A DGR ROUND-UP: MECHINA, THE AMENTA, TYRANT OF DEATH, CONDUCTING FROM THE GRAVE, STEVEN WILSON

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jun 162013
 

(DGR provides this round-up of artwork, new music, and new videos.)

Apparently nobody else got the memo that last week was E3 week and, goddamnit, that I was going to be away from the computer, because holy crap did the news updates come fast and furious throughout the week of June 10th. A lot of these bands are going to look very familiar to readers of the site because a lot of them are in fact the same groups featured in my last round-up. However, here at NCS we try to stick with really substantial stuff since a tracklisting usually means dick to the reader unless it has something attached to it.

This week, these bands delivered in spades – some with cover art, most with new songs or videos, one with a whole new release. Regardless, it was a smattering all across the board if you love music and love shit just being heavy as hell. I’ll attach my thoughts along the way, of course…otherwise this article is going to look all sorts of wacky.

MECHINA

That picture you see above is artwork for Mechina’s upcoming Xenon release, which the group stated in this here post would be hitting on 1/1/14. Continue reading »

TEASED: BLODSGARD AND SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jun 162013
 

In recent days two bands I’m very high on have released teasers of music from albums I’ve been waiting on for a long time (with a level of eagerness that hasn’t diminished as the months have rolled by).

BLODSGARD

Norway’s Blodsgard haven’t yet released a full-length album, only three demos — but the debut album is on the way. Its title is Monument and it will soon be made available both digitally and on CD via a label called The Oath (an exact release date hasn’t been announced). Yesterday, the band unveiled the killer cover art for the album (above), created by one of my favorite metal artists, Mark Cooper (Mindrape Art), as well as excerpts of all the songs.

When I first found out about Blodsgard in September 2011, the most recent demo — a four-song offering called Solve et Coagula— hadn’t even been released for public distribution, and the band had no plans to do so. I got a chance to hear it and then obtained permission to provide a link to a special 3-song download for our readers, which included two tracks from Solve et Coagula plus another even more recent song, as a companion to my review. All three songs, which are still available for free, will appear in remastered form on the forthcoming album. Continue reading »

FREE SHIT: A SUMMER SAMPLER FROM PROSTHETIC

 Free Shit, Metal News  4 Responses »
Jun 152013
 

Here’s a nice piece of news that I missed when it happened a few days ago: Prosthetic Records has created a free summer sampler that includes 13 songs from 13 new and forthcoming albums by members of the label’s roster. I won’t take the time to list them in the body of this post since you can see them quite clearly in the graphic above. I’m familiar with 12 of the 13 bands (Zodiac being the outlier) and they are all very good (and the music’s very diverse)

I mentioned that the sampler includes tracks from forthcoming albums as well as new ones released earlier this year. To be specific, it includes songs from yet-to-be-released albums that we’re eagerly anticipating from Sweden’s Darkane (due on July 2), Denmark’s Mercenary (out July 30), and Boston’s Ramming Speed (to be released June 25).

To get the sampler, you’ll need to go to Prosthetic’s Facebook page via THIS LINK and download a .zip file of the music. When I tried it, it didn’t require surrendering of an e-mail or anything else — just a straight, immediate download of the file. In other words, painless. And that’s a hell of a line-up of songs.

SEITA: “ASYMMETRIC WARFARE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jun 152013
 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews the 2012 debut album by a Brazilian four-piece based in The Netherlands who call themselves Seita.)

Let’s talk about Sepultura for a minute…

A lot of people will talk about the Big Four, the underrated Testament, or the technical wizardry of Watchtower and Annihilator, but for me the height of thrash metal was the early Sepultura catalogue before Chaos A.D. Thrash took a pretty huge turn in the late 80’s and early 90’s, where if it wasn’t going the way of groove metal it was pushing the speed limit: How fast can you go, how heavy can you be while doing it, and how absolutely visceral an effect can you produce? For me in many ways, Sepultura defined what I ultimately loved about thrash metal. The frantic sense of panic, the speed, the technicality that could be gotten away with at those high speeds — Sepultura not only had all that in the bag, they also had an astute sense of songwriting.

