NO CLEAN SINGING

SONIC THUGGERY: RINGWORM AND DISENTOMB

Aug 202012

When it comes to metal, there’s a time and a place for complexity and nuance, and there’s a time for getting elbowed in the nose, punched in the kidneys, and ruthlessly choked out. You know, the kind of music where you listen to it, and for a couple hours after you’re nervously looking for blood in your piss and feeling around for loose teeth. When you’re in the mood for that kind of sonic thuggery, look no further than the music featured in this post.

RINGWORM

This Cleveland hardcore metal band is the real deal, and by “real deal” I mean no bullshit, no pretensions, high intensity, honest vehemence and vitriol. Their vocalist calls himself Human Furnace, and if you’re going to wear that moniker, you sure as shit better be able to walk the walk. James Bullock really walks the walk, and by “walk the walk” I mean gargle with battery acid and spit it out along with esophageal blood.

I’m pretty new to this band, despite the fact that they’ve been around for 20 years (though about half that time they were on hiatus). Their latest album, Scars, was released in July 2011. But what really grabbed my attention recently is a new live album that A389 Recordings plans to release on August 23. It will be a 12″ vinyl entitled Stigmatas In the Flesh. It was recorded in 2010 at A389’s 6th Anniversary Bash. I’ve only listened to a few of the tracks so far, but man, it’s really blistering. And by “blistering”, I mean it will cause your skin to peel for weeks. Continue reading »

SHUFFLE (NO. 2)

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHUFFLE 6 Responses »

Aug 192012

For better or worse, because of this blog, I spend almost all my listening time on new music, either hunting for new tunes or videos that I think would be worth your time or in preparation for scribbling a review. But not long ago I did something I rarely do any more: put my iPod on shuffle and listened to whatever the machine served up from the 22,000+ songs that are on there. I didn’t listen for long — just long enough to walk to work at the beginning of the day and walk back at the end.

That turned out to be fun, as well as a nice surprise, because the first five songs that Shuffle served up happened to be good. So, I wrote a post about that experience. And I decided to do it again two days ago. And now I’m starting to get a little creeped out. I’m beginning to think my iPod could pass a Turing test for artificial intelligence.

This time it once again served up three good songs in a row (and I stopped at three this time because, as you’ll see, the songs turned out to be long). But the songs also fit together like hands in gloves. All three were longer than average (two of them very long), and each of them was a different type of progressive metal. So here we go — music from Ikuinen Kaamos (Finland), We Were Gentlemen (U.S.), and Odyssey (U.S.).

IKUINEN KAAMOS

I first came across this band at the end of 2010 when we were doing that impromptu Finland Tribute Week series (which turned into two weeks of nothing but Finnish metal). Andy Synn had recommended Ikuinen Kaamos to me (and he later named their Fall of Icons release to his list of 2010’s great albums). When I wrote the post that included Ikuinen Kaamos, I had only listened to one song from Fall of Icons — “Condemned” — but I subsequently listened to the rest of the album, too. Continue reading »

THE AXIS OF BLACK DEATH: WEAPON AND WITCHRIST

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 17 Responses »

Aug 192012

As a genre term, “blackened death metal” is imprecise, which of course doesn’t distinguish it from all other genre terms. For example, I’ve seen it used to describe the two subjects of this post, despite differences in their sound. I happen to be thinking about these two bands because of new things I’ve seen from both of them in the last 24 hours. I’ve also been thinking about the fact that Western Canada and New Zealand seem to be breeding grounds for many of the best “blackened death metal” bands on the planet — hence, my use of the word “axis” in the post title. More thoughts below . . .

WEAPON

As previously reported, this excellent band from Edmonton, Alberta, have a new album entitled Embers and Revelations due for release by Relapse Records on October 9 (pre-orders are already being fielded here). I first discovered them in December 2010 (and wrote about them here) through a tip from NCS patron SurgicalBrute. The band was started by frontman Vetis Monarch in Bangladesh before his eventual migration to Canada, and since then Weapon have become consistently stronger with each new release.

