WHAT WOULD YOU SAY TO A NORTH AMERICAN TOUR BY GOJIRA, THE DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT, AND THE ATLAS MOTH?

 Metal News  5 Responses »
Oct 212012
 

THis news is way too fucking awesome to wait until tomorrow for posting. Thanks to Lambgoat, I’ve just seen the news that Gojira, The Devin Townsend Project, and The Atlas Moth are teaming up for an early 2013 tour of North America. And I used to think men couldn’t have multiple orgasms.

I’m still sort of in disbelief that someone was smart enough to pull these three bands together on a single tour. It’s clearly going to be a huge profile upgrade for The Atlas Moth to be tagging along with the likes of Gojira and DT, and it will likewise be a boon to the many fans who’ll get a chance to hear them for the first time.

And the opportunity to see Gojira and DT sharing the same stage . . . well, that’s something I’ll spend the next three months salivating about. Given how much I drool on even a normal day, this is going to be embarrassing.

The tour was apparently exclusively announced during Full Metal Jackie’s show Saturday night (October 20), and tickets are supposed to go on sale October 26 and 27.

The dates and places as reported by Lambgoat are after the jump. I haven’t yet seen any other official announcements. Continue reading »

SUNDAY SAVAGERY, WITH ENSLAVED, XEHANORT, FISTULA, AND CATS MATING

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  15 Responses »
Oct 212012
 

The loris compound at NCS HQ has been in turmoil. They apparently expected me to leave grubs for them before I left town last week, and they resorted to cannibalism while I was gone. Must have been a ritualistic aspect to it, because I found them chanting over those big eyeballs of the dead, which had been collected like marbles in a shallow pit.

I thought they would just fast, and some of them had gotten pretty hefty so I figured that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Actually, to be brutally honest, I just fuckin’ forgot to leave food.

Anyway, they’re in a feisty mood, because I guess uncooked loris doesn’t taste as good as grubs. I don’t understand their language, but I’m pretty sure they were chanting something about impaling me on greased spikes. I’m glad I reinforced the fencing and electrified it last month. All my efforts to reason with them seem to have fallen on deaf ears, so I’ve had to resort to stern disciplinary measures.

I’ve been playing them some savage new music I discovered recently, using the compound’s megajoule PA system. It’s causing blood to come out of their ears, but instead of getting docile, it’s causing them to headbang. Very slowly. Because they’re lorises, aren’t they?

I thought I’d share the music with you, too. Not that you need disciplining, of course. Unless you do.

ENSLAVED

Thanks to a tip from MaxR (Metal Bandcamp), I started the lorises off with Enslaved providing a live cover of Led Zeppelin’s classic “Immigrant Song” on the Norwegian TV show Trygdekontoret on October 17 2012. It’s a goddamn glorious cover, with the band blackening the song and then ending it by dropping down into a doomy breakdown with Ice Dale spinning off a psychedelic guitar solo. I thought it was generous of me to give those slow creatures something to watch as well as hear. Continue reading »

DEAFHEAVEN / BOSSE-DE-NAGE SPLIT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Oct 212012
 

deafheaven are one of my favorite genre-bending black metal bands. Their debut album Roads To Judah made many of the Best of 2011 lists we published at this site, and I also included the song “Violet” in our list of 2011’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. Though I was sold on the band based on that album and their previous EP, Libertine Dissolves, I became an even more devoted fan after seeing them perform live at Neumo’s in Seattle about a year ago and talking with their charismatic frontman George Clarke both before and after that set.

When I saw the news that they had recorded a song for a forthcoming split release with another Bay Area black metal band, Bosse-de-Nage, I begged for the chance to hear the split, and my wish was granted.

deafheaven’s song is a cover of “Punk Rock” and “Cody”, the opening songs from the 1999 album Come On Die Young, by Scotland’s Mogwai. By coincidence, Andy Synn included this deafheaven track in a list of his favorite “unexpected” covers that we published only a few days ago.

Before diving into deafheaven’s take on the songs, I first listened to the Mogwai originals, with which I wasn’t familiar. “Punk Rock” is a drifting, dreamy, isolated guitar arpeggio that plays out over a sample from a speech that Iggy Pop made during a 1977 CBC interview. “Cody” is similarly slow and restrained, a beautiful, hypnotic, near-pop song with layered guitars, almost-hidden vocals, and a decidedly melancholy ambience. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 65)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  12 Responses »
Oct 212012
 

It’s time again for another installment of THAT’S METAL, where we take a brief break from the headbanging to collect, images, news items, and videos that we thought were metal, even though they’re not music.

