Slayer Christmas light show for 2011.
No home should be without them at this special time of year. Your neighbors will love you for it.
Be sure to wait and see what happens when the guitar solos kick in.
Nice touch on the snowman, too.
What am I talking about? You’ll see, after the jump. Continue reading »
It appears we have helped spawn a new blog. And not just any blog. And not just by anyone. Ladies and gentlemen, allow us to introduce you to ALSO, WOLVES, the new blog dedicated to folk, Viking, and pagan metal launched by our very own Trollfiend.
Well, he’s not really ours. We explored the possibility of establishing ownership but learned to our dismay that the 13th Amendment to the U.S. constitution prevents that here in the States. But even though we don’t own him, Trollfiend has become a welcome presence around NCS through his frequent comments and occasional guest posts about pagan and folk metal, which is a sub-genre we had been unfairly neglecting before Trollfiend showed up.
After spending some months around NCS, Trollfiend evidently came to the logical conclusion that if people will read the kind of shit we post at NCS, well then, fuck, why not do it himself? And so he has. And it’s really good. So far, Trollfiend has put up 3 posts on the new site since launching in late October (we knew about it then, but Trollfiend asked us not to spout off about it until he had built up a bit more content), and all three are worth reading. The headline for today’s offering at ALSO, WOLVES is at the top of this post, and you should definitely check it out.
But don’t stop there. Show Trollfiend some love. And no, I don’t mean e-mailing him photos of your genitalia. Well, I mean don’t just do that. Continue reading »
(The MetalSucks-sponsored METAL SUCKFEST in NYC early last month was a milestone event. Two NCS emissaries were on hand to witness it — BadWolf and photographer Nick Vechery — and they’ve already turned in reviews of the show here (Day 1) and here (Day 2). BadWolf also interviewed a number of the performers, including this discussion (completed a couple weeks after the SUCKFEST) of Ramming Speed drummer Jonah Livingston.)
I caught on to several outstanding bands at the Metal Suckfest, but none of them caught my ears the way Ramming Speed did. Their hooky mix of punk and classic metal is perfect recession-era drinking music. Thanksgiving weekend, I sat down with their drummer, Jonah Livingston [also head of TDB (Teenage Disco Bloodbath) Records] during the OSU/Michigan football game to talk about Suckfest, Boss HM-2 core, and why marching bands need more Entombed in their repertoires.
Ramming: sup!
BW: Hello, Jonah! I’m just glad Michigan is actually ahead rt now!
Ramming: Cheers dude
BW: But enough about that. How does the band feel post-Suckfest?
Ramming: Personally I’m feeling energized, we spent a lot of this year sitting at home writing but it’s been super busy since the fest. We’re leaving on tour in a few days so this last month has been dealing with merch, finishing the booking, promoting etc. We also got to try a bunch of new songs at the Suckfest that seemed to work well, so we’ll be doing even more of them on the tour.
BW: It was a very good set! Are you changing it for the tour? As in, even more new material, or more older stuff?
Ramming: Out of all our new songs I think 9 of them are ready to play live, so we’re doing one set with like 4 new ones and 5 old, and a second set with 5 different new ones and 4 old ones. The idea is to switch off between the two sets every day so when we get home those 9 will be as tight as shit so we can hopefully we can hit the ground running and go into the studio as soon as possible after that. Continue reading »
(Editor’s Note: Beginning next week, we will start publishing our own lists of 2011’s best metal from NCS writers, NCS readers, and guest contributors who we invited to participate in our year-end review. Here’s Andy Synn’s prelude to what he’s got planned for us — plus the first of our year-end lists; so I guess we’re actually starting today?)
Every day next week I will be delivering one of my Year In Review columns for 2011, much in the same format as I did last year. For those of you who are newer to the site, here’s how it works:
On Monday you will get the list of the “Great” albums of the year. An aggregation of the best written, best played, and most artistically rewarding records of the year, in my critical opinion.
On Tuesday you will get the list of the “Good” albums of the year. A composite of all the albums which are undeniably solid, with a mix of great/good songs, all exceptionally strong but with slight weaknesses that stop them from being really “Great”.
On Wednesday you will get the list of the albums I consider the most “Disappointing” of the year. Now to try and mediate the inevitable flame wars and insult that will be thrown my way, let me make it clear; as things stand I very rarely, if ever, review an album I know I am going to dislike. I try and listen to, and then review, albums that are at least “Good” if not “Great”, so as to describe them and recommend them to people in a positive way.
