AN NCS INTERVIEW: AEON’S ZEB NILSSON

 Interviews  2 Responses »
Oct 082012
 

EDITOR’S NOTE: Sweden’s Aeon are set to detonate their latest album Aeons Black via Metal Blade Records on November 20, 2012. The 15-track opus was recorded at Empire Studio in Östersund, Sweden and was engineered, mixed, and mastered by Ronnie Björnström (Garageland Studios). It features cover art by the legendary Kristian “Necrolord” Wåhlin. And it’s available for pre-order here. To say it’s highly anticipated around this place would be an understatement.

Today, we’re fortunate that our guest contributor KevinP has brought us an interview with the band’s founding guitarist Sebastian “Zeb” Nillson. And at the end of the interview, catch the new lyric video for the title track to Aeons Black.

 

KP: So what’s behind the title to your new album, Aeons Black?  Is this your ode to Metallica? (smiles)

ZN: (Laughs) At first you could believe it would be. But the title track´s lyrics are all about the end of the world. When the sun has been burnt out and nothing can save you.  So for me it would make more sense to have the title Black Aeons since that is what you can expect after the sun has burned out. But I guess Tommy [Dahlström] just wanted to give it a little twist.

 

The title track (released for the world to hear), is one of the consistently slower songs you have ever recorded.  How did that come about ?

Hmmm…I´m not really sure. Our last album did lack heavy songs IMO, so I tried to actually make songs that were HEAVIER and did not have blastbeats in them this time. And I feel much more happy with it now. It´s much more varied.  But we still have fast songs as well.

Some people have asked us “is that cause Arttu [Malkki] can’t play fast like Nils [Fjellström]“? But if he couldn´t play fast, that would mean that he couldn´t play our old songs live and he would never been given the job as drummer of Aeon.  We always play “Forever Nailed”, “Kill Them All”, and “Forgiveness Denied” live, and unless you can perform them as a drummer, you simply won’t fit the bill.  So to get to the point somehow….we just wanted to have more heavy shit this time! Continue reading »

“THE ONLY GOOD TORY”: NO CLEAN SINGING RELEASES A UK POWERVIOLENCE COMP

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Oct 082012
 

This is a milestone day for NO CLEAN SINGING. Today, in collaboration with GRIND TO DEATH, we’re launching the NCS Bandcamp page and releasing our first compilation of recorded music — The Only Good Tory — a FREE collection of 46 songs by 46 UK bands who are on the cutting edge of grind, powerviolence, harsh crust, and fastcore. It’s guaranteed to wreck heads.

The lion’s share of the credit for this blockbuster goes to our friend Alex Layzell of GRIND TO DEATH. It was he who conceived of this idea, contacted the bands, assembled the tracks, and arranged for the preparation of a killer artwork booklet prepared by the talented Kex Whelan — which includes separate artwork for each of the 46 tracks on this comp.

We’re making the comp available as a free download to support the bands — this comp is dedicated to them and their passion — and to thank the fans of honest music wherever they may live. But in the near future we’ll be offering the comp on limited-edition tape produced by DIY Noise as a prize for a competition among NCS readers. We haven’t yet thought up a contest for how to do this, but it will probably involve the submission of nude photos. Or not. We’re working on it. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: REVOCATION — “TERATOGENESIS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Oct 082012
 

(In this post, TheMadIsraeli reviews the Scion A/V release of a new EP by one of our favorite bands, Boston’s Revocation.)

I’m just gonna put this out there: Scion A/V are my heroes.

So we’ve got a new FREE EP from hybrid deathrash hoplites Revocation titled Teratogenesis.  I don’t even know what the fuck that title means, but I love the album art and this EP contains some of the best music Revocation have written so far.  The assault of Teratogenesis is definitely more brutal and more focused as compared to the band’s last opus, Chaos of Forms, which I reviewed last year.

It seems that when a band does an EP, especially if it consists of material meant only for that EP, the result tends to be more intense.  I like this situation, because it’s here when a band just goes completely balls-deep with the more brutal aspects of their sound.  As such, don’t expect to find anything on Teratogenesis comparable to the more experimental numbers found on Chaos of Forms.

Teratogenesis is nothing but an adrenaline rush of hyper-speed fusion metal that definitely brings more of Revocation’s thrash influences to the forefront.  Everything else Revocation are known for is still here, it’s just that apparently they wanted to write something fast as fuck, which this EP definitely is.  Continue reading »

DARK CLOUDS ON THE HORIZON: ROTTING CHRIST AND INCANTATION

 Metal News  1 Response »
Oct 072012
 

You know how when you get really excited about something you just want to tell everyone you know immediately? I mean, other then when you get excited because you realize no one got your license plate after that hit-and-run accident, the one where the little girl is going to talk funny and have a really bad limp for the rest of her life but will damned sure start looking both ways before she enters a school cross walk again, at least as soon as she gets out of intensive care and physical therapy? I hope her parents have major medical coverage, ’cause they’re gonna fuckin’ need it.

