VULTURE INDUSTRIES: “THE TOWER”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Jul 182013
 

Okay, it’s time to confuse people again (at this site we call things like this “Exceptions to the Rule”, but could just as easily classify them as “Seeds of Confusion”).

Vulture Industries are not strangers to these pages, though 18 months have passed since we last featured their music. They dwell in Bergen, Norway, population 270,000, and home to an astonishingly large number of talented metal bands given the city’s modest size. But it’s safe to say that Vulture Industries are unlike any other band from Bergen. In fact, I’m having some trouble thinking of anyone quite like them anywhere else in the world. Today they debuted (via the Pyro site on Norwegian national radio (NRK P3)) a lyric video for the title track to their forthcoming album The Tower, and it proves my point.

The music is a bombastic, theatrical, head-spinning thing. The excellent instrumental part of the music is sort of like a blend of melodic death metal, post-rock, and Broadway show-stopper, spun in an avant-garde centrifuge, and Bjørnar Erevik Nilsen’s mainly clean vocals will take you into the clouds. He sings, “It Soars!”, and his voice soars like you won’t believe. He also assumes a variety of other vocal personae in this allegorical song about the materialism of modern life in the Western world.

As eccentric and borderline-surreal as the song is, I found myself immediately riveted by it — and I do mean immediately, as in, from the first seconds. And the first thing I wanted to do after hearing it was hear it again. Continue reading »

REVOCATION: “REVOCATION”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 182013
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new self-titled album by Boston’s Revocation. For another opinion, check out BadWolf’s review here.)

I’m pretty sure I should be in the ER right now for all the bones I just broke moshing and headbanging to this album, but duty calls.  Revocation’s S/T is pretty much the shit.  Maybe more than the shit.  Certainly their best album to date, most brutal, most technical, and just downright fucking nasty, grimy, and vicious in every way possible. Last year’s Teratogenesis EP in no way will have prepped you for this bad boy.  It takes no prisoners, it shows no mercy, I’m still trying to figure out how they managed to make an album this malicious and rabid.

Revocation, along with bands like Vektor and Sylosis, have really proved that one of the few ways (maybe the best way) for thrash metal to achieve legitimacy in the current world is to completely assimilate itself into death metal frameworks with jazz influences and black metal touches. In fact, this may be the new standard. I mean yeah, I heap praise upon bands like Evile and Havok, but I have no problem also saying that, as good as they are, they still pale in comparison to bands like Revocation — because bands like Revocation are paving the way for the future of metal as we will know it.

I know some observers already consider Revocation to be a “death metal” band per se, but I entirely disagree.  The band’s character is definitely more in line with thrash; the music is an organized anarchy, a barrage of Molotov cocktails and riot shields crashing into each other, the sound of civilizations collapsing beneath the frantic violence of life itself.  Nowhere is this more evident than on their new self-titled opus.  This record is chaotic as fuck and holds nothing but warriors’ pride in that fact. Continue reading »

REVOCATION: “REVOCATION”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Jul 182013
 

(BadWolf reviews the new album by Revocation. For another opinion, check out TheMadIsraeli’s review here.)

You pick up a record, and find one phrase, even one word, on the cover—it sends a message. “This is a singular experience. This word is the definition of these sounds, and vice versa.” A self-titled album, then, should either be a band’s self-estimated masterpiece, or, at the very least, a record that best encompasses a band’s sound.

One should not self-title an album lightly—to do so is to make a major artistic statement frivolously. It’s like a superstition—a dicey proposition. I can think of four self-titled metal albums off the top of my head: Metallica’s 1991 blockbuster, Avenged Sevenfold’s best-forgotten stinker, and Killswitch Engage’s two(!) eponymous records. All four fail at defining those bands. Metallica will always first-and-foremost be the band that recorded Master of Puppets; Killswitch Engage will always be “That band with the black guy that did the heartbreak song.” (Sorry, Jesse Leach).

Enter Boston’s Revocation, releasing their self-titled record just in time for this year’s Summer Slaughter tour. While I don’t see Revocation reaching the mainstream-appeal of the aforementioned bands, it’s realistic at this point to see the band making records as a career for the foreseeable future. Unlike most other bands playing technical-melodic-death-thrash-insert-adjective metal, Revocation can craft a good tune, and have a certain general appeal as well.

