BLACK BREATH: “SENTENCED TO LIFE”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Mar 062012
 

(BadWolf reviews the new album on the Southern Lord label by Seattle’s own Black Breath.)

One look at that album cover should let you know that this music is going to kick your ass—it functions as a statement of purpose. It’s striking, minimal, and to the point—unlike the muddled cult paraphernalia on the cover of 2010’s Heavy Breathing. It evokes metal classics like Judas Priests’ British Steel, Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All, and The Scorpions’ Virgin Killer; even though Black Breath sounds nothing like those bands, they still bring adolescent fury in a way that feels fun, like those bands, while still sounding modern.

Why am I talking about the art? Everyone knows you can’t judge a book by its cover.

Because you used to be able to buy an album based on its art and know you were in for your money’s worth of audio pummeling—that’s true here.  Black Breath evaded the sophomore slump and delivered one burst of white-hot intensity with Sentenced to Life.

Its predecessor, Heavy Breathing, would have been near the top of my favorite albums of 2010 list had I heard it before January 2011. I would rank it alongside Trap Them’s Darker Handcraft and Masakari’s The Prophet Feeds as the finest examples of my favorite current trend, the Crust-Punk-Meets-Old-School-Death music that has come to define post-2010 Southern Lord records (see also: Heartless, All Pigs Must Die, each fucking great). While I give Darker Handcraft a slight edge, Heavy Breathing has an ace up its sleeve: the song “I Am Beyond,” possibly the best mosh riff I have ever heard. Continue reading »

CANNIBAL CORPSE: “ENCASED IN CONCRETE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Mar 052012
 

So, because a certain record label has mistaken NCS for a legitimate organ of metal journalism (when in fact we were born out of wedlock), we have already heard the new Torture album by the almighty Cannibal Corpse. On March 13, when it issues forth from whatever kind of womb gives birth to something like this, everyone can hear it. But until then, the public streaming of new songs from the album is like a present for the ears.

Just moments ago, the quite awesome DECIBEL magazine gave us one of those presents when they began streaming the fourth track from the album, “Encased In Concrete”. This motherfucker is like the detonation of a giant riff bomb. I counted three killer riffs (after I picked my teeth up off the floor), any one of which could have solidly anchored your average death metal onslaught. And that’s not counting the song’s intro, which is like the musical equivalent of being hosed down with a flamethrower.

Go visit DECIBEL at this location to read the cool write-up about the album and stream the song. And if you’re too lazy to do that, the player is also here, after the jump. Continue reading »

HAIL SPIRIT NOIR: “PNEUMA”

 Album Reviews  14 Responses »
Mar 052012
 

I tend to act on impulse most of the time, but all restraint completely goes up in smoke when I hear music that’s as unusual and original as the debut album by Hail Spirit Noir from Greece. And so it was that after initially intending only to test the waters on Pneuma, I became thoroughly immersed and completely captivated by its idiosyncrasies; all best-laid plans for other NCS projects were shoved aside in favor of this review.

What makes Pneuma so arresting is the brashness with which it combines dramatically disparate styles of music (and instrumental sounds) without completely losing the thread of cohesion. Cohabiting, more or less cooperatively, under a loose framework of black metal aesthetics are everything from 60’s flower-power pop psychedelics to 70’s prog rock to 80’s New Wave dance beats to melodic doom and cool jazz — and let’s not forget about the strings, the mellotron, and the occasional punk chord progressions.

Hail Spirit Noir are not the first band who have combined and juxtaposed elements of black metal with more popular musical styles far outside the genre. I don’t pretend to have made a serious study of the subject, but the first time I can recall hearing anything like this was on Enslaved’s 2008 album, Vertebrae. Perhaps most vividly captured by the opening track “Clouds”, it snapped black metal apart and creatively spliced in elements of psychedelia, prog, and alt-rock, while combining Grutle Kjellson’s harsh rasps and Herbrand Larsen’s clean, clear vocals to good effect.

More recently, Sweden’s Ghost have hit lots of radar screens with a different kind of juxtaposition, combining hook-filled pop-rock melodies and almost exclusively clean tenor vocals with satanic lyricism and just enough fuzzed-out riffage to make you realize (agreeably) that the music really isn’t all that wholesome after all. Continue reading »

BLOODSHOT DAWN UPDATE

 Metal News  17 Responses »
Mar 052012
 

That is still one uber-badass album cover, isn’t it? The album also remains one of the biggest, most pleasant surprises of the year for me. To quote from my January review (because I always turn to myself for quotes whenever possible): “In a nutshell, Bloodshot Dawn’s debut album is a shockingly strong explosion of fused thrash and melodic death metal, driven by a guitar duo who have bright days ahead of them. I’ll be surprised if we see a stronger debut from anyone this year.”

Today is another red-letter day for Bloodshot Dawn and their fans, because today they’re putting the album up on Bandcamp for streaming and for digital download directly from the band — and this is the link for that page.

