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 »

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 »

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