IRON MAIDEN + SIKTH = PRIMAL ROCK REBELLION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jan 032012
 

Okay, the headline of this post is a bit of an exaggeration, but I think you’ll forgive me after you hear the music.

The news is this: Iron Maiden guitarist Adrian Smith has joined forces with former SikTh frontman Mikee Goodman for a new studio project. It’s called Primal Rock Rebellion, and the duo have finished recording an album that will be released on February 27 by the Spinefarm label.

The songs were all co-written by Smith and Goodman, with Smith playing both guitar and bass. Session musicians who also contributed to the forthcoming album include Abi Fry of Bat For Lashes, plus original SikTh member Dan ‘Loord’ Foord on drums, among others.

Spinefarm and the band have just released a song from the album called “I See Lights”. It’s dark and nasty, and the guitar and bass riffage get their hooks in you pretty fast. Listen to it after the jump — and if you like what you here, you can download it for free. Continue reading »

THE BEST OF 2011: LISTS FROM GROVERXIII

 Listmania  26 Responses »
Jan 032012
 

(In this post, The Number of the Blog’s groverXIII provides his lists of 2011’s best EPs, albums, and videos. To hear music from the selected albums and EPs, click on the artwork.)

2011 was quite a year for music. I won’t lie… I’m generally a pretty positive guy when it comes to music, which is how I ended up with 75 honorable mentions (and probably more, if I were to go through my massive “albums I listened to” list with a fine-toothed comb). This list isn’t entirely metal, of course, but rather my favorite albums of the year regardless of genre. I had begun my rundown of the following honorable mentions over at TNOTB, but they were lost in our Viking funeral and I don’t have the patience to redo them, so I’m kicking things off with a simple list, in alphabetical order, of albums that I listened to in 2011 and enjoyed, but didn’t quite make my top 25.

There are a lot of big-name releases in the honorable mentions, and lest you think I didn’t like them, bear in mind that these are albums that I did like. If I were to list every album that I listened to in 2011, well, we’d be here for a long fucking time. Anyway, honorable mentions. BEHOLD. Continue reading »

TOP 10 OVERUSED WORDS IN EXTREME METAL ALBUM REVIEWS

 Album Reviews  22 Responses »
Jan 032012
 

(The dude who has written for NCS as “Willard Shrapnelspear” also wrote briefly as “Rev. Will” for The Number of the Blog before that site shut down following massive technical problems that appear to have deep-sixed the site’s archive of web posts. We agreed to give Rev. Will’s homeless TNOTB posts a home, beginning with this one — which reminded me of this post I wrote for NCS back in the dark ages.)

Warning: Take one glance at these words and find yourself waking up in the hospital from an overdose of (visual) cheese.

By Rev. Will

I would have added “old school” into this list if not for the very obvious fact that it is made up of two words. Excluding the really quintessential terms like “riffs”, “solos”, “metal” et cetera, here is a list of words that I thought have become really overused and cheesy over the past few months of metal blog-scouring I did to pre-occupy my stay-home-and-be-a-metal-nerd hours. Some of them are mostly used in a very misleading context, while the rest are pretty normal-looking, everyday words… which is why you guys should already try your best to stop repeating them over and over again, dolts. Continue reading »

SOME NEW THINGS FOR THE NEW YEAR

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jan 022012
 

The new year has started off with a bang here at the NCS island. We’ve been swamped with new music in just the last couple of days — too much for me to take in all at once, but I thought I’d pick out a random sampling to throw at your faces on this first Monday of 2012. Both of these songs come from relatively new bands, and both are damned impressive. So, while we’re still not finished with our Listmania look-backs at 2011, let’s also start looking at what the new year has in store for us.

BLOODSHOT DAWN

This is a band with members scattered around Portsmouth and Hampshire in the UK. They’ve completed a self-titled debut album scheduled for release on January 26 that contains 11 tracks and more than 50 minutes of music — and as you can see, it features some typically terrific Par Olofsson artwork on the album cover. The band have just made available a single from the album for free download as a taste of what the album offers. It’s called “Godless”, and man, it lit me up like fireworks exploding on New Year’s Eve.

The song is a double-barreled blast of melodic death/thrash with flashy riffing and a headstrong rhythm that’s immediately galvanizing. But what really got me enthusiastic was the instrumental extravagance that takes over in the last third of the song — one head-spinning guitar solo after another. It comes your way right after the jump. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2011’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 8

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011  3 Responses »
Jan 022012
 

This is Part 8 of our list of the most infectious extreme metal songs released this year. Each day until the list is finished, I’m posting two songs that made the cut. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the Introduction via this link. To see the selections that preceded this one, click the Category link on the right side of the page called MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011.