That appeal is David Davidson, the band’s lead guitarist/vocalist/songwriter, whose distinctive harsh vocals and expressive guitar leads give Revocation something most modern metal bands absolutely lack—personality. Honestly, the band should just call the album “David Davidson” and be done with it. Continue reading »

JUCIFER: NEW VIDEO, NEW SONG, NEW ALBUM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jul 172013
 

I’ve heard a lot of thoroughly pulverizing metal performed live, but I’ve yet to hear any band who are more gut-liquifying than Jucifer. In the one and only time I’ve managed to catch them live (despite the fact that they’ve been touring non-stop for almost two decades), my jaw hung open the entire set, even while mercilessly headbanging. I was too stunned to close it, not only because the decibels were threatening to un-do the structural integrity of my body but also because the husband-and-wife duo of Gazelle Amber Valentine and Edgar Livengood were so riveting to watch.

On July 17, Jucifer will be officially releasing their new album, with the Cyrillic title of за волгой для нас земли нет. It means “There is no land beyond the Volga”, though people are already just calling it “The Russian Album”. Inspired by the time Jucifer have spent in Russia as well as their longstanding interest in Russian history, it’s described as “a concept album dedicated to the people, events and geography of Volgograd – more famously known as Stalingrad”.

As noted, the new album will be released on July 17 in a limited edition 6-panel digipak, and digitally via Nomadic Fortress (Jucifer’s own imprint) and Mutants of the Monster – the label run by C.T. Farris of Rwake, and David Hall of Handshake Inc.  A vinyl version of the record, and North American retail CDs, will become available in October.

And now to the three main draws of this post. First, NPR has created a killing video of Jucifer laying waste to a D.C. venue in January with a medley consisting of “Throned In Blood” (from the album of the same name) bookended by two songs from the new album — “Pavlov’s House” and “Shame”. It’s really superb, and provides as good a sense as you’ll get of what it’s like to be confronted by Thee White Wall without experiencing it in the flesh. Continue reading »

WATAIN: “THE CHILD MUST DIE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Jul 172013
 

Swedish black-metal horde Watain have a new album named The Wild Hunt coming on August 19 in Europe and August 20 in the US via Century Media Records. A two-track single (All That May Bleed) was released on June 21, and that was followed by the band’s official lyric video for the single’s title track (featured at NCS here). And now we’ve got another new song from the album, “The Child Must Die”.

The vocals are still soul-scraping, but much of the song may have more kinship to melodic death metal than the kind of scathing black metal you might be expecting. Yet although the song might be considered more “accessible” than Watain’s more typical output, it’s also multi-faceted, which should come as no surprise to fans of this band. It’s juiced with electricity and moments of thundering power, and it features a thrilling guitar solo. I’m quite liking it, though I’ll be curious to see what kind of reactions we’ll get in the comments.

Listen to the song next. You’ll find the lyrics below the video. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: THEATRE NOCTURNE – “NEPENTHE AND LAVENDER”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Jul 172013
 

When we got the chance to premiere the new music video from Buffalo, New York’s Theatre Nocturne, we jumped on it. Not only is “Nepenthe and Lavender” a killer song, the video itself is also riveting to watch.

As for the music, it’s flat-out explosive — a jet-fueled rampage of blackened death metal that’s a sure-fire headbang trigger. It lets all of the band’s talented performers strut their stuff, and they’ve definitely got the right stuff: razor-edged riffing and fiery soloing, gut-rumbling bass, munitions-grade drumwork, and feral howls. And you gotta love the spine-jarring bass lead that takes center stage in the song’s mid-section.

But there’s more to the music than a pleasing amount of technical flash and a healthy dose of ravenous brutality. “Nepenthe and Lavender” is also a dynamic, well-written song with a catchy melody, the sort of thing that pulls you back for repeat listens. And the production quality is excellent.

