(TheMadIsraeli reaches new heights of fanboy-dom in this latest installment of his Melodeath Week series, shining the spotlight on Denmark’s The Arcane Order.)
Just listen to this…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-6ZDxBkt0g
I think I could honestly end this article right here, but I’m a fan boy for this band, so I have to gush a bit. (gushing, and a lot more music, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »
About five days ago we ran a post about a mysterious new UK death metal band called Vallenfyre who had recently signed to Century Media basically on the strength of a two-song 7″ single. Granted, after listening to excerpts of that single, it became immediately apparent why a venerable label like Century had signed this band, because the music is motherfuckin’ titanic.
In that earlier post (which generated quite a lot of interest as it turns out), I explained that despite hunting high and low over the trails of the interwebs, I had found very damn little information about the band. At the end of the post, I ventured a guess, based on the maturity of the music and appearance of the band members that they “have been metalling for a while, with other outfits.”
Well, holy fuck, was that a good guess. Today, Century Media released some additional details about Vallenfyre. For example, here’s who is in the band:
* Gregor Mackintosh (PARADISE LOST) – Vocals and Lead Guitar
* Hamish Glencross (MY DYING BRIDE) – Rhythm and Lead Guitars
* Mully – Rhythm Guitars
* Scoot (DOOM, EXTINCTION OF MANKIND) – Bass
* Adrian Erlandsson (AT THE GATES, PARADISE LOST) – Drums
Good lord, is that an impressive collection of talent or what. And coincidentally, it wasn’t so long ago that we posted a feature about Adrian Erlandsson and his brother Daniel (here). But wait, there’s more: Vallenfyre’s debut album, A Fragile King, will be released on October 31 in Europe and on November 1 in NorthAm. And there’s still more (after the jump). Continue reading »
(Today is a day for guest contributions, and this one is from ElvisShotJFK, who has been a friend of this site and an insightful commenter almost since the beginning of NCS. And there will be more to come from him next week . . .)
It’s no secret that I am quite fond of the stuff deemed Oriental metal or Middle-Eastern metal. There’s something about it, beyond the music itself, that I find myself drawn to for some reason. The band that is most directly responsible for this would be Orphaned Land.
Mabool is one of those albums that made me aware of music I hadn’t really heard before and gave me reason to explore the music of other bands from the region. And of course, I was eagerly awaiting the arrival of The Never Ending Way Of ORwarriOR. I wasn’t fond of the title, but as Mabool had proved to me before, one shouldn’t judge an album by its title; ORwarriOR met my expectations and even exceeded some.
For a metal band to thrive in the Middle East is quite an accomplishment. Orphaned Land had disbanded after their second release, but they had a loyal fan following brought together by the internet, which helped convince singer Kobi Farhi to bring the band back together. With a new record deal, Mabool was the impressive result that they needed.
One of the things about Orphaned Land’s fans is that they have been able to put aside many of their differences – real and perceived – to come together under the banner of metal. Regardless of the generations-old hatred that is still passed on and on, Arabs and Jews have gathered together, singing in each other’s languages and getting along. Much better than the shit we usually hear about on the news. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »
(TheMadIsraeli delivers the next installment of his Melodeath Week series.)
Now we get into the real meat and potatoes. This is the shit I LOVE out of this list. So without further ado…
The Absence is pretty easy to sum up. Mix At The Gates with early In Flames and you have this band in a nutshell. From Your Grave, for a debut, was vicious, sharp, and aiming for the throat. This band was obviously out for blood at the time, having the problem to overcome of being an American melodeath band.
From Your Grave is fast, technical, and memorable in all the right ways. Somehow The Absence found a way to take the brutality and dark riffing of At The Gates and counterbalance it with In Flames sense of guitar harmonies and emotive melodies. As the album’s intro plays, with that somber sole riff in the distance and the harmony coming into it, you’re being lured you into the assault of the official opener “A Breath Beneath”.
This album is full of riffs. Chock-fucking-full. You’ll remember every single one of them and want to hear them on repeat. Guitar duo Patrick Pintavalle and Peter Joseph perform with each other as if they’re one entity. It’s rare to hear two guitarists who write dual guitar parts THIS seamless. Picking the harmonies at the right time is a huge thing for me on this album. In fact, everything occurs at the right place, at the right time.
Most of you will already know this band, but if you don’t, learning about them now might serve you well. These guys BLEED melodic death metal. Listen after the jump . . . Continue reading »
There’s something about the lure of free metal. I suppose, in a sense, all metal is free these days if you’re willing to torrent it, but I’m talking about metal that’s intended to be free. And the subject of this post is intentionally free metal from Victory Records — a Labor Day Sampler that includes tracks from 16 different bands.
What caught my eye about this offer is the second song on the sampler — since by coincidence it’s the Pathology track we featured in our last post yesterday — “Media Consumption” — from their as-yet-unreleased second album. The sampler also includes a demo track from God Forbid plus tunes from the likes of Jungle Rot, Ringworm, Within the Ruins, Carnifex, and Snapcase, just to mention the bands that interest me the most.
After the jump, we’ll show you the complete run-down of the sampler’s 16 tracks. To download it, visit the Victory Records facebook page here, where you’ll have to “like” them to access the download. Continue reading »
Leviathan is a one-man American black-metal project whose alter ego is Jef Whitehead (a/k/a Wrest). Whitehead has been making Leviathan music since at least 1998, including 15 demo’s, 7 splits, two EPs, and four full-length albums, the last of which was 2008’s Massive Conspiracy Against All Life. Whitehead also collaborated with Nachtmystium’s Blake Judd and the multi-talented Sanford Parker in a project called Twilight that created a highly regarded 2010 album entitled Monument To Time End. Despite my continuing efforts to become better educated about black metal, my exploration of Leviathan has been limited (by time) to just a few tracks from the last album, but it’s clear that the name is one to conjure with in circles of the black metal intelligentsia.
Over the last year, Whitehead has gained notoriety for reasons other than his prowess as a creator of distinctive music: He is facing criminal charges for assault on his former girlfriend. You can read about the details here or here. In an interview of Blake Judd conducted earlier this year by our own BadWolf, Blake Judd questioned the accuser’s credibility, and he doesn’t appear to be the only person who’s doing that, but the charges are still pending.
Today, Pitchfork published an interview of Whitehead, the first time he’s given an interview in close to a decade. In addition, Pitchfork premiered a new song from Leviathan’s next album, True Traitor, True Whore, which is scheduled for release by Profound Lore on November 8. Pitchfork’s Brandon Stosuy, who conducted the interview, has heard the album and calls it “one of the best metal albums of the year.” In a different interview, Chris Bruni, the head of Profound Lore, called it “very creepy, dark, eerie, and quite disturbing and unnerving” and “different than anything Leviathan has done.” I haven’t heard the album, but I did listen to the new song.
It’s called “Her Circle Is the Noose”. It’s a harrowing piece of music, clattering with off-kilter drumming, shrouded in a haze of melodic tremolo chords punctured by electronic pulses, and charged with Whitehead’s visceral, hair-raising vocals. Worth hearing — which you can do by following this link.
(Our cup runneth over — NCS reader/commenter Trollfiend, who clearly knows how to write a review that will cause you to brown your underoos with laughter, rejoins us for the second time this week with an immensely entertaining retrospective on the music of Minas Morgul. Allow me to say, “Pure blackity blackness with a side of black. Also, wolves.”)
Germans are good at a lot of things: making chocolate, designing cars, and brewing beer, for example. I bet you thought I was going to make some sort of crass WWII reference, like “they’re also good at invading Poland” or something inappropriate about the Holocaust. I would never do such a thing. I abhor stereotypes as much as I abhor lederhosen swamp-ass, and I don’t make jokes about horrific tragedies unless they’re really fucking funny.
So, in the interest of good fellowship with our jackbooted fascist friends over in good olde Deutschland, I am going to share with you one of their little musical gems, largely unknown outside the land of biergartens and polka. My German is not great, pretty much limited to what I’ve learned from repeat plays of Castle Wolfenstein, but as any true soldier of the Fatherland would do, I’m going to struggle manfully through this review without the use of Google Translate. So here we go: Minas Morgul.
If you’re thinking, ‘hey, I’ve heard that name before’, you’re either a big fan of pagan/black metal or a monstrous shaggy nerd-ape (the two aren’t mutually exclusive). Minas Morgul, for you folks who don’t know, is the name of the city of the Nazgul in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’s also the name of a black metal band from Frankfurt. Now I’m not sure if Minas Morgul (the band… not to be confused with Minas Morgul, the Summoning album) counts as Tolkien metal per se – with songs like “AK-47 – Kalaschnikov-Standgericht”, it’s probably safe to say they deviate from the oeuvre just a little – but for the most part you can call them black metal pretty accurately. That is assuming you don’t count the occasional Rammsteinesque clean bridges that pepper their songs like hairy vestigial nipples on a child-devouring witch. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »
Am I overdoing this? I know that some metal bloggers harp so incessantly on a particularly subject that it has an effect that’s the reverse of what’s intended: It drives readers in the opposite direction. I think this is the result of a deep-seated acculturation process that begins in childhood. Your parents yammer at you ceaselessly to stand up straight, chew with your mouth closed, stop snorting, brush your teeth, etc., etc., and so the first chance you get you slump like a knuckle-dragging caveman, show the food in your mouth to everyone while eating, snort and swallow your snot like it’s a five-star dessert, and let your teeth turn into bacterial hives that produce immediate sensations of nausea to anyone within a five-yard radius.
And then on top of that kind of reflexive behavior, you add the natural contrariness of the species metalheadus-erectus, and you get the kind of reactions I’m talking about. As a metal writer, you say something more than once, and readers call “Bullshit!” and go the other way.
But look, let me be up front about this. I am NOT getting royalties from Ola Lindgren for promoting The Lindgren Diet. I am NOT making money preparing pre-packaged meals of Spicy Elmo wraps and blow to fulfill diet-meal orders that are surely rolling in at “Lindgren’s Health Blog 666″. I am speaking from the heart about a fabulous total-health regimen that will change your life.
Okay, to be brutally honest, which is the only kind of honest we know how to be at NCS, I have been trying to convince Ola to let me ghost-write the future bestseller The Lindgren Diet: How To Snort, Drink, and Gorge Your Way To A New You. But that has nothing to do — nothing, I tell you — with this series of posts about the diet. I’m just trying to share with you the phenomenal benefits, which I have yet to personally experience, of this revolutionary body-mind health plan created by the long-time guitarist and frontman of Sweden’s Grave. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »
Well sir, yesterday’s post about the new song premiere from those brutal-death-slam carnivores in San Diego’s Condemned, attracted more interest than anticipated, so here we go again — because San Diego is home to more than one brutal death band with a fondness for slams.
We’ve got more than a passing interest in Pathology, (i) because their current vocalist is a Seattle-area dude named Jonathan Huber, who used to gutturalize for local-band-made-good, I Declare War, and (ii) because the awesome Pär Olofsson is responsible for the cover art on the new album, Awaken To the Suffering. So, when I got an e-mail from NCS reader Utmu last week about a new Pathology song that had premiered on Lambgoat, I perked right up.
I listened to the new song, vowed to post about it at NCS, and then something distracted me. I think it was a passing fly; it doesn’t take much. Fortunately, I was reminded about the song from a mention of Pathology in a comment by Homelessviking (cool name, that one) on yesterday’s post about Condemned. So, finally, we have the new song for you.
It’s called “Media Consumption” and it includes: Big, concrete-hard, slamming riffs; full-auto drumming; gruesome gutturals; and the squealing of a gutted pig. This sounds fairly standard, no? Well, the song also has an unexpected guitar solo that almost sounds jazzy, except it also sounds diseased. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »
All Pigs Must Die is a band I discovered for the first time watching them kick the holy bejesus out of an audience at a Seattle club on August 18. They were taking part in Southern Lord’s The Power of the Riff tour. I mainly went to see Pelican, but discovered a lot of other awesome bands in the process, APMD being one of them (see our partial review of that show here). Southern Lord has just recently released the band’s debut album, God Is War, and it’s a hard-to-define amalgam of punk, hardcore, crust, black metal, and death metal that’s beastly.
But God Is War isn’t the main reason for this post. The main reason is that APMD was persuaded by CVLT NATION to select songs for a mixtape that the site released for free download yesterday. The band explained what they did: “This is a selection of songs from bands that have have influenced us as a whole and as individual players. Our goal was to put together a range of music that has contributed to our musical output as a band, rather than compiling a list of more obscure songs we may each be listening to at the moment. So while you may have heard much of this before, we hope you enjoy hearing it all at once.”
Perhaps reflecting the eclectic mix of styles you can hear in APMD’s own music, the mixtape is a wide-ranging compilation, and a fucking good one to boot. In toto, it’s an hour and a half of music, and includes songs by 27 bands. Just a few examples: Electric Wizard, Amebix, Leviathan, Neurosis, Blue Oyster Cult, Pentagram, Hawkwind, Entombed, The Secret, Dismember, Trap Them, Black Sabbath, and Nick Cave. To stream all the music and to download the mixtape, visit the CVLT NATION page via this link. We’ve also included the full track list after the jump. Continue reading »