A NEW LEPROUS VIDEO: “THE CLOAK”

 Exceptions to the Rule  3 Responses »
May 142013
 

Here’s one of those posts that causes people unfamiliar with our site to become confused. It concerns Norway’s Leprous, who create music vastly different from the vast majority of music we cover here.

I am providing this post as a public service, because I know some of our other writers and many of our readers were quite taken with this band’s last album, Bilateral. The new one, entitled Coal, is scheduled for release on May 28 in North America and May 20 in Europe by InsideOut Music. I really like the cover art, by Jeff Jordan.

Today, Leprous released an official video for one of the new songs, “The Cloak”. Fittingly, it was filmed in a mine — the Konnerud Hill Mines in Norway, to be precise.

The song is languid, pared-down, ethereal, haunting, and memorable — and Einar Solberg unquestionably has got a set of quality pipes, if you’re into pipes that aren’t corroded beyond recovery. There’s some heaviness in the riffs, too, which I appreciate.

So, have a look and a listen while I go hunt for some metal that will strip paint from the walls. Continue reading »

VIDEO ROUND-UP: BLOOD RED THRONE, REPTILIAN DEATH, INTERNAL BLEEDING, AND WREKMEISTER HARMONIES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
May 142013
 

I already posted one kind of round-up this morning, one that involved sending you away to other sites to hear new songs that are exclusively streaming elsewhere. But the last 24 hours were so chock full of new musical discoveries that I need to add a second round-up. In this one, however, I can give you the music to hear and the videos to watch at our very own humble site.

BLOOD RED THRONE

And the first offering comes your way from the icy fastness of southern Norway where Blood Red Throne sit on their blood red throne. As previously reported, this band are celebrating the 15th year of their existence with a new, self-titled album in a special edition LP box set that’s been up for pre-sale on Blood Red Throne’s Bandcamp page (here) since March. It will be released by Sevared Records on May 21. It features that sweet cover art by Rafael Tavares that’s staring at you above.

Today, the band premiered a music video for one of the new songs, which bears the wonderfully descriptive title of “Primitive Killing Machine”. It’s a merciless meat-grinder of a song, but as your head is pulled down into the teeth of the machine, it will be ringing with an exotic melody and banging happily away as it’s being pulverised and pulped. Nasty video, too. Continue reading »

SENDING YOU AWAY: MAN’S GIN, SIGHT OF EMPTINESS, ELDKRAFT, AND KATECHON

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
May 142013
 

We like having you around here, but I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to leave. That’s because a quartet of new songs debuted yesterday that I’m recommending to you, but you’ll have to go elsewhere to check them out. They’re exclusively streaming at other sites, so I can’t embed them here. Actually, I could, because no page code is safe from me, but I’m being atypically respectful.

MAN’S GIN

Man’s Gin is the brainchild of New York-based Erik Wunder, who is also one-half of another band I like a lot — Cobalt. He’s joined in Man’s Gin by New Yorkers Scott Edward and Josh Lozano. I thought Man’s Gin’s debut album Smiling Dogs (2010) was fascinating, and it seems the same will be true of the second one, Rebellion Hymns. It’s scheduled for release by Profound Lore on June 25. The new song that premiered yesterday is “Deer Head & The Rain”.

This song isn’t our usual fare. The vocals are more clean than unclean and the music is more folk than metal, though it’s not exactly folk music either. There’s a disturbing undercurrent in the music, and from the acoustic-guitar-and-hand-drum intro straight through to the discordant electrified finish, it’s been relentlessly tunneling through my head since yesterday. Continue reading »

YOU’LL NEVER GUESS HOW MUCH MONEY MISERY SIGNALS RAISED THROUGH THEIR INDIEGOGO CAMPAIGN

 Metal News  13 Responses »
May 142013
 

Last night, Monday, May 13, 2013, at 11:59 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time, the indiegogo.com crowd-funding campaign of Misery Signals — which they launched to help pay for the recoding of a new album — officially came to an end. Do you know how much money they raised? I’m not gonna make you guess. They raised $104,295. Let me repeat that: They raised

One Hundred Four Thousand Two Hundred Ninety-Five Dollars!!!

I shit you not.

They started the campaign on April 3, with a goal of $50,000. A pretty ambitious goal, one would think. Yet in less than 24 hours they had received pledges that exceeded half of that amount. On April 9 they met the $50,000 goal. In six fucking days.

But the campaign deadline was May 13, so they just let it keep going. You’d think people would have stopped contributing once the goal was met. Obviously not. Misery SIgnals doubled their money over the last month. Hell, I was watching the money counter at indiegogo last night and people were still contributing thousands of dollars more in the last few hours of the campaign.

How the hell did they pull this off? I’m so fucking glad you asked. Continue reading »

YOU MAY HAVE SEEN MESHUGGAH’S LIGHTS OPERATOR AT WORK; NOW SEE THE LIGHTS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
May 132013
 

In late April you may have seen a video that showed Edvard Hansson — the light technician for Sweden’s Meshuggah — operating the control board for the band’s show in Paris last December (I saw it via The Monolith). By all accounts, the lighting on the band’s current tour is a true extravaganza, and what made the Hansson video such a jaw-dropper was the realization (in The Monolith’s words) that, “Rather than having programmed a static lighting show, he actually ‘plays’ along with with them, triggering parts of the setup in time with the complex rhythms of the music.