Their know-how of when, in the midst of their slower numbers, to ambush listeners with an orgasmic adrenaline rush of fury out of nowhere was unrivaled at the time (I present “Desperate Cry” as evidence of this), and quite frankly in my book still is. This is the kind of thrash I like. It’s focused on absolutely blistering speed, a healthy dose of technicality that is yet pointed and focused, with an emphasis on savagery. My other thrash tastes reflect this in the music of bands such as Sodom, Kreator, early early Slayer (pre-Reign in Blood and post-Show No Mercy), Devastation, Exhorder, you get the idea. Continue reading »

PROMETHEE: “LIFE/LESS”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jun 152013
 

Hell-raising Friday nights bring apocalyptic Saturday mornings, and so it is that on this Saturday morning my ass is dragging through the wreckage I made of my life. I’ll probably feel normal by about sundown, if I’m lucky. I do have some things our other writers sent me overnight, but the words are all blurry at the moment. While I wait for my eyes to focus, I’m going to give you a video to watch and a song to hear, to pass the time in a pleasant way.

The video is brand new and comes from a Swiss band named Promethee. The song is named “Life/Less” and appears on their debut album, Nothing happens, Nobody comes, Nobody goes. The music is a mantic, frantic burst of melodic, metallic hardcore. It includes a lot of frenzied, spastic guitar exercises, but the notes ring out in chiming waves almost as often as they give your head a good shake to see what might come out of its orifices. And in the mid-section Promethee settle into a groove that will get your head slamming something fierce (or at least that’s what happened to me, which may explain why printed words look kinda blurry at the moment). Also, vein-bursting vocals and a bass guitar that gets a moment to shine near the end.

But regardless of how you might react to the music, the visual part of this video is worth watching all by itself. It was filmed in black and white, with the band in silhouette against a white screen most of the time, and it has a cool kaleidoscopic quality (along with other eye-catching visual effects).   Also, a really pretty woman. Continue reading »

MUMAKIL: “DEATH FROM BELOW” VIDEO

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jun 142013
 

This post is about a video from the band Mumakil. Their new album Flies Will Starve is coming out on June 25 in North America (and on slightly earlier dates in Europe). The video is for a song called “Death From Below”.

I can’t watch the video. I’m not in a place where I can watch it. I know nothing about it. I have only these words from my NCS comrade DGR, who sent me the link: “I’m attempting to write this sentence while seizing up. It’s Difficult.”

The video is after the jump. If you’d care to, please feel free to leave a comment and tell me what happens, and any reactions to the song, which I can’t hear at the moment.  Thank you for your attention. I’m going back to work now. Continue reading »

ÆVANGELIST: “NIGHTMARE FLESH OFFERING”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Jun 142013
 

This will be an unusual day for us. My fucking day job is going to keep me away from a computer all day and my comrades who write for the site are also otherwise occupied. So the odds are this post will be the only one we have for you today. Therefore, I’m going with something that will open up your abdomen and leave your guts in a steaming pile at your feet. Because that’s just the kind of friends we are.

Ævangelist’s 2012 debut album De Masticatione Mortuorum in Tumulis was stunning. On the scale of stunning things, it was right up there next to the seven-inch steel bolts fired into the foreheads of corn-fattened cattle who’ve reached optimal slaughter weight in a feedlot. No one knows about the emotional life of penned cattle, but as a normal un-penned human, I found that album both galvanizing and frightening.