The albums that make up my “Disappointing” list are not necessarily BAD albums, but largely they are albums from bands who should have, and could have, done better – often because they’ve done better before. At worst, these albums are distinctly average and unimpressive offerings from bands who have far greater potential. A warning though – there are a lot of “big hitters” who produced ultimately “Disappointing” albums this year. Continue reading »
We’ve been re-publishing the Best Metal of 2011 lists that we’ve seen on other web sites, focusing on sites that have really big audiences — which sorta means, by definition, that they’re not metal-only sites. So far, we’ve reported about the lists on Pitchfork, NPR, Noisecreep, and PopMatters (and we also included DECIBEL magazine’s Top 40 list and . . . uh . . . Revolver’s list). You can catch up on all that by using this Listmania link.
Today, we’re reporting on The Top 50 Albums of 2011 as selected by Adrien Begrand for MSN Entertainment. MSN Entertainment (which is owned by Microsoft) is another broad-scope entertainment site that includes coverage of music, film, games, videos, celebrity gossip, and a wide range of music. They claim over 23 million unique visitors to the site every month, narrowly edging out NCS in audience size. Once again, we’re featuring their list not because MSN Entertainment is one of our go-to sources for discovering and assessing metal, but because we’re curious about what mass-audience outlets are touting from our precious underground genre.
MSN Entertainment has been rolling out their Top 50 list all week in segments, and as of this morning, the list is now complete. To see the list at MSN Entertainment, along with Adrien Begrand’s comments about each album, GO HERE.
A few thoughts about the list: Finally, the Devin Townsend Project and Ghost Brigade get some listmania recognition (and Amon Amarth make another rare appearance, too); thrash-lovers will be happy to see Evile’s name on the list; the list includes high finishes for Obscura and In Solitude; straight-up death metal is largely ignored, despite the plethora of good, filthy, old-school offerings this year; and I predict the Top 4 will prove disappointing to many NCS readers.
Continue reading »
(Music as sex. BadWolf reviews the self-titled debut album by California’s Ash Borer, which has been making more than a few Best of 2011 lists.)
My favorite bands tend to write longer songs, and yet longform heavy metal intimidates me. The thought of going a full 20 minutes without changing a song terrifies me—I blame the iPod in my pocket, which might as well be part of my anatomy now. Perhaps I’m scared of commitment; some women in Toledo, Ohio, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, will attest to this, and in many ways loving music is like romance. There are plenty of fish in the sea and my time is valuable; I cannot date every good-looking metal record for a full six months before deciding whether or not I want it to stick around. It’s a risky game to play—lots of great records don’t make good first impressions (I hated …And Justice for All when I first heard it).
But let me be a typical man and reflect the blame back on my dates, for a moment. I’m scared of 20-minute songs because I do not trust them to stimulate me enough for the full duration of a single listen. Sprinting is hard enough, a Marathon is herculean. Twenty minutes is a long time, most people can’t handle writing a 20-minute long piece of music, and in general I do not recommend that artists undertake the task. Tom G. Warrior is the exception—I do love “The Prolonging” from the Triptykon record — but otherwise I don’t recall a 20-minute long metal song I’ve listened to on repeat.
But Ash Borer’s 20-minute opus “My Curse Was Raised in the Darkness Against a Doomsday Silence” held my undivided attention for its full duration. I listened to it twice in a row. I did not fetch more hot tea; I let that mug get frigid. I had to urinate, badly, but remained seated until the last strains of odd synthesizer at the end ebbed into silence. Until the amp hiss ceased. Continue reading »
Yeah, I’m joking. I don’t really intend to devote any of our precious space to Revolver magazine’s list of the 20 best albums of 2011. Actually, our space isn’t precious. It’s unlimited, but still.
It just happens that although I haven’t renewed my subscription to Revolver, they continue to mail me the mag, and when I got the current issue a few days ago, I peaked at the list. It’s just as terrible as I thought it would be. Not 100% awful — there are a few good albums on the list — but overall it’s painful.
Album of the Year? It’s the same title as the one that DECIBEL named Album of the Year, except instead of being Path of Totality by Tombs it’s The Path of Totality by . . . Korn. Seriously.
