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 »

THE CONTORTIONIST: FULL ALBUM STREAM AND DEBUT VIDEO FOR “CAUSALITY”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jul 162012
 

Within certain circles, much eagerness seems to have been building for the new album from Indiana’s The Contortionist. Entitled Intrinsic, it will be released tomorrow via eOne/Good Fight Music.

To be brutally honest, I can’t say that I’ve been among the eager, because my own tastes tend to veer off in different directions. But I have at least been interested, and I suspect some of you are in the same camp. So, as a public service, I want to bring two pieces of information to your attention.

First, the entirety of Intrinsic is streaming at this location, at least for a little while.

Second, today Noisecreep exclusively premiered the band’s official video for “Causality”, the album’s third track. The song combines djent-style pneumatics, prog-style instrumentals, a dreamy/spacy keyboard layer, and a combo of hardcore roaring and ethereal crooning. It becomes . . . beautiful. The well-made video is pretty to watch, too . . . the dreams of a middle-aged man, both a kind of discovery and a kind of emotionally wrenching journey.  Nice shots of the band performing, too.

Anyway, to check that out, follow this link.

MISCELLANY NO. 46: JANAZA, NETHER REGIONS, APOTHEOSIS, AND BLACKLISTERS

 Free Shit, MISCELLANY  22 Responses »
Jul 162012
 

Time for another edition of MISCELLANY, a game I made up for myself in the early days of this blog and still play on an irregular basis. The rules of the game: I randomly pick a few bands whose music I’ve never heard and whose names are new to me. I listen to one recent song by each band (I try to limit myself to just one song, but I sometimes I get carried away). I record my impressions here, and then I stream the song(s) I heard so you can make up your own minds about whether to explore the music further.

Usually, I pick bands to explore from e-mails I’ve received from the bands themselves or from NCS readers, and sometimes from links I see on Facebook. But two of today’s picks I came across in other ways. Today’s test subjects: Janaza (Iraq), Nether Regions (U.S.), Apotheosis (U.S.), and Blacklisters (UK).

JANAZA

Last week The Atlantic magazine published a piece by “Grim Kim” Kelly (one of my favorite metal writers) under the headline “When Black Metal’s Anti-Religious Message Gets Turned On Islam.” I received links to it from several NCS readers and writers and saw more links from bands in my Facebook news feed. To read Kim’s article, go here.

The focus of the article is an example of “art and dissent [intersecting] in a region where dissent can sometimes have deadly consequences,” and specifically on a handful of black metal bands in the Middle East who have re-directed “black metal’s historically anti-Christian ferocity to rail against Islam.” The lead example chosen by Kim was a one-woman Iraqi black-metal band known as Janaza. Continue reading »

IN THE NEWS: DAMNATION FEST, A NAPALM SAMPLER, HIGH ON FIRE, AND KRALLICE

 Metal News  No Responses »
Jul 162012
 

Here are some things I saw while having my morning coffee. Wonder what the rest of the day will bring?

DAMNATION FESTIVAL 2012

This thing is scheduled to go off in Leeds (UK) on November 3.  Festival organizers had previously announced some of the bands, but a group of new eye-catching names were revealed today — and this list still isn’t finished. But as it now stands, this festival looks amazing, and talk about diversity!  Electric Wizard, My Dying Bride, Pig Destroyer (in their first UK show in 8 years), Primordial, Bossk, Belphegor, Extreme Noise Terror, Aura Noir, Textures, Devil Sold His Soul, Gama Bomb, 40 Watt Sun, and Wodensthrone.

For you lucky fuckers who are able to be in Leeds on November 3, go here for more info.

FREE NAPALM SAMPLER

Napalm Records has compiled a free sampler of music from their stable of artists. For my tastes, it’s a mixed bag, but it includes some winners as well as some bands whose music I’ve never heard, and therefore it offers some intrigue. Also, it’s free. To see the list and find out how to get the sampler, go past the jump. Continue reading »

100 RIFFS IN 12 MINUTES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Jul 162012
 

Alex Chadwick has got some mad skillz. He’s a guitarist who made a video for something called the Chicago Music Exchange, and in the video he plays 100 famous guitar riffs, one after the other, straight through in one take. They’re arranged in chronological order, so you get something like a 12-minute history of rock ‘n roll. And he does it really fuckin’ well, changing the tuning on the fly and even quickly playing some bottleneck guitar when the riffs call for it. Since the video went up on YouTube in early June, it’s been watched by more than 2.8 million people . . . and counting.

The songs from which he selected the riffs are almost entirely rock songs, though you’ll see some metal in there, too.  What would really be cool would be to see someone as good as Chadwick do a video like this composed entirely of metal riffs — straight through, in one take.

By the way, in the video, Chadwick is playing a 1958 Fender Stratocaster Three-Tone Sunburst that the Chicago Music Exchange is selling for a cool $33,000.

For the old farts in the audience (including me), this video is like a trip down memory lane, and for the younger farts in the audience, it’s some schoolin’. Watch it after the jump. Continue reading »

NCS SITE RE-DESIGN

 IQ Subtraction  24 Responses »
Jul 152012
 

The last time we re-designed the look of the NCS site, we went big on the skulls.  The skulls are nice and all, but I’m thinking we’d get more visitors if we had more pussy. Of course, as always, we’d like your input.

Go HERE to take a look at a mock-up of the new site.  Be sure to scroll all the way down when you get there.

