NO CLEAN SINGING

BABYMETAL GROWING UP: “MEGITSUNE”

Jun 042013

Long-time NCS readers know that we have a weakness (in a totally non-pedophile way) for BABYMETAL, the three-member female group who made a name for themselves by fusing Japanese idol music and metal. This obsession began with former frequent visitor and occasional contributor Phro (who is based in the Tokyo area). Even though Phro is occupied with other pursuits and doesn’t show up around here very often, he still stays in touch, and this morning he fired off an e-mail alerting me to the premiere of a new BABYMETAL song and video: “Megitsune”

In fact, we have Phro’s own introduction to the video (which will be followed by some more Phro words and some of my own):

“Alright you sad sacks, sit down, shut the fuck up, and press play, because Baby Metal have a new song and video. It’s bombastic in all the right ways, slightly cheesy in all the best ways, and just barely cute enough to still be recognizable as Japan’s finest pop metal band.

“I won’t bother explaining it to you, because, seriously, there’s a fucking YouTube video right here. If you can’t press play because you’re at work, I forgive you, but otherwise this should be fucking your eardrums like a giant, zombie tyrannosaurus rex cock hungry for your ear cherry.” Continue reading »

THE ART OF THE REVIEW, PART 1

Mosh Pit 25 Responses »

Jun 042013

(Andy Synn wrote the following essay. However, I picked the image above, just so you don’t go believing that Andy is proclaiming his own wisdom.)

So if you’ve been following the site for a while you’ll hopefully have gotten some sense of the personalities of The Big Five ™ involved in the day to day running of things. You’ll probably know a bit about our general preferences, our particular style of writing, etc.

And if you know me, you’ll know that I’m always coming up with ideas for new ongoing columns. Some of them stick around pretty well (The Synn Report being the obvious one here) and some of them fall by the wayside.

What I’m going to try and do with this one is simply produce short/semi-short pieces of my musings on what it means to review and write about metal, the good parts, the bad parts, etc… basically just a series of random observations written up as inspiration comes to me. No real order or agenda. It just seems like it might be interesting (to some people anyway) to get an insight into my/our process when writing for the blog.

So, without further ado, let me present to you part 1 of ‘The Art Of The Review’: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SAILLE, WATAIN, ORDO INFERUS, AND MAJALIS

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 1 Response »

Jun 042013

Unlike the usual “Scene and Heard” post, this one collects items of interest that I heard more than 24 hours ago. And the reason is that my blog time has been severely constricted since last Friday by a two-headed boa named Work and Party. The coils have been loosening a bit, so now I’m able to highlight the following new video, new teasers, and new song that I’ve been digging lately.

SAILLE

Andy Synn made this Belgian band’s second album Ritu (released earlier this year by Code666) the subject of one of his reviews in haiku: “Subtly symphonic / A glorious, sweeping sound / All hail the darkness”. For a three-line synopsis, that was pretty spot-on, but the record deserves more extensive praise. It really is a very fine album, multi-faceted and tremendously engrossing.

Lyrically, the songs deal with death rites in ancient cultures, as well as aspects of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. One of the songs, “Blood Libel”, takes as its subject the murder of a boy (William of Norwich) in Norwich, England, in 1144. The Jews of Norwich were falsely accused of killing him in a ritual murder (a “blood libel”). According to The Font of All Human Knowledge, similar accusations were made in other English towns over the next 40 years, leading to massacres of Jewish people in many communities, including the butchery of Norwich Jews in their homes in 1190. Continue reading »

CHTHONIC: “BU-TIK”

Album Reviews 9 Responses »

Jun 032013

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Taiwan’s Chthonic.)

Hail true believers!

One of the reasons I elected to review the new Chthonic album, apart from being a huge fan of the band already, was because they’re at such an interesting point in their career right now, one that’s ripe for (over)analysis.

Bear with me, as this might get a little intellectual.

