THE LEVITATION HEX AND ATRETIC INTESTINE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Oct 152012
 

I decided to start off the new week of NCS posts with two new discoveries from opposite ends of the Earth: The Levitation Hex from Australia and Atretic Intestine from Finland.

THE LEVITATION HEX

I found out about The Levitation Hex thanks to an e-mail from fireangel of the Night Elves blog. Not knowing anything about them, she caught part of their show at the Progpower Europe festival in early October, and they obviously made quite a favorable impression on her, not only because of the music but also because of their stage presence. I’ve watched their recently released music video and one other track that’s streaming via Soundcloud, and they’ve made quite the favorable impression on me, too.

The band was formed in 2010 by Adam Agius, the former frontman and guitarist of a long-running Australian metal group named Alchemist. He recruited Alarum bassist Mark Palfreyman, and they were eventually joined by drummer Ben Hocking of Aeon of Horus and ex-Alarum guitarist Scott Young. This past summer The Levitation Hex released their self-titled debut album, which features the very cool cover art of Glenn Smith.  Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC: STRATOS SUCCESS FOR FELIX BAUMGARTNER

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  13 Responses »
Oct 142012
 

In one of our THAT’S METAL! posts back in early August (here), we included an item about the plans of Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner (a/k/a “Fearless Felix”) to make a parachute jump from a height of 120,000 feet and break the sound barrier with his body as he was in free-fall. The project, called Stratos, was being funded by Red Bull. And earlier today, Fearless Felix achieved his goal.

He ascended 24 miles into the sky via a gigantic balloon (55 stories tall) filled with 30 million cubic feet of helium and then jumped — from a height of 128,000 feet above the Earth, reaching a top speed of 833.9 mph. That amounts to Mach 1.24, which is faster than the speed of sound. No one has ever reached that speed wearing only a high-tech suit.

In one of those coincidences of history, Baumgartner did this 65 years to the day — Oct. 14, 1947 — after pilot Chuck Yaeger (of “The Right Stuff” fame) broke the sound barrier in an aircraft. If it had been me 128,000 feet up, looking down at the planet through an open door, my final words would have been “FUCK THIS!  I’VE CHANGED MY FREAKIN’ MIND!” Instead, Baumgartner’s words before he took the plunge were these:

“Sometimes you have to go really high to see how small you are.” Continue reading »

SUNDAY VIDEOGRAPHY: XERATH AND GRAVE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Oct 142012
 

Just yesterday I was raving about the performance of Sweden’s Grave at the Seattle stop of their current tour with Morbid Angel and Dark Funeral, and what should greet my bloodshot eyes this morning than a video of the band killing it on stage. I’m not sure where this performance was filmed (it’s not from the Seattle show), but it’s damned cool.

Grave bassist Mika Lagrén attached one of those tiny cameras to the head stock of his bass and let it roll. You can see and hear frontman Ola Lindgren in the background and you can hear that nasty snare tone from the drum kit that I was talking about in the Seattle review. You might get a crick in your neck from watching this, but for me it brought back some very sweet recent memories of an awesome night of metal.

This morning, thanks to a message from TheMadIsraeli, I also caught up with the latest official music video from UK juggernauts Xerath, which debuted last week. The song is “Machine Insurgency” from the band’s most recent album, II (reviewed here). That was one of our favorite discs from 2011, and the song is a real ass-kicker. Continue reading »

CREEPMIME: “CHIAROSCURO”

 Album Reviews, Free Shit  6 Responses »
Oct 142012
 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews a classic of Dutch death metal from a long-defunct band and provides a free download of this out-of-print beauty.)

Ok, this is me finally getting around to a favor that was asked of me all the way back in the summer of 2011.  You might remember my coverage of a now defunct Dutch band I was a huge fan of called Cypher (who were kind enough to provide us with free downloads of their music, including that unreleased EP we helped bring to the light of day).  While I wait for Tobias Borra and gang to resurface with what is essentially Cypher 2.0 (name not yet revealed), Tobias had asked me to check out a band considered to be Dutch death metal legends alongside the likes of Pestilence who were rather overshadowed in their day.  The band has Cypher/I, Chaos/Dew Scented bassist Joost Van Der Graff on bass and vocal duties, so Tobias felt I’d find it extremely relevant to my interests.

The band in question is Creepmime. Information about them is rather obscured and hard to come across (even the Metal Archives page appears to be inaccurate and very incomplete).  Actually, information on them is VERY obscure and nearly fucking impossible to come across.  Wanna know how obscure?  It’s nearly impossible to find line-up-per-album info, including for the album (Chiaroscuro) that’s the subject of this post. This band is so obscure that there aren’t release dates, simply fucking estimates of time.  All I can tell you is that Chiaroscuro came out sometime between late ’93 and ’95. Continue reading »

MORBID ANGEL, DARK FUNERAL, AND GRAVE: LIVE IN SEATTLE — OCT 10, 2012

 Concert Reviews  10 Responses »
Oct 132012
 

On the night of October 10, 2012, I was in metal heaven, and the gods were all on stage: Morbid Angel, Dark Funeral, and Grave.

At times like this, I love living in Seattle even more than usual. The city is just big enough to draw tours like this one, but small enough that they get shoe-horned into venues like El Corazon. I’ve seen reports that El Corazon has a capacity of 750, but that must include the separate room where the main bar is located because there’s no way the room with the stage holds that many. Especially when the bar area in the concert room is blocked off and used for gear storage, as it was for this 21-and-over show, that room doesn’t look like it holds more than about 250 people.

And it wasn’t even packed to capacity for this show. Though the turnout was strong, it was still possible to maneuver pretty close to the stage, as I did, getting within about 10 feet from the front. The only drawback was that I forgot to bring my fucking camera, an oversight for which I will forever beat myself up. My companion took a few pics with her phone, and I’m using a few of the better ones to illustrate this review, but still . . . not the same.

