WOUND UPON WOUND – S/T

 Album Reviews, Free Shit  6 Responses »
Jul 252012
 

(In February 2011, we reviewed the 2010 debut EP of Dublin’s Wound Upon Wound. Today, NCS writer Andy Synn provides his assessment of the band’s debut full-length album, which was released earlier this month and is available for free download.)

Brothers and sisters, I am here today to talk about… DOOM!!!!

Blackened doom at least. Or, Doomy black metal. Genre terms are confusing. Either way this album is a monolithic treatise on desperation and despair, soundtracked by venomous tremolo melodies and crushing slabs of doom-laden guitars.

An admission though, first. Doom isn’t one of the genres I am particularly au fait with. Though there’s a crossover with some of the more melodic, melancholic stuff I find pleasure in imbibing (a pint of Daylight Dies always goes down smooth) I’m definitely something of a neophyte when it comes to the slow struggle, at least on record (though I have experienced the breaking weight of several devastating doom bands in the flesh).

But Wound Upon Wound are far from a simple Doom band. The name itself should tell you that. No, what we have here is a black metal band who are not only unafraid to ease up on the speed once in a while, but who actually revel in reining in their breakneck speed suddenly, reducing their momentum to a crushing, cataclysmic crawl, all the chaos and calamity crashing together in a massive pile-up of sickening, juddering riffage. Continue reading »

AGALLOCH: MARROW OF DENVER’S SPIRIT

 Concert Reviews  21 Responses »
Jul 252012
 

(NCS guest contributor Mike Yost attended the Denver stop of Agalloch’s current tour with Taurus on July 17, 2012, and graciously shared this review with us.  It also appears on Mike’s own blog, Remnants of Words.)

It was just after 5pm, and I was pacing back and forth in my apartment, trying to watch a movie.  The concert didn’t start until 8pm, and I was attempting to exercise some patience.  Then I thought to myself:  “Fuck patience.  And fuck exercise, too!”  I grabbed my ticket, some cash for swag, and my ID.  I ran out the door, jogging (not walking) toward the theater where Agalloch was going to play.

Normally I wouldn’t stand in line for two-and-a-half hours to see a concert.  Nowadays I’m more content to hang back and enjoy the music with a cold beer in my hand.  But Agalloch isn’t just some nominal band rolling through town, and this wasn’t going to be just another show.

The concert was at Denver’s Bluebird Theater.  An official historical landmark, the brick building is one year shy of being a century old.  It was once a movie house, and its maximum capacity is only 500.  This creates an intimate atmosphere between the crowd and the band.  Best of all, it’s only a fifteen-minute walk from my apartment. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: HOODED MENACE / HORSE LATITUDES SPLIT

 Album Reviews, Metal News, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jul 242012
 

Among the current practitioners of death-laden doom metal, you’ll be hard-pressed to find two more catastrophic practitioners of the art than Finland’s Hooded Menace and Horse Latitudes. In January 2012, Doomentia Records released a 12″ vinyl split by the two bands, with each one contributing a song. Since January, Doomentia has gone through two limited pressings of 500 copies, and both are sold out, though it appears that copies may still be available through the bands’ online shops — Hooded Menace here and Horse Latitudes here.

Fortunately, you don’t have to scrounge around for one of the remaining copies of the vinyl edition to hear the music, because Doomentia has recently made the split available for streaming and digital download on Bandcamp.

As we previously reported, Hooded Menace also have a new album on the way via Relapse Records by the name of Effigies of Evil. It will be released on September 11 and can be pre-ordered in a variety of formats and bundles here. Today, Noisecreep premiered that album’s title track, which I strongly recommend you check out at this location.

But the main purpose of this post is to review and recommend the Hooded Menace / Horse Latitudes split. Though it consists of only two songs, it’s almost 19 minutes of music, because both songs are long-format offerings. Both songs are also lessons in how to make slow, extended, completely gut-crunching music without sending listeners into a coma. Continue reading »

INTERLUDE: TWO AMAZING FAN-MADE VIDEOS FOR VALLENFYRE AND PARADISE LOST

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jul 242012
 

As previously mentioned, we’ve got another doom-oriented post planned for today, as a bookend for the one with which we started, but in the meantime here’s one more interlude.

Vallenfyre and Paradise Lost are two of our favorite bands, united by the common presence of Greg Mackintosh. Both of them have released extremely strong albums over the last eight months — Vallenfyre’s A Fragile King (reviewed at NCS here and here) last November and Tragic Idol by Paradise Lost (reviewed here) earlier this year.