Coming in at No. 3? Megadeth.
Locking up the No. 4 spot? Evanescence.
Do you really, truly want to see the rest of the list? Alright then. Suit yourself. Continue reading »
Yessirree, it’s that special time of year when our tender ears are bombarded not only by multi-media ads exhorting us to spend our money like there’s no tomorrow, but also by manifold forms of musical Christmas cheer, whether in the form of carols or other “standards” we’ve heard a jillion times before, or special seasonal items being released for the first time.
Take this new video by Ancient VVisdom, for example. Specially timed to help celebrate the Yuletide season with tidings of great joy and the harking of heralds, these Austin-based musical angels have chosen to bless us all, every one, with a very catchy tune from their well-received 2011 debut, A Godlike Inferno. It’s called “The Opposition”, and it’s guaranteed to be a hit wherever fine Christmas music is heard on a non-stop basis, such as shopping malls and elevators.
So go ahead, get in the Christmas spirit: fill up a glass with eggnog, light some votive candles, and sing along with Ancient VVisdom to these stirring lyrics:
“Hail to thee, Lord Lucifer/I sing praises to thee/and I suffer no longer” Continue reading »
“The name of this game is death fucking metal, the kind that rampages like a heartless, mechanized beast the size of a house. The music slams and hammers with advanced pneumatics, interwoven with snakelike guitar leads and bounding bass lines. It’s fast and technical, and the vocals are downright voracious. Very fucking impressive, and possibly originating from space.”
That’s what I wrote in our review of the new EP from a Long Island, NY band called Artificial Brain, which includes Revocation guitarist Dan Gargiulo, possibly may include ex-Biolich vocalist Will Smith, and others whose identities I haven’t yet discovered with certainty. I wrote other things, too, but I’m pretty sure I was under the influence of biomechanoid larva from space who Artificial Brain keep as pets and use to infiltrate the weak-minded.
Wait, that didn’t come out right. Anyway, whatever the fucking things are that wormed into my brain stem when I listened to the EP, those things have returned and are acting as receptors of microwave transmissions from space. I feel like something is crawling under my skin and looking out through my eyes with multifaceted cornea. Milky white foam is coming out my nose and dropping onto my keyboard.
I also hear a massive mechanized noise that’s starting to crack the walls in my home. I think it’s the sound of the new Artificial Brain video for “Tongues”, the one song from the EP I didn’t stream with my review. The EP is still available for free download at the Artificial Brain Bandcamp page. The video is after the jump. The green slime is coming out of my ears again. My brain is in a mixer. Continue reading »
Bob Malmström. That’s a band name. They’re from someplace called Westend in Finland. They claim to have originated borgarcore, which seems to be an abbreviation for bourgeois-hardcore. They are politically incorrect, in that they celebrate the enjoyment of things like eating meat, wearing furs, drinking copious amounts of Dom, lap dances, and making big piles of money.
In October, Spinefarm Records released Bob Malmström’s debut album, Tala svenska eller dö, which means “Speak Swedish or Die”. This has something to do with a linguistic minority group in Finland consisting of Swedish-speaking Finns. According to The Font of All Human Knowledge, “they maintain a strong identity and are alternatively seen either as a distinct subgroup of the Finnish people or as a separate ethnic group or even as a distinct nationality,” and they represent about 5.5% of the total Finnish population.
There seems to be some kind of continuing controversy over various government protections of the right of Swedish-speaking Finns to speak Swedish. Problem is, I can’t quite tell which side of this debate Bob Malmström is on. I found this Bob Malmström interview in Finnish, but as we all know, Google Translate does an especially piss-poor job converting Finnish into English, and the translation I get is mostly gibberish. So, I can’t tell whether Bob Malmström is protesting prejudice against the finlandssvenskar/suomenruotsalaiset or fomenting it — or just putting everyone on. Any Finns out there care to help me out?
Anyway, although this is all kind of an interesting aspect of Finnish culture that I didn’t know existed, it’s not the reason for this post. The reason for this post is the recently released official music video for a Bob Malmström song called “Eliten”, which has been rocking my ass this morning. It’s kind of a searing, headbanging, thrash/hardcore/punk onslaught, as rendered by a bunch of dudes in suits sipping champagne. Fuckin good pancake. Check it after the jump. Continue reading »