GRAVE

I’ll just be honest and admit up-front that I had trouble maintaining objectivity about each of these bands. Completely separating the feelings of excitement-verging-on-awe that I felt from finally getting to see each of them live from my reactions to what I heard just isn’t possible. Grave, for example, is pretty much a band who can do no wrong in my book. They occupy a central place in metal history as one of the progenitors of Swedish death metal, yet they have not only survived for more than two decades, they continue to put out dependably strong albums, with this year’s Endless Procession of Souls (reviewed here) being no exception. Continue reading »

SOMETHING VERY NASTY: DE MAGIA VETERUM – “THE DEIFICATION”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Oct 132012
 

They left me late in the day after what seemed like hours of feasting with lip-smacking glee on selected internal organs.  My internal organs.  They secreted an enzyme in their salvia that acted like an anesthetic, dulling but not deadening the pain, avoiding the onset of shock that might have killed the host.  Apparently they prefer the pulse of warm blood through their banquet instead of the cold, maggot-ridden dregs of cooling, lifeless flesh.

More than once, after seeing Jaws, I morbidly imagined the horror of being eaten alive by a carnivorous thing for whom I, for all my vaulting egoism, was to be nothing but food, my consciousness surviving long enough to realize that I was being eaten and would be digested and then shat out, my life amounting to nothing but nutrients for another.  But actually experiencing this firsthand instead of imagining it made my waking dreams a pale fairy tale by comparison.

I did not wonder who they were.  I knew.  After all, I had unwittingly invited them into the chamber of my body, opening myself to their hunger and their gnashing jaws. They entered through the ears. Continue reading »

IT’S FRIDAY, SO IT MUST BE TIME FOR A NEW GOJIRA LYRIC VIDEO: “LIQUID FIRE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Oct 122012
 

Gojira have produced another lyric video for a track from L’Enfant Sauvage. This time the song is “Liquid Fire” and the visual accompaniment is a montage of really excellent live performance photos.

The song is really excellent, too, including the lyrics. Not a bad way to end our posts for this work week. Of course, we will have some other kind of ear wreckage ready for tomorrow morning.

Video after the jump . . . . Continue reading »

THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT: AN UPDATE

 Metal News  4 Responses »
Oct 122012
 

Michiel Dekker and Ivo Hilgenkamp, on the verge of redefining civilization.  Again.

The Monolith Deathcult’s new album TETRAGRAMMATON has been brewing slowly, like a fine Dutch lager, except with more radiation. Their last album, Trivmvirate, erupted from the womb in 2008, and the gestation period for the new release has been so protracted that we expect the new offspring to be a real monster (yeah, I mixed my metaphors, so sue me).

TMDC have periodically been streaming pre-production teasers of the new music, and we’ve been dutifully posting those streams as they’ve emerged, but they haven’t stayed up on the net for long, and it’s never been entirely clear whether the songs would actually find a place on the new album. But the final shape of the music is now being formed.

Yesterday we received word that TMDC entered the studio in September to record TETRAGRAMMATON. The band’s statement deserves to be quoted in full, so masterful is its understated eloquence:

“Since 2008 – when we redefined art, music and human civilisation – we’ve been milking Trivmvirate until it’s cheese,” said bassist/vocalist Robin Kok, “so we decided to make a new album and see if we can milk that even further.” Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC FROM KRODA, SKELETAL REMAINS, AND TIAMAT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Oct 122012
 

In this post I’ve collected three new songs I heard earlier today that I wanted to recommend. They’re all quite different from each other, sharing only a common devotion to the darkness.

KRODA

Long-term NCS readers will know this Ukrainian band because I’ve written about them so often (their 2011 album Schwarzpfad was probably my favorite black metal album out of all the ones I heard last year, and I included a song-stream from the album on our list of the 2011’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs). But we continue to pick up new readers at a steady clip, and the band’s new recording gives me an excuse to introduce them to our new followers.

As previously reported at this site, Kroda will be releasing a live album in the form of a combined CD and DVD under the title HelCarpathian Black Metal – Heil Ragnarok: Live Under Hexenhammer, which was recorded and filmed in Moscow. Today the band announced that mixing and mastering of the album is now complete and that it will be released as a digipack edition later this winter. They also released one of the live tracks for streaming.

It’s a cover of a song called “Noregsgard” by the Norwegian band Storm (which included Fenriz [Darkthrone] and Satyr [Satyricon]) from their 1995 Nordavind album. I believe the song, even as originally recorded by Storm, was a metallicized version of a folk tune, and Kroda’s performance, which includes both flute and clean vocals, definitely has a pagan/folk air. But it’s still pretty fuckin’ heavy. I like it a lot. Continue reading »

METAL FROM ROMANIA: ABIGAIL AND SICULICIDIUM

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  8 Responses »
Oct 122012
 

On the same day last week I came across both of these very good Romanian bands.  The last time I came across a Romanian band that was new to me was in June (Void Forger), so to find two on the same day was like a message from some dark entity compelling me to write something. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was just a coincidence, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.

ABIGAIL

I have a post by MaxR at Metal Bandcamp to thank for my discovery of Abigail. As you’ll have realized by now, this is not the Japanese black/thrash band named Abigail. This group is based in Bucharest, though they’ve been around as long as those Japanese stalwarts, with their first demo dating back to 1994.

Despite their longevity, they have yet to release a full album, instead producing demos and EPs — though they are now at work on a projected 3-CD + DVD album entitled Dark Days Turned Into Blue Nights. What I heard was the band’s most recent release, an October 2011 EP named It Is the Night I Fear, which is available for free on Bandcamp. A review of that EP is next . . . Continue reading »

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