Unfortunately, the Hansson video didn’t show the light show itself, other than through the strobing flashes in the corner of the screen. But I just saw a video of the band performing at the Cirkus venue in Stockholm on May 9 that provides a good view of what happens as Hansson pushes all those buttons. It’s really amazing.

WARNING: For those prone to strobe-induced seizures, don’t watch this. It comes next . . . . Continue reading »

I’LL HAVE A SHOT AND A PERMANENT FUNERAL

 Metal News  10 Responses »
May 132013
 

Three Floyds bills itself as “a small Artisanal craft brewery located in Munster, IN just down the road from Chicago, IL”. I found out about them because they’ve brought out an ale named “Permanent Funeral”, after the song of the same name from Pig Destroyer’s Book Burner album. The ale’s description is as follows:

“The wolf inside this pale ale is trying to walk upright. This bright and aromatic beer was brewed with our friends in the band Pig Destroyer.”

It’s too bad Three Floyds is so far away from Seattle and so limited in its distribution, because they’d sell the shit out of this stuff here. I mean, even if it tasted like piss from a diabetic goat, lots of people would pay for the pleasure of ordering “a shot and a Permanent Funeral” at their local watering hole, and then drinking the brew from a bottle with a label like the one above.

Plus, it appears that Permanent Funeral will knock you on your ass. Continue reading »

A BEHIND THE SCENES LOOK AT RYAN BEGLEY’S COVER ART FOR HOWL

 Eye-Catchers, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 132013
 

If you’re a regular NCS stalker, you’ve seen this cover before. Twice before, actually, because I keep looking for new excuses to stick it on the site. It’s the hellaciously eye-catching gatefold artwork for Bloodlines, the new Relapse Records album by Rhode Island’s Howl — which is also hellaciously good, by the way. To see an even larger image of the artwork, click the pic above.

The artist who created the cover is Ryan Begley, and this is his third record cover for Howl (the other two are also killer). Today we have the pleasure of giving you a behind-the-scenes look at how the Bloodlines artwork came into existence, including the rough and final pencil sketches that evolved into the finished inked-and-colored piece you’re looking at. As Ryan explains:

All the visuals were inspired by lyrical content and both the band and I wanted to have an image with a lot of elements that would take time for the viewer to soak in. I tried to have all the characters and elements interacting and overlapping as much as possible.  The blood was one of the more difficult but fun elements to draw for the cover. Figuring out how it would flow and move throughout the frame and around the characters took a while to sketch out.

The band wanted a bright and vibrant cover and I thought it would translate best if we kept the colors in the same family. Once I settled on a specific red for the blood the rest of the palette was pulled from that.

Continue reading »

THE FUROR: “SERMON OF SLAUGHTER”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
May 132013
 

I’m usually racing so fast to keep up with the continual advent of new music that it’s rare to take a breath long enough to explore music from a previous year. But I did that yesterday, and I’m sure glad I did.

The Furor is a band from Western Australia that released three full-length albums between 2004 and 2011, after which the membership dwindled to a single individual, Disaster (Louis Rando). Undeterred by going it alone, he put out an EP in 2012 under The Furor name entitled Sermon of Slaughter, and it is indeed a sermon of slaughter. The exceptional quality of the EP is perhaps surprising, because Disaster’s forte is drumming.

He is a ridiculously good drummer and a true metal veteran, as witnessed by his current participation in bands such as Singapore’s Impiety and Australia’s Mhorgl, as well as his past membership in the likes of Dybbuk, Pagan, Pathogen, and Psychonaut. But it turns out that his talents are manifold, and he shows them off to good effect on Sermon of Slaughter.

The music reminds me of a cross between Marduk and Satyricon. It is unquestionably warlike. The songs generally move at a furious pace, with hell-ripping guitars, booming bass notes, and the kind of murderous percussion that makes full-auto machine-gun fire seem slothful by comparison. Disaster’s scalding, clawing vocals also remind me of Mortuus and Satyr — full of fire and venom. Continue reading »

CARCASS AND VADER IN THE NEWS

 Metal News  1 Response »
May 132013
 

If you’ve been following us for very long, then you know we’re not a “news aggregator” site, by which I mean sites that simply copy and paste the daily flood of metal press releases and other newsy blurbs. That’s a useful service, but there are tons of other places out there which do that. In the category of “breaking news”, we usually focus on new music or videos, and we’re selective about what what we recommend. But mainly it’s because we have a small staff of unpaid slaves who spend most of their time sleeping or fending off creditors.

But I’m making an exception for the two items in this post, because they involve Carcass and Vader. Honestly, there’s not much meaningful news in this post, but . . . to repeat . . . the news involves CARCASS AND VADER!!

The news about Carcass is two-fold: First, we now have the first official photo (above) of the new Carcass lineup, courtesy of Adrian Erlandsson of Murder Mile Studios: bassist/vocalist Jeff Walker, guitarist Bill Steer, new guitarist Ben Ash (Pig Iron, Desolation, Liquefied Skeleton) and new drummer Dan Wilding (Aborted, Trigger the Bloodshed). And second, Carcass signed a deal last Thursday (May 9) with an as-yet-undisclosed label for the release of their new album, Surgical Steel. Why have Carcass not disclosed the label? Fuck if I know. Continue reading »

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