ROD SOFTNESS ELIMINATION AWAITS!

 IQ Subtraction  15 Responses »
Dec 192011
 

FINALLY! After those dozens of e-mails I’ve received from Africans offering me ridiculous sums of money, fully loaded bags of gold dust, pre-funded ATM cards, and other forms of wealth in return for my personal details, I’m now starting to get e-mails from new friends offering other benefits. It’s about fucking time, because not one of those other motherfuckers has yet sent me a dime, despite the fact that I’ve replied to them quickly and sincerely and given them all the personal info they requested.

Here’s an intriguing message I got over the weekend from a helpful guy named Fritz Fish. I thought it would be good because of the alliterative name. When I replied to his message, I decided to just interlineate my responses in his message and send it back.

From: Fritz Fish
Subject: Overcome rod’s softness
Date: December 18, 2011 1:46:18 AM PST
To: Islander <islander@nocleansinging.com>

– There is no reason to feel depressed if you, like so many other men today, have hit the rough spot of your sexual life when you cannot seem to be performing as well as you used to do. Your agitation and frustration are easily understood, and still you should know that with the modern development of worldwide pharmacological industries it is but natural that there is bound to be a solution for your own needs when it comes down to solving your erectile dysfunction problems.

Dude, thanks so much for your interest in NO CLEAN SINGING and in the state of my mental and penile health. You’re like some kind of fucken mind-reader!  How did you know I’d hit a rough spot in my sexual life? I’ve been so agitated and frustrated lately that I can hardly hit the bowl when I take a piss. I’m like painting the goddamned floor and walls all around the shitter with my piss. But I tell you what,  I’m already getting rigid just knowing about the modern development of worldwide pharmacological industries and their solutions for my own needs.

Continue reading »

NOCTEM: THE BEST ALBUMS OF 2011

 Listmania  No Responses »
Dec 192011
 

(As we continue to barrel ahead toward the end of 2011, we continue our Listmania series, looking back on the year’s best metal. In this post, we have two lists of favorite albums from members of Spain’s Noctem — lead guitarist Exo and vocalist Beleth. Noctem is one of our favorites here at NCS — check out Andy Synn’s review of their fantastic 2011 album here and his interview of Beleth here, and you can watch their new music video for “The Arrival of the False Gods” in this post.)

EXO

1-Obscura – Omnivium

Really liked their previous album, but this one blew my mind, really complex and original at the same time.

2-Decapitated – Carnival Is Forever

These Polish guys still impress me. This album sounds more modern and includes some kind of hardcore influences. The result of a brutal procreation between old Decapitated and Meshuggah. Continue reading »

AMORPHIS DEATHMATCH – Rules and Round One

 Album Reviews  19 Responses »
Dec 192011
 

(We now haz our own version of MMA: Trollfiend and Amorphis going head-to-head in a cage match from which only one will walk away. Ladies and germs, place your bets!)

There’s been a lot of talk around the NCS chambers lately about whether or not an artist has the right to radically change everything about their music (they do) and whether or not we as fans should support them or heap massive amounts of hatred and ridicule upon them (we should – ideally, both). This kind of talk inevitably leads (in my tiny, pea-sized Trollbrain) to the band Amorphis.

I fucking loved Amorphis when they first came on the scene way back in 1992 (that’s 19 years for those of you keeping track) with their wacky, zany, combination of folk-scented melodeath. In that nearly two decades they have released 2 demos, 3 EPs, 10 studio albums, 11 singles, 11 videos, 3 compilation albums and a DVD. But somewhere around the third album the love affair ended, and I felt betrayed and abused because they went off in a completely different direction than I was expecting. They grew and changed and went through a dozen lineups and did some weird jazz fusion thing and lost their growled vocals and kind of came back halfway and then… I don’t know. All I do know is that I was left at the prom in my robin’s-egg-blue silk tux holding a bouquet of wilted roses and a used condom while they roared off in their Trans Am and never called me again.

But I’m starting to think that maybe I didn’t give them a fair shake. In my defense, this was right around the time I was getting into black metal, so their artistic meanderings were that much more jarring in contrast. And several NCS contributors have lately made me question my rigid stance on just how much the artists owe to their audience. So there is really only one solution, which is how I solve all major and minor conflicts in my daily life: gladiatorial bloodsport.

That’s right. I, Trollfiend, will go head-to head with Amorphis’ complete studio discography in a bloody, no holds (or holes) barred, teeth-and-nails combat that will only end when one of us is lying bleeding on the sand frantically trying to stuff our intestines back into a gaping gut-wound. Continue reading »

CONTINENTAL DRIFT

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Dec 192011
 

There’s now extensive evidence that hundreds of millions of years ago, all of Earth’s continents were joined together in one “super-continent” that scientists call Pangaea. Over immense periods of time, Pangaea divided into two smaller super-continents called Laurasia and Gondwanaland. Those giant land masses eventually divided into the continents we see today, and they have been drifting apart ever since, through the operation of plate tectonics.

