PSYCHIATRIC REGURGITATION: “STABBED IN THE EYES WITH A CRACK PIPE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 042012
 

PSYCHIATRIC REGURGITATION are an unsigned band from Dallas, Texas, who sent me the songs from their new debut album not long ago, describing the music as sort of like a cross between Death/Decrepit Birth and Exhumed/Carcass/Impaled.

The music happened to arrive in one of those rare moments when I wasn’t right in the middle of something else, and the description sounded like my kinda thing. So, I listened to a few tracks and got a big smile from what I heard — and not just from the sample that starts off the opening title track, “Stabbed In the Eyes With A Crack Pipe”.

Despite the humorous samples and song titles — including the unforgettable “Smoke Crack, Worship Satan, Kill People” — the music is seriously good death metal. It’s a rapid-fire blast of skull-hammering brutality delivered with blazing technicality, but it also includes catchy melodic riffing, head-spinning solos and progressive instrumental breaks that may take you by surprise, and even a few clobbering slam breakdowns. The barking-dog vocals are cool, too (big, rabid dogs, to be clear).

When you see names like Death, Decrepit Birth, and Exhumed tossed around in an e-mail out of the blue, you tend to take it with a grain of salt. But Psychiatric Regurgitation have the songwriting and performance chops to back it up.  Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HELLWELL, SHINING, AND VHÖL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 032012
 

Here’s another daily round-up of metal things I saw and heard this morning that I thought were worth sharing. Fair warning: there is clean singing in the first two items, but it’s counter-balanced by harsh vocals and an overlay of darkness.

HELLWELL

I came to metal relatively late in life. I’ve devoted a lot of effort catching up on what I missed in the decades preceding my initiation. One of the bands I missed was Wichita-based Manila Road, though judging from the enthusiasm that greeted our report about the band’s scheduled appearance at MARYLAND DEATHFEST 2013, it seems many of our readers are quite familiar with them.

This item, however, is not about Manila Road. It’s about a side project created by Manila Road’s Mark “The Shark” Shelton. The band is called Hellwell, the album is named Beyond the Boundaries of Sin, and it will be released this month by High Roller Records and Shadow Kingdom Records — though it’s already up on Bandcamp. Shelton describes it as “like Manilla Road’s evil twin”, with a sound that resembles “a cross between Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, early Metallica and Manilla Road.”

The band is named after Ernest “Ernie” Cunningham Hellwell, who Shelton says is a writer of horror-themed fiction and plays keyboards, synthesizers, and bass on Hellwell’s debut album. I am somewhat skeptical about whether Hellwell is a real person as opposed to the alter ego of someone else, because I can find nothing about him in my net sleuthing, either as a writer or as a musician.

In any event, I was attracted to the music by the awesome cover art (above) by Alexander von Wieding, and this morning I listened to about half of the album on Bandcamp. Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 62): THE LABOR DAY EDITION

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  18 Responses »
Sep 032012
 

It’s time for another edition of “THAT’S METAL!”, in which we collect images, videos, and news items that we think are metal, even though they’re not music (though sometimes we include music that’s not metal, but it’s “metal”, if that makes any sense, which it probably doesn’t, but we only make sense about half the time around here on a good day anyway).

We have a slug of items for you today, but it’s Labor Day, in which we Americans commemorate the labor movement and the value of hard work by fucking off, drinking copious amounts of beer, and grilling dead animals, so I figure you’ll have time to wade through everything — and it’s all worth the wading.

ITEM ONE

As usual, Item One relates to that pic you see at the top of the post. That lovely young lady with the flowing tresses is Sue Austin. She’s a British multimedia performance and installation artist who has been wheelchair-bound since 1996 and has devoted much of her art to challenging notions of disabled people as “the other”. She developed an underwater wheelchair with help of diving experts, who installed two dive propulsion units on the chair as well as a clear fin that helps with steering. More details about the development of the chair can be found here.

Undoubtedly, there are more efficient ways for a disabled person to scuba dive than being strapped to a self-propelled wheelchair — in fact, Ms. Austin learned how to dive in 2005, long before this chair became a reality. But there’s a point being made here, and the chair is part of a performance designed to drive the point home — because, as you’re about to see, Ms. Austin also assembled a film crew to create a beautiful documentary of her dreamlike journey through an ocean world. Continue reading »

MIDNIGHT: “COMPLETE AND TOTAL HELL”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Sep 032012
 

(In this post, BadWolf reviews the forthcoming Hells Headbangers compilation of Midnight’s entire pre-Satanic Royalty back catalogue.)