As for the video — filmed and produced by Doug White of Watchmen Recording Studios — it layers a montage of images of the dead over well-filmed, well-edited video of the band thrashing in a fire-lit space. The photos are from another era, solemn portraits of loss, the living and the dead side-by-side. Since “nepenthe” is a medicine for sorrow, a drug of forgetfulness in the ancient Greek, the imagery is fitting. Continue reading »

TOURISM: LAMB OF GOD, KILLSWITCH ENGAGE, TESTAMENT, AND HUNTRESS

 Metal News  3 Responses »
Jul 172013
 

Rumors of this tour have been circulating, but now it’s official: Lamb of God, Killswitch Engage, Testament, and Huntress will be joining forces in a North American tour that begins in October and will hit 28 cities before it ends right after Thanksgiving. Tickets go on sale this Friday.

Check out all the tour dates after the jump. Continue reading »

I TECH, THEREFORE I AM (PART 1): WHAT’S IN A NAME?

 Mosh Pit  22 Responses »
Jul 172013
 

(This is the first part of a two-part post by Andy Synn. Part 2 will be delivered to your doorstep tomorrow.)

Technique. Technicality. Technical skill and flair. However you describe it, it’s one of metal’s most defining traits when compared with the majority of other genres. After all, it takes a level of commitment (and, often, underlying talent) to achieve even a general level of proficiency, let alone a mastery, of metal’s traditional instruments.

As both skills and equipment have developed over the years, we’ve seen an increasing focus being placed on the technicality and complexity of metal across almost all its sub-genres (and, of course, a resultant reactionary backlash as well). The drums have gotten faster, the rhythms have gotten more poly-rhythmic, the guitars have gotten more note-crazy, and the time-signatures have gotten more algebraic – sometimes all within the same song!

Understandably, there have been those who’ve said that this focus on relentless technique and flashy playing often comes at the expense of good songwriting, and in many cases you’d be hard-pressed to contradict this assertion. But still, painting things as if they’re simply black and white is a mistake neither side in the pro-/con- technical debate should be making. Continue reading »

BISPORA: “THE PINEAL CHRONICLES PHASE I: FURTHERANCE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Jul 162013
 

(DGR reviews the new release by Sacramento-based Bispora.)

Back in 2011, local Sacramento group Bispora released an EP called The Cycle. For a group that pretty much came out of nowhere, The Cycle was a fantastic twenty minutes of music. It combined a love of prog metal, some djent elements, and a serious bit of Between The Buried and Me influence into something that you couldn’t really find elsewhere. It was a very guitar-centric disc too, with a pretty amazing melody that was intertwined throughout the first and last songs.

With a first release like that, Bispora became a band to watch. While they occasionally played with the same genre tropes as a lot of other bands, they managed to morph them into something all their own, so that they didn’t sound like just generic musician exercises. That’s why they gained the following that they did and why so many folks have been watching and waiting to see how they would follow it with the now-titled The Pineal Chronicles Phase One: Furtherance. (For the sake of my own fingers I’ll probably alternate between Phase One and Furtherance.)

Phase One was released the evening of July 4th and was free for an hour, before the band decided to start selling it for the pittance of $5. So is the first half of a promised two-part release worth the time of day? Have the band managed to pull away from the tractor beam that is the ‘difficult second release’? Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: KRALLICE, STOMACH EARTH, AND OCCULTIST

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jul 162013
 

Did you miss our usual daily round-up yesterday? Well, you’re not alone. I missed it, too. In other words, I failed to write one. Instead, I decided I ought to do some of the work I actually get paid to do, even though I didn’t have a gun to my head. What a dumb idea. That meant I had to spend a few hours late yesterday and last night catching up on what I missed in the world of metal instead of continuing my experimentation on the development of pocket-sized nuclear fusion engines and the negotiation of lasting peace in the Middle East. But, you know, a person’s got to have his priorities straight. Here’s what I found:

KRALLICE

I like Krallice. I also like synchronicity. Less than a week ago I reported that Krallice spent a week in the studio this month recording three songs for a forthcoming split release with a project of Blut Aus Nord’s Vindsval named Vjeshitza. And then last night I found that the unparalleled (((unartig))) had filmed a Krallice set at Public Assembly in Brooklyn on July 14 that included two untitled new songs. Could these be two of the songs on the forthcoming split? Oh, I bet they are.

The videos are kind of dark, but the sound quality is good, as it usually is with an (((unartig))) production. But you should boost the volume so you don’t miss Mick Barr’s guitar leads, or for that matter what Nick McMaster, Colin Marston, and Lev Weinstein are also doing. Continue reading »

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