NEW VIDEOS FROM INSOMNIUM AND PARADISE LOST

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Mar 222012
 

I’m just taking a short break from slaving away at my fucking day job . . . just long enough to tell you that TERRORIZER just premiered brand new videos from Insomnium and Paradise Lost in advance of their UK tour next month, the poster for which you can see above.

The Insomnium video is for “Regain the Fire” from One For Sorrow. The Paradise Lost video is for “Honesty In Death” from their new album Tragic Idol.

To see these videos, go past the jump. I haven’t even seen them yet, so please let me know what you think so that I will know what to think when I watch them during my next momentary break from my fucking day job.

Thank you for your service. Continue reading »

REV. WILL’S RITVAL TOOLKIT, OVT NOW!

 Metal News  17 Responses »
Mar 222012
 

No Stvpid “Delvxe” Or “Limited” Editions!

Not Black Metal, Bvt Pretty Kvlt

What’s vp, yov feeble-minded hvmans? Has everyone been listening to tr00 n’ kvlt black metal? Yov’ve got to be listening to tr00 n’ kvlt black metal, or yov ain’t welkome arovnd here. All ov yov scene kids and -kore kvnts can rvn back to yovr  holy holey friends and bawl like a baby for all Rev. Will cares—ONLY TR00 N’ KVLT BLACK METAL SHALT BE TOVCHED VPON HERE.

By the keratin goodness ov Satan’s goat horns I swear, I shall khristian my anti-kore krvsade “The Lvciferian March Ov Diabolikal Radioaktive Yadabradabra Khristflakkin’ Volkanik Tortvre Ov Blasphemy” and embark on its virgin qvest ov desekration akross the kommercially-driven sovndskape ov the modern metal mvsik indvstry once I prokvre enovgh war fvnds from trvsty warriors ovt there.

I know, many ov yov are bvsy with yovr day jobs as meek data klerks and salesmen, and perhaps even the okkasional rich bvt vseless fat boy who jvst got grovnded by his bvsinessman dad, so I will extend the deadline to the seventh date ov Blvshreck, at exaktly, I repeat, exaktly 9 O’Klokk, 9 minvtes and 9 sekonds dvring daybreak. No more, no less.

Now that I have gotten that ovt ov my pagan system, let’s talk abovt one ov Rev. Will’s most hated phenomena in the realm ov kommercial mvsik—the “delvxe” or “limited” edition that yovr typikal Maiden and Metallika albvms are svre to have. Continue reading »

THE SWEATPANTS MOSH UPDATE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  22 Responses »
Mar 222012
 

(We’re pleased to welcome guest columnist JJ “Shiv” Polachek, the vocalist for both 7 Horns 7 Eyes, whose debut full-length Throes of Absolution will be released on April 24 by Century Media, and Ovid’s Withering, whose debut EP we recently reviewed here. In this first of what we hope will be many posts, Shiv gives us some slamz.)

So I’ve been given an opportunity to stand on a soapbox and deliver a brain dump to you faithful readers of NCS, and I’m gonna utilize it to aware you all of something that the major metal news and media sites always seem to overlook: SICKASS NEW SLAMZ.

I’m not talking about artsy-fartsy stuff like Deeds of Flesh, Disgorge, Blasphemer, or the new Condemned (even though I love all those bands). I’m talking about good old-fashioned, blue-collar, working-class SLAM. Bands that make a conscious decision to not get too out-of-the-box because that would take away from the crushing sickness throughout, and they don’t have time to worry about luxuries and privileges like “counterpoint” and “polyrhythms”. As a direct result of this, they always kick infinite ass 100% of the time. I could wax pretentious like any typical Internet Metal Nerd, but these jams speak for themselves. I’ll still write about them though, I guess, whatever:

PIGHEAD

 

Continue reading »

ANNIVERSARY REVIEWS BY WILLIAM SMITH (ARTIFICIAL BRAIN, BUCKSHOT FACELIFT), PART 2

 Album Reviews, Listmania  6 Responses »
Mar 222012
 

(William Smith is the vocalist for Buckshot Facelift and a Long Island band named Artificial Brain that I wrote about twice early last fall — here and here. He also writes a very entertaining blog called Vitos Squid Stop and Death Metal Museum. I asked him late last year if he would write something for NCS . . . and this is it!  Part 1 of this post appeared here yesterday.)

