ARSAFES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  27 Responses »
Dec 182011
 

Kartikeya is a Russian band we’ve mentioned quite often at this site (use the search box on this page and you’ll see what I mean). They’re very popular among those of us on the NCS staff, and they seem to be popular among our readers and other contributors, too (e.g., see Trollfiend’s list of the year’s best albums posted earlier today). They play an unusual (and unusually appealing) style of heavy-grooved melodic death metal that incorporates elements of traditional Indian music.

The leader of Kartikeya is a dude named Roman “Arsafes” Iskorostenskiy. Quite by accident, while doing some webernet research on Kartikeya for a forthcoming post, I learned that Arsafes is involved in other musical projects besides Kartikeya, and this morning I quickly checked them out.

One is a Russian pagan-metal band called Nevid (Невидь). Nevid have produced four full-length albums, the most of recent of which is 2011’s Agarta, and it appears that Arsafes has been the composer and guitarist for that band over the course of the last two albums. I’ve only listened to a couple of tracks from Agarta, but man is it good. There are some traditional pagan/folk instruments in the mix, but also some of those Meshuggah-esque, Kartikeya-style riffs and really catchy melodies. Nice, harsh, growly vocals, too.

Arsafes has also created a solo EP called A New Way of Creation that appeared in 2010. It includes an instrumental at the start, five original songs, and a cover of “Relentless” by Strapping Young Lad. I haven’t listened to the entire EP either, but what I’ve heard so far is also . . . aces. It’s a blast-furnace combo of progressive death metal with industrial overtones, sweeping melodies and Meshuggah-style hammering, and a mix of bestial death-metal roars and clean vocals. Reminiscent of SYL, Fear Factory, and the afore-mentioned Meshuggah, among other influences. There are some free download links to be found at this forum.

After the jump I’ve got sample songs from each of these two releases, both of which are quite different from each other — and different from Kartikeya, too.  Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (No. 48)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  10 Responses »
Dec 182011
 

This will be our last THAT’S METAL! post of 2011, unless I decide to do another one, in which case this will be the penultimate one.  It really, probably, will be the last one.  I mainly just wanted to use “penultimate” in a sentence. I don’t see why Andy Synn should be the only person at NCS who uses words like this.

“Penultimate” is a cool-sounding word, although it doesn’t really look or sound anything like what it means. In that respect, it’s like “mantissa”. Mantissa sounds like some kind of giant centipede-like monster with big mouth pincers that it uses to tear and consume human flesh. Instead, it means “an addition of little importance”. “Dragoman” is another example. It sounds like a name or the bass-player in a vicious black metal band, or maybe a Bulgarian MMA star. But it simply means “an interpreter or guide”.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, THAT’S METAL! These are the posts where we collect news items, images, or videos that we think are metal, even though they don’t have anything to do with music. Today, we’ve got four items, and I will act as your dragoman as we work our way through them, providing my own mantissas as we go.

ITEM ONE

Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese artist, though he has lived in New York since 1995. His medium of choice is gunpowder. He started off using gunpowder in drawings, and then moved on to the creation of “explosion events”. If you watched the waaay over-the-top opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, then you’ve seen his work. His most recent explosion event was a daytime spectacular on December 5 called “Black Ceremony” at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar. It’s been described as the largest daytime fireworks display ever. Continue reading »

TROLLFIEND’S TOP TEN TUMESCENT TROLLCOCK TANTALIZERS OF 2011

 Listmania  20 Responses »
Dec 182011
 

(Our man Trollfiend was good to his word. Even though he has his own new, already thriving, metal blog now (ALSO, WOLVES), he hasn’t forgotten his old friends at NCS. Herewith, his list of . . . uh . . . trollcock tantalizers for 2011.)

Not much new music makes its way to the Trollcave,  I barely get any kind of internet connection up in this bitch, and the iTunes store apparently does not accept Trollcash (which consists individually of a severed and shrunken priest’s head stuffed inside a boiled and distended bull’s scrotum and tied shut with seven strands of golden hair from a female dwarf’s beard – in other words, accepted everywhere you see a Visa or Mastercard logo).  What little new music I get must be carefully pillaged from local and ecologically sustainable villagers.  It must then be fermented inside a sheep carcass for six months and then distilled and filtered through rendered baby fat before the pure delicious goodness rises to the top and the rest trickles out the bottom, fit only to fertilize my dung heap farm.

