NO CLEAN SINGING

NEW LOOK, SAME HALF-ASSED CONTENT

Mar 252012

Shit, that’s a lot of fuckin’ skulls, innit?

Yes, brethren and sistren, we decided to change our clothes. Not that there was anything wrong with the old clothes, other than the fact that they hadn’t been washed in about a year, but sometimes a new look helps keep things interesting. Or so I’ve been told.

I am not responsible for our new look. I had some input into the tweaks here and there, but credit for the new banner, background art, and font goes to none other than groverXIII, the creator and frontman of The Number of the Blog who occasionally comes slumming here at NCS when he’s not working on his next blog project. Grover also designed our last site header, and this time, as then, he did it out of the goodness of his heart, for which yours truly is very grateful.

So, what do you think? Leave comments after the jump, and be honest. Continue reading »

ENSHADOWED: “INNER PSY-TRIP”

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 6 Responses »

Mar 252012

This three-man black metal band from Greece is blowing my mind and not even leaving the tiniest scraps of tissue behind.

I discovered Enshadowed for the first time in January because I saw that fantastic album cover up there, and I promptly included them in this feature. The artwork — created by the band’s guitarist N.E.C.R.O and an unidentified friend who did the design for the Lucifer figure — is for the band’s third album and their first on the reliable Pulverised label: Magic Chaos Psychedelia.

The title of the album (which was recorded by Fotis Benardo of Septic Flesh) is descriptively accurate, at least based on a song called “Inner Psy-Trip” that was released for streaming yesterday. It swarms like demon hornets, it blasts like anti-aircraft armament, it shrieks like a black cloud of wraiths, it crawls with reptilian menace, it lurches like a damaged golem, it thunders like an orcish army on the march.

The tempo changes constantly, the guitars alternately buzz and chime, the music attacks voraciously but also reverberates with grim, even funereal melodies. It starts with teeth bared and ends with slow piano keys over an electronic drone. Fascinating song. Listen after the jump. Continue reading »

FUCKING PIGS!

Phro's Posts 6 Responses »

Mar 252012

(Phro wrote this review.)

(Trolling bandcamp this morning, I found the excellent Georgia grindcore band Gripe. They seems awful pissed about pigs or something…)

Sunday morning.

I hate every fucking morning, but there’s just something about Sunday morning that really just…makes me wanna fuck a possessed nun with a Molotov cocktail. And this morning is no different. I wake up and wipe the sleepies from my eyes, get out of bed, and trip over the head of a pig.

Splat!

Face full of pig guts. Seriously, I mean, by now I’m really not surprised by the horrific shit I find in my apartment, but this… Ug. And it’s still warm, too. Eww…I think there’s some shit mixed in with the blood. Goddamnit.

I stand up and, covered in pig blood and little squishy flecks of pig shit, kick the head.

“Stupid fucking dead pig. I don’t even want to know where you came from.”

There’s a bottle of Four Roses, still half full. Oh, good. That’ll help me get through the day. I wander over to the computer. We need some fucking music to help me clean this shit up before the girl comes home from her business trip. Continue reading »

BEFORE THE DAWN: “THRONE OF ICE”

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 2 Responses »

Mar 252012

At this rate maybe we’ll get the whole album for free!

About two weeks ago, we featured the official music video by Finland’s Before the Dawn for a song called “Phoenix Rising” from their new album, Rise of the Phoenix. We also included this link for a free download of the song, courtesy of Nuclear Blast (and the download offer is still available).

Yesterday, another song called “Throne of Ice” became available for free download via the Finnish language EMI web site. You have to register on this page to get the download, but it doesn’t seem to be limited to residents of Finland, because I got it. The registration page is in Finnish, but with a little help from Google Translate, I can tell you that the boxes you’ll need to fill out ask for the following info in the following order: a first name, a last name, an e-mail address, a gender selection, and a year of birth. After that is a box with stuff you can sign up for like e-mail alerts (you’ll probably want to uncheck what’s in that box). Then click the “Rekisteroldy” button and you’ll immediately get a download link.