Both of them also seem to be united by the dedication of fans who are not only faithful but also really fuckin’ talented. Witness the two videos featured in this post, which I just saw this morning.

The first one is a stop-action animation for Vallenfyre’s tremendously monstrous song “Ravenous Whore”. It tells the story of theocratic rat people trying to summon a creature through the sacrifice of one of their own, and it’s really well-done. Not only is the animation extremely cool, but the conception and syncing of the visuals to the music are creative and beautifully executed. Credit goes to Jamie Evans from the UK, who is submitting the video to the upcoming Bradford Animation Festival.

The second video is another animation, in the style of a lyric video, for the song “Theories From Another World”, which is probably my favorite track on Tragic Idol. A Russian fan who goes by the name MrHuempolbu created the animation using the Tragic Idol cover artwork created by Jean Emmanuel Simoulin (www.metastazis.com), and it’s also superb.

Both videos are greatly helped by the fact that the songs kick so much ass, but the creativity and artistic skill shown in both of them deserve a round of applause. Watch them next . . . Continue reading »

INTERLUDE: FALLEN JOY, FROM ASHES RISE, AND THROWERS

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 242012
 

We started this day with doom (mixed with stoner) in a review of the debut EP by France’s Mudbath. We’ll be going back to doom in the next post (and I’m talkin’ about seriously catastrophic doom), but just to prevent things from getting too abysmal around here, this post includes two videos and a song that I saw and heard yesterday that get the blood pumping (instead of freezing it into a viscous sludge). And the bands are: Fallen Joy (France), From Ashes Rise (U.S. – Portland), and Throwers (Germany) — clicking on their names will take you to their Facebook pages for more info.

FALLEN JOY

Fallen Joy have a debut album coming soon called Inner Supremacy. The artwork for the cover and the CD booklet can be seen above, created by the very talented Strychneen Studio; in fact, I discovered this band through Strychneen’s posting of the album art on their Facebook page.

So far, the band have released one song from the new album for streaming on SoundCloud (here), and now they’ve released a music video for the same song: “Hymn To Silent Soldiers”. Whoever those silent soldiers may be, the song is also a hymn to bands such as At the Gates, but with some blackening in this canticle and an air of modernity in the riffing and soloing. The song is a blood-pumping, jolting gallop with riffs that blister and a nice blend of black- and death-metal vocals. Check out the video right after the jump. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET (AND FREE): MUDBATH – “RED DESERT ORGY”

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 242012
 

Go low, go slow, and crush all hope of life into the muck. That’s the plan of attack for Mudbath, a band from Avignon, France, who have just self-released their debut EP, Red Desert Orgy.  The spiritual offspring of bands such as Sleep, Electric Wizard, and Eyehategod, Mudbath deliver a heavyweight narcotic concoction of black doom and sludge-filled stoner metal that’s definitely worth spreading around.

“Loserwood” hooked me in the first 30 seconds with a disease-ridden lead guitar riff and a brutal bass line, both of which have the distortion dialed to the point that they’ll jar fillings loose in your teeth. A dual-tracked, downtuned guitar solo dumps a heaping bucket of filth all over the proceedings, and the song also includes a screaming psychedelic solo. To top it off, Mudbath’s vocalist sounds like Eyehategod’s Mike Williams, which is to say that the skrieks are enough to wake the dead.

Getting comfortable with the music isn’t an option, and I’m sure that’s not Mudbath’s goal either. But the fat, dissonant riffs in “Mudjahideen” are pretty infectious nonetheless. Yet the lumbering stomp of the music is still bereft of hope or light, and this time the burning-lung vocals are joined by a braying yell, though it sounds no more sane. The last third of the song briefly shifts into a higher gear as the guitars skitter about crazily, but that’s just a prelude to another warbling solo that’s awful damned sweet (and awful damned ill). Continue reading »

BETWEEN THE BURIED AND ME: THE “TELOS” VIDEO

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jul 232012
 

Between the Buried and Me have a new album coming. Its title is Parallax II: Future Sequence, it will be released on October 9, and it’s already available for pre-order from Metal Blade HERE and from this site, which is offering some nice bundles (including a spacesuit!). Today we also have a new official video for “Telos”, a song from the album that has made the rounds in a few fan-filmed videos of recent BTBAM shows.

The video is mainly a series of fade-in, fade-out ads for the release with a couple of excellent pieces of album art interspersed. The main benefit of the video is the the song, straight from the album. It’s a neuron-twister of a tech-death workout spliced into an ethereal space-swimming, time-traveling segment, which is part jazz fusion, part prog exploration.

I’m tolerating the clean vocals in the cosmic-drift part of the song, but confess that I’m much higher on the harsh, tech-death mind-fuckery, which is really excellent.

