VEKTOR: “OUTER ISOLATION”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 282011
 

(Here, TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Arizona’s Vektor.)

Originality is a loaded word when talking about music of any sort.  Some would argue there is no originality any more, that we have exhausted every worthwhile note combination, every beat, every possible syncopation and harmony imaginable.  If you’ll notice, and correct me if I’m wrong dear NCS readers, I have never used this word once in any of my reviews to describe a band’s sound as a whole.  I feel, however, that when it comes to intergalactic blackened space death jazz thrashers Vektor, “original” is exactly the word that must be applied.

No one else out there sounds like these guys, and they do what they do with unmatched conviction. I don’t know how many of you who read NCS heard this band’s debut album, Black Future, but to deny the UTTER SHEER FUCKING INSANITY of the music on that album would definitely be foolhardy. Vektor kind of fell off of my radar, though, after I listened to Black Future so many times that it created its own black hole and collapsed its own universe into it.  It was only like last fucking month that I found out Vektor would be releasing a new album entitled Outer Isolation.  To say I was pumped would be a huge understatement. To say that this album takes Vektor’s sound to the next level would be an even bigger fucking understatement.

For the uninitiated, Vektor play a crazy, fuck-nuts hybrid of thrash metal, black metal and death metal with jazz coloring.  But they don’t just add small doses and elements of these styles; they fully incorporate and combine them in all of their glory into cohesive, atom-smashing assaults.

In a nutshell, Vektor’s sound is something that by all conceivable logic should be impossible to pull off with such proficiency and legitimacy.  One would expect that their strategy would lead them in a completely directionless meandering, with a train wreck at the end (and that’s the ending I think just about anyone else would reach if they were to attempt what Vektor has done). That Vektor has avoided those pitfalls is part of what makes this album truly stand out.  The number of bands who have genre-blended this seamlessly and successfully I think could be counted on your fingers. Continue reading »

ABIGAIL WILLIAMS: “BECOMING”

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Nov 282011
 

(Andy Synn has had the chance for an advance listen to the next album from Abigail Williams — Becoming — which is not due in stores until January 24. As you’ll see from Andy’s review, it made quite an impression.)

Very much an album of music put together as an individual artistic statement, Becoming effortlessly embodies that central paradox of black metal; the more the bounds and prescribed rules of orthodoxy are stretched, the more the central tenet of the genre, “do what thou wilt”, is given shape and form.

Throughout the 55+ minutes of music contained on this disc, the group weave a tapestry of their influences together into a sound that, whilst still woven through with slender, gossamer threads which tie it to the past, is fuller and more realised, yet at the same time more dream-like and unearthly, than anything that has gone before.

The venomous ire of the vocals remains undimmed, each spiteful tirade and scornful diatribe spat forth with vehement fury like flames from the mouth of hell itself, raising them above the empty cascades of hollow invective that  spill from the mouths and minds of so many of their so-called peers.

The scathing incandescence of the guitar work melds restrained technicality with devastating, brazen intensity, the guitarists thrashing, scratching and clawing at their instruments like those possessed, underpinned throughout by serpentine bass-lines which flow and undulate seductively through the warp and weft of the music and by the towering drums of Zach Gibson, who gives a varied and multi-faceted performance whose monstrous speed and colossal power is matched only by its unyielding grasp of the many intricate subtleties and nuances of performance and restraint required to give breadth and depth to the lengthy and complex structures of each piece.

In addition to all this, however, it is the group’s use of real strings and piano work that is one of the strongest and most distinctive elements on the entire album, manifesting in a manner which eschews the predictable “symphonic” approach in favour of more subtle and refined compositions. This more classically inclined ideology sees a wealth of keyboard tones and stringed accompaniments employed as singular instruments in and of themselves, each designed to contribute in a specific and precise way to each song, adding another voice to the choir of rapturous instrumentation without ever succumbing to the devilish temptations of symphonic pomp and excess. Continue reading »

CORMORANT HITS BANDCAMP AND NPR WITH NEW MUSICS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Nov 282011
 

Thanks to Metal Bandcamp and MaxR, I discovered yesterday that Cormorant has made its new album, Dwellings, available for pre-order on Bandcamp (here). This supplements the now-closed exclusive pre-order option that the band offered earlier in the fall through their blog page.

As MaxR reported, you can choose between 7 different packages ranging from the download-only for $7 up to a bundle that includes the CD, a t-shirt, a zip-up hoodie, and the album download for $50 (plus shipping). The CD comes in a 6-panel Digipak, which includes the hand-drawn vertical panorama cover artwork by Alice Duke, full-color on-disk design, and a 12-page booklet containing lyrics and liner notes.The pre-orders will ship on December 7, which is the day after the official album release.