Less than hundreds of millions of years ago, I listened to a shit-ton of melodic metalcore. In fact, it made up a significant majority of the metal I used to crank up on a daily basis. It was like a big land-mass of music where I lived. Over time, I’ve steadily drifted away from it, to the point where I almost never listen to it at all. I’ve moved away from it, or it moved away from me, and there’s now an ocean between us. The genre became saturated, but in my case, the main explanation is that my tastes changed.

It’s not enough to say that melodic metalcore stagnated, though it has. I now listen to genres of metal that haven’t changed much more than metalcore has changed over the same period of time, or even longer (old-school death metal anyone?). My tastes have simply moved in the direction of more extreme music.

One of the melodic metalcore bands whose albums I used to eagerly consume as they came out was Germany’s Caliban. They’ve been putting out albums since 1999, and they still are. The latest (their 8th) is called I Am Nemesis, and it’s scheduled for a North American release by Century Media on Feb. 28, 2012. This morning, the band released an official music video for the first single, “Memorial”. For Caliban, time has stood still. Continue reading »

THE TOP 10 LIST OF TAMÁS KÁTAI (THY CATAFALQUE)

 Listmania  11 Responses »
Dec 192011
 

(Tamás Kátai is the man behind a Hungarian band called Thy Catafalque, whose fifth album Rengeteg is one of my favorite recordings of the year,  for reasons I’ll be explaining in a forthcoming review. Also, a song from that album will appear soon on our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. So of course, as part of our Listmania series, I asked Tamás to contribute his list of the year’s best albums — and here we have it.)

10. Baaba Kulka – Baaba Kulka

A Polish band with early Iron Maiden covers up to Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son album. Why it’s interesting and worthy of note is that they handle the task with exceptional freedom and taste. My faves are the trip-hopish “Aces High” and the beautifully low-key “Flight Of Icarus”. True Warriors Of Heavy Metal keep out!


Continue reading »

ARSAFES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  27 Responses »
Dec 182011
 

Kartikeya is a Russian band we’ve mentioned quite often at this site (use the search box on this page and you’ll see what I mean). They’re very popular among those of us on the NCS staff, and they seem to be popular among our readers and other contributors, too (e.g., see Trollfiend’s list of the year’s best albums posted earlier today). They play an unusual (and unusually appealing) style of heavy-grooved melodic death metal that incorporates elements of traditional Indian music.

The leader of Kartikeya is a dude named Roman “Arsafes” Iskorostenskiy. Quite by accident, while doing some webernet research on Kartikeya for a forthcoming post, I learned that Arsafes is involved in other musical projects besides Kartikeya, and this morning I quickly checked them out.

One is a Russian pagan-metal band called Nevid (Невидь). Nevid have produced four full-length albums, the most of recent of which is 2011’s Agarta, and it appears that Arsafes has been the composer and guitarist for that band over the course of the last two albums. I’ve only listened to a couple of tracks from Agarta, but man is it good. There are some traditional pagan/folk instruments in the mix, but also some of those Meshuggah-esque, Kartikeya-style riffs and really catchy melodies. Nice, harsh, growly vocals, too.

Arsafes has also created a solo EP called A New Way of Creation that appeared in 2010. It includes an instrumental at the start, five original songs, and a cover of “Relentless” by Strapping Young Lad. I haven’t listened to the entire EP either, but what I’ve heard so far is also . . . aces. It’s a blast-furnace combo of progressive death metal with industrial overtones, sweeping melodies and Meshuggah-style hammering, and a mix of bestial death-metal roars and clean vocals. Reminiscent of SYL, Fear Factory, and the afore-mentioned Meshuggah, among other influences. There are some free download links to be found at this forum.

After the jump I’ve got sample songs from each of these two releases, both of which are quite different from each other — and different from Kartikeya, too.  Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (No. 48)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  10 Responses »
Dec 182011
 

This will be our last THAT’S METAL! post of 2011, unless I decide to do another one, in which case this will be the penultimate one.  It really, probably, will be the last one.  I mainly just wanted to use “penultimate” in a sentence. I don’t see why Andy Synn should be the only person at NCS who uses words like this.

