SHOW REPORT AND INTERVIEW: GOATWHORE – LIVE AT RAMALAMA RECORDS, TOLEDO, OHIO 3/7/12

 Concert Reviews, Interviews  6 Responses »
Apr 112012
 

(BadWolf and friends attended a special performance by Goatwhore in Toledo on March 7. This is his review, plus his on-site interview of Ben Falgoust and Sammy Duet. All photos accompanying this post were taken for NCS by Nicholas Vechery.)

I’ve had the most rotten luck with local shows lately. That awesome Black Dahlia Murder/Skeletonwitch/Nile tour was supposed to come through my hometown, as was the Faceless/Dying Fetus/Goatwhore tour. Both of those were cancelled. In fairness, the Black Dahlia Murder decided to headline a huge local metalcore festival—the Jamboree—instead, but I’m no huge proponent of skinny-jean deathcore. Thank god (or satan or wotan or whatever) for Goatwhore, who decided to play Toledo anyway—for free.

Ramalama Records

Goatwhore picked the perfect venue: Toledo’s finest record store, Ramalama Records. I have a long history with the establishment; it’s fair to say I would not be a metalhead were it not for the owner, Rob, and his clerk, Nick. A story within a story:

I rode into the store on bicycle on a Saturday afternoon at the age of 15. I was dressed in black jeans and a Master of Puppets tee-shirt—Nick said I was the first cool-looking guy to enter the store all day, and as such if I bought a record the second would be half off. A sick deal, but I had no idea what to get, so I just pointed at my tee shirt and said “Stuff like this.”

Nick picked out Municipal Waste’s Hazardous Mutation record. “What’s that sound like?” Nick threw it on the stereo.

“The good old days,” he said. Twenty seconds into ‘Unleash the Bastards’, I said he had himself a deal.

For my second buy I took a gander at the new releases shelf, and a  record cover caught my eye—some really great art of a ship being sunk by a whale. The band was called Mastodon. The album, obviously, was Leviathan. Nick let me listen to “Blood and Thunder”, and that was the end of normalcy in my life. $20 or so later, I was in metal for life. Continue reading »

ALL OVER THE PLACE: REVERENCE, ZATOKREV, AND THE KOREA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 112012
 

We’ve got some show reviews and an interview coming up today that you won’t want to miss, but I thought I’d start off our Wednesday with an assortment of metal that I discovered yesterday while browsing the interhole. The first two items are from bands whose music I’d never heard before: Reverence (France) and Zatokrev (Switzerland). Both have been signed by Candlelight Records, and the songs I heard are new. The Reverence track comes packaged with an official video that’s a real eye-catcher. The third item is a new video from a Russian band we’ve featured here before — The Korea.

Stylistically, the music is all over the place — as diverse as the bands’ locations. As you’ll see, my reasons for picking each of these items are also all over the place. Here we go:

REVERENCE

This French band had their genesis in 1998. After assorted demos and splits (including one with Blut Aus Nord in 2003), they released their first album in 2005. Two more followed that one, and in 2010 the band signed up with Candlelight. Their fourth album and first Candlelight release, The Asthenic Ascension, hit the streets in Europe on April 9 and is being sold as a CD here.

To launch the new album, the band released a music video for “Earth”, the new album’s opening track. Although I’ve seen Reverence described as industrial black metal, “Earth” begins with a slow, lush, orchestral introduction, and when the metal starts, that symphonic air remains. The music swells with keyboard grandeur and heavy riffs and includes a mix of clean and harsh vocals.

“Industrial” this is not; it has more in common with Dimmu Borgir than Blut Aus Nord. Though I enjoyed the song, it’s not enough on its own to make me rush out and get the album. It’s the combination of the music and the video that landed “Earth” in this post. Continue reading »

DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT WILL DRAG THE U.S. INTO THE ABYSS THIS SUMMER!

 Metal News  18 Responses »
Apr 102012
 

Well, hot fucking shit. It was less than a week ago when we reported the latest news about the UK’s Dragged Into Sunlight, and now look at this juicy (and somewhat frightening) piece of news that just popped into my e-mail inbox this afternoon (and then proceeded to dissolve the whole thing in a pool of acid):

Dragged Into Sunlight will be touring the U.S. this summer, beginning with an appearance at The Maryland Deathfest on May 26. On the front half of the tour, they’ll be joined by Cough and on the back half they’ll be touring with Wolvhammer.

By all accounts, this band puts on a cataclysmic live show. Certainly, their recorded music is a soul-sucking morass of depravity and despair, and of course I love it. There’s only one eensie weensie itty bitty tiny little problem: The closest they’re getting to the Pacific Northwest is motherfuckin’ Arkansas!!!

