GIRL GROWLERS – PART 3

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Dec 052011
 

In this third part of our impromptu mini-series on female fronted metal bands we’ve recently discovered, the subject is Winds of Genocide. This band is based in Durham City, in the northeast of England and are fronted by a woman named Kat “Shevil” Gillham. Their debut effort is an EP released in 2010 called The Arrival of Apokalyptic Armageddon. I heard about them recently via a message from occasional NCS contributor “Willard Shrapnelspear”. He may not have been a patron of NCS for very long, but he has already figured out the kind of rank, disgusting musical assaults I often prefer in metal.

Just a few days ago, the reliable, Singapore-based Pulverised Records (home of bands such as Desultory, Interment, Impiety, Bastard Priest, and Morbus Chron) announced the signing of Winds of Genocide for the release of their debut album sometime in 2012. The music is described in a press release as “an offensive d-beat onslaught” and “a bastardized fusion of Cianide, Amebix, Unleashed and Bolt Thrower.” That all sounded pretty fuckin good to me.

The most recent song released by the band is a tune from an upcoming split with Abigail (Japan), and it’s called “Into the Darkness of Eternal Nuclear Winter”. The band describes it as “kinda like Unanimated, Naglfar, early Unleashed thrown into a blender with old school Svensk Käng/ Crust Punk”. Check it out on the Soundcloud player right after the jump. It’s also the first song streaming on the ReverbNation player that I’m also including after the jump. It includes songs from that 2010 EP, too. Check it out. Continue reading »

GIRL GROWLERS – PART 2

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Dec 052011
 

Still making up for the infliction of Amaranthe on your ears earlier today . . .

Part 2 of this day-long mini-series focuses on an L.A. band called My Ruin. As in the case of Wykked Wytch, this band is a new discovery for me despite the fact that they’ve previously release six albums, and a seventh one is about to debut. The core of the band is a husband and wife team consisting of vocalist Tairrie B and multi-instrumentalist Mick Murphy. The new album is called A Southern Revelation, and fittingly it was recorded in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Although the band has had label support in the past (and apparently an ugly falling out with their last label), the new album is 100% DIY and will be made available on December 7 as a free digital download on My Ruin’s Bandcamp page HERE.

To promote the album, My Ruin recently premiered an official music video for the album’s opening track, a song called “Tennessee Elegy”. The video was made by the band themselves and friends on a low budget, but it looks pretty good to me. As for the music on the new album, I’ve seen it referred to as Black Sabbath meets Black Label Society, and that’s a decent description, based on this one song. Continue reading »

GIRL GROWLERS – PART 1

 Uncategorized  7 Responses »
Dec 052011
 

In an effort to make up for inflicting Amaranthe on you in today’s first post, I’m going to spend the rest of the day serving up female-fronted metal that’s more in line with our tastes here at NCS. We’ve run features on female growlers in the past, and I’m not going to repeat any of that. Instead, today’s mini-series will focus on bands who we’ve never mentioned before on this site. Coincidentally, I’ve learned about all of them over just the last 30 days. At least musically, I’d honeymoon with any of them over Amaranthe.

This first one I discovered only this morning. This South Florida band is called Wykked Wytch, and their vocalist is a chick who calls herself Ipek. Wykked Wytch has recently signed with Goomba Music for the release of their fifth full-length album (scheduled to hit the streets on February 14) called The Ultimate Deception. A press release describes the music as “a unique mixture of black, death, thrash metal with melody, technicality, and aggression.”

The album was recorded at Lambesis Studios in San Diego, it was mastered by Alan Douches, and it features Kevin Talley (Daath) as a session drummer. The album art is by Marcelo Vasco, who’s done work for lots of name bands including Dimmu Borgir and The Faceless — and it’s a fucken eye-catcher. In fact, it’s the first thing you’ll see after the jump. Continue reading »

LAMB OF GOD: “GHOST WALKING”

 Metal News  1 Response »
Dec 052011
 

For those of you who subscribe to DECIBEL magazine or happened to see our post about DECIBEL’s “Best of 2011” list, you know that Lamb of God is on the cover, right above this headline: “INSIDE 2012’S BIGGEST METAL RECORD”. That’s a pretty big claim, especially since the album isn’t out yet — but it’s coming. And today, Metal Sucks premiered the first song from the album, “Ghost Walking”.

The long feature story in DECIBEL about the band and the making of the album (which is titled Resolution) includes this quote from Randy Blythe: “This is the first Lamb of God record that I actually like listening to.” Nick Green, who wrote the piece, calls it “the most diverse-sounding Lamb of God offering to date, mostly because guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler each contributed about half the songs, and there’s a wild contrast between their songwriting styles” — with Morton providing the more hook-driven, straightforward songs and Adler writing songs that sound like journeys (“the weird and unconventional stuff”, as Chris Adler puts it in the article).

Based on the article, it appears the album will include “true bookends and an instrumental interlude”, and one of those bookends — a closer called “King Me” – begins with Blythe’s “hushed vocals draped in eerie echo effects” and then volleys back and forth between his harsh vocals and an operatic female vocalist, with lyrics in Latin adapted from Mozart’s Requiem. There’s also reportedly “an arty and angular” song called “The Number Six” and “a bona-fide punk rock song” called “Cheated”. Yeah, that all sounds pretty diverse. Continue reading »

HUMBLED

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  30 Responses »
Dec 052011
 

Believe it or not, I try hard each day to concoct something interesting to post on this site. I try to avoid posting completely lame-ass bullshit (hereafter, “C-LAB”). Some days, avoiding C-LAB is difficult. I run out of time, or I party too hard and too late, and I do something that basically just feels like I’m showing my ass. And then some days, I feel like I’ve written something really good.

But how do I really know whether I’ve done a C-LAB post or instead something better than that, i.e.,  something that’s mainly lame-ass bullshit (“M-LAB”) but not C-LAB? Well, one way to find out is to check Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a service that gives web sites a shitload of data about their traffic. It’s mainly used by people who are trying to make money off their sites. Since we don’t advertise, and therefore don’t make shit off what we do here, I only use it to satisfy my curiosity about whether we’re dishing up C-LAB or M-LAB.

I don’t check our Google Analytics account that often, but since we’re nearing the end of the year, I thought I’d explore the data more deeply than usual. What I found really boggled my already boggled mind. I found that the third most popular post we’ve ever done since starting NCS is THIS ONE about Elize Ryd, the vocalist for a band called Amaranthe, which I posted in January 2010. Continue reading »

BARSOOM

 Off Topic  58 Responses »
Dec 042011
 

I have to take a break from our usual subject matter and geek-the-fuck-out for a few minutes, because JOHN CARTER, the movie, is on the way.

Edgar Rice Burroughs is best known for being the creator of Tarzan, about whom he wrote 20+ books between 1912 and 1947. But Burroughs wrote other series as well, including 10 books set on Mars that featured the adventures of a hero named John Carter. This coming February will be the 100th anniversary of the novelization of the first book in the series, A Princess of Mars. (it was originally serialized  in a magazine called All-Star). In the Martian language used by Burroughs in his books, the name of Mars is Barsoom.

When I was much younger and even more geeky than I am now, I spent many happy hours on Barsoom, reading all the books in the Mars series more than once (I read all the Tarzan books, too, plus just about everything else Burroughs wrote). They told the story of a Civil War captain who inexplicably found himself transported to Mars, full of exotic civilizations, races of bizarre beings, and rampant conflict. So, I became childishly excited when I saw this morning that Disney has made a movie based on A Princess of Mars called JOHN CARTER.

It was directed by Academy-award winner Andrew Stanton (Wall-E) and starts Taylor Kitsch (Friday Night Lights) as Carter, Willem Dafoe as Tars Tarkas, and the delectable Lynn Collins (X-Men Origins: Wolverine) Princess Dejah Thoris. I really, really, really, really hope this movie is good. Really. Shit, I’ll be thrilled if it’s just decent.