Obviously, the backing from Relapse is going to help spread this band’s name around at an accelerated pace, and I have a feeling that fans are going to eat up this new album like famished wolves at a fresh kill. What I’ve heard from it so far are a teaser clip that we featured in a post earlier this month and now the title track from the album that got its premiere at Pitchfork. Continue reading »

SÓLSTAFIR LIVE IN ROMANIA

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC No Responses »

Aug 182012

Up there is quality fan-filmed video of Iceland’s Sólstafir performing “Fjara” live last night at a festival called Dark Bombastic Evening 4, in Alba Iulia, Romania.

With Motorga Catalin of Negură Bunget on panpipes.

Yeah, this is about the 1,000th time we’ve posted about this band and about the 900th time we’ve featured this song. But I’m never not in the mood for “Fjara”. That’s just the way it goes.

Enjoy the rest of your fucking day. We’ll be back in the morning . . .

BLOODRED HOURGLASS

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 20 Responses »

Aug 182012

Finland continues to spawn excellent new metal. I know that’s not a revelation, but it’s in the front of my mind because I’ve been listening to my own latest Finnish discovery — a band from Mikkeli named Bloodred Hourglass. After a few demos, they recorded their debut album Lifebound last year and then succeeded in forming a relationship with the Finnish label Spinefarm, which is set to release the album on August 24.

I first got curious about Bloodred Hourglass after seeing a review of Lifebound by Madame X at the Angry Metal Guy blog (is she still a “probationary scribe”?). And then yesterday I noticed that the entire album was streaming at Finland’s Inferno magazine website, and I let it run roughshod through my head over the ether.

The music represents a confluence of styles. Thrash is the dominant ingredient, but it would be misleading to brand this a thrash album, because (as Madame X noted) it’s almost equally freighted with groove metal in the vein of Lamb of God, and there are hardcore and melodic death metal elements in the mix, too.

And then in addition to all that, the album includes unexpected instrumentals that don’t fit with any of those other genre references — sometimes as standalone songs (“We Lived Like Kings” and “Ghost Wounds”) and sometimes cropping up in the middle of something else (as in “Arcadia”). The instrumental music is so divergent from the band’s dominant motif that I can’t begin to explain it. But if I tried, I’d say it’s like being teleported to an alien mother ship for unnatural impregnation right in the middle of Breaking Bad.

I don’t know about you, but I happen to like surprises when going through an album, and taking a sharp left turn into a parallel dimension can fire different neurons and produce a greater “fuck yeah” sensation about the album as a whole. Which it does here.

THINGS SEEN AND HEARD TODAY: COBOLT 60, DYSRHYTHMIA, AND INDESINENCE

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 9 Responses »

Aug 172012

This is the second part of a round-up of noteworthy news and music I picked up while browsing the web today. The first part is here.

COBOLT 60

I was introduced to Norway’s Cobolt 60 by my NCS co-writer Andy Synn via a post he wrote in February about the band’s debut album Meat Hook Ballet — an album that came out 10 years ago and was then followed by . . . 10 years of inactivity. Cobolt 60 began as a team-up between Daniel Olaisen, a/k/a Død of Blood Red Throne, and BRT’s original vocalist Flemming Arnesen-Gluch, a/k/a Mr Hustler (who handled both drums and vocals on Meat Hook Ballet).

What led Andy to write about the band’s debut album was the whispering of rumors that Cobolt 60 were working on new music. Now we know the rumors were true. On September 14, a new album entitled The Grim Defiance will be released by Demonhood Productions/Neseblod Records, and pre-orders can be placed at this location.

But that’s not all. As of today, two tracks from the album became available for streaming — “Hammer the Creationist” and “Sort”. I have a feeling that Andy will be reviewing the album when the time is right, so I’ll just say that if you want to burn yourself with a dose of superb black thrash hellfire, you should listen to these two songs . . . and you can do that right now: Continue reading »

THINGS SEEN AND HEARD TODAY: WINTERSUN, EVOCATION, AND TOMBS

Metal News 8 Responses »

Aug 172012

Man oh man, I encountered a flood-tide of post-worthy shit in my morning ramblings through the interhole. So, I’m breaking it up into two posts, this one being the first.

WINTERSUN

Uh huh, the massive PR ramp-up to this Finnish band’s loooooooong-awaited duo of new albums is beginning. As previously reported, the first of those albms — Time I — is due for release by Nuclear Blast on October 19. Today brought us the unveiling of the cover art for that album, which you can see above. It was created by Cameron Gray, who also created the cover for the Born of Osiris album The Discovery, among others.

