“Pest” is the seventh track on Decapitated’s Carnival Is Forever album. Today, the official video for the song debuted on Metal Hammer.
Watch it after the jump, and remember, mirrors aren’t always what they seem.
Also remember that Covan needs to wake the fuck up. If you feel moved to contribute, go here. Continue reading »
(NCS scribe Andy Synn reviews the new album by Germany’s Secrets of the Moon, which was released on March 16 by Prophecy Productions.)
Perfect pitch black majesty. That pretty much sums this album up.
Yet at only seven songs, each of an extensive length and ambitious, demanding structure, Seven Bells is not designed as an album that is easy to listen to. It is a record that demands the listener’s full attention, one which creates and destroys in equal measure, tearing down preconceptions while conjuring a massive and relentless groove that brooks no argument or resistance. Artful masters of their Machiavellian craft, the group play with the subtleties of light and shade, dominating heaviness and devastating metallic fury matched with a use of disarming melody and seductive beauty.
Theirs is the way of the serpent and the apple, whispered sedition and howling damnation, luring the unwary in with promises of knowledge and power, corrupting and turning them to the dark side without ever blinking a single, serpentine eye. Continue reading »
Three videos from yesterday, packaged together for your viewing pleasure.
The first is the official video from God Forbid and Victory Records for the song “Where We Come From” off the band’s sixth album, Equilibrium, which is going to drop on March 26. This is the second track released from the album so far, the first being “Don’t Tell Me What To Dream”, which we featured in an earlier post (here). Both songs are strong. Although I thought the first one incorporated some “modernizing” elements, this new one sounds more like what I expected from these metalcore heavyweights. It’s immediately infectious and of course it brings the groove. It’s a fun video, too, transitioning from day-job clips to a live performance at a joint called Dingbatz on February 24.
God Forbid’s North Carolina label mates Wretched also premiered a new video yesterday. Victory seems to be staging the ramp-up to both bands’ albums in tandem (Wretched’s Son of Perdition is due for release on March 27). We included the first track from Wretched’s album in that same previous post that featured “Where We Come From”, because they premiered on the same day, too. The new song is called “Dilated Disappointment”, and it’s a heavy metal blizzard. In fact, it appears to have ionized the atmosphere where the video was shot, leading to an electric storm that matches the conflagration of the music.
The third video is one I discovered thanks to an e-mail tip from Ben C. (Church of the Riff). It’s a visually arresting CGI animated short called Ruin. It depicts airborne mechanized hunters chasing a human (who doesn’t seem to be entirely human) through a post-apocalyptic city. Fortunately, the prey has a Yamaha MT-01 in damned good running order, so he has a fighting chance. I’m not a gamer, so the level of visual detail and realism achieved in the video may be old hat, but it sure wowed me. It was created by Wes Ball and Oddball Animation.
All three videos come right after the jump. Continue reading »
(An old friend of the site, ElvisShotJFK, makes a guest appearance with this review of the first album in seven years from Italy’s Opera IX.)
Italy is home to a lot of great things – art, literature, food, and architecture are among the things worth checking out, as is Italy’s metal scene. The boot-shaped country is quite strong in the ways of power and progressive metal, but death and black metal bands can also be found. While they weren’t the first metal band to have a female singer, Opera IX were still one of the early bands to do so in the 90’s, forming before the likes of Nightwish, Theatre Of Tragedy, or Lacuna Coil. Unfortunately, Opera IX didn’t get the same kind of attention as their female-fronted peers. It’s not that Opera IX were too “brutal” to get noticed, but Cadaveria’s vocals probably made it hard for some people to get into when they could have the operatic vocals of Tarja or Liv or the soft, sometimes sweet voice of Cristina. That and the fact that Cadaveria also employs a raspy sort of growl, switching between the two in a song (although nowhere as extreme as Karyn Crisis’ bipolar voice).
A change in a band’s lineup is hardly a new thing, and bands can successfully transition from one singer to another, but few bands have actually gone from one gender to another; Arch Enemy, Dark Moor, and Cerebral Bore come to mind as ones who’ve undergone a vocal sex change, each with varying results. When Cadaveria left after The Black Opera (along with Flegias) to form her eponymous band (and later adding DyNAbyte to her musical résumé), Opera IX turned to M the Bard to take over vocals for the first entry of their witchcraft trilogy, Maleventum. Like his predecessor, the Bard also employs clean singing to complement his raspy vocals. Also like her, his cleans aren’t the highlight of his performance, while Cadaveria’s cleanly sung vocals seem to have gotten better over time, based on what I’ve heard from her. Fortunately, he’s in his better vocal element most of the time, which works for Opera IX’s musical direction. Continue reading »
(TheMadIsraeli reviews the latest onslaught by Cannibal Corpse.)
PAIN! DEATH! FLESH,BLOOD AND BONES EVERYWHERE! EAT EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE! REDUCE DIET TO NOTHING BUT HUMAN BRAIN MATTER!
Cannibal fucking Corpse man.
Heretical-metal-fact-about-Israel time: I never really listened to Cannibal Corpse.
I know. I know. I cried, too, once I realized my heresy, my crime against the metal lords and masters. The hype ramping up to their new album Torture caused me to go back and truly explore the band. I listened to the entire discography back to front, and realized . . .
WHAT HAVE I BEEN FUCKING MISSING!?
Torture is the latest crusade in Cannibal Corpse’s tyrannical campaign to rule over everyone and everything with audio carnage so visceral that simply listening creates a serious risk of blood-vomiting convulsions. But Torture? Torture is officially the best album of the Corpsegrinder era yet.
By using the rewind button a bit and revisiting roots that had been missing from the band’s sound since Corspegrinder’s introduction, Cannibal Corpse have succeeded in producing the finest slab of savagery in their latter period. Continue reading »
You know a band is close-knit when they share the experience of man-sized bowel movements. But can they rock as well as they can roll?