ESSENCE

Last February some impulse made me stop in my web browsing and watch a music video from a Danish thrash band called Essence. I gritted my teeth before pressing “play” because I tend to get bored by most thrash metal, both old and new. But the song turned out to be different from what I was expecting, and not just different but really good — thrash with some unusual and original ingredients in the mix, including traditional heavy metal influences.

The video was for a song called “Blood Culture” off the band’s debut album, Lost In Violence, which was released on February 25 via Belgium’s Ultimhate Records. As I wrote in an enthusiastic post about the video, what initially stopped me from hitting the “stop” button was the extended bass intro — a very cool piece of lower-register slap-and-tap flash that got my head nodding as it gained and then lost speed. At about 1:25, the song proper starts, and it’s built around some speedy, immensely catchy riffs — two main ones that, standing alone, would have been quite satisfying but when joined together elevated this song to a high level of infectiousness.

The vocals are also great (and thrash vocals are part of what usually turn me off about the genre), but what really seals the deal is what happens beginning at the 4:20 mark. Continue reading »

SNAGON’S TOP 25 ALBUMS OF 2011

 Listmania  27 Responses »
Jan 022012
 


(Today we’re happy to welcome another visitor from The (sadly departed) Number of the Blog: Snagon shares with us his list of the Top 25 albums of 2011.)

2011 marked the end of my life as a boyfriend (I’m engaged), the beginning of my teaching career, and the end of the place where my blogging started, The Number Of The Blog. For all these endings and beginnings I have had my fair share of great new music to take along for this journey and thus my list holds a tremendous amount of personal emotion for me. For now we have the honorable mentions.

Anaal Nathrakh – Passion, Anthrax – Worship Music, Antichrist – Forbidden World, The Black Dahlia Murder – Ritual, Boris – Heavy Rocks,  Charred Walls Of The Damned – Cold Winds On Timeless Days, Craft – Void, Dream Theater – A Dramatic Turn Of Events, Haemorrhage – Hospital Carnage, Jungle Rot – Kill On Command, Manilla Road – Playground Of The Damned, Necrophagia – Deathtrip 69, Opeth – Heritage, Pentagram – Last Rites, Razorblade Handgrenade – Tales From The Bricks,  Revocation – Chaos Of Forms, SSS – Problems To The Answer, Today Is The Day – Pain Is A Warning, Toxic Holocaust, Conjure And Command, Yob – Atma

I listened to a ton of music this year so you must wonder how I was able to talk about only 25 of the new 2011 albums; just read on below and behold, the majesty of balance. Continue reading »

A DIFFERENT KIND OF 2011 LIST FROM MICHIEL DEKKER (THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT)

 Listmania  3 Responses »
Jan 022012
 

We’re big fans of The Monolith Deathcult, and we’ve written about them repeatedly over the last two years. Most recently, Andy Synn included them in a post called “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King”, contrasting “the electrifying, eclectic, and downright esoteric bludgeoning of” their album Trivmverate with the puzzling Ilud Divinum Insanus: “Unlike Morbid Angel’s most recent offering, this actually fuses a brilliant variety of techno-industrial elements and symphonic excess onto a chassis of pulverising death metal utterly seamlessly, making a whole that is far, far greater than the sum of its parts.”

Andy also wrote a SYNN REPORT about their discography, and last March I had the pleasure of interviewing the band’s guitarist/lyricist/backing vocalist Michiel Dekker (published here), who is also a high school history teacher. TMDC have been painstakingly writing and recording a new album called Tetragrammaton — almost two years have passed since the band’s last release, The White Crematorium 2.0 — and the interview provided a few insights into the typically fascinating lyrical subjects of the new album.

So far, the only lasting taste of the music from the new album is a track called “Aslimu!!! — All Slain Those Who Brought Down Our Highly Respected Symbols To The Lower Status Of The Barren Earth”, which was released last February, and can still be heard HERE. I’ve also had the privilege of listening to unfinished demo versions of a few more songs, which has only made me eager for more. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Tetragrammaton will be released in 2012 — it’s certainly one of my most anticipated albums for this new year.

All of this is by way of introduction to the real point of this post. As part of our year-end Listmania series, I asked Michiel Dekker if he would give us a list of the best albums he heard in 2011. Instead of that, I got something perhaps more interesting. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SEAN GOLYER

 Interviews, Phro's Posts  8 Responses »
Jan 022012
 

EDITOR’S NOTE:  Phro gets serious. Using Jesper Zuretti’s recent opinion piece as the inspiration, he interviews budding producer/engineer Sean Golyer, and the result is one of the most informative and articulate interviews we’ve published. You’ll see references in the interview to Oak Pantheon’s 2011 release, The Void. We’ve written about that EP a couple of times, most recently here. To hear more of Sean’s work, he has a SoundCloud page at this location.