EVOCATION

I saw that Century Media started streaming the first new track from the next album by Sweden’s Evocation, Illusions of Grandeur. About a week ago, I created a feature about the band that was occasioned by the unveiling of the awesome Xaay cover art for the album (here). I didn’t have any new music to share at that time, so I loaded up the post with videos for previous Evocation songs. But now we’ve got the new album’s title track. It makes me very happy. Continue reading »

APOSTATE: “Λ ♦ Λ ♦ Ø”

SHORT BUT SWEET 3 Responses »

Aug 172012

If the name Apostate or that cover art up there seems familiar to you, it may be because I wrote about this band (here) in early June. At that point, they had put up a video for a song called “The Town”, which was to appear on a five-song EP entitled Λ ♦ Λ ♦ Ø. The song and the video hooked me right in the gills, and I wondered aloud what else Apostate had in store for us on that EP.

Well, now I know, because they self-released the EP on August 3, and I finally made time to hear it this week. It fulfills the considerable promise of that first song.

The five songs are named in a way that implies a story — “The Road”, “The People”, “The Speech”, “The Rupture”, “The Town”. The EP title itself, though expressed in symbols, stands for “against all odds”. And the band’s name, at least in the dictionary definition, means someone who has abandoned, renounced, turned away from, a religion — or less commonly, a non-religious cause or belief.

There are more clues the the theme of this EP in the lyrics to the four songs that have lyrics (which are available here). Contrary to the usual meaning of “apostate”, they don’t seem to be one of the usual metal rants against religion, at least not clearly so. In fact, they could be considered a profession of belief against un-belief. They’re very well-written, and they appear to be about a specific time and place, events on a bigger scale than a mere individual’s experience. But they’re deliberately mysterious, and so they’re subject to interpretation.

The words convey a sense of triumph against fear and violence, but also weariness and regret, condemnation of self almost as much as condemnation against an un-named enemy, and a lot more. I rarely bother with song lyrics, partly because they’re usually so unimportant to an appreciation of metal (they’re usually unintelligible), and partly because when you take the time to read them, they’re so often terrible. But in this case, the music made me curious. And yes, I really am getting to the music . . . in fact, I’m there. Continue reading »

DEXTER AND DEFTONES

Off Topic 24 Responses »

Aug 172012

SPOILER ALERT: If you’re new to Dexter and haven’t yet made your way to the end of Season 6, skip this post.

I don’t watch a lot of TV, but one show I do watch like an addict watches for his dealer is Dexter — the ongoing story of a police blood spatter analyst who moonlights as a serial killer (or vice versa). For six seasons I’ve been glued to it, caught up in every twist, turn, and cliffhanger. And speaking of cliffhangers, Season 6 ended with a real doozie, as Dexter’s police-detective sister Deb enters the church that Dexter has outfitted as a kill room just in time to see him plunge a knife into the demented Travis Marshall.

This is obviously going to mark a dramatic turn in everything about the show and its central characters. Dexter’s success, against all odds, in passing as “normal” is over. He can’t possibly think his way out of this mind-blowing revelation. Or can he? That’s what Dexter addicts like me will find out when Season 7 begins on September 30.

Yesterday, Showtime started streaming a trailer for Season 7 that got my blood racing — a montage of eye-popping scenes that hint at awesome things to come (and of course raise far more questions than answers). And in one last bit of coolness, the music of “Change (In the House of Flies)” by Deftones can be heard at the end. Watch it after the jump. Any other Dexter addicts in the audience? Continue reading »

HERESIARCH, NICK KELLER, AND DARK DESCENT

Album Reviews, Eye-Catchers, SHORT BUT SWEET 11 Responses »

Aug 172012

I saw this stunning painting long before I knew what it was or that it had any connection to metal. Only yesterday did I find the connection. The artist is a New Zealander named Nick Keller, and the painting is the gatefold interior artwork for an EP named Hammer of Intransigence by a New Zealand band named Heresiarch. To see any even higher-res version, click on the image.

The cover art for the EP, also painted by Nick Keller, is also amazing (and you can again click on it to see a larger version):

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about Hammer of Intransigence — though I’ll be coming back to Nick Keller shortly. Continue reading »

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