Apr 242012
 

(BadWolf provides this report of a show at Headliner’s in Toledo, Ohio, on March 23, 2012, featuring Legacy of Disorder, Ghoul, Municipal Waste, an GWAR.  All photos were taken by Nicholas Vechery.)

Every large metal show in Toledo rolls through Headliners—bands like The Black Dahlia Murder or Between the Buried and Me play the small drive-friendly stage. Bands like GWAR, however, play the big stage, which looks like a whole lot of nothing, just a big concrete floor splaying out in front of a stage with a few industrial beams holding the roof up. In other words, spartan. The place practically begs to be coated in fake blood.

I’ve seen some of the best and worst shows of my life here: one side of the equation, I saw Lamb of God, Trivium, and Machine Head here in 2007 with a little-known band called Gojira opening for them; on the other hand I saw The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus here. (Don’t ask. It’s a shitty story. I punched a 12 year old boy.) I rank this show in the middle of the pack overall—two winners, one check, and one dud.

I arrived before Vechery, Vokillist, and d00shc00gr to interview Municipal Waste. I tried to interview GWAR and failed to penetrate a layer of bureaucracy—yes, such things exist in the world of metal. I accept this failure as an even trade for a rarer sight: a team GWAR staff meeting.

Opinions on the band aside, I have never seen such professionalism backstage. The band’s Tour Manager showed zero-tolerance for bullshit on the part of local staff and the band alike while displaying absolute reverence for the security team. Continue reading »

Apr 242012
 

(groverXIII reviews the new album by NCS favorites, Death Grips.)

[CLEAN VOCAL WARNING]

[ACTUALLY, RAPPING WARNING]

Now that we’ve got that out of the way… By now, you should have heard of Death Grips. This Sacramento-based experimental rap trio has been mentioned several times by myself and BadWolf, and the aural insanity that is the Exmilitary mixtape has been spread everywhere. (It’s downloadable for free on the Death Grips site, along with several tracks off of this album, and the whole album can be streamed there.) Following the buzz that Exmilitary generated, Death Grips signed with Epic Records (on the condition that they maintained full creative control) and have released the first of two highly-anticipated 2012 albums, The Money Store. And that, my friends, is what brings me here.

Now, if somehow you missed out on Death Grips, they’re a bit hard to describe. They are ostensibly a rap project, but the experimental nature of the group pulls them into completely foreign territory. Let me put it this way… With most of the good rap (read: not the shit that they play on the radio), the MC is an instrument of surgical precision, utilizing intelligent wordplay and a deft delivery the way a master swordsman wields a rapier. Death Grips, on the other hand, are a warhammer being swung recklessly by a berserk, half-mad barbarian tweaking on meth. I initially compared them to the rap equivalent of black metal, but the more I think about it, the less accurate I think that comparison is. No, I would say that Death Grips is more like the rap equivalent of Gorguts, taking a fairly established sound and twisting it into something bizarre and otherworldly. Continue reading »

Apr 232012
 

Tomorrow, April 24, Damned will be released in North America by the increasingly can’t-miss Southern Lord label. It’s the latest riptide to be unleashed by a venerable Swedish band who haven’t lost the reflexes or the bloodlust that inspired their first music in the mid-90’s. Wolfbrigade remind us about the vital contribution of punk to death metal, but Damned is no history lesson. It’s an explosive, immediate, vibrant album that’s a hard boot to the ass.

I’ll come back to the rest of the band in a minute, but I have to start with what infected me from the beginning of this album: The vocals of Micke. His voice sounds like it’s been regularly bathed in a concoction of napalm, sandblaster grit, and pure grain alcohol from a backwoods still. It’s abrasive, pissed-off, and bleeding from a dozen raw wounds. It’s all smoke and shrapnel, and it lights up this music like a free-fire warzone at midnight.

