TOUR NEWS (PRIMORDIAL, CORMORANT, AND YOB) PLUS NEW MUSIC FROM A MILLION DEAD BIRDS LAUGHING AND XAPHAN

 Metal News  16 Responses »
Jul 192012
 

Still plagued by the annoying intrusions of non-metal life (fuck non-metal life), your stupid friends at NCS have nevertheless found time to gather a few recent items of interest for your amusement and edification.

ITEM ONE

First item is above, presented to you as a public service, rather than because of my usual self-centered interests, since this tour isn’t coming remotely close to Seattle. But any U.S. tour involving both Primordial and Cormorant is by definition newsworthy. I don’t know While Heaven Wept, but they must at least be interesting or they wouldn’t be along for this ride.

Do pay close attention to the little asterisks, since not all bands will be at all dates.

ITEM TWO

The next item is also a tour announcement that also happens to be in September and also happens to include Cormorant (look closely at the dates for Sept 16-20 on the following poster) and also happens to be by-passing Seattle. On this tour, the headliners will be YOB and a band called Norska, which features YOB bass player Aaron Rieseberg and his brother Dustin and is described as a “progressive tech-sludge rock band.” Continue reading »

KHORS: “WISDOM OF CENTURIES

 Album Reviews  12 Responses »
Jul 192012
 

Khors are a Ukrainian band on the verge of a breakthrough. Though their star seems to have been rising steadily over the course of four albums beginning with The Flame of Eternity’s Decline in 2005, their signing with Candlelight Records in May for release of the band’s fifth full-length album will likely lead to significantly greater exposure, especially because that fifth album is so damned good.

Wisdom of Centuries tests the limits of genre classification. It combines elements of black metal, progressive metal, ambient music, doom, and to a lesser degree folk metal, producing something that is bleak, beautiful, and often mystical. Distancing themselves from the black metal label, Khors characterize the music as “heathen dark metal”. Perhaps that’s as good a shorthand description as any, since “dark metal” is so often used to describe music that doesn’t neatly fit anywhere else.

To the extent one seeks guidance from lyrics in helping to understand the inspiration behind the music, the quest will be difficult because this is the first album in which all the band’s vocals are in their native tongue (though the song titles are translated). However, Khors have explained that Wisdom of Centuries “is dedicated to the 95th anniversary of Kholodny Yar Republic, to its founders and defenders.” My own feeble research indicates that this refers to a rural partisan uprising against the Bolsheviks and the Russian Red Army occupying the Ukraine, which ultimately failed — and then the Iron Curtain descended

Fittingly then, the emotionally resonant, atmospheric music on the album creates moods of longing, loss, and anguish. But calling it “depressive” would go much too far, because the songs are as melodically rich and vibrant as they are melancholy and wistful. Wisdom of Centuries has the feel of a journey through memory, an exploration of a tragic but heroic past that lives on in spirit.  Continue reading »

SEPULTURA AND SATYRICON

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  33 Responses »
Jul 192012
 

We’re all toiling away here at NCS on various projects, none of which are quite yet finished for this morning. Actually, to be brutally honest, I was sleeping instead of toiling away, and before that I was fucking off. I have no idea what the other idiots who work here have been doing, and I use the term “work” loosely, since nobody gets paid shit for scribbling about metal at NCS. Actually, I do have an idea what they’ve been doing, and it’s called “life”, which is bullshit because having no life is one of the key qualifications for “working” at NCS, and they all checked the “has no life” box on the NCS “employment” application, so what’s up with that?

Anyway, I haz nothing at the moment, so I’m doing this: I’m playing for you two excellent old songs plus some covers of them that I found this morning. I love these songs, and so it goes without saying that you love them, too. So we will all feel the love this morning, and then we can all do what we do when we feel the strong love, which in most cases will involve some kind of autoerotic satisfaction (and yes, you may take photos, but you may not send them to me because I don’t want to spoil my appetite before breakfast).

The first song is “Slave New World” by Sepultura, and I’m talking old-school Sepultura, from 1993’s Chaos A.D. You, of course, know this song and love it as much as I do, because it is such a great fuckin’ metal song. I think you will also like the cover of the song that Norway’s Dead Trooper did back in 2010, because I like it a bunch. I like it better than the cover Trivium did (also in 2010), though their cover still sounds good, because the riffs in this song are so damned compelling. I just like the original Max Cavalera vocals and the Dead Trooper vocals better.