Where was I? Oh yeah, being really excited and wanting to share. That’s how I feel about these two news items.

ROTTING CHRIST

Today I saw this on the Facebook page of these stupendous Greeks:

“We proudly announce that the recording session for our new album is close to the end. A hard but majestic simoultaneously trip for more than 4 months in Deva Soundz studios-Athens have found the band creating maybe its Darkest and more Mystical and Occult outcome ever. Stay tuned for samples and updates.”

Yes, I believe I will stay tuned. Also, Rotting Christ have a revamped official web site that includes 11 songs for free download HERE.  Also, Sakis has a beard now (thanks for the photo link, Utmu)!  Also . . . Continue reading »

RITUALS / DEZAFRA RIDGE: SPLIT LP

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 072012
 

I’m feeling doomed today. I started with a review of the debut album by Seattle doom duo Bell Witch, and now I’m moving on to the new LP-length split by Rituals from Phoenix, Arizona, and DeZafra Ridge from Leipzig, Germany. Both bands are new discoveries for me, and very fortunate ones. Though their musical approaches differ from each other, the songs they’ve created for this split on the Alerta Antifascista label are excellent.

RITUALS

Each of the two bands contributes two long songs to the split, with the pair created by Rituals clocking in at more than 9 minutes each. Forlorn guitar notes and the harsh whistle of a cold wind open “It Means Nothing”, and a slow, shimmering guitar melody follows that, with the intermittent thump of a drumbeat backing it. Eventually, ragged vocal roars convey bestial malignancy as the glittering guitar melody builds in intensity.

Past the halfway point, the intensity diminishes and a clean dual guitar harmony weaves seductive magic. The vocals build to a harrowing howl. The song seques into a slow, beautiful, hypnotic finish. The aura is one of bereavement and pain, but the melody is also glorious. There’s an almost post-black metal feel to this doom, and it strikes a strong emotional chord. Continue reading »

BELL WITCH: “LONGING”

 Album Reviews  17 Responses »
Oct 072012
 

So much of the metal I listen to is so fast and furious that when I dived into Longing, the debut album by Seattle’s Bell Witch, I felt like a sprinter who’d been dropped in his tracks, as if the gravitational pull of the Earth had suddenly been quintupled. The pace of this tremendously heavy music is far slower than the beat of a human heart, yet a heart beats within it, as the songs push and pull between the sounds of devastation and salvation.

Longing is an apt title for this album. Its six atmospheric tracks create an uncanny ambience of loss and despair, a sense of isolation and depressive wistfulness, and often the feeling of unavoidable catastrophe and even horror. Yet the dark and brutal hopelessness of the songs is offset by slow, beautiful melodies — not cheerful ones, mind you, but profound expressions of melancholy.

The music is amazingly simple and spare. The only instruments employed by the Bell Witch duo of Dylan Desmond and Adrian Guerra are bass and drums (respectively), and their voices. I assume the bass is a six-string instrument, because those aching melodies are often carried by notes that climb up the register, often free of the massive distortion that surrounds the cave-in chords at the bottom of every song.

Two of the tracks — and they are the shortest ones — consist of no instruments but the bass, and no vocals. In “Beneath the Mask”, slow, reverberating notes and chords provide grim accompaniment for a sample from the Roger Corman 1964 horror classic Masque of the Red Death, in which the Satan-worshipper Prince Prospero discovers the identity of the Man in Red. The final track, “Outro”, is simply a bass solo — ponderous, booming, yet still woven with bleak melody. Continue reading »

SATURDAY SOUNDINGS: CAUSEMOS, TYRANT OF DEATH, CALIGULA’S HORSE, AND DEATHEMBER

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Oct 062012
 

Here’s another round-up of new musical discoveries from the last 24 hours. NCS writer DGR delivered the first two of these items to my in-box, for which I bow down in gratitude. NCS reader Austin S-K brought me the third one, for which I bow down in gratitude. I came up with the fourth one on my own, but I’m now unable to straighten up so you could bow down in gratitude to me. Not as limber as I used to be. I’ll be spending the rest of the day staring at the floor. And headbanging.

CAUSEMOS

Causemos are a Finnish band who yesterday released their debut album, Infinite Event, as a pay-what-you-want (or pay nothing) download on Bandcamp. (I suppose you might also call this an EP, since the songs only total about 25 minutes of music.) Causemos brand their music as “cosmic space metal”, which is not a bad description. I would elaborate on that description as follows:

Causemos weave together symphonic keyboards and technically demanding melodic death metal, with vocals that move seamlessly between brutish howling/growling and really nice soaring cleans that reminded me a bit of Dave Hunt’s clean ceiling-busters for Anaal Nathrakh. The music is intricate and vitally dynamic, ranging from bombastic hammering to astral streams of progressive ambience. The music has a grandiose and sometimes spacey quality, but not at the expense of headbanging rhythms or infectious melodies — of which there are many. Continue reading »

WHITE SOCKS ARE IN AGAIN

 Metal News  5 Responses »
Oct 062012
 

In your formative years, you learn some things that stay with you. In my formative years, I learned that if you wore white socks and black shoes to school, you were just asking for abuse. Only helpless nerds whose mommas dressed them wore white socks and black shoes. Poor motherfuckers, it was even worse than duct-taped glasses and using pocket protectors with a half-dozen pens. Yeah, that’s how fuckin’ old I am.