It’s worth reminding everyone, especially for this installment, that things can be metal for a bunch of divergent reasons — ranging from the blindingly awesome to the brutally destructive to the disgustingly grotesque to the utterly ridiculous. Of course, like beauty, what’s metal is in the eye of the beholder . . . and I’m kinda cross-eyed.

ITEM ONE

The first item, as usual, is the photo at the top of this post. I saw it at the amazing Big Picture at Boston.com, which is one of the best photo-collecting places on the web. It’s a shot of a Great White shark taken from below, by a photographer who was perched on top of a submersible cage just after he released a breath through his respirator. It’s one of thousands of photos that are currently being submitted in The National Geographic’s 2012 photo competition. More can be viewed here.

ITEM TWO

I’m indebted to Ben C from The Church of the Riff for this next item. It’s a collection of photos of intricate wax anatomical models created by anatomists and biological sculptors from the late 1600’s to the mid-1800’s.

The models are creepy as fuck, and many of them seem to be women. In fact, during the 19th century the dissected anatomical statues of reclining women came to be known as “Venuses”. Sexy. Continue reading »

WHERE AM I?

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Oct 202012
 

I think I’m back home after a week of being here, there, and everywhere. I woke up disoriented, jet-lagged, and thinking about the lyrics to “Once In A Lifetime” (Talking Heads). Was that my beautiful wife in bed next to me? Is this my beautiful house I’m in? Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground. Into the blue again . . .

I’ll get my shit together before the day is out, but at the moment the shit is kind of scattered and incoherent. After a week of having not much time to call my own, I’m also way fuckin’ behind on the metal. A lot of catching up to do, a lot of new music to hear, a lot of gibberish to write. But I ought to make a start right now, shouldn’t I?

For example: Yesterday our friends at The Monolith turned on the site and made it go live. If you haven’t checked out that site, you should give it a whirl. A couple of very good dudes who’ve been slumming here at NCS after The Number of the Blog shut down — groverXIII and DGR — will be writing over there now, as will a bunch of other folks from other blogs who we’ve gotten to know and admire since we started NCS. We wish all of them much success with the new venture.

I also heard some new tracks that I thought you might enjoy, from ILSA, Devolved, and Rage Nucleaire.

To begin, I saw that CVLT Nation has started streaming a new ILSA track from their new album Intoxicantations (to be released by Baltimore’s A389 Recordings on Nov 23). I fuckin’ love the artwork for the album, which was created by ILSA’s drummer, Joshy: Continue reading »

A FRIDAY FLOOD OF NEWS AND MUSIC: MORS PRINCIPIUM EST, BLUT AUS NORD, SOREPTION, XENOCIDE, THE FEVERED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 192012
 

For me, where I’m currently located, Friday has barely begun, but it has already brought a flood tide of news and music that I think are worth sharing. So much, in fact, that the only way I can squeeze it all into a single post is to cut my own verbosity to a trickle. This is painful, of course, because it goes against the grain. But I will do my best to be brief.

MORS PRINCIPIUM EST

In late July, I posted a bunch of news about this excellent Finnish band, which included the fact that they were finally recording a new album after many long years following the release of 2007′s Liberation = Termination. And then in August, I learned the album’s title (…And Death Said Live), I found out it would be released this December (on AFM Records), I found the cover art (which you can see above), and I posted about all that news.

At that point I also learned from the band that the album will include guest appearances from shredders Ryan Knight of The Black Dahlia Murder and Jona Weinhofen of Bring Me the Horizon and I Killed the Prom Queen.

And today, finally, we have music from the album. Or to be more precise, Metal Injection has music from the album — a song named “Destroyer of All”. The song kills. Go HERE to listen, and then please come back and give us your reactions. Continue reading »

NOTHNEGAL VIDEO: “SINS OF OUR CREATION”

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 192012
 

July 4, 2010. That was the day I first wrote about Nothnegal. Looking back at that post I realize how damned wordy I was. And you know that as long-winded as I am, when I say something is wordy, I mean it goes on and on and on.  And on.

I was really pumped up about that band, in part because they were from The Republic of the Maldives and in part because the music on their debut EP (Antidote of Realism) was so fuckin’ good.  Since then, they recorded a debut album (Decadence), which was released by Season of Mist in January 2012. That album featured drums by Kevin Talley (Dååth) and keyboards by Marco Sneck (Kalmah).

Decadence took me somewhat by surprise, given what I was expecting after Antidote. The album is primarily mid-paced, heavy-chugging melodic death metal with significant use of Sneck’s keyboards to lend the whole affair a sci-fi aura. The biggest surprises were two tracks near the end of the album — “Sins of Creation” and “Singularity” — which replaced the raspy growls that accompanied the rest of the music with strong clean vocals (by Affan) that would have been right at home in a power metal band.

Today, the band released an official video for “Sins of Creation”. It’s animated, it’s science fiction, and I thought it was a blast to watch. And it reminded me that “Sins of Creation” is really not a bad song, and that because of my prejudices about vocals I didn’t really give it a fair chance when I heard the album the first time. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: INCANTATION, SLIDHR, AND DEER CROSSINGS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 182012
 

I’m a little off my game at the moment, out of town and with not much time to call my own, so our posts will be a little more sporadic than usual this week. But I wanted to throw a few items your way before the day ended, and they are as follows:

A calamitous new track from Incantation (U.S.), two intriguing new songs from Slidhr (Ireland), and your wtf? moment for the day straight from Fargo, North Dakota.

INCANTATION

I assume this band need no introduction, and therefore none will be provided. Their ninth studio album, Vanquish In Vengeance, is due for release on November 26 by Listenable Records. About 10 days ago I found out that the band had recorded a song for DECIBEL’s Flexi-Disc series and included that exciting news in a post despite the fact that the song hadn’t yet been released for streaming. Well, as of today, we can now hear it.

The song is ”Degeneration,” which originally appeared on the self-titled 1989 demo of John McEntee’s pre-Incantation band, Revenant. Incantation’s dynamic version of the track is completely devastating — disemboweling guitar grinding, ghoulish vocals, skull-smashing percussion, and a couple of guitar solos that are the equivalent of throwing open the door to a blast furnace. In other words, everything a death metal fanatic could want. Continue reading »

DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT: “WIDOWMAKER”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Oct 182012
 

Even after my first listen to Widowmaker all the way through — and it must be heard in that way — I began giving it my own subtitle: “The Descent of Man”. Charles Darwin may have claimed the title as his own 131 years ago, but the new concept album by Dragged Into Sunlight isn’t about the evolution of human mental faculties to a higher state. It’s more the reverse — an inexorable degradation into misery, and ultimately savagery.

For those of you who are familiar with the band’s debut album Hatred for Mankind (reviewed here), listening to Widowmaker is in most ways a very different experience. Though its release follows Hatred, it was recorded in three separate sessions between 2010 and 2012, with the band consciously creating a different kind of soundscape than the cataclysmic, corrosive, chaotic cacophony that suffused the debut release.

Though there are three long tracks on Widowmaker, they are numbered and nameless. Think of them as three sections of a single song, or perhaps as three movements in a symphony of doom. No one will jail you for listening to these tracks separately, but it’s clear that this gradual descent into the abyss was meant to be experienced as a unified whole, lasting more than 40 minutes. Continue reading »

INFANT ANNIHILATOR ANNIHILATES INFANTS, GANGNAM STYLE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 182012
 

Back in August I was roughly the 63 millionth person to jump on the “Gangnam Style” bandwagon by posting PSY’s video for the song here at our metal site, undoubtedly provoking a bunch of disgusted noises from the more KVLT readers in the audience.

More recently, I got on another bandwagon just as it was beginning to roll by featuring the ridiculously insane and ridiculously funny new video for “Decapitation Fornication” by a multinational collective who call themselves Infant Annihilator, undoubtedly provoking a bunch of new disgusted noises from the more KVLT readers in the audience.

And what should I see this morning but a YouTube clip of Infant Annihilator’s metal remix of “Gangnam Style”. I ask you, how could I resist? The answer is, I could not.

There have been other metal covers and remixes of this song; I included one of them in the original post about the song. But this one is my favorite. I mean, if you’re going to metallicize the song you might as well repeatedly fuck it really hard and throw in some explosive breakdowns, too.  Continue reading »

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