Check out the video after the jump. Continue reading »

AEGAEON: “BEING”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jul 232012
 

(TheMadIsraeli returns to NCS after a hiatus with this review of the new EP by Indiana’s Aegaeon. The EP is available digitally on iTunes and Amazon and physically from the band’s BigCartel page.)

Aegaeon’s new release is proof not only that deathcore has life left in it, but also that they’re definitely at the forefront of the bands I’d call truly legit.  They’ve released a killer debut Dissension and now this EP, Being, on a totally independent basis, funded straight out of their own pockets — merch and all.  They don’t seem to be at all concerned with finding a label, which gives the band a sort of hard-edged DIY ethic that comes through in their already cathartic brutality.

They play a style of deathcore that is not only absolutely unrelenting in its brutality, it also comes with a very morose sense of ambience and atmosphere.  Dare I say Insomnium-ish, in a way?  A lot of this EP has a rather doomy characteristic to it as well, which gives the music a real sense of heft and also helps establish a standout identity for Aegaeon, one that was already pretty well-cemented based solely on vocalist/living-Cthulu Jim Martin.

Being is only 6 songs long, but it’s an ethereal yet pulverizing journey.  It seems obvious to me it’s meant to be listened to that way, from start through to finish, because all of the songs bleed into each other.  The inside of the digipack case I have before me even states in big font, “Being is best experienced from beginning to end with no breaks”.  I agree. Continue reading »

ZATOKREV’S “GODDAMN LIGHTS” IS A GODDAMN EPIC HEADBANG

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jul 232012
 

I find it occasionally amusing and more often annoying to see how often male metal fanboys and even metal bloggers describe their enthusiasm for music by referring in graphic (but presumably figurative) terms to having explosive orgasms. I took a personal vow that I would never resort to anything so stupid and juvenile in my writing for NCS. And then this morning I saw Zatokrev’s official music video for a new song called “Goddamn Lights”.

I came so hard that I punched a gaping hole in the wall with my cum. I splooged so voluminously that I’ll be scrubbing my computer screen with industrial-strength solvent for the rest of the week. Both of my heads exploded with the force of my money shot like the second coming (cumming) of Krakatoa. My shorts are in tatters.

I also took a personal vow that I would try to hold my use of the term “epic” to a bare minimum (having failed in my vow never to use the word at all). But “Goddamn Lights” is just fucking epic — not only to hear, but also to watch. It’s a hybrid of Agalloch-ian melodic black metal and dramatic progressive metal, with undertones of stoner metal and psychedelic rock. It’s a guaranteed headbang trigger. It’s both scarifying and beautiful. It gets this work week off to an awesome start.

And the video is beautifully made (credit to Lionel Weitnauer for the awesomeness), the band drenched in hot colors, with the shadows filled by images of nature. Continue reading »

DIOCLETIAN / WEREGOAT: “DISCIPLES OF WAR”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jul 232012
 

At least some of you who are on Facebook and who have liked the NCS Facebook page saw this album art when I posted it late yesterday. Based on how many people saw that FB post, it seems like the artwork has generated a lot of interest. So I thought I ought to explain what it is in more detail.

It’s the cover of a forthcoming split by Diocletian from New Zealand and Weregoat from Portland, Oregon. The title of the split is Disciples of War. It will be released on 12″ vinyl by Parasitic Records and on CD by Dark Descent. I don’t have a release date yet and pre-orders haven’t started. Once I get more info, I’ll add an update.

The complex, hand-drawn album art is, as you can see, amazing, and amazingly vile. It was created by Daniel “Desecrator” Corcuera, a 27 year-old artist who lives in Chile. Based on a brief bio I found on a site that was describing an exhibition of his work in Portland (here), it appears he is entirely self-taught and spends his time as a tattoo artist, illustrator, and vocalist/bassist for a band called Slaughtbbath.

Desecrator has created album art and logos for bands such as Bestial Mockery, Sathanas, Vomitor, Suicidal Winds, Dead Congregation, Hooded Menace, Thornspawn, Satanic Warmaster, and more. A listing of many bands for whom he has created artwork can be found here. And via this link, you can find an interview with him and more of his artwork.

As for the music on the split, I expect it will be utterly savage. We’ve written about Diocletian multiple times, most recently here. Their most recent releases are a May 2012 7″ EP entitled European Annihilation, produced for their European tour earlier this year, and a June 2012 hour-long compilation of the songs from their first four recordings between 2005 and 2008 by the name of Annihilation Rituals. The word “annihilation” appears in these titles for a reason. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries