FLAMENCO METAL: IMPUREZA

 Album Reviews  19 Responses »
Dec 032011
 

I found out about the band featured in this post about a week ago, thanks to two, almost simultaneous messages from NCS reader Utmu and NCS writer TheMadIsraeli, both of whom seem to have an ear for metal that pushes my buttons. Impureza immediately pushed two of them: Their music incorporates both traditional “ethnic” influences and instruments that are rarely found in metal — in this case flamenco — and the cover to their most recent album, La Iglesia Del Odio (“the church of hate”), is a real eye-catcher (it was created by Johann Bodin).

The band are currently based in Orléans, France, and they actually appear to be Frenchmen instead of transplanted Spaniards, as one would expect from the music. Following a series of demos and splits, they released their debut album in April 2010 — the aforementioned La Iglesia Del Odio — on a French label called Snakebite Productions, from which the album can still be acquired in CD form.

Now, despite the abstract attraction (at least to me) of a death metal band who incorporate flamenco music into their sound, and despite the fact that they were deemed worthy of a spot at HELLFEST 2011, I did have to wonder whether this might turn out to be nothing more than a gimmick, a passing curiosity, a novelty without substance, and I also wondered how flamenco and death metal would sound in combination.

The answer: Impureza sounds brilliant, particularly if you’re a fan of technical death metal in the vein of Nile, Krisiun, Decapitated, or Fleshgod Apocalypse, and the distinctive flamenco cadences and melodies are no gimmick: They’re integral to this music, and they give it a fascinating, distinctive flair. Continue reading »

YOUR GALLIC GOODIES FOR THE DAY: OUTCAST AND HYPNO5E

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Dec 022011
 

On March 4, 2011, we included a song from a French band called Outcast in a post called Diversionary Tactics. The title of the song was “Elements”, and it was very fucking diverting. To quote from the post: “The riffs and time signatures jump around like barefoot children on a hot pavement, the drums rarely repeat the same patterns twice, there’s a freaky-good guitar solo, and the vocals bray in a hot fury (a mix of hardcore howls and death-metal growls). If you’re a fan of bands like Textures, CiLiCe, and Tardive Dyskinesia, do check this shit out.”

The song was taken from Outcast’s third studio album, Awaken the Reason, which hadn’t yet been released — an album mixed by Jochem Jacobs of Textures and mastered by Alan Douches. Well, here we are in December and the album still hasn’t been released. BUT, the latest word is that it will be coming in early 2012 and that specific info about the release date and the label will be coming within days — AND today, the band released another song from the album called “Abysmal”.

The music still puts me in mind of those three bands I mentioned in the March post — its pneumatic rhythms are pummeling and physically convulsive, with lots of funky, math-metally riffing, but it also includes nice melodic choruses and swirling, proggy, clean guitar solos in between the rounds of heavy, djent-style head-bashing. I am definitely looking forward to the album, just as much as I have been since March. Bring it on! You can hear the song after the jump.

The other offering of Gallic goodness for today comes from a band called Hypno5e, who I had the pleasure of seeing on the Art As Metal tour a couple years ago with Revocation and The Binary Code. Yesterday, Lambgoat exclusively premiered the title song from the band’s forthcoming second album, Acid Mist Tomorrow. It’s a helluva song, parts of which are very strongly reminiscent of Gojira (a plus, of course) and parts of which are soft, melodic, beautiful, and experimentally progressive. And you can hear it after the jump, too. The album should be very interesting and absolutely worth hearing. Fair warning: clean singing is involved. Continue reading »

MORE 2011 SICKNESS (Part 12)

 Forthcoming Albums  17 Responses »
Dec 022011
 

November is done, and the countdown begins to the end of 2011 and he beginning of the New Year. We’ve been so focused this week on the year behind us, since 2011 Listmania is now in full swing, that we almost forgot that there is a future, and it will be filled with metal.

So, here’s the deal:  In these METAL IN THE FORGE posts, we collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last month (November) about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including occasional updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know their music yet. In this series, we cut and paste those announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

Remember — THIS ISN’T A CUMULATIVE LIST. If we found out about a new forthcoming album before November, we wrote about it in previous installments of this series. So, be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported earlier.

This month’s list begins right after the jump. As usual, this list is half-assed rather than comprehensive. So, feel free to leave Comments and tell all of us what we missed when we put this list together. Let us know about albums on the way that  you’re stoked about! Continue reading »

VILDHJARTA: “MÅSSTADEN”

 Album Reviews  21 Responses »
Dec 022011
 

(The Madithraeli . . . uh, TheMadIsraeli . . . hath entered a thtate of thalldom to write thith enthuthiathtic review of the debut album by Sweden’s Vildhjarta. I feel compelled by unknown fortheth to thay: THALL!)

MASSIVE


FUCKING


BRUTHALLITY!


Alright, so we have a band here who have named themselves after a Swedish Dungeons & Dragons expansion about an ancient magical forest, have invented a word that has no veri-fucking-fiable definition that makes ANY SENSE and insert it into everything, and have pulled off one of the most notable changes in sound in the last five years.  But let’s get a refresher on what really matters… Continue reading »

THE THALL MEME

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  21 Responses »
Dec 012011
 

Definitions of the words in the title to this post from The Oxford English Dictionary (online):

MEME

noun
an element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.

Origin:

1970s: from Greek mimēma ‘that which is imitated’, on the pattern of gene

Word trends:

When Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, he wanted a word like gene that conveyed the way in which ideas and behaviour spread within society by non-genetic means. Since then the word has been picked up to describe a piece of information spread by email or via blogs and social networking sites. A meme can be almost anything—a joke, a video clip, a cartoon, a news story—and can also evolve as it spreads, with users editing the content or adding comments. Common collocates in the Oxford English Corpus are spread, pass, and transmit: as with the Internet sense of  viral, meme uses the metaphor of disease and infection

THALL

Ask Vildhjarta, because I have no fucking idea. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA: INVITATION NO. 2

 Listmania  58 Responses »
Dec 012011
 

The end of the year draws nigh, and with it comes lists. Many lists, everywhere you turn. Lists of the best of what 2011 has offered us. Back in 2009, when this site was just an ugly, smelly baby a few days old, we wrote a post about year-end lists and why people bother with them. The best reason still seems to be this: Reading someone else’s list of the albums they thought were the year’s best is a good way to discover music you missed and might like.

We don’t do an “official” NCS year-end “best albums” list. It’s just too damned much work. We listened to a mountain-sized pile of new music this year, we liked a helluva lot of it, and trying to decide which 10 or 15 or even 20 albums were the best we heard would be a bunch of effort I’d rather devote to coming up with new posts for this site. Plus, the music that I and my collaborators like is so varied that trying to compare this apple to that orange and decide which one tastes better is a very confusing enterprise.

But mainly, I’m just too fucking lazy.

Fortunately, we have some regular contributors who have more energy, and we’ll be publishing their year-end lists later this month. We’re also inviting some other folks to give us their lists in the form of guest posts for this site. And, as described in this post, we’ll also have our list of the extreme metal songs from 2011 that we thought were the most infectious.

But we ain’t stopping there. If YOU have made your own mental list of the best metal albums you heard this year, we want to see it. Because we’re fucking nosy like that. (details about this invitation are after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

LISTMANIA: INVITATION NO. 1

 Listmania  47 Responses »
Dec 012011
 

As the end of 2011 approaches, we’ll be reprising once again two of our year-end traditions — and we want your help with both of them.

FIRST, we’re again going to create a list of the The Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs of the year. In case you’ve forgotten, or you’ve become an NCS reader since this time last year, here’s what this is about:

This isn’t a list of the best metal albums of the year. It’s not even our list of the best individual extreme metal songs of the year. Though some of the songs might actually be among the best of the year, creating that kind of list isn’t the objective. That would tax our brains way too much, and frankly this is the time of year when devoting serious effort to anything is just fucking difficult.

Instead, ours is a list of the most infectious extreme metal songs we’ve heard this year. We’re talking about songs that produce involuntary physical movement. Even on a crowded bus, subway, or ferry, your head starts banging, your fingers start tapping, your foot starts thumping, your legs start twitching — different people have got different body parts that start convulsing when they hear something that’s got a groove to it, a catchy rhythm, a memorable melody.

To be one of the most infectious songs of the year, it’s got to be something that worms its way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get it out (and wouldn’t want to) — you mentally replay it at unexpected times and you go back to the song repeatedly for listening. It’s the kind of song that has become one of your favorites for some kind of activity — whether it be drinking or smoking a bowl, working out, humping, rolling down the road in some kind of wheeled vehicle with the volume turned up, doing your laundry, doing school work, doing actual paying work, pleasuring yourself while gazing at a photo of me, getting into the right kind of mood or out of the wrong one, or even just day-dreaming. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA CONTINUES: THE DECIBEL TOP 40

 Listmania  22 Responses »
Dec 012011
 

Listmania season is in full swing. So far, we’ve reprinted the Best Metal of 2011 lists from Pitchfork and NPR, not because they have deep credibility in the scene but because they’re heavily trafficked web sites and because I thought the lists were better than expected. But today we’ve got a list from a source that unquestionably does have credibility.

Yes, the current issue of DECIBEL magazine (the only print metal magazine we read at NCS) arrived at the NCS Island in yesterday’s mail, and that issue includes the magazine’s list of the Top 40 Extreme Albums of 2011. Some of the names on that list have already surfaced on the internet — including the band whose album DECIBEL named the best of the year (Tombs) — because record labels and bands who made the list have been posting about it. But I didn’t know the full list until greedily opening the mag last night. And of course, I can’t resist providing that list for your amusement after the jump.

You’re going to see some of the same band names that have already appeared on both the Pitchfork and NPR lists. Fifteen bands appeared on both of those lists, and 13 of those 15 are also on the DECIBEL list — Tombs, YOB, Hammers of Misfortune, deafheaven, Ulcerate, Krallice, Negative Plane, 40 Watt Sun, Trap Them, Mournful Congregation, Disma, Autopsy, and Exhumed. (Altar of Plagues and Ash Borer were on the other two lists but not DECIBEL‘s).

You will also see names that weren’t on the other lists. For example, technical death metal rears its head through the appearance of Origin and Obscura, and old-school death-doom is represented through the welcome appearance of Vallenfyre. I was also happy to see Revocation highly placed on the DECIBEL list, and surprisingly — though not without justification — Inquisition, Hate Eternal, and Brutal Truth are in the Top 10. You definitely weren’t going to see those names at Pitchfork or NPR.

On the other hand, wait ’til you see who DECIBEL names for the No. 2 and No. 3 albums of the year. They’re certainly not my picks for those spots; they wouldn’t even be in my Top 20. But what the fuck, half the fun of Listmania is the generation of controversy. Continue reading »

OPERA IX: “MANDRAGORA”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Dec 012011
 

Opera IX is a symphonic black metal band from Italy who’ve been around since 1989, which makes them . . . survivors. On January 24, 2012 in Europe and February 28 in North America, Agonia Records will release their first studio album in 7 years — Strix Maledictae In Aeternum. The new album is described as the last in a trilogy of records that explores witchcraft.

I’ve heard a bit of Opera IX music in the past, but it came from the days when Cadaveria was fronting the band, and I’ve heard nothing since. But curiosity about what had become of their post-Cadaveria sound led me to watch an official video that was released in early November for a song from the new album called “Mandragora”. I’m including the video after the jump (because it’s NSFW), and featuring it here for three reasons.

First, I enjoyed the song. It reminded me of Satanica-era Behemoth, an imperial mix of black and death metal. Second, I was surprised to see that the video is hosted on YouTube, because it features copious nudity. And then I saw the little notation on the YouTube page: “This video has been age-restricted based on our Community Guidelines.” I’d never actually read the Community Guidelines, and I wondered why the video was available with an age restriction rather than being banned altogether. Continue reading »

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