Phro’s note: A few days ago, Jesper Zuretti provided No Clean Singing with an excellent opinion piece on the song quality vs recording quality debate.  (Or maybe he sparked the debate?)  I noticed some comments written by Sean Goyler (producer for Oak Pantheon’s excellent The Void) and was interested in getting a different perspective.  This interview was conducted via e-mail, so if some things seem out of place, my apologies.  While I don’t think Sean is deviating all that greatly from Jesper’s main points, I do think he has some great things to add to the conversation.

 ********

Is there anything about yourself that you think readers should know to help us get a better view from your perspective? 

I’m just another Midwestern American guy who really loves his metal. I grew up on classic rock and folk in the suburbs of Minneapolis, MN and was turned to the dark side of music during my latter years of high school. It started innocently enough with power metal and sludge but has since taken me into the realms of extreme metal, doom, post-metal, crust, and countless other genres and sub-genres. Around the same time in high school I was introduced to some friends who would later come to form Oak Pantheon, a small independent metal band that released its first EP in July of 2011 and is currently working on our debut full-length album. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2011’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 7

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011  8 Responses »
Jan 012012
 

This is Part 7 of our list of the most infectious extreme metal songs released this year. Each day until the list is finished, I’m posting two songs that made the cut. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the Introduction via this link. To see the selections that preceded this one, click the Category link on the right side of the page called MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011.

DECAPITATED

Carnival Is Forever wowed a lot of the folks whose year-end lists we’ve published at NCS. The Demonstealer (Demonic Resurrection) wrote: “The album is brilliant, the guitar playing is phenomenal, and so is the drumming. For me this album sets the benchmark for audio production, it is brutal as fuck but yet so organic.” Exo (Noctem) called it “the result of a brutal procreation between old Decapitated and Meshuggah.” Tamás Kátai (Thy Catafalque) ranked it No. 6 on his list, finding it much better than the band’s older work.

Our own Andy Synn named it one of the year’s Great Albums and rated it No. 5 on his Critical Top 10, writing that it “stands as one of the finest and most intriguing experiences I have had with modern death metal in a long time.” The album also made TheMadIsraeli’s Top 15 for the year and he summed it up this way in his NCS review: “This kicks ass. This destroys universes. This is the purest, blackest, weightiest form of sonic nihilism laid to audio I’ve heard all year.”

The album is indeed deserving of all the praise it’s received here and elsewhere. It’s technical, progressive, brutal, and heavy-grooved all at once. It includes two songs that I put on my “master list” of possibilities for this MOST INFECTIOUS series — “United” and “404”. Continue reading »

METAL ELITISM

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  42 Responses »
Jan 012012
 

I’ve been spending more time than usual over the holidays with IntoTheDarkness, one of the two other people who were with me at NCS when we started this site, but one who has found many other things to do with his life than write for NCS, despite my nagging (yeah, amazingly, he has a life). I got an earful from him yesterday. He thinks I’ve become a “metal elitist”, that I’ve fallen sway to the influence of NCS readers, and spend too much of my time listening to things like . . . black metal.

In particular, he thinks I’ve completely turned my back on music I used to like (along with him), such as deathcore. He sends me band names every now and then, and has discovered that I don’t listen to them. I try to explain that my listening time just seems to evaporate. In general, this is the big problem with life: If you really try to live it, instead of letting it live you, there’s just not enough fucking time. This excuse fell on deaf ears.

Well, I’m going to prove him wrong soon. But not at the immediate moment. I’m afraid this post may simply reinforce his conclusions. Except, I do ask myself this: can you really call a mole who burrows deeper into the metal underground an elitist? That doesn’t sound right. There should be a different word for a burrowing metal mole (other than the obvious word — filthy). And besides, what is a metal elitist anyway? I’ve never thought of myself that way. After all, I pop wood for every metal band on the planet. Someone said that about me once.

Where was I?  Oh yeah. So yesterday, a friend asked me for recommendations about metal blogs to read. Two of the many names I gave him were The Living Doorway and From the Dust Returned. These are blogs I don’t read nearly as often as I’d like (see above about not enuf fucking time). They tend to cover metal that’s even deeper underground than my burrowing has yet taken me; I don’t recognize many of the bands they write about, but the writing is so damned good that I like to read them anyway.

I read them yesterday, for example. In doing so, I made two wicked discoveries which got me so enthused that I feel compelled to share: music from Wrathprayer and Antichrist. Mind you, I knew nothing about either of these bands before yesterday. I still don’t know much — except I know I like the music I’ve heard. Continue reading »

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