The second song is “Forhekset” by Satyricon, from their 1996 Nemesis Divina album. It’s another great song, though I’m guessing many people would pick “Mother North” as the best song on that album. But anyway, today I saw a new video by a Québec band named Haeres performing a cover of “Forhekset” live back in March. I really like the cover — it’s not a carbon copy of the original, and it sounds really good. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: CULTFINDER – BLACK THRASHING TERROR

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jul 182012
 

The three songs on Cultfinder’s new EP fly by, but not like an exaltation of larks or even a murder of crows on the wing. Black Thrashing Terror flies by like a squadron of screaming Luciferian attack jets on a strafing run, spitting high-caliber ammo straight at your pathetic flesh.

Just seeing a piece of Mark Riddick artwork on the front, you could lay good odds that what lies within will take no prisoners, and you’d be right. The title track gives you a good head-fake at the start, crunching along ponderously like a death-doom golem, but then — true to the track’s name — Cultfinder begin to rip hell with a high-tempo whirlwind of distorted, punk-influenced, thrashy chords; hammering crashing percussion; and screeching, clawing vocals. There’s a reprise of that sludgy intro and then a spitfire finish.

“Archangel Burial” has its own little groaning-chord intro, and then the band let fly again, this time throwing in a wall of tremolo mayhem to spice up the rapid-riff pummeling.

And to finish off this brief offering of the devil’s music, “Witching Curse” gives you another good horse-whipping with a studded flail, pausing only long enough with a couple of doomy breakdowns and a moaning guitar solo to let you cry a little before the lacerating resumes. Continue reading »

SHIT SEEN AND HEARD: SONNE ADAM, ERUPTED, SILENT PATH, AND REIGN OF THE ARCHITECT

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Jul 182012
 

Collected in here are items I randomly happened upon last night while browsing the internest and checking out links sent in by our ever-vigilant readers.

ITEM ONE

Sonne Adam are an Israeli death/doom band whose 2011 Century Media debut, Transformation, garnered a lot of critical praise. It was also one heavy motherfucker. Yesterday, I saw the news that the band’s first two-song EP, The Sun Is Dead, has been released by Van Records as a 7″ vinyl with that new cover art you see above.

Sonne Adam are also now working on a new EP to be entitled Doctrines of Dark Devotion, and yesterday they started streaming (for a limited time) a rough mix of a new track called “Bestow the Crown of Death”. Shit sounds heavier than oceans, darker than your worst nightmares. Guitars grinding on HM-2 overdrive; awesome reverberating vocals, deep as trenches and cracked like the windows in an abandoned warehouse; eerie guitar instrumentals swirling above the massive grinding noises underneath.

This is a very cool song and makes me tumescent for the new EP. Stream it right after the jump. Continue reading »

GOJIRA’S FAVORITE MUSIC VIDEOS WILL SURPRISE YOU

 That's Music -- But It's Not Metal  2 Responses »
Jul 182012
 

Yesterday Joe and Mario Duplantier of French metal titans Gojira put up a video on YouTube recommending some of their favorite music videos and showing brief clips from the recommended vids. I thought the idea of this was cool — one band going further out of its way than you typically see to promote the music of other bands. I was also surprised by what they recommended.

I didn’t necessarily expect that all of Gojira’s recommendations were going to be metal. Lots of metal musicians listen to music from other genres, and the Duplantier brothers do seem like the kind of people who would have diverse interests and tastes. But their recommendations were dominated by not-metal, and the not-metal videos they recommended were in most cases not what I would have ever guessed, ranging from South African rap to the music of Lhasa de Sela, an American-born singer-songwriter who was raised in Mexico and the United States, divided her adult life between Canada and France, and died of cancer in 2010 at the age of 38.

The picks do shed light on the visual content of Gojira’s own videos. As you’ll see in Mario and Joe’s video introduction to their picks, they like videos by bands “who are not scared to be different”, and videos that are surreal and dreamlike.

I found this exercise interesting, in part because of the insights it gave me about the Duplantier brothers and Gojira, and in part because I enjoyed watching and listening to most (though not all) of the recommended videos. If nothing else, it got me out of my metal shell at least for a little while — long enough to want to go back inside it soon. But I’ll carry some of these songs with me when I go. Maybe you’ll get something out of the exercise, too. Let’s start with the Duplantier brothers’ video. Continue reading »

“VIKING METAL”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  113 Responses »
Jul 172012
 

In one of yesterday’s posts I compared a song from Sweden’s King of Asgard to Naglfar and Immortal, and I got questioned about that comparison in one of the comments, suggesting that King of Asgard is a Viking metal band. That caused me to consider, certainly not for the first time, what “Viking metal” really means and whether there really is such a thing as a “Viking metal” genre.