After reading a lot of people’s best of 2011 lists, I realized I have a lot of catching up to do and am in no position to judge what the best albums of 2011 were. On that note,  I’ve  looked through my collection and dusted off  5 albums each that were recorded or released ten and twenty years ago, respectively.  Some under-rated gems that maybe you overlooked or weren’t around for – either way, they deserve a second go around now that they’ve aged a little and can be seen in the context of history. They have all earned a special place in my collection – here I’ll share with you why.  In the words of Pyrexia – where were you?

CLASS OF 1992 (20 year anniversary)

1.   Viogression – Passage (Progressive International / Tombstone Records)

The few people who may remember this under credited Milwaukee Death Metal band would probably chastise this album for its thin and narrow production and the uneven volume problems that more or less straighten out after the first song. The main problem I found with this cd was that it spanned 13 songs in about an hour and it honestly could have probably been boiled down to 9 songs in 40 minutes.  For those who choose to brave the occasional mastering slipups and have the patience to give Viogression an hour of your life, though, you will not go unrewarded.

Camoflauged within Viogression’s warm, fuzzy brand of Obituary-style doom and gloom was a visionary capacity for atmosphere, depth, and technicality. Those who listen to this album in hindsight may find that, at times, it has more in common with what Canadian bands like Cryptopsy, Kataklysm, and Gorguts would be perfecting over the following decade than with the primitive mid-tempo style popular in the Midwest at the time. Beyond that, it also features a guest vocal appearance by Joe Ptacek, himself (R.I.P.). For what it’s worth, this was a “missing link” album that helped churn the evolution of Death Metal forward and is worth a second listen now that it’s almost as old as some of its members were when they recorded it. Continue reading »

UFOMAMMUT: “EMPIREUM”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

February 22, 2012: a day that will forever after be remembered as U-Day.

Okay, well at least I’ll remember it because I was so damned clever in coming up with that post title for a Feb 22 feature about new sounds from bands whose names begin with U.

Okay, I probably won’t remember it either.  In fact, the only reason I remembered it at all is because one of those bands was Italy’s Ufomammut, and today brought us a new Ufomammut track in the form of an official video. The music is called “Empirean”, and it’s the first movement on an album titled Oro: Opus Primum — “primum” because it’s the first of two albums that together will form the Oro saga in 10 movements. Neurot Recordings will release the first one on April 17 and the second in September.

Ufomammut plans to release videos for each track from both albums over the coming months and then collect them in a DVD that will be sold with a limited edition vinyl on the band’s own Supernatural Cat Records.

Now, with those details behind us, let’s move on to “Empirean”. The video, which is embedded here after the jump, originally debuted today on a fascinatingly eclectic metal blog called The Obelisk that I used to read before I sacrificed most of my reading to NCS (and congrats to The Obelisk on landing the debut). “Empirean” is about 14 minutes long, and it’s a disturbing, hypnotic journey. Continue reading »

ANNIVERSARY REVIEWS BY WILLIAM SMITH (ARTIFICIAL BRAIN, BUCKSHOT FACELIFT), PART 1

 Album Reviews, Listmania  5 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

(William Smith is the vocalist for Buckshot Facelift and a Long Island band named Artificial Brain that I wrote about twice early last fall — here and here. He also writes a very entertaining blog called Vitos Squid Stop and Death Metal Museum. I asked him late last year if he would write something for NCS . . . and this is it!  Part 2 of this post will appear tomorrow.)

After reading a lot of people’s best of 2011 lists, I realized I have a lot of catching up to do and am in no position to judge what the best albums of 2011 were. On that note,  I’ve  looked through my collection and dusted off  5 albums each that were recorded or released ten and twenty years ago, respectively.  Some under-rated gems that maybe you overlooked or weren’t around for – either way, they deserve a second go around now that they’ve aged a little and can be seen in the context of history. They have all earned a special place in my collection – here I’ll share with you why.  In the words of Pyrexia – where were you?

CLASS OF 2002 (10 year anniversary)

1.   Genital Grinder – self-titled cd (Adipocere Records)

The cover art is the type of amateurish cartoony obscenity that seemed popular with French bands of the time and depicts exactly what you’d expect from a band named after my favorite Carcass song. The song titles are all over the place between English, French, and acronyms, giving the overall first impression that this is some type of typical loose-knit noisecore operation at best. Instead what you get is airtight “spacey” sounding Death Metal in the Florida tradition, with outstandingly deep and guttural vocals. What makes things interesting is how GG frequently shrug off the atmosphere set by their stoic and relentless metal assaults with low-brow toilet grind humor similar to Viscera or Gut. Definitely for fans of the old Czech band, Hermaphrodit, if anyone remembers them. Continue reading »

TUESDAY VIDEOGRAPHY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

This morning I woke up, dressed hurriedly, slugged caffeine, drove a friend to the airport, and drove back — by which time it was 4 a.m. I feel like a reanimated corpse, but only partially reanimated. The only upside to this agony is that it gave me time to snoop around in search of new music, which I found in the form of videos from De Lirium’s Order (Finland), Job For A Cowboy (U.S.), and Horseback (U.S.).