It turns out that a teaser trailer was released in July, which I totally missed, but now there’s a new, longer one, which is finally what woke me the fuck up about this movie.  It looks pretty sweet. Check out both trailers after the jump, and I’ve also collected a shitload of stills from the movie and anothe rposter, too. Continue reading »

CHROME WAVES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Dec 042011
 

Unless I miss my bet (and I would bet a lot on this), the day will come when you will be reading and hearing about this band far and wide, and you can tell your friends that you heard them first at NO CLEAN SINGING. Your friends may then look at you like a slug just crawled out of your nose, but pay them no mind. Who cares if they’ve never heard of NCS? What matters is the music of Chrome Waves.

First, here’s the line-up of this band:

Vocals: Stavros Giannopolous (vocalist and guitarist for The Atlas Moth), whose current album is popping up on “Best of 2011” lists far and wide)

Guitars: Jeff Wilson (guitarist of Wolvhammer, whose 2011 album The Obsidian Plains is superb and is also appearing on lots of year-end best-lists; formerly of Nachtmystium and Bringers of Disease)

Drums and bass: Bob Fouts (bassist for doom-metal band Apostle of Solitude; formerly with The Gates of Slumber)

I saw those names, and that was all the inducement I needed to spend some time with the first track they’ve released — a song that publicly debuted only last night called “”Height of the Rifles”. After the jump, we’ll be streaming it for you, but first, a little more intelligence about Chrome Waves from this interview of Bob Fouts. Continue reading »

MISCELLANY NO. 40: ERUPTED, FOUL BODY AUTOPSY, ABSENCE OF LIGHT

 MISCELLANY, SHORT BUT SWEET  10 Responses »
Dec 042011
 

Between my vacation in November, trying to catch up on what I missed while I was out of action, and planning for year-end Listmania at NCS, I’ve gotten ridiculously late in doing another MISCELLANY post. The last one was during the third week in October, which already seems like an eon ago. But rather than moan about my tardiness, I decided to just knuckle down and get ‘er done. Or at least get one done.

MISCELLANY started as a bit of a goof. I decided to do something with music kind of like what some people do with their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, when they obnoxiously tell you hour-by-hour (or minute-by-minute) what they’re doing — except I limited my disclosures to metal and hoped it would be more interesting than describing what I just ate or read or watched on TV, or the pleasures of the man-sized dump I just took.

To be more precise, on July 5, 2010, I posted a log of exactly what new metal I listened to and watched on that particular morning, regardless of whether it was good, bad, or indifferent. I didn’t plan on it being any kind of continuing thing, but I got enough encouragement from readers that I decided to just keep on keeping on.

I’ve been thinking back about how this started because this post is now the 40th in the series, which I guess is some kind of milestone. The first band covered in the first MISCELLANY post was an Austrian act called Mastic Scum, and I wrote about a video they’d released for a song called “Construcdead”. I introduced the video with these words: “If it’s been a while since you snorted coke, shot-up with heroin, cavorted with oiled-up dominatrixes, stuffed your face with food, been bull-whipped, had a golden shower, took it up the bunghole with a black dildo, or dribbled snot uncontrollably — well, you can relive those fond memories by watching this.” Good times. No wonder I decided to keep doing this.

Anyway, here we are again, and the rules haven’t changed: I keep a list of bands who contact us or who I’ve read or heard about somewhere, I pick some names at random and listen to a song or two from each pick, and then I write about the experience. It has turned out to be a good way to discover new music, and I’ve had extremely good luck with the picks. But still, you never really know what’s coming.

Today’s picks: Erupted (Sweden), Foul Body Autopsy (UK), and Absence of Light (Kenya). As it turns out, free downloads are available from all three bands Continue reading »

SYLOSIS: “A SERPENT’S TONGUE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Dec 032011
 

I’m awake now, but still want to keep my “fuck yeah” face on.

I may write something later.  Or not.

This just up-loaded video sounds like the album track synced with video of the band’s last hometown performance in Reading, England, before embarking on their current US tour.

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