Professor Edward Said was considered one of the founding members of the post-Colonial movement of political/social discourse. He was also responsible for the more specific theoretical approach/consideration of ‘Orientalism’. Now, in a nutshell this posited that Western understanding and concepts of Eastern culture would always be imprecise, due to the necessity of translation – not just verbal, but mental translation – of underlying concepts. It also stated that there’s an inherent reflexivity involved, since we (as Westerners) view and understand the East through reflections on, and comparisons with, ourselves and our own experiences.

Now, more relevantly, it also exposes (in theory at least) that attempts by Eastern culture to bridge this gap are just as hamstrung – they often end up using imagery/translations already established by the West, communicating with us using words/concepts we’ve created already, with all their inherent deficiencies and reliance on familiar, but imprecise, Western analogues.

So what exactly does all this pontificating have to do with Chthonic? Well, due to their current position in the metal world, they’re caught at very much of a crossroads between East and West, culturally, politically, and musically. Continue reading »

NOEIN, Y U NO LOVE EIN?!

Album Reviews 3 Responses »

Jun 032013

(Guest writer Old Man Windbreaker returns to NCS. After some initial confusion, he delivers an album review.)

Greetings once again from Old Man Windbreaker’s oldmancave of broken winds. Yes.

Today, you shall learn about Noein, and One’s contempt for the people behind it.

One is, of course, speaking about the Japanese anime called “Noein”. It presents a sci-fi multi-verse with high-minded quantum-physics-inspired concepts. It also features a fictional dog, like any good anime should. But, One hates them for it. And this is why… Continue reading »

TRAITOR: “SHADOWHEART”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 1 Response »

Jun 022013

(In this post guest writer Kim Rosario reviews the latest EP by Traitor.)

Black metal, hardcore, and grindcore… Who on earth would combine those 3 genres and how would it even work? Black metal, for instance, is very dark and brooding at times and at others is played at blistering breakneck speeds. Hardcore is upfront and honest brutality with thundering rhythms and powerful grooves. I could see those two combining, but when you throw grindcore into the mix, that’s when it starts to get tricky.

Here you have two regimented genres that have a focused, articulated sound and you want to add grindcore to the mix? A high-energy, no-rules, just go genre? Yes, this does sound brave and challenging, but one band decided to do this. Metro-Detroit’s own Traitor just released their EP Shadowheart, which combines black metal, hardcore, and grindcore.

The album starts with the song called “Heart Of Gnarled Roots”. An abrasive shriek and the fury of pummeling hardcore riffs bombard the listener, with punk-fueled blast beats. The elements of each genre constantly fight each other in one giant sonic assault. While Traitor’s main focus is hardcore, this band’s emphasis on black metal makes appearances at all the right times. Continue reading »

IS WHITE THE NEW BLACK?

Mosh Pit 36 Responses »

Jun 022013

Okay, let’s talk fashion.

WAIT! DON’T LEAVE! Fercrissakes, when I say “fashion” I just mean “band shirts”. Sheesh!

In the straight world there was a time (eons ago) when fashion designers decided it would be an edgy new thing to produce fashions in monochrome black, giving rise to “black is the new white” proclamations. That’s ancient history, but not as ancient as black clothing in metal.

Wearing black has been the fashion choice of metalheads since, well, forever. Black band shirts, black jeans or shorts, black boots and shoes, more recently black hoodies — you wear black or you get the fuck out. When people try to make the point that supposedly anarchic metal culture is really more conformist and rule-based than you might think, the black uniform is usually marked as Exhibit A.

But lately I’ve been noticing more white band shirts for sale. I’m not talking about hardcore and straight-edge bands — white shirts in those scenes go way back. I’m talking about that new Autopsy shirt up there (being sold here). Or this new one at The Vault of Dried Bones for Mitochondrion, featuring Jeremy Hannigan’s killer art: Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 75)

That's Metal -- But It's Not Music 3 Responses »

Jun 022013

Welcome to another edition of THAT’S METAL!, in which we collect for your amusement and edification images, videos, and the occasional news item that I think are metal, even though it’s not music (or at least not metal music). Today I’ve got eight items for you.