Now THAT is soul-sucking, and not in a good way. Dudes, are you really going back to the UK with nothing but stories about the Ozarks, when you could be describing the majesty of the Cascades and the shitty bathrooms at Studio Seven or El Corazon? Say it ain’t so!

I’m gonna go stick my head in the oven and turn on the gas. The rest of you can see all the tour dates after the jump.    Shit. Continue reading »

GET U SUM NEW CATTLE DECAPITATION: “LIFESTALKER”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  14 Responses »
Apr 102012
 

Metal Blade will release Cattle Decaptation’s new album Monolith of Inhumanity on May 8 in the U.S. and on May 4 in Europe and the UK. Today, Metal Hammer grabbed the second song premiere from the album (we featured the first one here, along with a lot more info about the album). The song is called “Lifestalker”, and man has it fucked me up. I’ve had to play it repeatedly to make sure I didn’t have a spontaneous hallucination at the 1:30 mark.

Oh yes, the song begins with a white-hot blast of death-grind, all blistering riffage and meaty slams and Travis Ryan going from horrific rising growls to hair-on-fire shrieks. And then at that 1:30 mark a few bass notes announce a surprising shift into something very different and very, very cool. I ain’t gonna spoil the surprise — you should hear it for yourself. And even after that “what the fuck?” interlude, the back end of the song pays off again with another dose of fiery fretwork, drummer-pummel, and insane vocals.

I don’t think it’s premature to say this album will be the best thing Cattle Decap have ever done. Speed yourselves onward past the jump and listen . . . Continue reading »

JEFF LOOMIS AND THOSE RIFFS

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 102012
 

(TheMadIsraeli dragged himself out of his phlegm-soaked sickbed to write this retrospective about one of his guitar idols and to provide a brief review of Plains of Oblivion.)

I’m going to share something personal and meaningful about myself with you NCS folk.

I want to be a musician, in a band, and doing the albums-and-touring deal for a living.  If I were, I wouldn’t be doing this music journalism bullshit [editor’s intrusion: I’m sure he meant that in the nicest possible way].  It’s pretty much my alternative as a means of remaining close to something I love.  I’m a guitar player. I’ve played the instrument for over 10 years now (13, to be precise), trying my best to hone my skill and technique.  I’m all too broke to realize any of these dreams though — so broke that I can’t afford to buy a suitable PC, camera, or other gear necessary to produce anything of respectable quality.  So I sit here, wishing, waiting.

I like to think I’m a guitarist first and a music journalist second, as much as it seems The Good Lord doesn’t want to arrange the cards in that order. But even though that’s not the hand I’ve been dealt, it doesn’t change a simple fact about me . . .  I love metal, and I love the fucking guitar.

We guitar players hold onto our idols — those people who for each of us were the inspiration, the people who are our personal golden standard of WHAT IT IS to be a badass riff-writer or shredder.  For myself, I’m unable to pick one favorite, but I can tell you the 5 definitive icons in my evolution as a guitarist:

Chuck Schuldiner, Christofer Malmstrom, Per Nillson, Jeff Loomis, and Alex Skolnick.

If you’ve been paying attention to news in the metal world lately and know what day today is, you would probably know who this piece is going to be about even without the post title and photo. Continue reading »

CATCHING UP: THE ATLAS MOTH, TOMBS, AND EMBERS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Apr 102012
 

Hey, you don’t have to tell me. I’m well aware that this site is like life-giving oxygen to our readers, and I know the air has been getting thin. You’ve been gasping because our daily output of posts has diminished in recent days. It’s just one of those rare times when all of us who write for NCS have been distracted or diverted by one thing or another, all at the same time.

In my case, the diversion was a happy one: Over the last three days I was distracted by events surrounding a long-time friend’s out-of-town wedding, including getting there and getting back and getting hammered in between.

She is now off on her honeymoon and I am now mostly recovered from the celebration and have been trying to figure out what I missed while I was whooping it up and bearing witness to the joyous union. Among other things, I discovered three new music videos for three not-so-new, but excellent songs. The videos are reminders of how good the songs are (I’ve loved all three since I first heard them), but they also add new dimensions to the songs.

The music and the videos have a few other things in common. The first two were produced with backing from Scion A/V, and the production values are quite high. The first two also involve candles. The third is creatively self-produced, making do with Creative Commons footage, but it shares this element with the other two more ambitious projects: You can drown yourself in the audio-visual experience, because there’s a powerful intensity to all three songs, and the visuals suit them well.

