PIG DESTROYER: “BOOK BURNER”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Oct 022012
 

(In this post, BadWolf reviews the new album by Pig Destroyer.)

Pig Destroyer showed me that grindcore could be good music in 2008, at the lowest point in my personal life. In that time of need, my palate for metal expanded in manifold ways. That was the time I got into Black Metal, Death Metal, and metallic hardcore. Suddenly the idea of NO CLEAN SINGING clicked with me.

And Pig Destroyer (along with early Napalm Death) opened the Grind gateway for me. The album, Phantom Limb, was relatively new then. And up until now it has remained Pig Destroyer’s most current work. Best album or not (probably not), Phantom Limb is my permanent personal Deathgrind yardstick.

So, Book Burner is my first ‘new’ Pig Destroyer album. Until I heard it, the band was synonymous with the Phantom Limb sound. I knew there had been lineup changes—Adam Jarvis now drums in the group—but they didn’t matter until now. Now they do, because Book Burner, while still a great album, is a step away from Phantom Limb. Its predecessor felt Lovecraftian in its looming malevolence. Book Burner, by contrast, is as human as Pig Destroyer have ever been.

The sound has been taken out to dry, especially in Jarvis’s drums—the snare pops like Chinese firecrackers here. Jarvis also rolls with a little more slop than his predecessors, which probably works to his advantage—grind albums all flow together anyway, and at least this one doesn’t have any jarring breaks. Scott Hull’s guitar has dropped some heft in exchange for clarity. The spaces between his notes are audible. You can imagine his fat monkey fist sliding up and down the neck of his guitar. Continue reading »

ABIOTIC: “SYMBIOSIS”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Oct 022012
 

 

South Florida’s Abiotic have experienced a meteoric rise, launching themselves with a couple of singles and a seven-song EP in 2011 (A Universal Plague) and then signing with Metal Blade Records this year after being contacted by that venerable label out of the blue. In three weeks, Metal Blade will release Abiotic’s debut album, Symbiosis. It consists of “tweaked” versions of the seven songs from A Universal Plague plus three new songs.

The songs on Symbiosis follow an unrelenting pattern. The template is in fact so consistent that on a first listen the songs tended to merge together into one long sonic barrage that left this listener battered, bruised, off-balance, and with a head full of thoroughly scrambled wiring. Subsequent spins through this chaotic album allowed me to focus more on the variations among the songs, but in the end they still emerged as a fractal design in sound, with the highly intricate structures multiplying yet unfolding in fundamentally the same shape:

Blasting start/stop rhythms, with drums, bass, and rhythm guitar all firing in bursts like a heavy-caliber machine gun. Schizoid time signatures that change rapidly and unpredictably. Percussive riffs that jab and punch like a nail-gun in overdrive. Periodic atonal hammering in the low end, like concrete girders being wielded as hammers by robotic giants.

Through that maelstrom of hard-punching sound come spacey bursts of weird guitar arpeggios and shimmering, swirling, blazing segments of fluid sweep picking (or finger tapping), giving shape to a futuristic atmosphere. Strange, skittering electronic noises appear and then disappear, and a variety of other electronic effects, including channel-shifting, are applied to enhance the mechanistic vibe of the music. Continue reading »

FROM EXILE: “MARTYR’S GAMBIT”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 022012
 

From Exile are an Atlanta progressive metal band we’ve written about frequently at NCS. You can see a collection of all our previous features via this link. The last time we checked in with them, they had released a new, freely downloadable song called “A Desperate and Willing Enslavement” and a music video to go along with it. The video was a live performance of the band filmed at the studios of Digital Arts Entertainment Lab on the Georgia State University campus in downtown Atlanta. It was filmed as part of a video series focusing largely on Atlanta-based bands called indieATL (check out their web site here).

At the time of that last post, From Exile had disclosed that they recorded a second song as part of the indieATL session and planned to release it (along with a video of the performance) at some future date — and last night they did that. The new track is called “Martyr’s Gambit”, and man, is it cool.

As in the case of “A Desperate and Willing Enslavement”, it’s not as extreme as most of the music we cover at NCS, and all the singing is clean. But the song is heavy, intricate, and superbly rendered, and it features a powerful, oh-so-memorable chorus. The dual vocal harmonies are beautiful, as is the interplay between the triad of guitarists, the nimble bass player, and the hard-hitting drummer. And as the icing on the cake, the instrumental jam in the song’s back half is a galvanizing flow of compulsive energy. Continue reading »

MORE SEEN AND HEARD: ENCRUST, TREPALIUM, KLONE, UNFATHOMABLE RUINATION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Oct 012012
 

Earlier today I collected a handful of items I saw and heard in my catching-up time last night, but since posting that round-up I’ve discovered even more new metal that’s worth passing around. The bands featured in this post are: Encrust (U.S.) Trepalium (France), Klone (France), and Unfathomable Ruination (UK).