The vocals suit the music, because Damned is one raw skin-scraper after another, and they leave no time to breathe — 12 songs in under 35 minutes. The majority of the tracks are a boiling stew of d-beat drums, swarming chainsaw guitars, slamming rhythms, and molten guitar solo’s that come for you like grasping alien face-huggers that are a shitload stronger than you are. Continue reading »

Apr 232012
 

 

(Rev. Will continues on his mission of interviewing every metal blogger and journalist in creation with an actual personality, though this one runs the risk of making all the others seem dull by comparison. As one of Rev’s previous subjects, I just want to say, thanks a fucking lot, dude, what did I ever see in you?)

Perhaps the most greatly misunderstood metal e-zine out there on the Internet is Teufel’s Tomb. Style-wise, it is like the metal equivalent of Tucker Max (that Texan lawyer-by-profession and self-proclaimed asshole who shot to infamy in 2006 with his debut ‘fratire’, “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell”); disgustingly hilarious and exuding a personality protected by such a thick layer of concrete-coated skin that the two words “shame” and “remorse” do not exist in the mastermind’s music reviewing dictionary (obscene words are a dime a dozen though!).

Many people got and still are getting offended by the mastermind’s highly satirical and offensive writing style, which probably explains its low number of ‘Like’s’ on Facebook even though Teufel’s Tomb has been in existence since 1996, but that is actually the whole point! And from an objective point of  view, the dude and his cronies actually consistently cover many of the latest album releases on time, so labels and bands especially should not be complaining. You know what they say about any publicity being good publicity.

The mastermind in question is, obviously, also a self-proclaimed asshole called “Teufel”. On top of being an experienced web developer and graphic designer, Teufel once worked in the adult entertainment industry (or “smut biz” as he calls it), and his recollections are as funny as Tucker Max’s own wild escapades.

Who knows? If his interest in something as underground as extreme metal music didn’t exist in the first place, he might have gone down a different career path entirely and penned a book called “I Hope They Don’t Buttfuck In Hell” and shot to promiscuous notoriety! Continue reading »

Apr 222012
 

In celebration of yesterday’s fifth annual Record Store Day, various people have made metal available for free download. For example, the organizer of the Death Metal Decapitation 2 festival in Toronto (scheduled to explode on May 4), Blacktooth Entertainment, has put together a free compilation of music from extreme bands who will be playing at the fest. The line-up includes Toronto’s Nephelium, an excellent band who we’ve previously featured at NCS. The comp includes two songs from Nephelium’s new album, Coils of Entropy.

Also on the comp are two tracks from a Montreal band named Derelict, who are also excellent (and we’ll be reviewing their new release, Perpetuation, shortly). We haven’t yet explored the music of the other bands on the comp — Deamon (Ottawa), The Unborn Dead (Toronto), and Blastmycosis (Toronto) — but this comp will make it easy to do that. To stream the music and download it for free, use this link:  http://blacktoothmay4.bandcamp.com/

But wait, there’s more! Free music from The Neologist and Dreaming Dead . . . after the jump. Continue reading »

Apr 222012
 

Yesterday, I pulled together music from three old-school death metal bands who’ve been honing their craft for about two decades each. Today, we’re dealing with death again, but these are much younger bands and their linkage to death comes more from their choice of names than from the style of metal they play. But listen, although it may not be steeped in pus and corpse-meat stew, it’s still mighty tasty.

Both Deathember (Sweden) and Deals Death (Sweden again) are bands we’ve covered before at NCS, and both of them have recently released new videos that are worth seeing and hearing.

DEATHEMBER

We first encountered Deathember in October 2010, featuring a brief review of their first EP in one of our MISCELANNY posts. Last November, they released a second EP with the title of A Thousand Flatlines. It includes six songs and is available via iTunes, Amazon mp3, and the band’s BigCartel site.

Yesterday, they premiered their first music video for one of the new songs — “Scapegoat”. The band and their friends financed and made the video themselves, and especially for a “homemade” project, it’s unusually well done. It’s devoted to the band performing the song, and the performance looks like I imagined it would from listening to their music — a balls-to-the-wall blast of screaming fun. Continue reading »

Apr 212012
 

I like almost every kind of metal yet invented, though not to the same degree. Straight-up death metal holds a special appeal, and so periodically I need to return to the great swollen bosom of the death mother and nurse on the sticky, putrescent fluids that leak like winter sap, viscous and foul-smelling, from her maggot-swarmed nipplage.