ITEM ONE

The first item is the image at the top of this post. Take a good look at it. It was created by a Japanese-born artist currently living in New York City named Kumi Yamashita using only three materials, but I bet you can’t guess what they are.

The materials consist of a wooden panel painted a solid white, thousands of small galvanized nails, and a single, unbroken, common sewing thread. Kumi Yamashita created this image and others like it by winding the thread through the array of nails, with the darker and shaded areas created solely by the density of the string and the nails. Amazing stuff. If you doubt me, take a look at the close-up that comes next. Continue reading »

A WEEK TO REMEMBER

Concert Reviews 4 Responses »

Jun 012013

(Bolt Thrower — photo credit Fred Pessaro and Invisible Oranges)

Live metal was all up in Seattle this past week. I can’t remember another week like it. I went to shows on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I could have seen Kylesa and Blood Ceremony on Tuesday night and Hate Eternal and Fear Factory, or Bell Witch and Usnea, on Thursday night if I’d wanted to. But in theory I had a day job I was supposed to tend to, so I tried to moderate things just a bit. The shows I did see were fantastic, ranging from killer sets by a group of local bands to the likes of Bolt Thrower, Benediction, and Gorod.

Old fart that I am, I’m exhausted from all those late nights and early mornings, suffering from a weeklong hangover/bangover, and black and blue from being caught in a couple of mosh pits, but this was definitely a week to remember. I didn’t take my camera to any of the shows I saw, so I’m using other images to pretty up this post. I’m mainly writing this to thank all the bands for killing it this week, and to introduce you to a few new names along the way.

MONDAY, May 27

On Monday night I went to the 2 Bit Saloon to catch the latest show by Seattle’s Carnotaurus (I’ve written about them before). Normally a three-man combine, they were missing their bass player due to a miscommunication about transportation to the venue, but that didn’t stop vocalist/guitarist Travis “The Virus” Helton and drummer Brad Navratil from tearing everyone a new asshole with a blast of vicious Mesozoic death metal. Travis gets so much low-end radioactivity out of his Jackson Kelly guitar and his riffing and soloing are so fast that the absence of the bass wasn’t a deal breaker. Carnotaurus are working on a new album that should be out this summer. Stoked for that. Continue reading »

ANTIGAMA: “METEOR”

Album Reviews 9 Responses »

May 312013

(NCS contributor Austin Weber returns with this review of the sixth studio album by Poland’s Antigama.)

If the metal-as-noise paradigm has any truth to it, grindcore has always pushed that maxim relentlessly, essentially willing you to find something enjoyable within such abrasive sounds. Of course the best grindcore bands have always had a knack for rising above mere raw aggression to take grind to a refined, more delicately controlled state of chaos. As a group, Poland’s Antigama have wisely merged the two schools of thought, which means they do spend time assaulting your ears in noisy fashion, but do it with a more developed manner of songwriting with more structure, which I will dub “grown up grind”. They’ve been on this path since 2002 and over the course of numerous full-lengths and splits they’ve gotten consistently better and more disturbing with each release.

Meteor feels like the work of a band who are smartly aware of the current grind landscape and subtly bringing to their music certain sonic comparisons to the best elements of several top-tier grind bands. They’ve managed to channel the essence of Kevin Sharpe’s (Brutal Truth) deep, barked enunciations as well as having an influence from their death-metal-meets-punk riffs. They also have more than a few toes dipped in the Pig Destroyer school of deathly diverse riffing and complex suffocating drumming, and they tie all this together with a production reminiscent of Mumakil.

The end result is murderous and catchy but with an oddball side to it that is uniquely Antigama. From the very beginning they always had an experimental nature that’s set them apart from the pack. However, they’ve been greatly refining this aspect of their sound for some time, culminating in out-there extremes like “Paganini Meets Barbaplex” and the ambient film score feel of “Black Planet”. the closer off their last record, 2009’s Warning. Continue reading »

Older Entries Newer Entries