a video they premiered through Terrorizer on Friday for one of the album’s songs. The song’s name is “Of Strife Of Discord”, and according to the band: “The song’s title is a reference to Eris, Greek goddess of chaos, strife and discord. The song is about the destruction of the self and allowing chance to rule one’s course; about becoming the embodiment of chaos.”

The song is a dichotomy, too. On the one hand, it’s a jet-fueled blast of melodic death metal with a lot of flying fretwork and some pleasingly serpentine guitar solos. On the other hand, it delivers a boatload of galvanizing grooves that should get heads banging hard. I had fun listening to it. Continue reading »

A DGR ROUND-UP: THE AMENTA, DEATH I AM, AND EXHALE

Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Sep 142013

(DGR brings you a collection of goodies from The Amenta (Australia), Death I Am (Japan/US), and Exhale (Sweden).)

THE AMENTA – Soundtrack To A Hidden Earth

In my mind, The Amenta are one of the most interesting and challenging bands out there right now. They play an industrialized style of black metal and write songs that challenge even the most traditional metal listeners. They’re probably doing the most metal thing you can do by presenting music so unlikeable and abrasive in its sound that even though the music underneath is actually pretty approachable, it still causes people to shy away.

I thought their release earlier this year, Flesh Is Heir, was pretty good, so if you haven’t had the opportunity to check these guys out, this is not the article to do so with, go read that. However, I do find what the band posted earlier this week fascinating, and if you’re looking for stuff that definitely isn’t music and is mostly a collage of distorted sound that would go perfectly in a horror film then continue on – because the band is giving away a (formerly) rare five-song collection from their very early days of writing music known as Soundtrack To A Hidden Earth. The band explain on their Facebook page:

“Soundtrack to a Hidden Earth” was originally released on the initial pressing of “Occasus”, the debut album by The Amenta, released by Listenable Records in 2004. The tracks were hidden in the data encoded on the disc.

The recordings were experiments in sound destruction and contextualization of sounds. These experiments led directly to some of the methods used in the follow up album, “n0n”.

Few people have heard these tracks. Continue reading »

WINDHAND: “SOMA”

Album Reviews 4 Responses »

Sep 132013

(Guest writer Leperkahn returns to our pages with a review of the debut album by Windhand, which will be officially released by Relapse Records on September 17.)

Before I start, I should qualify this review by noting that it’s an Exception to the Rule, as it features the ethereal clean singing of one Dorthia Cottrell. That said, this 75-minute behemoth of a disc is heavy enough to drag down the pace of your entire day, so I think it should fit into the NCS aesthetic just fine.

Windhand hail from what has now become a mecca of ‘00s metal, Richmond, Virginia, home to such heavyweights as Lamb of God, Gwar, Municipal Waste, and Inter Arma, bearing with them one demo, one split, and one full-length before this one. Bathing in such fertile waters has done them well, as they have emerged as much a product of their hometown as of their influences. This tends to be evoked in the subtle southern country bleakness that pervades this record, and sets it apart from the rest of the doom crowd to which it may be compared.

The first comparison that comes to mind starting this disc is the heavy influence of Electric Wizard, and Windhand admittedly come frighteningly close to aping them completely, from the same fuzzy, monolithic guitar tone to the same distant, ethereal singing that sounds as if it’s coming from beyond a hazy, LSD-soaked void. Continue reading »

Older Entries Newer Entries