Umm . . . I don’t know if that last sentence came out quite the way I intended.  Maybe it needs more work.  On second thought, nah.

Anyway, last night I sampled the music of three bands whose music is new to me, though the bands have been devoting themselves to death metal for a long time. I really liked what I heard from all three. There’s some eye-catching cover art in here, too. So, nurse on this music from Vore (Arkansas), Uncanny (Sweden), and Catastrophic (New York).

VORE

This three-man band have been churning out punishing music since 1994. They’ve self-released an EP and three full-length albums, the most recent of which is Gravehammer, which appeared late last year. But yesterday, the band announced that they had signed a deal with Germany’s AFM Records. AFM is going to re-release Gravehammer in CD and vinyl formats on July 20. That’s the news that grabbed my attention, and I decided to check out a song from Gravehammer that’s been released for streaming. And holy death mother, it’s a great song. Continue reading »

Apr 212012
 

I’m getting yet another slow start this morning, but I have something to hold you while I finish the post I intended to finish last night.

If you couldn’t deduce it from their name, the Portuguese band Moonspell have a thing about werewolves.  They also have a new album due for release by Napalm Records on April 27 (May 8 in NorthAm) called Alpha Noir. There will also be a special edition of the album that includes a second CD called Omega White. The album features dual cover art by Seth Siro Anton, one of which you can see above.

Now, back to the werewolves. About a week ago, the band released an official video for an Alpha Noir song called “Lickanthrope”, the title of which is kind of a play-on-words for another name for werewolf — “lycanthrope”. There’s some licking in this video, as well as other scenes of debauchery and weirdness in a bar that’s probably not like the ones you may patronize. Red Riding Hood also makes an appearance, and of course there’s . . . the change. Must have been a full moon rising when they filmed this.

The video has way-above-average production values, and the song is a scathing yet addictive romp. Amuse yourselves after the jump, and I’ll be back with something else soonish. Continue reading »

Apr 202012
 

It’s 4/20, and Reefer Nation will be mostly mellow today. But since we already ran BadWolf’s post about Mastodon and Feist, I think we’ve tipped our hat to mellowness, and so it’s time to get pissed off again.

Nedā Āghā-Soltān was a beautiful young Iranian woman whose death during protests over the phony 2009 Iranian elections became a rallying point for people around the world. If you were paying any attention at all to the news of what was happening in Iran during those tumultuous days, you couldn’t miss the video of her bleeding to death in the street from a chest wound.

Mortad is a London-based metal band whose 2012 debut album is called The Myth of Purity (the album was included with the February 2012 issue of Metal Hammer magazine, but will be getting an official release later in the year. According to a press release, the band was formed by an Iranian vocalist and songwriter named Somi Arian, “whose lyrics take aim at the hypocrisy of religion and the government as well as seeking inner truth and strength in the face of such oppression.”

Today, Mortad released an official video for a song called “The Voice”, which takes as its theme the death of Nedā Āghā-Soltān. It’s a good song, a thundering slice of Scandinavian-style melodic death metal with hints of Eastern melody, and Somi Arian’s harsh vocals build an aura of caustic vehemence and rage. Continue reading »

Apr 202012
 

(BadWolf brings us the news!)

In case you haven’t heard, tomorrow, April 21st, is Record Store Day, when all sorts of super-cool (mostly) vinyl releases will be available at record stores across the country for one day only.

In fairness, Record Store Day is some hipster shit—the vast majority of these releases are Pitchfork-approved independent releases, or classic rock re-issues. BUT!!! Participating stores will have two Mastodon split-7” records available, one with psych-rockers The Flaming Lips, and one with lo-fi loving singer-songwriter Feist

So far, the split with Feist has been hyped the hardest on metal blogs as well as indie blogs. And now, it’s streaming!

Behold: Continue reading »