And to celebrate the digital release, the band have teamed up with the formidable UK-based extreme metal zine Terrorizer to stream the album in full on the Terrorizer web site between today and March 14. To check that out, go here. Terrorizer will also be giving away the album with subscriber copies of Issue #221 beginning March 22. Continue reading »

SHAMISEN ROCK

 Off Topic, Phro's Posts, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  26 Responses »
Mar 052012
 

(You can’t say we don’t try to broaden your musical horizons here at NCS, but today’s guest post by Phro may push them farther than we ever have before.)

Well, there’s been a lot of talk recently about Celtic/bagpipe metal around these here parts. Which is pretty fucking awesome, if I may be so bold as to force my opinion on you like a political advertisement. Nothing wrong with a little sack in your metal, right? (Yeah, that’s the best I have right now…don’t expect anything too funny from this.)

Anyway, all this “traditional instruments doing dirty things with my metal behind closed doors and having babies that clearly are far more awesome than simply genetics should allow” got me thinking about a traditional instrument that I love: the shamisen. (Click here to get some Wikiknowledge dropped on your ass.)

Now, I know every FrownyFaceTrveCvltMetalHeadOfDoom out there thinks his or her favorite thing is the most metal thing of all, so that’s not what I’m going to say. However, if you don’t find yourself rocking (at least just a little) to some good tsugaru-jamisen, I’d say. . . well, I’d say this music probably isn’t for you and that’s tots cool. Seriously. Tots. Cool.

Before we really get started, I’d just like to explain very briefly what the fuck a shamisen is. A lot of people describe it as a Japanese guitar, which is just stupid. I think “Japanese lute” is the most commonly accepted description, but I prefer to think of it like a banjo. (They sound pretty similar to me.) Anyway, they have three strings, a long, thin neck, and a small box body.

Depending on the kind of shamisen, the form and size will be different.The Okinawan shamisen is smaller and the body is usually round and made of snake skin. The “standard” shamisen is about a 3 or 4 feet long with a body of about 10 inches which looks like a box. (It is a box, but the top and bottom are covered with animal skin.) The tsugaru-jamisen is basically a bigger version of the standard one.

Important note: there are no frets and the damn things go out of tune like a drunken sailor, so players are often re-tuning between songs. The largest string also has a natural reverb to it, so it’s the only acoustic instrument I know of that has built-in distortion. (I could just be stupid. Let us know how stupid in the comments below!)

Alright, so, today, for your totally-not-really-all-that-metal-but-kinda-metal entertainment, I’m going to be presenting some shamisen rocking. Pull on your hakama, throw some sen in your wallet, and let’s get this matsuri going. Continue reading »

MISCELLANY NO. 41

 MISCELLANY  5 Responses »
Mar 042012
 

You didn’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway: I woke up this morning at the obscene hour of 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t go back to sleep. Unfortunately, this happens to me frequently, but it really chaps my ass when it happens on a Sunday morning.

So I got out of bed, made a pot of black, sludgy coffee strong enough to wake the dead, and decided to catch up on recent NCS e-mails that I’d either neglected or overlooked. And then my sleep-deprived brain had the idea of turning that into fodder for this MISCELLANY post: I decided that I would include in this post the first five pieces of new music I came across, regardless of what they were (and by “new”, I mean new to me).

It seemed like a good idea at the time, because the last MISCELLANY post I wrote was on December 4, and shit, three months is a pathetically long time to go between installments of this series. Now, it’s not like I didn’t have plenty of fodder for a MISCELLANY post already. I already have hundreds of bands on our running MISCELLANY list of music to check out, all of whom I’ve been sadly neglecting. But logic gave way to impulse, as it usually does in my case, and so here we have offerings from the first five bands whose music I came across in my e-mails this morning: Seed (South Korea), Evil Shine (Russia), The Great Sabatini (Canada), Scourge Schematic (Seattle), and Nylithia (Canada, again).

SEED

The first e-mail I found had arrived from NCS contributor Rev. Will overnight (or what little of the night existed during my abbreviated nappy time). He pointed me to a YouTube song clip with these words: “I think this song will make you buy a new pair of boxers!” Well, nothing will make me buy a new pair, since the underoos I have are now seasoned just the way I like ’em, capable of standing up even when I’m not in them. But I decided to check the song anyway. Continue reading »

SUTEKH HEXEN: “LARVAE”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Mar 042012
 

How far can you go in the creation of harsh, ritualistic noise and still term the results “music”? Sutekh Hexen test those limits with their new album Larvae — the first of their creations I’ve heard. They come pretty close to the bleeding edge — and I say that as someone whose musical diet is confined largely to the kind of extreme metal that 99% of the world’s population would scorn as “not music”.

I found a quote from a musicologist named Jean-Jacques Nattiez that seemed relevant: “My own position can be summarized in the following terms: just as music is whatever people choose to recognize as such, noise is whatever is recognized as disturbing, unpleasant, or both.”

Of course, I would disagree with that conceptual dividing line (and I suspect Sutekh Hexen would, too). Some of the most powerful metal is both disturbing and unpleasant, just as life can be, and I would still call it music — because listening to it is a human-generated experience that engages the mind and moves the emotions. Larvae certainly does that, and isn’t that what music does?