“Penultimate” is a cool-sounding word, although it doesn’t really look or sound anything like what it means. In that respect, it’s like “mantissa”. Mantissa sounds like some kind of giant centipede-like monster with big mouth pincers that it uses to tear and consume human flesh. Instead, it means “an addition of little importance”. “Dragoman” is another example. It sounds like a name or the bass-player in a vicious black metal band, or maybe a Bulgarian MMA star. But it simply means “an interpreter or guide”.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, THAT’S METAL! These are the posts where we collect news items, images, or videos that we think are metal, even though they don’t have anything to do with music. Today, we’ve got four items, and I will act as your dragoman as we work our way through them, providing my own mantissas as we go.

ITEM ONE

Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese artist, though he has lived in New York since 1995. His medium of choice is gunpowder. He started off using gunpowder in drawings, and then moved on to the creation of “explosion events”. If you watched the waaay over-the-top opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, then you’ve seen his work. His most recent explosion event was a daytime spectacular on December 5 called “Black Ceremony” at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. It’s been described as the largest daytime fireworks display ever. Continue reading »

TROLLFIEND’S TOP TEN TUMESCENT TROLLCOCK TANTALIZERS OF 2011

 Listmania  20 Responses »
Dec 182011
 

(Our man Trollfiend was good to his word. Even though he has his own new, already thriving, metal blog now (ALSO, WOLVES), he hasn’t forgotten his old friends at NCS. Herewith, his list of . . . uh . . . trollcock tantalizers for 2011.)

Not much new music makes its way to the Trollcave,  I barely get any kind of internet connection up in this bitch, and the iTunes store apparently does not accept Trollcash (which consists individually of a severed and shrunken priest’s head stuffed inside a boiled and distended bull’s scrotum and tied shut with seven strands of golden hair from a female dwarf’s beard – in other words, accepted everywhere you see a Visa or Mastercard logo).  What little new music I get must be carefully pillaged from local and ecologically sustainable villagers.  It must then be fermented inside a sheep carcass for six months and then distilled and filtered through rendered baby fat before the pure delicious goodness rises to the top and the rest trickles out the bottom, fit only to fertilize my dung heap farm.

Since most of the good shit has already been skimmed off the top (sweet delicious chunks like Vallenfyre, for example), I decided to be more selective in my selection of selections for this list.  Specifically, I chose my top 10 folk/folkish/ethnic/Viking/pagan/weird-ass-shit albums of the year…in other words, the gristly nuggets no one else would touch.  So fill up your pints and break out the hot sauce because here we randomly go: Continue reading »

[INSERT NAME] SCREAM.COM

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  28 Responses »
Dec 172011
 

So, this new Metal Injection-conceived web page called Tom Araya Scream has been making the rounds of the interhole since it appeared yesterday. It’s a clever idea, and if Slayer is, like, still your favoritest metal band ever, dude, SLAAAAAAAYER!!!! (while throwing two-handed horns), then you’ll probably be punching this button on your smartphone all weekend to get a few seconds of Tom Araya’s tinny scream.

However, if you’re to the point in your metal-listening life (as I am) when this scream has begun to sound sort of . . . what’s the word? . . . anemic? . . .  by comparison to the kind of really ugly, vicious, bile-vomiting screams and roars you really enjoy, then Tom Araya Scream is more useful as a template for something . . . better.  And no, I’m not talking about Bruce Dickinson or Rob Halford.

Like, how about Lord Worm Scream . . . such as the vein-exploder that starts at about the 3:45 mark of Cryptopsy’s classic “Open Face Surgery”?  (after the jump) Continue reading »

BONE5

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  35 Responses »
Dec 172011
 

Gee whiz, it’s been almost 24 hours since we last talked about a Finnish band here at NCS, and even though Andy Synn listed two of them yesterday as his top 2 picks for favorite albums of 2011, the loris horde at the NCS Compound is starting to get restless, so we’d better do something about that.

Bone5 is a band from Jyväskylä who released their debut album in 2010 — Dead City Tales. Earlier this month, they released their second album, From the Ashes. What caught my eye was the news announced in late November that Pasi Pasanen had joined the band as its new drummer. Pasi Passanen was the drummer for Swallow the Sun for almost the first decade of that fine band’s existence (2000 – 2009). In addition, along with Bone5’s vocalist Tony Kaikkonen (Code of Silence) and a couple of dudes from Ghost Brigade (among others), he’s also a member of a fairly new band called Sons of Aeon, who we featured with high praise in this post last spring.

When I saw the news about Pasanen joining Bone5, the band had just released a music video for a track off From the Ashes called “Rain”. I liked the song a lot, but deferred writing about it until I could try to learn a bit more about the band. With the help of fireangel, who’s a Finland-based creator of the Night Elves site and whose year-end list of songs we published recently (here), I was able to get in touch with Pasi Pasanen, and he was nice enough to answer a few of my questions.

After the jump, check out the cool video for “Rain”, and you can also read our mini-interview with Pasi Pasanen. Continue reading »

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