I have friends who subject themselves to the risk of death on a weekly basis, but if you live a life less filled with the death wish, as I do, then you hunt for that special feeling of impending extinction in your music. Ævangelist grants your wish. And now they have something that’s both new and old, something that will efficiently turn you into rump roast, flank steak, standing rib, and brisket. Continue reading »

NEW THINGS FROM DARK TRANQUILLITY, EXHUMED, AND CORPSET

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jun 132013
 

Here are a trio of things I spied on the web this morning. The first two are in the nature of coincidental follow-ups, since our last post was a review of Dark Tranquillity’s new album, and since yesterday we frothed at the mouth over the newly announced North American tour involving Exhumed (headlined by Dying Fetus and also featuring Devoured and Abiotic). And then the last item is a semi-obligatory check-in with Finnish metal.

DARK TRANQUILLITY

The August issue of DECIBEL magazine (order-able here) includes yet another installment in the magazine’s Flexi-Disc series, and this one is a previously unreleased song by Dark Tranquillity entitled “Sorrow’s Architect”. The song was recorded during the sessions that produced the band’s new album Construct. DECIBEL kindly began streaming it today on SoundCloud.

To my ears, it sounds much in the vein of the more “experimental” songs on Construct, predominantly mid-paced and moody, with dreamlike, synth-assisted instrumental passages that add a dark ambience to the song (nut no clean singing). I do like it. Go HERE to listen. Continue reading »

DARK TRANQUILLITY: “CONSTRUCT”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jun 132013
 

(DGR reviews the new album by Sweden’s Dark Tranquillity, with all four officially released album tracks to stream at the end.)

When a band has become as storied as Dark Tranquillity, new releases can pose a bit of a challenge. It seems that at some point pretty much everyone in the metal community has crossed paths with these melodeath veterans, and their opinion of them has largely been marked by that experience.  Reviewing a new release by a band such as this one is also difficult; you don’t want to spend a whole review comparing a newer work to past albums because you tread a very thin line between either sounding informed or accidentally painting the new disc as derivative and making yourself look like someone who can’t let go of past glories.

Construct, which saw release at the end of May, is a tale of two albums. It is an album that feels a bit like a career retrospective, yet it also includes some of the most daring work the guys have gotten up to in a while. Construct is the furthest that Dark Tranquillity have spread their wings in their career.

On We Are The Void it really felt like they had pushed the style that they had used on Character and Fiction – a sound that is more straightforward melodeath and really represented a more refined Damage Done. The crazy part about Dark Tranqullity’s career arc, however, is that they also produced a couple of slower, mid-tempo, synth-filled affairs in Haven and Projector, and until now, those albums had represented the points at which the band had most changed things up.

If you were to put Dark Tranquillity’s discs on a spectrum, then, Construct would lay closer to the Haven/Projector side of things. However, if you’re spooked by that mention, then you need to stick around – because Construct is one of those times where almost every experiment works really well. Continue reading »

KYLESA: THE VIOLITIONIST SESSIONS

 Exceptions to the Rule, Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jun 132013
 

We’ve mentioned The Violitionist Sessions twice before, but you may have forgotten. In the words of the site’s proprietors: “The Violitionist Sessions are 3 questions and 3 songs with bands from Denton and passing through Denton, Texas. The sessions are all recorded live in a living room with no overdubs and no fancy tricks. The goal is to document a moment in time. This is what happened in Denton, Texas.”

Yesterday, The Violitionist Sessions put up videos of the three songs recently performed in that living room by Savannah’s Kylesa. They also made the live recordings available for free download on Bandcamp. And they also included an interview of the band. The three songs are “To Forget” (Spiral Shadow), “Said and Done” (Static Tensions), and “Hollow Severer” (Time Will Fuse Its Worth). All of that is collected here, though I’m also going to embed the videos after the jump.

As has been true of every recording I’ve heard from The Violitionist Sessions, the sound quality is outstanding, and Kylesa were really hitting it hard in these sessions — tight, tough, trippy, and plenty heavy. I’m not well-versed in Kylesa’s music — hadn’t heard any of these songs before — and it was an eye-opener for me. “To Forget”, in particular, made a big impression when I watched and listened to these videos. Continue reading »

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