ENCRUST

Okay, first thing you should do is click THIS LINK to see a bigger copy of that stupendous cover art up there.

Is that not killer? It’s the cover for From Birth To Soil, the debut album by a Chicago quintet who call themselves Encrust. The artwork was created by Ryan Kasparian (whose work we’ve featured elsewhere on NCS) and Chris Angelucci. Not coincidentally those two happen to be one of Encrust’s two guitarists and the band’s vocalist, respectively.

From Birth To Soil was released by Density Records last week, and on the same day the band premiered a lyric video for one of the album’s tracks, “Engine of Deceit”. I only caught up with the video today, and I’m really digging the music and the lyrics. The song is a big, swaggering, brawling hybrid of sludge/stoner riffs, pile-driving percussion, and death-metal vocals. There might be some way to avoid headbanging to this song, but it would probably require severing all the nerves to your neck muscles. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: HAMISH GLENCROSS (MY DYING BRIDE)

 Interviews  No Responses »
Oct 012012
 

EDITOR’S PREFACE:

NCS reader and occasional guest contributor KevinP was able to snag an opportunity to interview guitarist Hamish Glencross of UK doom legends My Dying Bride (and Vallenfyre), and we’re thrilled to present their discussion here. My Dying Bride’s twelfth studio album, A Map of All Our Failures, is scheduled for release on October 15 by Peaceville Records. It follows the band’s acclaimed 2011 single-song EP, The Barghest o’ Wihtby. We previously featured (here) the first song released from the new album, “Kneel till Doomsday”.

 

KP: What have you done differently this time around, if anything at all, on this new album?

HG: Things had changed with having done The Barghest EP. We had brought back a level of intensity that had taken us back to using loud valve amps with an inspiring harmonic feedback in our sound, which we pushed to an extreme on the EP.  We wanted to maintain much of that, but to bring it more in line with a grander, epic approach more in keeping with what we would want to do with a full length album.  Andy [Craighan] and I had a very strong vision of what we wanted to do, and had actually started writing the music for this album as far back as two years ago. We had each set up quite considerable home studios, so we had recorded everything in a very advanced demo format before even hitting the studio, so we had done a LOT more preparation for this album,  more than anything we have done before.

We also had the ability to develop ideas much further, and continue to write and re-write right up to recording the actual release.  This is also how we ended up with a lot more songs recorded than we usually would do, allowing us to cherry-pick the most suitable songs for the album. Continue reading »

DEATH GRIPS DROPPED THEIR NEW ALBUM TODAY: “NO LOVE DEEP WEB”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, That's Music -- But It's Not Metal  33 Responses »
Oct 012012
 

Especially for an extreme metal site, we’ve showed a lot of love for Death Grips. Why? Because their music is “metal”, even though it’s not metal, and also because they don’t give a fuck.

How many fucks don’t they give? Well, you may recall that Death Grips signed a deal with Epic/Columbia to release two albums this year. The first one was The Money Store (reviewed for us here by groverXIII). The second one was supposed to be released sometime this month. But last night on Twitter the band said, “The label wouldn’t confirm a release date for NO LOVE DEEP WEB ’till next year sometime,” followed by, “The label will be hearing the album for the first time with you.”

And this morning Death Grips just went ahead and put up No Love Deep Web for streaming and free download. Maybe their contract with Epic/Columbia allows them to do this as long as they deliver some other album for label release, but something tells me this wasn’t exactly what Epic expected. I thought Epic was an odd choice for this band anyway, and maybe we’re starting to see why this wasn’t a marriage made in heaven.

Either way, it’s cool to get this new album. It’s so fresh that I’ve barely started listening to it. The SoundCloud player for the stream is after the jump, and you can go HERE to download it while you can (click the smaller “Premium Download” link — it’s the only one that will start the download of the album). You can also download it off the SoundCloud player, or from the other download links I’m including after the jump.

Also, the album cover is a picture of the album’s title written on an erect dick. No fucks given.