Midnight came seemingly out of nowhere last year with their debut Satanic Royalty. Clocking in at just over thirty minutes, the album roared out of the gates, dazzled with its compelling mix of old-school black metal, D-beat, and classic cock rock, then ended too quickly. I loved it—as did many others, judging by Midnight’s announced slot at Maryland Deathfest—and if I’d heard it before the holiday season, it would most certainly have wormed into my end-of-year lists. I await tis sequel with bated breath.

But Satanic Royalty was hardly Midnight’s first release. The Cleveland three-peice has been releasing music in splits, demos, singles, and EP’s since 2003, and now all of that early material (minus a Quiet Riot cover) is available in one convenient package: Complete and Total Hell. And while it hardly feels like the rock-solid sequel to Satanic Royalty, it serves as a convenient appetizer—the prequel to the sequel, if you’ll pardon my reference.

Complete and Total Hell flows well as an album, even though it is a compilation. “Funeral Bell” opens with some Bathory-style atmosphere, and then the record pumps out track after track of chunky and distorted riffs. The early tracks sound like they were recorded straight to cassette in a basement over a boombox—which they may have been. The raw recording works in their favor since the songs emerge from simple building blocks. As the record progresses you can actually hear more and more money flow into Midnight’s recording—the guitar solos clear up, the bass rumbles deeper, until the music breaks into jangly boogie rock on “Berlin is Burning,” over an hour later. Yes, an hour; where Satanic Royalty was brief, Complete and Total Hell is overlong. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BROOD OF HATRED, PLANKS, A TRIBE CALLED RED, AND ALLEGAEON

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Sep 022012
 

It may be Labor Day Weekend here in the U.S., and although it’s fair to say that I’m fucking off even more than usual with a 3-day weekend to enjoy, I’m also still prowling the interhole in search of new metal experiences worth sharing with our beloved readers, without whom I would just be talking to myself like the average homeless person. And man oh man, did I find some intriguing items yesterday.

I knew only one of these bands before seeing and hearing what I saw — Allegaeon. But we’ve slobbered over them a lot at NCS already, and they’re getting buckets of slobber from fans and critics already, so despite the fact that their new video is indeed awesome, I’m putting them last today. In front of them come three more obscure collectives that deserve the front end of the spotlight.

BROOD OF HATRED

I’m pretty sure that the first and last time I wrote about a metal band from Tunisia was in July 2010, when the subject was a band named Barzakh, in a series on Metal From North Africa. Yesterday I found another Tunisian band named Brood of Hatred, thanks to the wonderful Middle Eastern-based metal blog, Metality. This past March, Brood of Hatred released their debut EP, New Order of Intelligence, which is available for free download on Bandcamp (here). But though I’m now interested in hearing that, what I heard (and saw) yesterday that grabbed my attention was something even more recent.

It’s a brand new video for a new single called “Cacophony In Creation” that will appear on the band’s debut album, Skinless Agony. The song is excellent, both very well written and very well performed.  Continue reading »

NEUTRON HAMMER: “IRON STORM EVOCATION”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 022012
 

The album cover provides a good clue: Iron Storm Evocation is raw, primitive, and thoroughly necrotic. It’s also one hell of a hell-ripping ride.

The album is the full-length debut by Finland’s Neutron Hammer, the culmination of nine years of effort that included a demo and two EPs. It doesn’t boast zooming technicality, ground-breaking creativity, or melodic hooks that you’ll be humming days later, but for this kind of music who wants or needs that? What Iron Storm Evocation brings is 40 minutes of blasphemous black thrashing death mixed with venomous black ‘n’ roll that’s a shitload of evil fun. It exerts a kind of animal magnetism that has brought me back to it repeatedly over the last month.

With few exceptions, the music barrels ahead at high speed with high distortion, and although the production quality isn’t really lo-fi, it’s close enough to coat everything in grime. The dominant musical style is blasting blackened thrash with rapid-fire chords and hammering percussion, sometimes blazing away with enough speed to fuse everything into the proverbial wall of noise. But no song on the album is really all one thing.