The album is a paradox: Though it’s often massively distorted, atonal, and violent, it’s also hypnotic. It’s often utterly unnerving, and yet it matches the explosiveness of rage with moments of hollow resignation and sensations of grief-ridden acceptance. Much of the music sounds like a massive turbine generator on the verge of going supernova, and yet it includes extended passages of subdued acoustic guitar melody that somehow don’t seem out of place amidst all the background static.

And as unsettling as the Larvae listening experience is, it’s one that’s likely to stay with you; it has certainly stayed with me. Continue reading »

SOME FREE SHIT FOR YOUR EARHOLES: ESCHATON, GRANTED EARTH, LASCAILLE’S SHROUD, AND STUBB

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Mar 042012
 

(groverXIII drops manna from Hel into your auditory canals.  No charge.  Lots of song streams at the end of this bad boy, too.)

Howdy, folks. I know everyone loves good free music, so I’m just going to jump right into the bands here. Fuck yeah.

ESCHATON – ISOLATED INTELLIGENCE

Eschaton have been mentioned ’round these parts before (here and here), but I first discovered them back when they emailed me about their initial EP release An Instrument Of Darkness a while back when TNOTB was still up and running, and I’ve been a fan ever since. Isolated Intelligence is their first full album (at least, I think it qualifies as a full album… it’s only five tracks, but it is over 45 minutes), and it’s as fascinating a listen as one might expect from these guys.

Stylistically, the album is Eschaton’s usual take on black/death metal, which is to say that it is anything but usual. There is a lot of experimentation going on here, with sprawling post-metal soundscapes rubbing elbows with clean female vocals and discordant guitars, all contained with the basic framework of black metal. Get it on the Bandcamps, honky.
Continue reading »

THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT CHECKS IN FROM THE STUDIO

 Metal News  12 Responses »
Mar 032012
 


A blast from the past.

Pardon my harsh language, but if you don’t like The Monolith Deathcult, you’re a ninny and a poop-head.  You’re a nincompoop, even. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

The band have been working on a new album, Tetragrammaton — excuse me, TETRAGRAMMATON. Advance pieces of music, which may or may not appear on the album (and likely will sound quite different if they do appear) have surfaced over the last year, and they sound just fucking fine. Some of what we’ve heard has disappeared from public view, but some pieces remain — the evidence of works in progress. We’ll get to that in a moment.

But in addition to dribbling out songs in various stages of completion, TMDC are starting to give us up-close-and-personal insights into the recording process, fleeting glimpses of genius at work. Yes, we will now have a series of all-important video studio reports from TMDC as TETRAGRAMMATON continues to take shape.

Yesterday, we got Part 1 of a planned 342.4 video reports on the recording of the album. In Part 1, we see “offline” member of TMDC, Carsten Altena, laying down a keyboard track with the kind of verve and virtuosity that shames the classical masters. People who like a bit of orchestral grandeur in their blast-furnace death metal are going to eat this up like a plate of fresh road kill.

As for other evidence of the band’s creative progress, we have four clips of music retrieved from the TMDC SoundCloud page (some quite recent). The first one is “Aslimu!!! — All Slain Those Who Brought Down Our Highly Respected Symbols To The Lower Status Of The Barren Earth”, which the band released about a year ago, as kind of a gap-filler between albums. It’s still available for free download via the SoundCloud player. Continue reading »

THE 10 MOST LETHAL WEAPONS IN BLACK METAL: A PRELUDE

 Mosh Pit  15 Responses »
Mar 032012
 

(Earlier this week, Metal Injection published a discourse on The 10 Most Lethal Weapons In Black Metal. In the introduction to the article, the author alluded to the reasons why certain kinds of weaponry have been associated with the genre. Now we get the author’s full explanation — a Part 1, if you will, to the Part 2 piece that appeared at Metal Injection. At NCS, you know the prolific author as Rev. Will. In the course of his research, he consulted members of Noctem, Sigh, and Edge of Paradise, as well as the Vegan Black Metal Chef.)

Funnily enough, whenever black metal weaponry floats to the surface of the perpetually random sea of thoughts slushing about in my head, the next thing that invariably comes to mind is the “bling-bling” of hip-hop culture. Before the elitists out there start coming down on me with the wrath of Satan’s cheeseburger, consider for a moment the following comparison.

Now, I am not insinuating that there is a musical similarity between both genres. What I would like to point out is that just as bling-bling is the Statue of Liberty of hip-hop, black metal weaponry is very much an iconic part of black metal that serves as the first graphic reference for most people’s memory banks when they try to recollect what they can of the grim metal sub-genre (someone ought to give it a catchy name too, maybe “cling-clang”). Just as many hip-hop artistes are famous within the mainstream music circle for their overly-flashy jewelry, black metal musicians are infamous within the underground music community for their ostentatious weapons as well.

Over time, both sets of accessories have evolved from merely being elements of sub-genre attire into cultural movements of their own. Bling-bling and cling-clang are both usually made of metal, but that’s where the similarity between both cultural movements stops. Unsurprisingly, for a sub-genre and cultural movement as pessimistic and misanthropic as black metal, its proliferation in the early ‘90s even had the occasional political motive—something much of hip-hop has left far behind since its early days. Continue reading »

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