Why am I giving you this tedious step-by-step info? Because the song fuckin’ rocks hard, that’s why. Listen to it after the jump if you don’t believe me. What the hell, we’ll include a stream of “Phoenix Rising” after the jump, too, just in case you missed it the first time. Continue reading »

AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED MAKES BANDCAMP’S NOSE BLEED

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 6 Responses »

Mar 242012

In 2005, Relapse Records released a double-CD album by Agoraphobic Nosebleed titled Bestial Machinery. It collected all of the band’s recorded material before their Relapse debut, Honkey Reduction, including tracks from the Agoraphobic Nosebleed splits with Cattlepress, Laceration, and Enemy Soil, plus out of print material and previously unreleased tracks.

Now, if you’re unfamiliar with ANb, it is the mutated offspring of the infernally talented Scott Hull (Pig Destroyer) and a drum machine from Hell. The rest of the line-up (mainly vocalists) has varied over time, and I don’t think the current group was around when the material on Bestial Machinery was recorded. And what’s on Bestial Machinery is a rampaging cybernetic grindfreak on steroids, just as violent and otherworldly as Florian Bertmer’s magnificent album cover.

The main reason I’m posting about an album that’s now about seven years old is that I just discovered that it’s available for download on Bandcamp. I’m not sure how long it’s been there, but I think the addition is pretty recent.

Also, I’m posting about it because the album consists of . . . wait for it . . . 136 tracks!!! Now, a bunch of the songs are less than 10 seconds long, and the vast majority clock in under a minute, but still.

I can’t resist embedding all 136 tracks here at NCS, because that’s what having the album on Bandcamp permits me to do. The player is after the jump. Go listen and get fucked hard in the head. Should you choose to buy the album, you may do so HERE. Continue reading »

EYE-CATCHERS: IN MOURNING

Eye-Catchers, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 22 Responses »

Mar 242012

THAT, my friends, is the cover art for the new (third) album by Sweden’s In Mourning, The Weight Of Oceans, which will be released by Spinefarm Records on April 18. The artwork is by none other than Kristian Whålin (Necrolord).

This is old news, since the album art and details about the album were released in late February — except I didn’t pick up on it until TheMadIsraeli started chatting with me about In Mourning earlier today on FB.

Necrolord has created so many stupendous metal album covers in his career, but this is definitely one of my favorites. This excerpt from his bio at The Font of All Human Knowledge includes some info I didn’t know (and after the jump, I’ve got some music from The Weight of Oceans):

At the age of 17, Wåhlin formed Grotesque (as guitarist) with school friend Tomas Lindberg on vocals, Alf Svensson on guitar, and Tomas Eriksson on drums. The 1990 break-up of Grotesque would lead to the formation of At the Gates, who would be credited as instigators of the “Gothenburg Melodic death metal sound”. Wåhlin would collaborate with Lindberg and other At the Gates members a short time additionally in the death metal band Liers in Wait, and would go on to design the “Russian icon” cover-art of At the Gates’ cornerstone release, Slaughter of the Soul.

Dissection, who shared practice quarters with At the Gates, would display illustrations by Wåhlin on the cover of The Somberlain and also Storm of the Light’s Bane; the latter featuring the infamous scene of the “grim reaper horseman” in the middle of a snow-covered forest tundra. In the Nightside Eclipse, the debut of seminal Norwegian black metal band Emperor, would also be graced with his work on the cover. Wahlin would continue as an album artist for several other bands in the European death, black, doom, power and gothic metal collective throughout the 2000s.

MOONLOOP

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 9 Responses »

Mar 242012

My fucking day job forced me to be away from my computer most of yesterday. It was like a severing of the umbilical cord between fetal me and the mother web who gives me the sustenance of new metal, except no one slapped me on the ass to get me breathing on my own. This morning I was able to reconnect the umbilical and re-establish blood flow to my brain, although oxygen deprivation may have caused some brain damage. With me, it’s difficult to tell, because I come up with bad metaphors even at the best of times.

Anyway, I started catching up with metal news over the last 24 hours by browsing my Facebook news feed. I stopped when I came to a Listenable Records post about a band called Moonloop. I stopped because they are called Moonloop. How could I not check out music from a band named Moonloop?

It turns out that Moonloop are from Barcelona, Spain, and Listenable signed them last month for release of their second album Deeply From the Earth, which will come out in Europe on May 28 and in the U.S. sometime this summer. I found one of the songs from the album on Soundcloud. It’s called “Strombus”, and I dig it deeply.