Maybe best of all, for people who are as impatient as I am, if you make a pre-order, you get an immediate download of three tracks from the album. Like MaxR, I went with the shirt+CD option and got me that immediate download in the bargain. The band is also now streaming those three tracks on their Bandcamp page. You can find two of them streaming elsewhere (“Junta” and “The Purest Land”), but as MaxR noted, the third one didn’t seem to be currently available anywhere except at Bandcamp.

That third song is called “The First Man”, and it’s now available for purchase all by itself for $1. A few words about the song, plus the song-stream, follow the jump. But as of this morning, the whole album is now streaming at NPR, whose writer Lars Gotrich had this to say about the record: “Dwellings is, far and away, the best metal record of 2011: an emotionally and musically complex album which wrestles with our desperate and sometimes violent attempts to secure a place in history.”

By the way, speaking of the fantastic Dwellings album cover by Alice Duke, you should check out her on-line portfolio here for more fantastic-ness. Also after the jump: the full vertical piece of artwork, of which the cover is only a part. Continue reading »

LONE GUNMEN: LIBERTEER, AMPUTATION SPREE, and MORGH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Nov 272011
 

Here we have three one-man projects, one recently signed to a major label and the others unsigned, and all of them worth a listen: Liberteer (California), Amputation Spree (North Carolina), and Morgh (Pennsylvania).

LIBERTEER

Liberteer is the creation of SoCal resident Matt Widener, a former Marine, a former member of Exhumed, and the bass player for Cretin. Widener’s previous solo project was called Citizen. Earlier this month, Relapse Records announced that it had signed Liberteer and will be releasing the band’s debut album, Better To Die On Your Feet Than Live On Your Knees, on January 31, 2012. Widener had these comments about the Liberteer project:

“My thoughts on politics slowly changed over the past six years. In Citizen I had a sense of outrage about our government, but because it still supported the idea of state, it doesn’t make much sense to me now. I’ve come to embrace the ideas of anarchy. The old band name, Citizen, represents a system of exclusion and nationalism, things I can’t stand now, so I had to rename the band and change a lot of things. I think the good things about the music are still there—the thematic, major-key riffs, the d-beats and blasts—but the message is now pure.

“The album is one long song, with a handful of the coolest riffs reappearing as leitmotifs, like a pissed off opera made of blasts and d-beats. It’s utterly relentless. Plus, there’s a training montage at the halfway point.”

Seeing this in a press release was enough to pique my interest. I’m particularly curious about the “training montage”. But what sealed the deal was listening to the title track. Continue reading »

AGALLOCH LIVE IN TEL AVIV

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 262011
 

Last night, Oregonian black-metal icons Agalloch played a special show in Tel Aviv, Israel. Through the wonders of the interhole, a high-quality video of the show’s opening has already surfaced. It depicts the usual Agalloch incense-burning ritual that takes place before the live music starts, followed by “They Escaped the Weight of Darkness” and “Into the Painted Grey”. A second video features the band performing “Odal” and “Of Stone, Wind, and Pillor”. The video quality of both clips is excellent, and the sound quality is decent. As a die-hard Agalloch acolyte, I have to feature these videos (after the jump). They’re reminders of how fucking much I’ve enjoyed the Agalloch shows I’ve seen.

And this also gives me an excuse to report other Agalloch news that I meant to say something about a while ago: Agalloch has established a Bandcamp page and are using it to distribute eight (mainly acoustic and ambient) tracks of music, available for purchase individually, that previously appeared on compilations or hard-to-find EPs and LPs. You can stream and buy them HERE, including the epic 18-minute song “Scars of the Shattered Sky”, which originally appeared as a bonus “D side” track on the Ashes Against the Grain LP. I picked one of those songs to play for you after the jump, too.

“Temples of magma stream across the grey
The arc that transcends my iconic pride . . .” Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: UNEVEN STRUCTURE

 Interviews  2 Responses »
Nov 262011
 

(Not long ago, TheMadIsraeli gave us a glowing review of Februus, the new album on Basick Records from French/Swedish band Uneven Structure.  He now follows that with this interview of Uneven Structure’s Igor Omodei.)

So let’s cut right to the chase.  “Februus” is the fucking shit.  Why?

Because of way too much spare time and a slight pinch of monomania. Nah really, is it this worthy?

The album was quite an ambitious undertaking.  What made you all decide to write what is essentially a 55 minute epic of a song?  Was it intentional or did it simply happen that way?

We’ve always loved concept albums! The way you can push a mood into these can be much stronger than in regular albums. So yes, it was intentional. We wanted this kind of feeling that you’re into one piece, each track relating to each other with that latent tension building up through the whole album.