It’s been a little more than two years since Arsis released Starve For the Devil. Since then, the band have undergone some changes. Bass player Noah Martin re-joined the band, and less than two weeks ago, it was revealed that guitarist Nick Cordle had departed to replace Christopher Amott in Arch Enemy. James Malone was forced to sit out the band’s “Frets of Fury” tour last fall “due to professional and personal commitments” — but Malone is back in harness, and Arsis are working on a new album for release either late this year or early 2013.
As proof that Arsis are still rocking on despite the line-up upheavals, today Guitar World premiered a pre-production demo of a new song called “Choking On Sand”.
I don’t think fans of Starve For the Devil will be disappointed. Continuing the trend on the last album, this song is more melodic death metal than tech-death. Malone’s blackened rasp will be familiar, as will the Gothenburg-style riffs, and the song includes a shrieking melodic solo as well as healthy doses of double-bass pummeling. Check it out following the jump. Continue reading »
When we last checked in with Minneapolis-based Oak Pantheon, they had created a “teaser reel” of rough instrumental mixes for three songs from their next album and had invited fans to vote on which song the band should preview in full before the album drops. This morning they released the chosen track.
It’s an unmastered version of a song called “Aspen” that the band have made available on both their YouTube channel and on Bandcamp. On Bandcamp, the song can be downloaded with a “name your price” option, and all donations will help finance mastering of the entire album.
I got an advance copy of “Aspen” on Saturday, thanks to producer Sean Golyer, and I’ve lost count of how many times I spun it around my head over the weekend. Oak Pantheon’s 2011 album The Void was a stellar debut. Based on “Aspen”, I’d say this is one band who won’t fall prey to the dreaded sophomore slump. Continue reading »
It’s been a while since we last wrote about 16-year old metal prodigy Ray Heberer. The last time we did that was in the context of a September 2011 post about an artist who goes by the name All Things Rotten, the artist who will be creating the album cover for one of Ray’s many projects, Dreams of Winter. But this post isn’t about Dreams of Winter. It’s about Haemic.
Haemic is a collaboration that had its genesis years ago, when a Hungarian musician named Adam Farkas wrote a series of songs, recorded them on synthesizer, and uploaded them to YouTube. Ray Heberer (who lives in Taiwan) found the music and contacted Adam, and they began re-recording the music with Ray performing on guitar. The two of them also found a vocalist via YouTube — Mitch Shinderman, who is an American.
Haemic have now released their debut album, Fields of Sanguine, and over the weekend Ray made it available on Haemic’s Bandcamp page via a “name your price” option. As you may know, Bandcamp only allows 200 free downloads per month before converting the download into a “pay only” option. Haemic’s fans exhausted the 200 free downloads available during March in less than 24 hours. So, until April, you’ll need to pay $5 to get the Bandcamp download.
We certainly don’t want to discourage people from doing that — the money will be going to a good cause. But Ray and his Haemic mates are anxious to get this album out into the world without delay. So, they’ve come up with two ways of doing that until the stock of free Bandcamp downloads replenishes. First, we’ve agreed to host a free download of the album here at NCS in a .zip file format. Second, the guys have uploaded a compressed .rar file of the album to Mediafire.
After the jump, you can stream the entire album and get links to the .zip and .rar downloads. We’ll also give you an address to use if you’d like to order a CD of the album. Continue reading »
(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews an album he calls an early favorite for one of the 10 best albums of 2012.)
Ok, so . . . I’ve rewritten this review five times now and I finally decided, fuck it, my only option is to type an essay-length rave.
This album is my first Top 10 of the Year choice. It is both an unstoppable force and an immovable object. It takes the fusing of various schools of metal to the next level, and sets the bar to a new height for progressivism and for boundary breaking within the genre. Nothing is going to compare to this album, just as nothing really compared much to Outcast’s previous albums. If Outcast continue evolving as they have to date, these guys will become the figurehead of where metal needs to be heading as a whole.
Violent, chaotic, uncompromising, and unpredictable are the names of this game. Outcast’s new album Awaken The Reason is a true tour de force of composition, stylistic diversity, and melding of styles, tied together by some of the sickest riffs I’ve ever heard. If I don’t see this album on a multitude of top-album lists by December, I will be seriously dismayed and indeed fearful about how public opinion will shape the future course of metal.
Yes, I believe this album is that important. Continue reading »
The South by Southwest music festival has been burning Austin to the ground. Videos of live performances have been surfacing, successfully turning me green with envy. After the St. Patrick’s Day weekend, I was pretty green to begin with.
This morning I caught a video of The Atlas Moth performing “Holes In the Desert” on March 16 from their stupendously good 2011 album An Ache For the Distance. They were joined on stage by Bruce Lamont playing the sax.
Lamont is the vocalist and sax player (among other roles) for Chicago’s Yakuza, in addition to collaborating in the past with a host of other bands (including Nachtmystium, Locrian, Sigh, Minsk, and Brutal Truth). He’s also a fixture with many other projects, including Bloodiest, Circle Of Animals, Sick Gazelle, and the Led Zeppelin cover band Led Zeppelin 2. Last year he also released a solo album titled Feral Songs For The Epic Decline. The cover for that album is up above, because I like the artwork a lot.
I also like “Holes In the Desert” a lot. It’s a fat blast of psychedelic sludge that includes a gripping melody. It’s a heavy song made for a live jam, a song to get lost in, and the addition of the sax in this live performance fits it like a glove.
The video quality is very good. The sound quality is less good (it’s difficult to hear the vocals, for example), but I still banged my silly head. Bang yours after the jump. Continue reading »