Also after the jump, following the erect dick cover art (NSFW): a Phro-tastic write-up I just received from Phro (also NSFW) about this news.

(via Pitchfork) Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ATRIARCH, VOIVOD, SYBREED, AND CYTOTOXIN

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 012012
 

I’ve been missing in action more than usual over the last 4 days, having been kidnapped by work-related travel and activities that were fun, but  cut deeply into blog time. I’m now back home on this Sunday night and have been trying to find out what I missed in the world of metal. Of course, I missed a lot that interested me — too much to capture in a single post — so I’m going to pick out just a few of the items I thought were worth spreading around.

ATRIARCH

I first came across Portland’s Atriarch through their 20 Buck Spin split release with Oakland’s Alaric — and that whole split release is just chock full of win. If you haven’t heard it, check it out on Bandcamp here.

Atriarch is now on the Profound Lore label and their first PL release will be Ritual of Passing, scheduled to hit the streets on October 30. The cover art up there is by Stevie Floyd (Taurus). I saw that Pitchfork recently premiered the album’s third track “Altars”, and then I saw that PL had put the song up for streaming on SoundCloud as well. And I checked it out. Fuckin’ glad I did, too. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: NECROWRETCH – “NOW YOU’RE IN HELL”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Sep 302012
 

I first became curious about Necrowretch (from Valence, France) in February 2012 when I saw that they had been signed by Century Media based solely on two demos (in 2009 and 2010) and a four-song EP in 2011 — Putrefactive Infestation. I tracked down and listened to that EP and reviewed it here.

At the time of that review, there were plans for the Belgian label Detest Records to release  a 7″ NecroWretch EP titled Now You’re In Hell before the band turned to recording their debut album for Century Media. That release did happen last spring, though I overlooked it until recently.

The 7″ release includes two songs — an original Necrowretch number called “From A Hideous Summoning” and a cover of Death’s “Zombie Ritual” from Scream Bloody Gore (1987), which Necrowretch recorded on the 10th anniversary of Chuck Schuldiner’s death. Yesterday, Necrowretch uploaded the original track to YouTube, with the video providing a detailed survey of the beautifully beastly cover art provided by Montenegrin artist Milovan Novakovic. Continue reading »

RECOMMENDATIONS FROM SURGICALBRUTE: CHAPEL, THROWN, AND MORBID VOMIT

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Sep 292012
 

Long-time NCS reader SurgicalBrute has been a reliable source of eviscerating musical recommendations for the site, sometimes through guest posts and sometimes via e-mail. Recently he sent me an e-mail with three new recommendations, all of which proved to be excellent. I’ve collected some info and music from each of the bands in this post. Here we go . . . .

CHAPEL

Chapel are based in Vancouver, Canada and they released their debut album — Satan’s Rock ‘n’ Roll — on August 1 via the Irish label Invictus Productions. Here’s what SurgicalBrute said about Chapel:

“Midnight . . . Speedwolf . . . forget them both . . . this band plays some ripping satanic blackened speed metal, and will definitely be on my year end list.”

Rooting around in the interhole, I found that CVLT Nation is streaming the album in full (here). I’ve been listening to it, and yeah, it fucken rips hell. It’s not hard to imagine that if hell were real, this would be the party music of choice. Matching rock and punk beats with filthy riffs, burned-raw vocals, and acetylene solos, Chapel have created a virally infectious debut release. Check out a few of the songs next. Continue reading »

NEW VIDEOS: HOODED MENACE, DOWN, AND RED ELEVEN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Sep 282012
 

(Artwork by Sandro of Undead Creep.)

Not long after I posted that new Gojira video earlier today, I found three more new videos that I thought were worth sharing with our readers. The bands are: Hooded Menace (Finland), Down (US-NOLA), and Red Eleven (Finland).

HOODED MENACE

I’ve been writing a lot about this Finnish group’s new album, Effigies Of Evil, which is out now on Relapse. Of course, the one thing I haven’t yet written is a review, though I haven’t given up hope that I’ll find time to explain in more detail why I think this album is so titanic.

The latest from Hooded Menace is a music video premiered today by Metal Injection for “Crumbling Insanity”. The video was directed by Justin Oakley for Burial Offerings (Ulver). It intersperses footage of the band performing with images of such things as crucifixion, impalement, murder, and the collapse of churches. The song well-represents the talent of Hooded Menace for blending necrotic melodies, hard-charging death metal riffs, and the suffocating weight of funereal doom into a potent brew. Here’s the video: Continue reading »

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