(We challenged DGR to review the entire discography of the Danish metal band Raunchy. Amazingly, he is doing it. To see his reviews of of the first three albums, go here, here, and here.)

The chronological aspect of this project is really starting to get to me, mostly because the last album that we covered hit while I was in high school, and now we’re at 2008 and I’m two years into working graveyard shifts at my current job. Now, to be clear, I knew almost nothing about Wasteland Discotheque going in, other than that original vocalist Lars Vognstrup shows up during one of the songs and that they have a cover that has become something of an unofficial NCS theme song; mostly for the hilarity of it.

The Wikipedia article for the band states that Wasteland came out in 2008 and that it was, “generally well received among the press”. Which press? Who knows. Who is responsible for the Raunchy page over on that site? The fun part was traveling to the actual article about the album itself and seeing a one-sentence summary and a link to one review…which gave it five stars. The website is still around, although the review link on that page points to nowhere.

Now, as a pragmatist I know not to be worried about stuff like this, but I figured I’d ask my fellow NCS compatriots what they thought about this disc. Andy, acting as my Sifu for much of this trip. said the disc was “half awesome”. Everyone else wondered what the hell I was doing. That’s what I get for trying to provide some sort of backstory to the disc and not just doing this entirely off of a first listen. Continue reading »

(We all forgot that when DGR joined the NCS staff he was subjected to a mild form of hazing — we challenged him to review the entire discography of the Danish metal band Raunchy. He, however, did not forget, though he did take his sweet time on the follow-through. This is the third part of this raunchy hazing; the first review can be found here and the second review here.)

Raunchy continue to make big shifts in their careers by this point. We’re actually achieving something big here, because we’re starting to move into an era where the Internet really came into its own as a music-covering force, and I can actually try to dig deep into what happened without the wayback machine kicking out gibberish in the shape of a middle finger.

Death Pop Romance has a few things interesting in terms of Raunchy’s history:  This was their first release as part of a new contract with Lifeforce Records, their first disc that put them on the two-year album cycle, and their first disc with vocalist Kasper Thomsen. As usual, I tried to get some perspective from the various NCS hooligans in regards to this disc, in my own stupidity forgetting that this whole thing was supposed to be a joke on me. I got a singular “its pretty good” and my personal favorite response so far, which was just, “You’re seriously doing this?”. There were no dire “abandon all hope!” sort of messages, so even though the disc adheres to the Dimmu Borgir styling of “three words that sound good but make no sense together!” album naming, I’m curious as to what Death Pop Romance has in store.

As has been the case so far, some of this will be stream of consciousness and other bits will be written after a few listens. I made one cursory spin prior to typing this specific paragraph so I already have some minor thoughts but have yet to dig deep or even try to differentiate each song – it almost feels like I have a fifty-minute blank space, and no alcohol was involved to accomplish that. Continue reading »

(We all forgot that when DGR joined the NCS staff he was subjected to a mild form of hazing. He, however, did not forget, though he did take his sweet time on the follow-through. This is the second part of a raunchy hazing; the first one can be found here.)

So, fun story: Apparently nobody in our staff remembers giving me this assignment, and all of them seemed pleasantly surprised that I would accept the challenge of such an undertaking. I knew, in one sense, that it would be easier on me than expected because Andy’s and my own musical taste probably share the most in common amongst the NCS dudes, and he seems pretty defensive about his Raunchy. I actually used him a bit as a guide for what to expect on Confusion Bay and he seems pretty passionate about this disc, saying that there’s maybe one song on this one that isn’t awesome.

It is a very noticeable improvement from the group’s debut album, Velvet Noise. Debuts are always a little shaky though, and considering that the guys were founded in the early-to-mid 90’s I imagine putting anything out must’ve been an exciting change of pace after a few demos. One other author had this to contribute to our e-mail thread, though, which was amazing. We were mid-discussion over this release when all of a sudden this gem popped up:

“WHAT FUCKING BAND ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”

As you can see, we’re off to a fantastic start. Continue reading »