These are questions that have been argued in many other places at many other times. For example, our brother Trollfiend devoted a post to the subject at ALSO, WOLVES last fall, insisting that, yes, it’s a genre and it’s defined by the band’s lyrical themes (though he also implied that, musically, it’s a subset of black metal). Other people contend it isn’t a genre at all, or that if it is, it begins and ends with Bathory and early Enslaved and everyone else can go fuck off. And still other people say it’s a pointless question — you either dig the music or you don’t, and who gives a rat’s ass what you call it.

The fact that there seems to be no consensus about how to define “Viking metal” weighs in favor of the argument that it isn’t a genre. That conclusion is bolstered by the significant diversity in the music of bands who different people classify as “Viking metal” (see, e.g., the bands included in the “Viking metal” tag at Last.fm or the Viking metal genre group at Metal Archives). Genre classifications are usually (though not always) defined by widely accepted hallmarks of the musical style, and if no such consensus exists, or if the sound of the music isn’t really the defining characteristic, can we really say that “Viking metal” is a genre?

Is the lyrical content really enough, especially when much of the time you can’t make out the words in the songs when you hear them? Continue reading »

THE FACELESS: “AUTOTHEISM” ON THE WAY (ALSO, KRALLICE RELEASE DETAILS AND ART)

 Metal News  9 Responses »
Jul 172012
 

This morning, Sumerian Records announced that they will release the new album by The Faceless — Autotheism — on August 14. Pre-orders are now being taken at this site.

Four years have passed since the band’s last release, and yet few details about the new album’s the progress have surfaced until recently. Now that there’s finally an official release date — with less than a month to go before the album drops — I presume we’ll get a quick roll-out of promotional teasers. That roll-out began this morning with the release of the album art and a brief video. There’s no music in the video until the closing seconds, but even that will probably be enough to get the die-hard fans all slobbery.

2012 has already seen many high-quality tech-death releases, with the albums by Gorod and Spawn of Possession leading the pack (in your humble editor’s humble opinion). With four years of time for The Faceless to plan this new release, expectations for Autotheism will be high. The bar has been raised. With this long running start, we’ll find out soon whether The Faceless can jump over it.

Catch the teaser video after the jump. Also after the jump (thanks to Utmu), we’ve got the album art and release date for that new Krallice album we blogged about just yesterday. Continue reading »

MORNING ROUND-UP: THE INIQUITY DESCENT AND VENOMOUS MAXIMUS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Jul 172012
 

In this post are two videos from recent days that I missed in my daily rounds of the interhole looking for un-missable metal, and most truly, neither of these should be missed.

THE INQUITY DESCENT

We featured a previous video from this Finnish band back in February (here).  The band was formed in late 2009 by two childhood friends — songwriter and guitarist Mikael Mannström and vocalist Mathias Lillmåns, who provides vokillz for NCS favorites Finntroll and Magenta Harvest as well. They’ve produced two EPs as well as a 2012 full-length debut on Massacre Records, The Human Apheresis, which can be downloaded here.

Their new video is for a track from the debut album called “Collector Vs. Protector”. This song veers back and forth between a mid-paced segment with a stomping killer of a riff and a more accelerated part that’s a galvanizing death ‘n’ roll ass-kicker. And Mathias Lillmåns’ scalding vocals are fucken awesome. Watch this right after the jump. Continue reading »

AFTERNOON ROUND-UP: JON LORD, KING OF ASGARD, BTBAM, SYBREED, WINDS OF GENOCIDE

 Metal News  5 Responses »
Jul 162012
 

Very sad news to start this round-up: Jon Lord passed away today at the age of 71. He suffered a fatal pulmonary embolism while hospitalized, following a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Though he had a long solo career and played with a variety of bands, he is best known as the keyboardist with Deep Purple and co-writer of many of that band’s most famous songs, including “Smoke On the Water”.

Deep Purple’s music meant a lot to me at a particular point in my life, and I’m sad to see that Jon Lord is no longer in the world. In his memory, here’s “Perfect Strangers”, a song that stands the test of time:

[audio:https://www.nocleansinging.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/02-Perfect-Strangers.mp3|titles=Deep Purple – Perfect Strangers]

In happier news, King of Asgard released a music video for “The Nine Worlds Burn”, a song from their forthcoming album …To North, which is scheduled for release by Metal Blade on July 27 in Europe and July 30 in the U.S. The song should be familiar, since we devoted a post to it when it began streaming as the album’s first single in early June. The song still reminds me of Nalgfar and Immortal, with a dramatic feminine vocal in the interlude. Great song, and the video captures the fire of the song . . . with fire. Watch it next. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries