THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY OF DANZIG III IS UPON US

 Metal News  6 Responses »
Jul 132012
 

Due to a recent day-job grind and a very late night spent in the company of Agalloch (a show that’s in my future as I type this and in your past as you read it, but which I have no doubt will be/was awesome), I am leeching off the work of other writers for today’s first two posts rather than creating the kind of brilliant original content for which NCS is known far and wide, by which I mean from Seattle all the way to Tacoma.

This first piece of leeching sucks the creative blood from Full Metal Attorney, whose blood we have figuratively sucked in previous posts as well. As you may recall from our previous leeching, FMA has been running posts celebrating the 20th anniversary of iconic metal albums. Today, he has posted one about the third album by Danzig, How the Gods Kill (its 20th anniversary is actually tomorrow, but FMA doesn’t post on Saturday’s).

FMA calls Danzig III “one of the most cocksure, diabolical metal albums of all time”, an album that saw Danzig “following a devil on the left down the path to rock and roll perfection”. Not only does he view Danzig III as the apex of the band’s musical career, he contends it’s a collection of music that, twenty years later, “hasn’t shown its age in the slightest.”

I don’t know whether these are controversial statements because, for me, Danzig wasn’t a pivotal band in my own road toward metal hell, and I’ve never listened to all of the albums. But I’ll say this: “Dirty Black Summer” is a hell of a song, and the H.R. Giger artwork for Danzig III is completely killer. Continue reading »

DEATHSPELL OMEGA: “DROUGHT”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Jul 122012
 

Deathspell Omega’s new EP, Drought, is this distinctive French band’s first offering of music since Paracletus completed their conceptual trilogy of full-length albums in 2010, and it can be considered a further movement in the direction charted on that last album.

While the music (and perhaps the lyrics) create an aura of approaching catastrophe and convey a sense of freedom from external constraint that link it to the ethos of black metal, little remains of black metal’s most widely known (and most stagnant) musical tropes. There is also nothing on Drought that closely resembles the demon asylum quality of Fas – Ite, Maledicti, In Ignem Aeternum.

What Drought does offer is an experience that is at times memorably beautiful and at times utterly chaotic but always completely enthralling. The songs are intelligently constructed and performed with a high level of technical panache, and they’re organized in a way that provides an appealing sense of flow through the EP, even though that path is subject to a multitude of twists, turns, and jarring turbulence.

The EP is bookended by “Salowe Vision” and “The Crackled Book of Life”, two largely instrumental songs that are the most melodic offerings on Drought. Stylistically, they share more in common with prog and post-rock than black metal. At the outset of “Salowe Vision”, guitar chords ring like cracked, rusted bells, a slow tolling, as if to announce the isolated melody that follows, which drifts dreamily and buzzes with reverb before the song accelerates and intensifies at the finish. Continue reading »

BLOOD MUSIC: WIN SOME EYE-CATCHING ABIGAIL WILLIAMS VINYL

 Metal News  10 Responses »
Jul 122012
 

On July 2, we reported the unfortunate news that USBM band Abigail Williams will be calling it quits after a farewell U.S. tour that starts later this month and runs into September. As a result of that post, we made contact with a relatively new non-profit organization based in Helsinki, Finland, named Blood Music.

Among other things, Blood Music raises money for its activities by releasing vinyl versions of previously released metal albums. For example, they have released vinyl versions of albums by Maudlin of the Well and in the near future they’ll be releasing a 7 LP box set of music by Strapping Young Lad. But the subject of this post is Blood Music’s release on vinyl of the first and the last works by Abigail Williams — the Legend EP and the band’s 2012 full-length, Becoming. There are five previously unreleased bonus tracks included on Legend (turning it into an album-length record) and three on Becoming (totaling more than 27 minutes) — and everything was remastered by the band’s frontman, Sorceron, from the original 24-bit mixes.

To help spread the word about Blood Music, they’re running a contest where the winner will receive a free copy of the sweet colored vinyl edition of Becoming pictured above. This is a double LP, with the pressing limited to 150 copies worldwide.

To enter the contest, you’ll need to like the Blood Music Facebook page (here) and share the photo on FB that you can find via this link.

Of course, Blood Music is also selling the colored pressings of both albums (though they’re nearly sold out of those) as well as the black vinyl pressings of both (also limited to 150 copies each). To check those out, HERE is the link to Blood Music’s store. And THIS is the link to Blood Music’s web site. After the jump is a pic of the colored vinyl version of Legend. Continue reading »

OLD MAN GLOOM: “NO”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jul 122012
 

(London-based guest contributor Alex Franquelli returns to NCS with a review of the new album by Old Man Gloom.)

Forget for a minute that Old Man Gloom is made up of members of some of the greatest and most innovative bands hardcore and metal have seen in the last 15 years. Try to ignore the fact that the predecessor to No – Christmas – is one of the most underrated works in the realm of extreme music. What you are left with is an album whose songwriting and arrangements are the closest extreme metal can be to perfection.

The shifts between post-metal tantrums and the violent beauty of ambient and electronica are in fact less vivid than in the previous release but, after all, in eight years a lot has happened and a different world welcomes a renewed band, while the sheer contrast between the two facets of the spectre is a contrast determined by a sound, which is still in search of a balance but is daring at the same time.

Let’s face it, when Aaron Turner (Isis, Split Cranium, Mamiffer), Caleb Scofield (Cave In, Zozobra), Nate Newton (Converge, Doomriders) and Santos Montano (founding member of OMG) met in the studio the first time, not many people would have thought the outcome could be anything less than excellent. And excellent it is.  The sound gracing the speakers when No is spinning is nothing short of an intriguing experience. Enough drones to make Khanate proud embellish the already obsessive thrusts driven by riffs indulging in loops (“Regain/Rejoin”) and feedback (“Rats”) in ways that can be defined as “structural” rather than cosmetic. Continue reading »

A WHOLE FUCKLOAD OF ALBUM RELEASE AND TOUR NEWS (AND A NEW GRAVE TRACK)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Jul 112012
 

If you made your way through today’s earlier post about the first direct observation of Dark Matter, then you know we now have an official definition of “fuckload”: It’s a number that’s equal to the number of miles in 18 megaparsecs, which is (yes, I finally did the math) 1,126,656,000,000,000,000,000. Conveniently, that’s about 1.1 sextillion of whatever you’re counting, which is why it makes so much sense to just call it a fuckload.

And today there was a fuckload of news about forthcoming albums, with album art and release dates and such, plus a press release about a hellacious new tour. I don’t have time to write about the entire fuckload of news items, so I’m just going to pick the four that got the most “fuck yeah’s!” in a random survey I did of myself.

The bands in question are: Hooded Menace, Eyeconoclast, Cryptopsy, and Obituary.  And then at the end, I’ve got a new song from Grave’s next album, because we always have to have the musics.

HOODED MENACE

We’ll start this fucker off with Finland’s Hooded Menace. Today it was announced that their first album for Relapse Records, Effigies of Evil, will be released on September 11 (it can be pre-ordered in a variety of formats and bundles here). David D’Andrea did the album cover, which is cool. Relapse describes the album as “combining the grooving riffs of Black Sabbath and early Cathedral with the fire of classic Autopsy and Asphyx”. Fuck yeah. Continue reading »

5 OF MY FAVOURITE . . . GUITAR SOLOS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Jul 112012
 

(You can probably tell from the spelling in the post title that our UK-based writer Andy Synn is responsible for this post.  What do you think of Andy’s picks?  What are your favorite solos?  Leave comments!)

Greetings true-believers! Ok, so after the review-fest of “Unofficial UK Week” last week (which I swear, wasn’t intentionally timed to coincide with Independence Day) I’m easing up a bit this week. I should have a review of a truly badass new album by a certain Norwegian band for you in the next few days, and I’m slowly working on another Synn Report and a longer column or two for next week, but for now I thought I’d drop the inaugural column in what I hope to be a semi-regular series highlighting “5 of my Favourite…” things.

Today I’ve chosen to pick out 5 (ok, 6 actually, but I refuse to change the title) of my favourite guitar solos. Not of all time exactly, just five that came to mind when I was doing some random listening recently. Future iterations of the column, if it proves a success, will feature other random “5’s” in whatever order they happen to occur to me.

Enslaved – “Ground”

First off we have the defining solo in “Ground” by Enslaved. It’s a well-known fact that Ice Dale is a true guitar god, managing to rock both a killer solo and a series of iconic rock poses with a shirtless flourish. I’d swear he was the black metal reincarnation of Jimmy Page, if not for the fact that Page isn’t dead yet. Continue reading »

THE HEAVIEST MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  32 Responses »
Jul 112012
 

Nope, this isn’t about a Gojira song, despite the confusingly similar title of this post. It’s part of our continuing effort to transform ourselves into The Blog of Particle Physics, Cosmology, and Extreme Metal. It’s also about an occurrence that’s so profoundly mind-blowing on so many levels that it could not be ignored: the first observation of Dark Matter — the material that’s theorized to make up 96% of all matter in the universe and that provides the “scaffolding” of the cosmos.

To appreciate the full explosive weirdness of this event requires a bit of back story.

On July 4, 2012, humankind reached a milestone not only in the history of science but also in our understanding of all nature. As we reported in this post, that was the day when the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced the discovery (at a 99.999% confidence level) of the Higgs boson (a/k/a the “God particle”), a subatomic particle that’s responsible for giving mass to electrons, protons, and neutrons — the fundamental components of all visible matter in the universe.

The existence of the Higgs boson had been predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics in its finalized form since the 1970s, but the boson’s existence had never before been proven and verified. The Standard Model is a theory (though not quite so theoretical any more) about the interaction of three of the four basic forces known in the universe — the forces that describe the interaction of those particles described above. The one fundamental force omitted from the Standard Models’ unification is gravitation, a force described in the general theory of relativity.

I ended that earlier post with a quote from CERN’s press release about the discovery of the Higgs boson — a quote which emphasized that the Standard Model only explains the interaction among the particles that make up all the matter that we can see — and that we can’t see 96% of the matter (or more precisely, “mass-energy”) that makes up the universe; that remaining 96% is the stuff called Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

Most experts in this field believe that stuff mainly consists of undiscovered types of particles that are different from those that make up all the matter we’re able to observe. We can’t see it because it apparently doesn’t emit or absorb light or any other electromagnetic radiation at any significant level. But if we can’t see it, how do we know it’s there? Continue reading »

CATCHING UP (Part 2): SYBREED, ANCIENT ASCENDANT, KHONSU, SELFHATE, AND MORE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jul 112012
 

I’m still catching up with developments in metal that I missed while cut off from the web during my recent mini-vacation. And I saw some things yesterday that also perked my interest. In our last post yesterday, I rounded up some of the recent developments I thought were worth sharing. Here are some of the rest. They involve Sybreed (Switzerland), Ancient Ascendant (UK), Khonsu (Norway), Selfhate (France), Beak (U.S.), and Ensiferum (Finland).

SYBREED

The first item is the revealing of the cover art to Sybreed’s next album, God Is An Automaton. It’s by the very busy and very talented Seth Siro Anton, who is also the front man for Septic Flesh, whose headlining North American tour we posted about yesterday. The album will be released by Listenable on Sept 24 in Europe and on October 2 in North America.

Sybreed have been posting excerpts of songs from the new album, and they’re up to five so far. I don’t really find short song excerpts worth mentioning, except I did it yesterday with respect to the forthcoming Napalm/Converge split, so what the hell. The Sybreed excerpts released to date are collected right after the jump, in reverse order of their appearance. Continue reading »

CATCHING UP (Part 1): ENSLAVED, DAN DANKMEYER, NAPALM DEATH, AND CONVERGE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jul 102012
 

So much happens so fast in the world of metal that even being out of touch for two days means that you miss a lot, and some of what you miss is actually worth knowing about. I was in a remote location over the last two days with no internet connection, and since returning last night I’ve made an admittedly incomplete effort to find out what I missed that was important/entertaining to me. Turns out, there was a lot — so much that I’m dividing what I found into two posts, of which this is the first. The second one will start off our postings tomorrow.

In no particular order, this post includes news, new music, or new videos from Enslaved, Dan Dankmeyer, Napalm Death, and Converge.

ENSLAVED

Enslaved made a few announcements about their twelfth studio album RIITIIR — including the name of the album, the disclosure of the cover art (above) by long-time collaborator Truls Espedal, and the release dates (via Nuclear Blast): September 28 in Europe and October 2 in North America.

“Riitiir” doesn’t appear to be a real word, even in Norwegian or ancient Norse. As the band explained today, it’s a version of the words for “rites” and “rituals” and is intended to mean “The Rites of Man”. How that concept or the artwork connects to the lyrics or the music hasn’t yet been revealed, but the band say they intend to “discuss some key concepts and potential interpretations in deeper song-by-song analysis” in the weeks and months ahead. Enslaved are so talented and so creative that I’m actually interested — though of course I’m most interested in hearing the music. Continue reading »

EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULE: ACCEPT – “STALINGRAD”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 102012
 

(In this post, BadWolf reviews the new album by Germany’s Accept, which was released by Nuclear Blast in April.)

I’m not sure what you guys at large think of old-school heavy metal; not only do we only cover it occasionally here; Islander neglected to offer it as an option on his reader’s poll. Not that I blame him, the style has been on life support and morphine for the majority of my lifetime—although there’s been a recent groundswell of bands trying to bring it back in vogue, such as High Spirits, Christian Mistress, Witch Mountain, and to a lesser extent 3 Inches of Blood. I get the impression that it used to be people began liking traditional heavy metal and then segued into the extreme stuff we specialize in at NCS. Now, it seems the opposite: people start out on extreme metal and wind their way back—maybe—to bands like Accept.

This is a good time to start, because Accept’s new album, Stalingrad, is a super-fine slab of riffs and solos—one of the most consistent albums I’ve heard all year. I spent the 4th of July driving around parked streets for what seemed like hours while fireworks exploded overhead. In the 100+ degree heat, I rolled my windows down and played Stalingrad as loud as my speakers could muster. One could call this ‘extreme’ traditional metal—fitting, from the band who invented speed metal in 1982 on the song “Fast as a Shark”—though Stalingrad sounds less like old Accept and more like a spiritual companion to Judas Priest’s Painkiller album. Stalingrad sounds like triumph, not torture; a high-powered sports car ramming down a highway; fireworks. Continue reading »

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