Listenable says Moonloop’s music will appeal to fans of Gojira and Opeth. References to Gojira and Opeth in the description of other bands’ music are over-used (I’m certainly guilty of it myself), though in listening to “Strombus”, I can sort of see the connections. The structure of the song, the combining of harsh and clean vocals, and the incorporation of progressive musical elements could call Opeth to mind. And I suppose there’s a certain elephantine stomp in the guitar tuning and chord progression in parts of the song, along with the timbre of vocalist/guitarist Eric Baule’s voice and the environmentally themed lyrical focus, that could explain the Gojira reference. But as I heard other songs from the album, I also thought of Cynic and Obscura.

Regardless of which references might best capture the feel of the music, “Strombus” and the other two songs I found are definitely worth hearing. Continue reading »

FULL ALBUM STREAM: MESHUGGAH’S “KOLOSS”

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Mar 242012

Meshuggah and Nuclear Blast did a cool thing. They created this massive widget that allows you to stream the entire album and allows people like us to embed it in our web sites. If you hover your mouse over the center of the image, you will see a semi-circle of circles. If you then hover your mouse over each circle, you’ll see a song title and then you can play it. Magic!

You can also read BadWolf’s early review of KOLOSS, which Meshuggah themselves featured on their Facebook page, by going here. KOLOSS was released by Nuclear Blast in Europe yesterday and will be released in North America on Monday.

FULL ALBUM STREAM: ELYSIAN’S “WIRES OF CREATION”

Album Reviews, Metal News, Premieres 9 Responses »

Mar 232012

We’ve premiered individual songs before, but this is a red-letter day at NCS because today we’re premiering a full-album stream. The album is Wires of Creation (scheduled for release on March 26), and the band is Australia’s Elysian.

We first came across Elysian through one of our EYE-CATCHERS experiments — in which we listen to new music based solely on the appeal of the album art (the Wires cover was then, and still is, very cool). At that time, only one song from the album was available for listening (“Mans Design”), and it was a powerhouse piece of music. Now we’ve heard the whole album, and it fulfills the promise of that first song.

Elysian’s metal is both complex and primal, stylistically diverse and intricate in its composition, yet infused with atmospheric melodies and head-busting grooves. Wires of Creation is a dynamic work that both leads the mind down a labyrinthine path and packs a physical punch. It’s progressively minded melodic death metal that brings to mind an imaginary collaboration between Dark Tranquillity and pre-Harvest Opeth, but with other ingredients in the mix as well.

The band was founded by guitarists Gabriel and Nathan Hutchinson, and their interplay — part throw-down duel and part harmonious collaboration — is a large part of what makes the music so engrossing. They jab in a blur of hard punches, they bring the fiery shred, they spin webs of atmospheric melody. Gabriel is also responsible for keyboard additions that enhance the music with beats of electronica and soaring ambience. Continue reading »

THE FBI TRIES TO FUCK WITH US — AGAIN

IQ Subtraction 21 Responses »

Mar 232012

Well, I guess I succeeded in warning the FBI off my ass, so what did the cowardly motherfuckers do? They turned their malignant attention in the direction of poor, defenseless Andy Synn, who isn’t even a U.S. citizen, much less a real person. This called for hard measures, so I gave them hard. Measures.

First, here is the e-mail addressed to Guv’nor Synn, which he forwarded to me in my mind and which I am quoting verbatim because I could not have made this up, except I am omitting embedded links in the message, because although I love all of you, some of you might try to pretend you are me — or worse yet, Andy — and get the booty for yourselves.

March 19, 2012

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Anti-Terrorist And Monitory Crime Division.
Federal Bureau Of Investigation.
J.Edgar.Hoover Building Washington Dc
Customers Service Hours / Monday To Saturday
Office Hours Monday to Saturday:

Dear Beneficiary,

Series of meetings have been held over the past 7 months with the secretary general of the United Nations Organization. This ended 3 days ago. It is obvious that you have not received your fund which is to the tune of $2,500,000.00 due to past corrupt Governmental Officials who almost held the fund to themselves for their selfish reason and some individuals who have taken advantage of your fund all in an attempt to swindle your fund which has led to so many losses from your end and unnecessary delay in the receipt of your fund. Continue reading »

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