Since most of the good shit has already been skimmed off the top (sweet delicious chunks like Vallenfyre, for example), I decided to be more selective in my selection of selections for this list.  Specifically, I chose my top 10 folk/folkish/ethnic/Viking/pagan/weird-ass-shit albums of the year…in other words, the gristly nuggets no one else would touch.  So fill up your pints and break out the hot sauce because here we randomly go: Continue reading »

[INSERT NAME] SCREAM.COM

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  28 Responses »
Dec 172011
 

So, this new Metal Injection-conceived web page called Tom Araya Scream has been making the rounds of the interhole since it appeared yesterday. It’s a clever idea, and if Slayer is, like, still your favoritest metal band ever, dude, SLAAAAAAAYER!!!! (while throwing two-handed horns), then you’ll probably be punching this button on your smartphone all weekend to get a few seconds of Tom Araya’s tinny scream.

However, if you’re to the point in your metal-listening life (as I am) when this scream has begun to sound sort of . . . what’s the word? . . . anemic? . . .  by comparison to the kind of really ugly, vicious, bile-vomiting screams and roars you really enjoy, then Tom Araya Scream is more useful as a template for something . . . better.  And no, I’m not talking about Bruce Dickinson or Rob Halford.

Like, how about Lord Worm Scream . . . such as the vein-exploder that starts at about the 3:45 mark of Cryptopsy’s classic “Open Face Surgery”?  (after the jump) Continue reading »

BONE5

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  35 Responses »
Dec 172011
 

Gee whiz, it’s been almost 24 hours since we last talked about a Finnish band here at NCS, and even though Andy Synn listed two of them yesterday as his top 2 picks for favorite albums of 2011, the loris horde at the NCS Compound is starting to get restless, so we’d better do something about that.

Bone5 is a band from Jyväskylä who released their debut album in 2010 — Dead City Tales. Earlier this month, they released their second album, From the Ashes. What caught my eye was the news announced in late November that Pasi Pasanen had joined the band as its new drummer. Pasi Passanen was the drummer for Swallow the Sun for almost the first decade of that fine band’s existence (2000 – 2009). In addition, along with Bone5’s vocalist Tony Kaikkonen (Code of Silence) and a couple of dudes from Ghost Brigade (among others), he’s also a member of a fairly new band called Sons of Aeon, who we featured with high praise in this post last spring.

When I saw the news about Pasanen joining Bone5, the band had just released a music video for a track off From the Ashes called “Rain”. I liked the song a lot, but deferred writing about it until I could try to learn a bit more about the band. With the help of fireangel, who’s a Finland-based creator of the Night Elves site and whose year-end list of songs we published recently (here), I was able to get in touch with Pasi Pasanen, and he was nice enough to answer a few of my questions.

After the jump, check out the cool video for “Rain”, and you can also read our mini-interview with Pasi Pasanen. Continue reading »

UH, IT MIGHT BE BETTER TO LET THE MUSIC TELL THE STORY

 Metal News  38 Responses »
Dec 162011
 

I do like Eluveitie. They put on a helluva live show, and I picked “Thousandfold” as one of 2010’s most infectious extreme metal songs. I’m looking forward to hearing their new album, Helvetios, which will be released by Nuclear Blast in February. It’s a concept album about a time long ago when a Celtic tribe called the Helvetii occupied part of Eluveitie’s homeland of Switzerland.

Today, Nuclear Blast released a trailer for the new album. It consists of about 15 seconds of music and several minutes of Eluveitie frontman Chrigel talking about the concept behind the album. Watching the trailer induced an attack of narcolepsy, and I fell asleep before the trailer ended, so I may have missed some more music at the end. Apparently, there’s an even longer trailer available at Eluveitie’s web site. I’m getting sleepy just thinking about a longer version of the trailer I watched.

Are most Eluveitie fans even more nerdy than average metalheads (Trollfiend, I’m looking at you)? Because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for why Nuclear Blast or the band thought this trailer would put everyone on the edge of their seats, instead of into a deep coma. I will probably wake up again before the album comes out. I will probably still listen to it, because it couldn’t possibly be more soporific than the trailer. In case you’re feeling jittery and really need to calm down, the trailer is after the jump. Continue reading »

LOVE & THEFT

 Off Topic  4 Responses »
Dec 162011
 


An e-mail to me from Ben C. yesterday afternoon that I didn’t see until this morning: “If you haven’t tripped balls yet today, this should do the trick.”

Indeed, it did.  Just too amazing not to share.

ANDY SYNN’S PERSONAL FAVORITES FROM 2011

 Listmania  49 Responses »
Dec 162011
 

(This is the last installment in Andy Synn’s week-long series of posts looking back at albums released this year. Andy previously provided his lists of the year’s Great albums, the Good ones, and the most Disappointing ones, as well as his list of “The Critical Top 10″. For more explanation of what all this means, plus Andy’s picks for the year’s best EPs, visit this location.)

So here we are, the last list of Andy Synn Week (maybe not the official title, but give me something here guys). Here you will find the ten albums that have made the biggest impact on me personally, the ones which make the most frequent appearance on my playlist. Rarely a day goes by without me listening to at least one of these albums, often several times.

You will note that, in contrast to last year, all my favourite albums this year are drawn from my “Great” list. For once, this is definitely coincidental; it just so happens that as I was paring down my overall list of favourite albums to a mere ten entries, I was left solely with albums that I believe are personally, as well as critically, my absolute favourites. It also covers a whole spectrum of albums, some released right back at the very beginning of the year, reaching all the way up to extremely recent releases, so it also serves as a reasonably comprehensive list in terms of the time-frame it covers!

There’s some minor cross-over with yesterday’s list, as some albums were always bound to be both critically and personally fulfilling, but largely you’ll find here a cross-section of my musical preferences from the year. Each album comes with a short explanation of why I love it; not necessarily why it’s the “Best” album of the year, but just why it clicks with me personally. Continue reading »

THEMADISRAELI’S TOP 15: SYLOSIS-“EDGE OF THE EARTH”

 Album Reviews, Listmania  10 Responses »
Dec 162011
 

(NCS writer TheMadIsraeli is taking a different tack with his list of the year’s best albums — either reviewing or re-assessing each of them, one by one. Here’s the first.)

I have been truly dreading reviewing this album for the simple reason that I may fail to describe adequately what this album means to me in the modern metal landscape. I never got to review this album during my tenure at The Metal Register before we shut down, but I was supposed to.  I’m glad it didn’t go down that way now, because I’ve been able to sit on this album and really take it in.  It’s been in constant rotation all year, regardless of what else beckoned my listening habits.

I remember when self-anointed critics were unreasonably hammering these guys, after three EP’s and a debut full length, for being a Trivium knockoff, simply because they were busy taking Trivium’s thrash/metalcore hybrid sound to the next level.  Sylosis has come a very long way since then, along with numerous lineup changes, with only mastermind and guitarist (now also vocalist) Josh Middleton remaining.  The lineup established on Conclusion of an Age marked Sylosis finally establishing their identity, finally cementing what it was they wanted to do.  The Conclusion of an Age lineup is still here, minus vocalist Jamie Graham, in their triumphant, flawless victory known as Edge Of The Earth.

Sylosis are THE modern metal band, combining old-school thrash metal aesthetics, metalcore energy and dynamics, and powerful and majestic melodeath melodies.  THEY ARE the ultimate example of the future in metal that lies in the hybridization of sub-genres.  They manage to take the best of these three schools of thought while throwing out the superfluous, unneeded bullshit, and manage to form a cohesive sound that never fails to hit on target. Continue reading »

NEW ASPHYX ASPHYXIATES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Dec 152011
 

This will be quick. Those princes of death-doom in Asphyx have just released a new song for streaming. It’s the title track to their new eighth album, Deathhammer, which will be released via Century Media on February 27, 2012, in Europe and February 28, 2012, in North America.

The new track is exclusively streaming at CVLT Nation, so you’ll have to go there to hear it.  I did that.  I liked the song.  You will like it, too.  That’s both a prognostication and a command.

Be off with you, listen, and then return here to tell us how much you liked the song.

HERE is the link.

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