DE LIRIUM’S ORDER

I came across this band because their drummer, Ukri Suvilehto, is also the live session drummer for Before the Dawn, which is one of our favorite bands. Also, they are from Finland, and you know what that means.

WIthin the last couple of days, De Lirium’s Order debuted a video for a song called “Autistic Savant”. It’s the opening track from their latest album (their third), Veniversum, which is being officially released today. According to the band, “the video was shot in freezing conditions, minus 30 degrees Celcius, in an abandoned factory located in Joensuu, Finland.” This may explain why they’re playing so fast.

Whatever the reason, the song is very cool and so is the video. The music is a proggy, techy take on melodic death metal, with lots of spidery picking and hammering percussion, a resonant melody, and in the mid-section, a soft piano bridge leading to attention-grabbing solo’s by both of the band’s guitarists and a bass solo! I think this is a band we need to know better. Continue reading »

GUILTY PLEASURES: OCEANO’S “DEPTHS”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

(TheMadIsraeli is no fan of deathcore in general, but in this post he confesses and attempts to explain his love for Oceano’s 2009 debut.)

I know what a lot of you must be thinking.  Is he fucking shitting me?  No, I am not.

Anyone who keeps himself or herself apprised of metal should know who this band is, because they are one of the first stars of the second wave of deathcore along with bands such as Suicide Silence and The Acacia Strain.  You and I do not need to rehearse the beef with deathcore by metalheads of a more purist sort.  For the most part and in the case of most bands, I agree that it’s shallow, insipid, immature, half-assed death metal.  But I believe Oceano, on this album in particular mind you, had something going for them. I honestly don’t know if I can define it, but of course I will try.

Depths has a very strange character.  Its mix matches its title perfectly, with a very open yet hollow shape to the sound and an odd echo surrounding all of the instruments and the vocals.  It sounds like a recording engineered inside an ancient underwater cave infested by demon-spawned sirens.  This is one of the elements that gives Depths its weight and a mood that other deathcore records simply don’t have.  It’s distinctive for this reason alone.  The important part, though, must of course be what lies at the core — the music itself.  What to say about that? Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: GODS OF EDEN

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Mar 202012
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the debut EP by an Australian band named Gods of Eden.)

Alright, so . . . here we’ve got a band who combine aspects of thrash metal, death metal, prog metal, and grindcore.

Do what?

Yes.  Really.

Gods Of Eden are quite intriguing, to say the least.  Their debut self-titled EP, only four songs, has provided me with a suitable mind-fuck likely to last all year.  To say I want to see a full-length would be a massive understatement.  You have blazing, technical, off-the-wall riffing full of thrash blood, tech-death bones, grindcore sinew, and power metal/prog metal synapse connections.  The vocals equally span the range on that spectrum.  They move from thrash, to power metal falsetto’s, to a very nasty grindcore tone.

Plus, the music includes black-metal-tinged symphonic elements; actually, the second song “Shiva’s Dream” is very black metal as a whole in it’s character. Continue reading »

THE WRETCHED END: “DEATH BY NATURE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 202012
 

It seems to be the day for new videos — Wretched new videos. First we had the new video from North Carolina’s Wretched. Now we move across the Atlantic for a new video by a Norway-based band called The Wretched End.

This band started in 2008 as a collaboration between Emperor guitarist Samoth and Mindgrinder bassist Cosmo — both of whom played together in Zyklon — joined by Swedish drummer Nils Fjellström of Dark Funeral. Their debut album Ominous made NCS writer Andy Synn’s list of 2010’s greatest albums, and it was one of my personal favorites, too.

Naturally, we’re really looking forward to the April 23 release of the band’s second effort, Inroads, which will be distributed by Nocturnal Art Productions and Candlelight Records. Today we got our first taste of the music with the debut of an official video for the album’s third track, “Death By Nature”.

Ominous was a hell-ripping dose of blackened death-thrash, and “Death By Nature” punctures the same vein, but if anything it’s even darker. The pneumatic riffs in this song will kick your body into movement while the ominous melody thunders like a breaking storm. And when the gang vocals hit the chorus, you WILL want to sing along with an evil snarl. The video is worth seeing, too. Continue reading »

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