So, after the jump, the new videos for “Your Calm Waters” by The Atlas Moth, “Passageways” by Tombs, and “Shadows” by Embers. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: MAGENTA HARVEST – “APPARITION OF ENDING”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 092012
 

We seem to be living in an era where extreme “technicality” has infiltrated almost all genres of extreme metal. Rapid riffing and picking and barely human drum assaults seem to be a formula of choice employed by many bands to “modernize” their sound, almost regardless of the sub-genre in which they dabble. I’m not complaining, because I happen to enjoy bursts of flash and thrash, but it’s a refreshing change of pace, in a way, to find a newer band who create appealing music without resorting to pyrotechnics, acrobactics, and contortion and rely instead on the ability to write good songs and perform them capably. Magenta Harvest are one such band.

This Finnish group is composed of current and former members of Finntroll, Chthonian, Mygrain, and …And Oceans. They released a debut EP, A Familiar Room, in February 2011, which I really enjoyed — reviewing it here and including one of the EP’s songs in our list of 2011’s “Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs” here. Late last month, they self-released a second EP, Apparition of Ending.

Stylistically, it’s in the same vein as A Familiar Room — a dark form of melodic death metal that’s both viciously heavy and massively infectious. The changes from the first EP to this one are not huge — the most noticeable change is in the sparing but effective use of keyboards, courtesy of Finntroll’s Aleksi Virta. But the band’s songwriting flair is still very much in evidence, and in only four songs the band offer a lot of variety. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: PAOLO GIRARDI (plus TYRANTS BLOOD, WARPSTONE, and STAV)

 Eye-Catchers  19 Responses »
Apr 092012
 

I first came across Paolo Girardi’s name when writing about the Italian nuclear incinerator known as Blasphemophagher (here). Girardi painted the cover art for Blasphemophagher’s latest album, The III Command of the Absolute Chaos, which you can see above. He has painted many more album covers for metal bands, though it took a link from Rev. Will to one of Girardi’s most recent creations to remind me that I intended to explore his work in depth.

Girardi, who is also from Italy, doesn’t limit himself to album art for metal bands. He also paints landscapes, for example, such as these:

Girardi-Finnish landscape Continue reading »

THEMADISRAELI UPDATE

 Metal News  16 Responses »
Apr 082012
 

(In an effort to appease the hordes of tabloid reporters and paparazzi who follow him in packs, TheMadIsraeli offers this update for his adoring fans.)

As you may have noticed, I haven’t written anything in quite a bit. My output has decreased considerably because the American educational system is for the fucking birds and now also because I’m being fisted in the ass with sandpaper and icy-hot (the emphasis on this description is important) by a mother of all sinus infections.

I am attempting to get things done, and will try to nail my big reviews, but chances are Islander is going to have to take over for me.  Hard to write when you’re coughing up a phlegm and blood mixture on a consistent basis.  According to Phro, however, this is my opportunity to take advantage of a new market.

Phlegm porn.

Cause who doesn’t want to see a man jack off with his own sinus excrement, am I right?

I only have two goals for the month of April (and even these might be too fucking much):  Review the debut of NCS favorite 7 Horns 7 Eyes and review the new Jeff Loomis album, since I’m the only fucker qualified for the job (i.e., I’m the biggest sucker of Loomis cock on the planet). But Islander may have to pick these up if I fail. But that isn’t all I’m here to talk about today. Continue reading »

FLAY YER COCKMEAT ON MY HAMMER

 Album Reviews, Phro's Posts  4 Responses »
Apr 082012
 

 (Get your favorite blankie and read Phro’s review of the forthcoming album by Flayed Disciple, the first song from which we premiered here.)

You remember that blankie or teddy bear or giant horse cock you had when you were a kid that you wouldn’t let go of no matter how much your mommy begged for a turn? How you’d snuggle with it at night when you went to sleep and carry it around with you when you were running from bullies? It was warm and familiar and it just felt…right?

Well, that’s Flayed Disciple’s Death Hammer for me. It’s kinda old school but new school enough to avoid sounding so old school that you go “Oh, hey, another old school death metal band. Yah.” I’m assuming this is a result of their death-thrash sound (as the Wikipedia calls it). It’s familiar, but not trite. It hits that sweet spot that you didn’t even know you were missing and then massages that spot until you feel all warm and satisfied. All of this sounds like a horrible way to describe a death metal album, but this album is like a security blankie that demands blood sacrifice.

The first real, full song is called “Westboro Massacre” and it is littered with the holey (heh) corpses of the faithful. (To be honest, I have no idea exactly what the lyrics are, but the song ends with audio clips of screaming, punching flesh, and machine guns.) It’s a full steam ahead, let-me-rub-my-dick-and-awesome-solos-in-your-face monster of a track. The vocals are heavy and distorted and gravelly like a gangster Cookie Monster who’s been chugging napalm. They’ve strewn a few shorter solos throughout the song in addition to a longer one towards the end, so you don’t get the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-HOLY-SHIT-A-SOLO (non)surprise composition. (Though it does end up with quite a bit of soloing, but they are solos with more balls than wankery.) Continue reading »

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