What caused your immense shift in sound from the “8” EP?  A very Meshuggah-ish sound to ambidjent is quite a leap.

At the time “8” was released,  we already had a first version of “Februus” written but it was not up to our expectations. We needed much more time to deal with the relationship between rhythm and ambiences to make it work the way we wanted it to work. So we decided to take a couple of riffs and songs out of it, craft it in a Meshuggah-ish way of doing things and released it that way. It was more of a test to see if our writing tools actually worked on a finished song.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

WILD//TRIBE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Nov 262011
 

I grew up in Texas, I used to work there, and I still go back to the state for work. I’ve been to Ft. Worth a handful of times in the last 10 years. It’s in the North Central part of the state, a region that gets attacked by tornadoes, especially in the late spring and early summer of each year. It’s part of a broad north-south belt, extending as far north as Minnesota, that’s called Tornado Alley.

I was in an office building in downtown Ft. Worth during tornado season one year when an announcement came over the PA system in the building telling everyone to move away from the windows and into the building’s interior, because a tornado was headed toward downtown. Of course, the first thing I did was run to the windows to see if I could spot it. It was doubly stupid because, walking to that job, I had seen windows in high-rise office buildings throughout downtown boarded up with plywood because of damage caused by the last twister.

Looking out, I saw a massive wall of black that extended from the horizon up into a rank of equally black clouds, and I could actually see that wall moving — quickly — toward the downtown area. As it turned out, the tornado veered away from the area where I was and ripped the hell out of other buildings and homes. It still scared the living shit out of me.

Wild//Tribe is from Ft. Worth. Maybe Ft. Worth’s violent weather has something to do with the music that Wild//Tribe plays, because they’re like a sonic Tornado Alley, a fast-moving wall of black, a roaring, out-of-control, violent, whipping storm of hardcore Texas punk noise. Continue reading »

“BEARDING THE UK”: TOUR DIARY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 252011
 

(In late October, Becoming the Archetype and Bloodguard embarked on an NCS co-sponsored mini-tour of England called BEARDING THE UK.  Bloodguard’s Andy Synn recorded portions of the tour for posterity, and we’ve got his tour video after the jump, along with this diary of the experience.)

Well, the short tour with Becoming The Archetype (plus one extra date with Abgott, just for some drastic contrast) was both remarkably eventful and extremely good fun.

We knew it would be a good time when, having collected our awesome van (christened the Guard-Van for the duration of the tour) from Cambridge we realised, approximately 20 minutes down the road, that we had in fact accepted the keys and driven away with the vehicle without actually… paying for it. It’s always good to start a tour with a bit of accidental automotive theft!

Anyway, we did eventually organise leaving the necessary hire fee for the van, precluding the involvement of the police, and Ed and I set out to collect BTA from Liverpool airport. Simple enough right?

Well after almost an hour of waiting after their flight had landed and disembarked there was still no sign of the band. But then I received a phone call… from the immigration authorities. Who were refusing to let the band enter the country in the fear that they’d be taking hard-earned cash from the pockets of good British metal bands. However, some quick talking by yours truly, coupled with a very pleasant and helpful representative on the other end of the line, saw the band released and allowed to enter their ancestral homeland. Continue reading »

AN EVENING WITH DIMMU BORGIR – NOTTINGHAM RESCUE ROOMS, Nov. 24, 2011

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 252011
 

(Stop the presses!  Andy Synn attended Dimmu Borgir’s performance in Nottingham last night and he’s already delivered this concert review, plus two videos he filmed of the show.  Further proof that, like killer whales during their first month of life, Andy does not sleep.)

“An Evening With Dimmu Borgir”, as this occasion was billed, saw the band performing two sets during the course of the evening. The first featured Enthrone Darkness Triumphant performed in its entirety, while the second, subsequent set, saw the group concentrate on its most recent quartet of albums for a more dynamically varied mix of material.

For the first two songs, “Mourning Palace” and “Spellbound (By The Devil)”, the guitars were annoyingly muted, resulting in a mix of heaving bass lines and rumbling drums which, although powerful, lacked much of the clarity and sharpened melody which the songs require to truly breathe their morbid magic.

Thankfully, the sound picked up just near the end of the second song, allowing “In Death’s Embrace” to spread its blackened wings with malevolent grace and majestic glory. With the sound levels thus balanced out and the guitars now slicing through the mix like razor-edged scalpels, the song provided an early high-point to the evening, the 6 members performing as one blasphemously tight unit to produce glorious swathes of blackened riffage and sweeping, evocative keyboard lines. Continue reading »

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