Even on the tracks where rolling hellfire is king, you get changes in rhythm and riffing that bring the beats of old-school punk, crust and d-beat, Motörhead on an open throttle, and pretty close to straight-up rock, without ever losing the authentic air of thoroughly blackened filthiness. There’s a dose of Venom and Hellhammer, an injection of of Impaled Nazarene and Nunslaughter, and even a bit of Discharge,  to go along with the hailstorm of infernal thrashing. Continue reading »

ANAAL NATHRAKH: TITLE, RELEASE DATE, AND ALBUM ART FOR “VANITAS” SURFACE

 Metal News  12 Responses »
Sep 012012
 

Well, well, look at what popped up on Anaal Nathrakh’s Facebook page (here) a couple of hours ago. Though there hasn’t yet been any official press about it, I believe this confirms that the name of their next album is Vanitas and that it will be released on October 15 by Candlelight Records. And lookie what else I found — a page where the album appears to be available for pre-order (here) that includes a small image of the album cover:

You may think that “vanitas” means “vanity”, and so it does, but it also means “emptiness” and has connotations about “the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of all earthly goods and pursuits”. “Vanitas” was also the name given to a genre of still-life painting that flourished in the Netherlands in the early 17th century, usually containing “collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures”.

This album has been finished since March of this year. Here’s what AN’s Dave Hunt said about it in an interview about three days after it was completed: Continue reading »

PSYCHOFAGIST: “9 PSALMS OF AN ANTIMUSIC TO COME”

 Metal News, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Sep 012012
 

In February 2010, when NCS was only three months old, I stumbled across a mind-bending Italian band named Psychofagist and enthusiastically reviewed their second album, II secondo tragico, which had been released in November 2009 by an online record label named Subordinate Recordings. To quote myself (always an enjoyable activity):

“This noise howls and shrieks, stops and turns in sharp angles, screams in the piercing wail of a saxophone being tortured within an inch of its life, and then breaks down into a gloomy, meandering trek through a surreal landscape. . . . The drums and the bass careen unpredictably from wall to wall with power – you feel like ducking lest your head come off. The guitars scream furiously or shudder in desperation or mutter like the muted ravings of the insane. No consistent rhythms here. No headbanging riffage to be found. Just a pummeling but erratic sonic assault that keeps you constantly off-balance. . . . Oh, and did I mention the banjo on ‘Defragmentation Rotunda’? And there’s a flute in the mix somewhere too.”

The music was dramatically variable, dynamically unhinged, and like nothing else I had heard before. But despite how amazing I thought the album was, I lost track of Psychofagist until TheMadIsraeli sent me an e-mail today recommending a Psychofagist song called “Apophtegma Non-Sense”. It turns out that song is one of five that Psychofagist contributed to a January 2012 split with that excellent Polish grind unit, Antigama. The split was also released by Subordinate and its title is 9 Psalms of An Antimusic To Come.

Happily, the Psychofagist tracks are available on Bandcamp. Happily, the music is just as amazingly fucked up as ever. Continue reading »

MALAYSIAN DEATH: LAVATORY AND HUMILIATION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Sep 012012
 

We’ve never written about a Malaysian metal band in the nearly three years that NCS has been fouling up the interhole. If you had asked me two days ago to name a Malaysian metal band, I couldn’t have done it. I know there’s a scene there, and my guess is that, like a lot of Southeast Asian metal, it’s dominated by brutal/technical death metal and grindcore bands, but as for concrete facts, I had none.

However, within these last two days, by sheer coincidence, I’ve come across two Malaysian bands, both of whom have recently been signed by noteworthy record labels: Lavatory and Humiliation. They’re both devoted to old school death metal (though not the same kind), they’re both working on their label debuts, and they both sound tasty.

LAVATORY

It seems this band (above) is very new, having released their first music in the form of an EP called Transgression just earlier this summer (which I found on cassette at Hells Headbangers). But that EP was enough to snag the attention of Pulverised Records, who signed them for the release of a debut album.

Pulverised can be relied upon to deliver quality, and by “quality” I mean death metal that the average human skull isn’t strong enough to withstand. So the Pulverised signing alone was grounds for high hopes. I also found a song from Transgression that provides further grounds. Its name is “Blinded By Darkness”, and it’s a goddamn good song. The power of the filth is strong with these young ones. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: EARLY GRAVES, ZONARIA, DETHKLOK, NUCLEAR DEATH TERROR, RED ELEVEN

 Free Shit, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Aug 312012
 

Someone left a comment on one of today’s earlier posts saying “NCS has always been the most long-winded out of all the metal sites.” Really hurt my feelings. Made me feel real low and pouty. Some people just wanna know if the shit is awesome or not. Makes me wanna just clam up and let all this shit that I saw and heard today speak for itself.

EARLY GRAVES

New Early Graves album. Red Horse. Out 10/30 on No Sleep Records. Pre-Order available at http://www.nosleepstore.com/. New song, too. Also called “Red Horse”. Fucken explosive crusty punky grindy mayhem. Pure awesomeness. (thanks Utmu)


Continue reading »

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