More info about the project comes after the jump. Continue reading »

DEUS OTIOSUS AND ETERNITY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jul 152012
 

Deus Otiosus is Latin for “idle god”. It’s a phrase that refers to a theological concept of a god who created the world, set it in motion, and then checked out, leaving things to unfold as they have, which is a convenient explanation for both the ugliness that human beings have persisted in inflicting on each other and nature’s periodic outbursts of destruction. Deus Otiosus is also the name of a pulverizing Danish death metal band we spotlighted in a MISCELLANY post last August.

Eternity, of course, is another big concept, one that’s especially hard for us mere mortals to wrap our minds around, bound as we are by time and a strict (if unknown) sell-by date. Of course, the concept of eternity requires no religious belief, and it’s no more provable. Eternity is also the name of a German black metal band who’ve been kicking around since 1994, which may not be as long as eternity but is still longer than some of our readers have been alive.

Today I discovered new music from both bands, and it seemed fitting to package them together in this post, though appreciating their music requires neither a leap of faith nor solving the great mystery of the universe.

DEUS OTIOSUS

This band (whose Facebook page is here) have a second album on the way later this year called Godless, which is another concept for explaining why shit happens. The very nice album cover is taken from an engraving by Gustave Doré. Today the band started streaming a song from that album called “Pest Grave”, which is about the black plague. It’s a blast of death metal mixed with blackened thrash and energized with fire-breathing guitar fury, and it includes a grim melodic breakdown. The abyss-deep vocals are vividly voracious, too. I liked it. Listen right after the jump — and bring on Godless! Continue reading »

OH THOSE CRAZY FINNS!

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Jul 152012
 

I would like to chalk this up to the benefits of clean living, but who am I kidding? It’s just more of the dumb luck with which my entire life seems to have been blessed.

So, I’m sitting around feeling all mopey and disgusted because of some news I saw this morning that turned an inspiring metal story into what looks like a big fuckin’ con job . . . which will be described in tomorrow’s first post. And on top of that, a run of five straight days of glorious weather in Seattle has been interrupted with some gray dankness up in the sky this morning. In a nutshell, I needed some cheering up, pronto.

And then what should appear in my e-mail in-box at just the right moment but a message from Finnish NCS fan jeimssi with a link to a brand new Mors Subita video, which includes some film made by jeimssi himself.

I pressed play, and suddenly I perked right up, I got the big smiley face, I banged my fuckin’ head. I barely resisted the urge to rip off my headphones, grab a brew, put the music on the external speakers, and start finding shit in my house to bust up — an urge I resisted at the last minute only after remembering that it’s 7:45 in the fucken morning and my wife is still asleep. That was a near thing, as in a near-death experience, as in yours truly coming THAT close to being the victim of a spousal homicide. Continue reading »

BLOOD MORTIZED: “THE KEY TO A BLACK HEART”

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Jul 152012
 

On their second album, The Key To A Black Heart, Blood Mortized take a monstrous step forward, turning out by far their finest work yet and creating one of the best old-school death metal albums of 2012. By old-school, I’m referring to that distinctive old Swedish school, where rotting flesh sloughs off the faces of the taloned teachers and the curriculum concentrates on raising the dead and feeding them from the flesh of the living — but with a heavy course load in the lessons of bands like …For Victory-era Bolt Thrower and early Celtic Frost.

To succeed in creating this kind of music with the incontestable ring of authenticity requires faithfulness to the core elements of the sound, and Blood Mortized are definitely true believers. They’re also highly skilled practitioners in the dark arts of breathing ghoulish life into the festering meat of the departed. They know what body parts this music is made of, and they know how to reanimate the patchwork corpses and give them grisly new life.

But that alone wouldn’t earn them an A. What elevates this album above many other new offerings in the genre is superior songwriting and genuine flair in the performances at all positions.

A listing of the common denominators of the songs — those core elements of the sound — must begin with a truly massive “wall of guitar” approach to the riffing. Brutally down-tuned and distorted, the guitars grind and spin like giant buzzsaws pulverizing their way through dense concrete, or they chug like some titanic black train straight out of hell, belching dense, oily smoke. The bass tone is equally tank-heavy, more felt than heard as it sets up a vibration deep in your guts. Continue reading »

AGALLOCH LIVE IN SEATTLE (July 12, 2012)

 Concert Reviews  13 Responses »
Jul 142012
 

Agalloch’s current North American tour kicked off on July 11 in Portland and I saw the show when they moved up to Seattle the next night. That pic up above is the awesome poster created by Stevie Floyd for the tour. I intended to buy it at the show, but lost my mind at some point during Agalloch’s set and forgot.

They played at The Crocodile, a venue that was a fixture of the Seattle music scene (Nirvana played their first live show there, for example) for 16 years before it closed in 2007. It reopened under new ownership in 2009 after extensive remodeling, but this was the first time I’d been there (they don’t book many metal shows). Nice place — a big open floor with a full bar in the back and a small balcony area to the right. By the time Agalloch started (well after 11 p.m., unfortunately), the floor was jammed with people all the way from the front of the stage back to the bar.

Preceding Agalloch was another Portland band named Eight Bells (who aren’t part of the full NorthAm tour) and then Taurus (a two-woman band, also from Portland, that includes the afore-mentioned Stevie Floyd from Dark Castle). I enjoyed Eight Bells’ post-rock instrumentals, but the tag-team vocals of Melynda Jackson and Haley Weiner were too often off-key, and I confess that I gave up after the first three songs and went outside and spent the rest of their set catching up with Ryan Yancey and James Furrow from Blood and Thunder, a hard-working, hard-playing band we’re big fans of, who are forging ahead despite a couple of recent line-up changes. They’ll be opening for Korpiklaani, Moonsorrow, Tyr, and Metsatoll in Seattle on September 8, and I’m tremendously stoked for that show. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries