SUFFOCATION / CATTLE DECAPITATION / BLOOD RED THRONE / SADIST / CEREBRAL BORE / CARCERI – THE OLD BELL, DERBY, 14/03/12

 Concert Reviews  7 Responses »
Mar 302012
 

(Andy Synn witnessed the Derby, England stop of the Reborn of Death Tour and apparently was so skull-rattled by the experience that he thought he was at the movies.)

What a line-up, am I right? It’s like a 6-round pummelling before that final knock-out blow. Each band softening you up for another vicious beating by the next. So, still feeling a little punch drunk from the experience, how am I going to manage to review the show for you fine folks?

Through the works of one Mr Sylvester Stallone.

Chronologically speaking, Carceri are the Rocky Balboa (Rocky 6, for those not in the know) of the evening. Definitely the newest act on the block, with a large legacy to live up to. Thankfully, much like their filmic counterpart, they manage to take familiar elements and give them just enough of a modern shine to justify their position. Playing cuts from their new album The Good Must Suffer The Wicked, with a backdrop of dizzying, morbid imagery scrolling and warping behind them, the group deliver an electrifying blend of punchy, mechanical riffage, bone-rattling blast-beats and massive death growls that deftly bears up under the weight of their Oscar-winning legacy.

Unfortunately, the position of Rocky 5 is occupied by Cerebral Bore tonight, as their brain-mangling death-grind has all the familiar elements and hits all the expected story-beats, but somehow lacks the inherent character and heart in its delivery. The vocals are utterly monstrous, but the drums have an overly-triggered sound that robs them of their brutality, and the bass and guitar never fully lock in correctly. The actors are all present, but something about the story is lacking. Close to the end of the set, however, the band debut a new song that shows real promise, picking up the pace in time for the closing credits. Continue reading »

SHOW REVIEW: MARCH 23 AT THE BOARDWALK

 Concert Reviews  2 Responses »
Mar 292012
 

(DemiGodRaven checks in with his review of last Friday’s show in the Sacramento, California, area headlined by Conducting From the Grave and featuring a slew of other Sacramento bands, and his review is accompanied by lots of video.)

Marking the first time in a while that I’ve made the trip out to the Boardwalk in Orangevale, last Friday’s show was going to prove to be an interesting one. We had Sacramento hometown heroes Conducting From the Grave (it seems like every band opening for them holds them in some sort of reverence), who were going on a small headlining tour before they made the jump onto the monstrous All Shall Perish/Fleshgod Apocalypse and other-bands-that-have-floated-my-mind tour, playing with a bunch of scrappy local groups and Fallujah.

Unfortunately Fallujah couldn’t make it due to some difficulties and likely ongoing troubles stemming from their van situation, so another group out of my old hometown area of Hayward/San Leandro (according to their band profile) was brought in as a last minute replacement, making this a show consisting largely of a bunch of scrappy underdogs. John Abernathy of Conducting fame would find himself playing a double set that night as part of a new, semi-all-star group (in terms of the local scene) — a blackened death project known as Soma Ras.

I was initially worried that I would make it to the show late after some traffic horseshit on the way there since the show was supposed to start at 6:30 and I came barreling into the door at 6:48.   And the place was empty. Continue reading »

DREAM THEATER: REVISITING “IMAGES AND WORDS” (1992)

 Mosh Pit  22 Responses »
Mar 292012
 

Our fellow metal blogger, Full Metal Attorney, has been keeping his eye on the calendar, and he noticed that yesterday — March 28 — was the 20th anniversary of the release of Images and Words, the second full-length album by Dream Theater and a kind of milestone creation in the genre of prog rock/metal. To commemorate the occasion, he wrote a retrospective about the album. To commemorate his commemoration, I’ve written this post, because I’m curious.

This isn’t the first time I’ve leached off of Full Metal Attorney. I did this once before after he posted a piece about Pantera’s Vulgar Display of Power on the 20th anniversary of that album’s release. And, y’know, one good turn deserves another, particularly when the turn means I don’t have to come up with my own ideas.

FMA’s post begins with these words: “[Dream Theater’s] fan base is composed less of metalheads and more of music students and guitar nerds. There’s no mystery why that’s the case: The band’s musicians–who met at Berklee College of Music–are consistently named to be among some of the best in rock music. So music geeks love them. But Metalheads, as a rule, hate them.”

I don’t know if it’s true that Metalheads, as a rule, hate Dream Theater, because I don’t talk with anyone about Dream Theater, because I don’t like their music very much and I think discussing them would be boring. So although I must be one of those metalheads to whom FMA was referring, I am still curious about a few things. Continue reading »

GRAVEDANCER: BYZANTINE, CHROME WAVES, AND CONAN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 292012
 

Josh Eldridge used to be head of publicity at Century Media Records, and then later in business development and A&R. I remember him fondly because he was the first major label rep who gave NCS a shot at a song premiere for a big-name band (Deicide’s “How Can You Call Yourself A God”). Later still, he became the head of marketing for The MuseBox marketing company and founded his own business called ConspiracyPR.

Now, in partnership with MuseBox, he has formed a new metal label called Gravedancer Records and has made a deal for worldwide distribution of the label’s first three signings by EMI. And these aren’t just any three signings. The first bands signed to Gravedancer are Byzantine, Chrome Waves, and Conan. This shows extremely good taste (not that we hold ourselves out as arbiters of taste, of course), and a reason to pay attention to what Eldridge and Gravedancer do next. Allow me to elaborate:

BYZANTINE

The revival of this West Virginia band, with the reuniting of Chris Ojeda and Tony Rohrbaugh, was one of the real bright spots of news in 2011. TheMadIsraeli interviewed both of them for this post in February, and we’ve been following their progress closely. Small pieces of awesome music have surfaced now and then, enough to make us confident that Byzantine’s next album will be something special. The most recent taste of what’s to come is a Chris Ojeda playthrough that has now appeared on YouTube. That’s the first thing that will greet you after the jump. Continue reading »

HEAD SCRAMBLE: TARDIVE DYSKINESIA AND NEOSIS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Mar 292012
 

In this post, two bands with new music, both swimming in the same musical sea. One old favorite and one new discovery: Tardive Dyskinesia (Greece) and NEOSIS (Switzerland).

TARDIVE DYSKINESIA

Our attachment to this band goes back to the early days of NCS when we featured their 2009 album Sea of See Through Skins in a post about “math metal” (a post that also included Textures, CiLiCe, and Hacride). What a quaint term “math metal” now seems. Those were the days before the term “djent” polluted our vocabulary, before everyone’s neighbor began writing off-kilter pneumatic riffs a la Meshuggah and calling them “songs”.

It’s been a long wait for a new TD album, though the band have periodically given us reasons to remember them, including a free recording of a live performance (featured here). But now they’re beginning the ramp-up process for release of their third album, Static Apathy in Fast Forward, which is due later this year. Recently, they started streaming a rough mix of a new song called “Prehistoric Man”, which will appear (though possibly in altered form) on the new album, and I’m really digging it.

The song features to good effect the band’s blend of turbulent, head-twisting rhythms and progressive-minded instrumental passages that first attracted us to them years ago, with perhaps a more prominent place for melody and a few other added ingredients as well. There’s quite a lot of clean singing in the song, though the mixing of clean and harsh vocals also appeared now and then on Sea of See Through Skins, but I think it works well in “Prehistoric Man”. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: HEIDEVOLK

 Interviews  6 Responses »
Mar 292012
 

(You remember Trollfiend, don’t you? He used to hang around these parts more often before he started his own metal blog, ALSO, WOLVES. In February, he graciously (and glowingly) reviewed Batavi, the new album by Dutch folk/pagan metal band Heidevolk. The review is here. Subsequently, he conducted this e-mail interview with Heidevolk’s vocalist, Joris den Boghtdrincker. Wait for the insightful Q&A about growing Viking beards . . .)

 

Your vocal arrangement is pretty much unique. How did that come about? Was it chance or planned?

Me and Jesse, our previous singer, met up at a concert and after a few beers we came up with the idea of a choir-like vocal style for a metal band. It wasn’t long before we got in touch with other guys who wanted to start a folk metal band so we decided to join forces. We took our mics to the rehearsal room and started experimenting with combining our vocals. Ah yes, the good old days of 2002!

How many drinking horns do you own?

One. I used to have two but the other one got lost at Ragnarök festival in Germany. I wonder to this very day if it was because of an overzealous cleaner, or if it was stolen. It hasn’t popped up on E-bay so far. I’m still trying to come up with a fitting curse for the thief in case it was indeed stolen. Any suggestions? A drinking horn can cause a lot of nasty injuries and embarrassment when not handled properly, you know. That reminds me of the time our old guitar player Sebas mistook a blowing horn for a drinking horn. He only found out after he poured the beer in. Continue reading »

ABOVE THE EARTH: “SUPERCRUSH!”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Mar 282012
 

Kartikeya are a Russian melodic death metal band we’ve written about frequently at this site (use the search box on this page and you’ll see what I mean). The leader of Kartikeya is a very talented dude named Roman “Arsafes” Iskorostenskiy. We’ve previously explored a few of his other musical projects besides Kartikeya — a Russian pagan-metal band called Nevid (Невидь) and Arsafes’ own solo effort, with a 2010 EP called A New Way of Creation. But there’s still more:

Arsafes and a Serbian singer named Aleksandra Radosavljevic have collaborated to create a project called Above the Earth. Together they’ve recorded a demo of music described as “Atmospheric/Ambient/Progressive Metal”. The first piece of music I heard was an excerpt from a song called “All Our Dreams”, which they posted on YouTube as a preview of the demo. The first thought that popped into my head as the music began was, “this sounds like Devin Townsend!”