At some point, it looked like Michael Jackson would make white socks cool, back before it came out that he was sleeping with little boys. But I think you needed to have patent leather shoes and a white glove to pull that off, and you needed to be cool in all sorts of other ways, too. And honestly, I thought he was still pushing his luck with that shit, even when he was at the height of his powers.

Well, motherfuckin’ Death Grips may succeed where Michael Jackson failed. That pic up there is the new alternate album cover for No Love Deep Web, the new Death Grips album that has become a case study in how to viral-market your music. In case you missed our earlier post about this album and didn’t see the news elsewhere, this is the album that Death Grips released for free download earlier this week despite the fact that they’re signed to the mainstream Epic/Columbia label, who presumably has rights to the music — and used a picture of an erect dick as the album cover.

Supposedly, something about that album art led to the band’s site being shut down, though that still doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Web hosts don’t give  fuck what you put on your own web site and I can’t fathom how the band’s label could unilaterally have it shut down since the site pre-dated the band’s signing with them and presumably is paid for by the band.

But in any event, per a post on their Facebook page, Death Grips seem to have created a new alternate album cover, which is at the top of this post. Continue reading »

TIME TO BUST SHIT UP: NEW MUSIC FROM BEHEADED, MALEVOLENCE, UNDEAD CREEP, AND 7 H.TARGET

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Oct 052012
 

Here’s another round-up of music I came across over the last 24 hours that I want to recommend. By my lights, it’s a good way to charge into the weekend, because it helps get in the mood for destroying shit. And isn’t what weekends are for? To destroy all the things you spent the work week building, including your reputation?

Here’s a helping of viciously destructive music from Beheaded (Malta), Malevolence (Portugal), Undead Creep (Italy), and 7 H.Target (Russia).

BEHEADED

Beheaded are from the island nation of Malta in the Mediterranean. Having heard some of their new music, I’m surprised Malta hasn’t imploded and sunk beneath the waves in a titanic geyser.

Beheaded have recorded their third album, Never To Dawn, for release by Unique Leader on November 6. Based on a very old MySpace blog entry by the band, the fantastic cover art appears to have been created by an artist named Yang Guang (click on the image to see a bigger copy of it).

A few days ago Beheaded released an advance track from the album called “Where Hours Etch Their Name”, and it made me hungry not only for the whole album but also for human flesh. It’s a monstrous, and monstrously groovy, behemoth of death metal might that reminded me of Immolation and Hate.

The riffs have a booming, cataclysmic quality, spiced with rapid techy jabbing and whirlwinds of dark melody. The vocals are a paragon of bestiality, and the fuckin’ percussion is explosively off the hook. Beheaded definitely have the knack for forging relentlessly brutal music that’s also groovy and memorable. I’m in lust for this album. Here’s the song: Continue reading »

THAT RAW FEELING IN YOUR BUNGHOLE IS FACEBOOK WORKING ON YOU AGAIN WITHOUT THE LUBE

 Off Topic  24 Responses »
Oct 052012
 

Yes, I’m afraid it’s time for another rant about Facebook. The pressure was building, and I needed to vent for fear that otherwise I’d have an attack of explosive diarrhea.

The last time I had to resort to this kind of diarrhea remedy was in June, when the subject was an exploration of the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine who gets to see Page posts and the rollout of Facebook’s Promoted Posts feature. In a nutshell, if you’re the admin of a Facebook Page and you add a Page post, Facebook doesn’t deliver your post to the news feeds of all your Page fans. At one point, Facebook reported that on average only 16% of your fans will see any given post.

Facebook does give you the option of paying them to expand the distribution of your posts. That’s the Promoted Posts feature. We’ve used that feature only for certain posts at the NCS FB Page — when we want to spread the word about a song premiere or new album stream here at the site — and, unsurprisingly, it definitely does work. The stats we get from FB show that our posts reach a much larger percentage of our FB fans, as well as FB Friends of our fans, though the reach is still not 100%.

But we’re not a business, we get no revenue from anyone for running NCS, and so there’s a limit to how much money we’re willing to spend to spread our content around the FB community. Impecunious metal bands aren’t any more likely to fatten up Facebook’s bank account in order to reach more of their fans either.

But it turns out that with Promoted Posts, Facebook was only getting warmed up. On Wednesday of this week Facebook rolled out a new “test” in the U.S. (they’ve been doing it longer than that in other countries). Now, even individuals get the awesome opportunity to pay FB in order to increase the visibility of shit like your wedding photos, pics of your newborn brat, where your band is playing next weekend, and big news like what you ate for breakfast. Wheeeeeee!!! Continue reading »

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