SHORT BUT SWEET: GOSPEL OF THE HORNS – “CEREMONIAL CONJURATION”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Oct 032012
 

Sometimes I think that if a hateful supreme being brought his fist down on an astral kill-switch for metal and stopped the flow of new music forever, thundering “THOU HAST ENOUGH, AND THERE WILL BE NO MORE!”, we’d all still be fine. I listen to a lot of music, but every week I discover some new band I’d never heard of before, with a history and a discography unknown to me who prove to be worth the time. After many years of listening, I know I’ve still barely scratched the surface.

Take Gospel of the Horns as an example — and by the way, isn’t that a fine, fine band name? It even turns into the acronym G.O.T.H. This band trace their roots to Melbourne, Australia, in the year 1993. They’ve toiled in the darkness for nearly 20 years (with the inevitable changes in line-up), producing a couple of demos, a couple of EPs, two albums, and a compilation, and yet they are new to me.

My introduction to G.O.T.H. came through a five-song 12″ vinyl EP released a bit earlier this year under the name Ceremonial Conjuration, with the music waiting behind the venomous gaze of that goat creature on the cover. What I got was a fistful of slashing, guitar-driven black thrash ‘n’ roll.

G.O.T.H. know how to riff your face like a barbed flail, snapping your head back and forth with one galvanizing chord after another. Trading off between punk rhythms, speed-metal fury, and mid-paced head-busters, G.O.T.H. have created one purulent mass of filth encrusted infection, each song bent on domination and every one very damned effective in accomplishing the mission. Continue reading »

RUMBLINGS OF THE BEAST: DEAD BEYOND BURIED, GHOULGOTHA, SHADES OF RETRIBUTION

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Oct 032012
 

This is another “Seen and Heard” post. I just got tired of calling them “Seen and Heard”. I thought about spelling it “Scene and Herd”, just to fuck with people a bit, except those words would really send the wrong message about today’s bands.

Dead Beyond Buried (UK), Ghoulgotha (U.S.), and Shades of Retribution (India) are underground collectives who are each doing their own thing their own way (and by my lights, the right way). They will draw fans not from scene kids or those who travel in herds but from metalheads with discerning taste. You’ll see (and hear) what I mean. Their music makes me want to do my part to help elevate their visibility.

So without further ado, here are the items I came across yesterday via e-mails to NCS and perusal of the interhole that I thought were worth spreading around.

DEAD BEYOND BURIED

I really liked this London-based band’s last album on the Seige of Amida label, Inheritors of Hell (2010), but I had kind of forgotten about them. Their name popped up on my radar screen again recently as one of the bands highly recommended by Ageless Oblivion guitarist David Porter in the Porter interview conducted by our Andy Synn not long ago. Not much later I saw that they would be self-releasing a new album (The Dark Era) in the near future, and that was welcome news. And then I saw that they had released a music video a few days ago for one of the new tracks, “Cold Black Stars”, and I got even more interested.

Man, what a surprise! The video, which was filmed, animated and edited by Joe Slatter (www.thedarkpower.co.uk), is one of the best I’ve seen this year. The animation, and how it alternates and eventually merges with the band performance, is fascinating. And the song itself . . . Continue reading »

HATEBREED / WHITECHAPEL / ALL SHALL PERISH — ACE OF SPADES, SEPT 27, 2012

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 022012
 

(In this post DGR reviews the Sacramento show of the current Hatebreed-Whitechapel-All Shall Perish tour on September 27.)

Here’s the thing about a show like this. I know that I am not the hugest fan of the hardcore scene and I’ll be the first to admit that I was really only there to see All Shall Perish and Whitechapel (for the 2nd and 3rd times, respectively), and if Deez Nuts turned out to be great, fine. If Hatebreed were awesome, then that would be great, too. However, I found myself a little more excited when it finally hit me that this was what they were calling the Ten Years Of Perseverance tour and that Hatebreed would be playing pretty much all of that disc front to back, with some of their other songs interspersed throughout. Now, if you’re going to go see Hatebreed it may as well be during this tour because man, Perseverance is kind of THE Hatebreed album and everything after that was more for fans.

I managed to get some good parking and they already had the doors open, which was a little odd since the flyer said 6:30 doors, 7:00 start time. Little did I know that they would actually start the show about half an hour early and end it really early and pack a ton of music in between. Seriously, I got home at 10:44, which is nuts. I usually don’t expect to get home from one of these until 11:30-ish. Also, I bumped into the folks from RockHardLive, one of the local video companies, so any footage comes from them. You should check them out and follow their YouTube channel, because they do some damn good concert footage from around this area. Continue reading »

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 »

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