And then today, they posted the first full song, and guess what? It’s a cover of “Supercrush” from DT’s Addicted album. Now, you know we don’t include much clean singing on this site, because it’s mainly my site and I don’t have much patience for clean singing in metal. But there are exceptions, to be sure, and Devin Townsend is one of them — and “Supercrush” happens to be one of my favorite DT songs.

So, I approached this cover with both excitement and fear — excitement, because I know Arsafes is one immensely talented guy, and fear, because how can a cover of a song like “Supercrush” do anything but pale in comparison to the original? Well, it turns out that my fears were groundless, because Above the Earth nail that fucking song. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC: MARDUK, MITOCHONDRION, AND DEATH GRIPS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  28 Responses »
Mar 282012
 

Work, work, work.  That’s me right now, though I would rather be blog, blog, blog. So this will be short.

MARDUK

You know Marduk. They’re from Sweden. They play tumultuous black war metal. They have a new album coming on May 28 called Serpent Sermon. The album cover is after the jump. So is the first song from the album, which premiered yesterday on Metal Hammer. It’s called “M.A.M.M.O.N.”

It’s not exactly what I was expecting from Marduk, which is not a bad thing at all. Yes, there are bile-vomiting vocals. Yes, there are weapon-like blast beats and double-bass. Yes, the guitars come in menacing waves. But there are changes of pace in which the guitars also ring out slow, chiming melodies while the bass audibly bounds along beneath them in a jazzy progression. Interesting. Continue reading »

GORGUTS ON THE MOVE

 Metal News  1 Response »
Mar 282012
 

Yesterday, I wrote about an exciting new band named Crator who have finally surfaced some new music after first being cryptically mentioned in an update written by John Longstreth for Sick Drummer magazine in 2010. In addition to being one of the members of Crator and the drummer for Origin, Longstreth is also the current drummer for Gorguts.

When it comes to technical death metal, Gorguts occupies a place in rarified air. It has gone through several iterations divided by long periods of inactivity, with legendary vocalist/guitarist Luc Lemay being the only constant.  The band’s last album, From Wisdom To Hate, was released 11 years ago, but word surfaced about three years ago that Lemay was reviving Gorguts yet again — this time with the line-up filled out by Longstreth and by Dysrhythmia bandmates Kevin Hufnagle and Colin Marston.

Since then, Gorguts die-hards have been waiting . . . and waiting . . . and waiting for new music. It appears we will finally get to hear some of what the new line-up have been creating, because it was announced yesterday that Gorguts have been added to the U.S. DEATH TO ALL TOUR 2012. Continue reading »

AVENGER: “BOHEMIAN DARK METAL”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Mar 282012
 

 

Record Label: Deathgasm | Year: 2012 | Genre: Black Metal

By Willard Shrapnelspear

I always feel awkward reviewing an album sung and written in a language that is not English. Maybe it is because it makes me feel like I’m doing a half-assed job. Oh well, here I go again.

Apart from not being able to read a single word in the track titles (as they are all in Bohemian, the main language of the Czech Republic), obviously, I can’t figure out a single word vocalist and talented multi-instrumentalist Honza Kapák is spewing forth either. You might be thinking that that’s a pretty pointless statement, since who the hell can actually figure out harsh vocals. Well, seasoned listeners of extreme metal can actually make out a word or two from a set of harsh vocals even without first looking at the lyrics or track titles (but of course, some badasses like BadWolf can make out Carcass’ lyrics… wait wut?), and of course, I’m referring to extreme metal sung and written in English.

But guess what? When it comes to listening to foreign extreme metal and being so damn clueless as to what the vocalist is singing about and whatever the hell the lyrics are saying, it’s really not that bad a thing! It actually accentuates that feeling of exoticness found only in exotic metal, which is kind of like being lost in a random Vietnamese village (after watching a hungry village kid gobble up your tasty-looking map) and not having a clue as to what your next move should be.

In musical terms, your next logical move should be allowing the foreign music to wash over you and take you places; and boy does this fourth studio album from Avenger wash over you like a murky wave filled with bits of rotten leaves and soggy twigs, and carry you all the way to some twisted, paganized version of the Caribbean. Continue reading »

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