“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 33)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  22 Responses »
Mar 292011
 

Do you know about EPIC MEAL TIME? It’s some kind of ongoing, web-only video series. The motto is “We make your dreams come true, and then we eat them.” I didn’t know about this thing until earlier today when a video link from a Facebook friend led me to the latest installment in the series, which was just uploaded.

I don’t know if what happens in this video is the template for all the installments, but in this one, a bunch of armed dudes (the Epic Meal Time crew, no doubt) walk into an Indian restaurant, take it over at gunpoint, and oversee the preparation of a meal — the centerpiece ingredient of which is curry candied bacon.

I was going to save this thing until I had enough additional items for a full THAT’S METAL! post, but it’s just so fucking awesome that I couldn’t wait. Here were my reactions as I watched:

Why is he sniffing her scarf? Bacon goes with everything, right? Why didn’t I think of bacon-curry Jack Daniels shots? I want my own man-bread. I’m getting queasy. Now I’m getting hungry. Now I’m getting queasy again. I would not want to be near the john when these dudes take their next shit.

Go for it after the jump . . . and be sure to share your own thoughts in the comments. Disgusting or delectible? Continue reading »

DISFIGURING THE GODDESS: THE NEW ALBUM IS STREAMING

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  23 Responses »
Mar 292011
 

We’ve written about Cam Argon, a/k/a Big Chocolate, before. Many times before, in fact, though not recently. What first attracted our attention to him back in 2008 was his involvement in a brutal death-metal project called Disfiguring the Goddess.   You can find a bit of the backstory about DTG in this post we ran more than a year ago. Cribbing from that post, we described the original DTG EP like this: “a raw, distorted vortex of brutal, slamming death metal marked by some truly distinctive vocals.”

Since surfacing as a cult-figure-on-the-rise through DTG, Cam has gone on to do many other things, including dubstep, remixes, a project called Commissioner with Mitch Lucker of Suicide Silence, making music videos, and a stint as the vocalist for Burning the Masses. His musical interests are, shall we say, varied.

But no matter how far and wide Big C’s musical creativity has taken him (or will take him), there have been a solid mass of core fans interested mainly in one question: When will there be new Disfiguring the Goddess music? The question is now answered, because yesterday Cam Argon uploaded an entire new album’s worth of DTG music to Soundcloud.

The album is called Circle of Nine. Based on previous reports, we assume Big C recorded all the songs with ex-Misericordiam blaster Phil Cancilla on drums and Joe Broodle on guitar, in addition to the instrumental and programming work that Big C himself did. [Update: that was a bad assumption — we’ve now heard from Cam, and he did this whole album by himself, all the vocals, guitars, and drum programming.] And, of course, there are those distinctive vocals.

We’ve just started listening to these tracks this morning, and goddamn, it will spin your fucking head around and then tear it off. Fast, brutal, jolting, unpredictable, instrumentally inventive, and anchored by the most gut rumbling, abyssal, brutal-death vocals on the planet. Check it out for yourselves — the whole album stream is after the jump. Continue reading »

PHRO MAKES GOOD

 Mosh Pit, Phro's Posts  17 Responses »
Mar 292011
 

To recap:

An earthquake of historic proportions hit northeastern Japan on March 11. That triggered a massive tsunami that flooded a wide swath of the Japanese mainland. Millions were left without power, and the loss of power also caused malfunctions at a nuclear plant, which has been leaking radiation ever since. More than 9,800 bodies have been recovered so far, another 17,500 are still missing; the majority of those are probably dead. Even now, more than 600,000 homes are without water, more than 200,000 still without power. Hundreds of thousands remain homeless.

We have a faithful reader named Phro whose frequent comments make me laugh or feel queasy (or sometimes both). He’s an American living and working in the Tokyo area. On March 16, at the end of one of our more widely read posts, called “Our World”, we passed along an appeal from Phro for contributions to the relief effort in Japan. And then, in an update to the post, we explained that Phro had offered an extra inducement: if NCS and its readers could meet or exceed the goal of raising $500 for Japanese relief, Phro promised to do something inappropriate and ridiculous (e.g., wear a maid skirt and dance around akihabara) and send us photographic evidence.

We exceeded that goal — and Phro has now paid off.  (details – and photos – after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

A CREEPING FEELING OF DREAD

 Metal News  9 Responses »
Mar 282011
 

For me, In Flames is a special band. They were one of my “gateways” to extreme metal. My NCS co-founders and I have seen them many times live, and we’ve always gotten a charge out of their shows. We’ve also met and talked with the band, and they are kind-hearted people who don’t come across as egotists, despite their global success. And on top of all that, I’m still a big fan of the music.

But to be brutally honest, I’ve become less of a fan as time has passed. I know some of you, maybe many of you, feel the same way. There is a vast distance between Clayman and A Sense of Purpose. Hell, there’s some real distance between Come Clarity and A Sense of Purpose.

Based on a news item from earlier today, I’m getting an uneasy feeling that the distance is going to increase even more when the next In Flames album, Sounds Of A Playground Fading, hits the streets in June. Yes, we now have specific worldwide release dates. We also have the news that In Flames is now signed to Century Media. 

And we have comments like this from Anders Fridén in a recent interview: “[One] song begins with a spoken-word part that evolves into a kind of hard DEPECHE MODE-type thing.”  Gulp.  (more after the jump . . .)
Continue reading »

. . . AND STILL MORE VICIOUSNESS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 282011
 

I don’t think two posts’ worth of viciousness are enough to ameliorate the suckitude of this Monday. We need one more. Unless of course I come across even more slashing metal before this vicious Monday turns into a moderately less vicious Tuesday.

This next offering is a brand new song from Samael, a Swiss band whose experimental brand of black metal will be known to many of you. After almost three years of work, their new album, Lex Mundi, will be released on April 29 in Europe and May 3 in North America via Nuclear Blast Records.

The cover art is by Patrick Pidoux, who is also the drummer for a band called Sludge. It’s apparently intended to be shiny black imagery on a matte-black background. When I first saw it on other sites, it just looked like a solid black square (which may have something to do with the settings on my computer). Anyway, to bring out the imagery, I enhanced the exposure of the image on a photo program, and the result is above.

As for the song, it’s awesome. I’m not terribly well-versed in Samael’s extensive discography, but it doesn’t sound quite like anything from the band that I’ve heard before. It features tribal rhythms and scorching guitars, and it’s just massively infectious. You listen to this, and in addition to whispering “Fuck Mondays” under your breath, you may be moved to start pounding any nearby flat surfaces with both fists. Go past the jump and stream this mutha . . . Continue reading »

MORE VICIOUSNESS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Mar 282011
 

Monday is still vicious. We’re still not willing to suffer in silence. Now we have one more piece of music to keep us company. If we’d seen this before finishing off our first post of the day, we would have included it there — but actually, it just became available a few hours ago. Good fucking timing.

It’s a new music video from Sweden’s Evocation. Their 2010 album Apocalyptic was one of our hands-down favorites of that year. We included one of the tracks (“Sweet Obsession”) on our list of the year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs (check that here).  The music is a smoking chainsaw of death metal from a band who recorded one of their first demos at Sunlight Studios in 1992, so yeah, they know what the fuck they’re doing.

The songs are varied in their pacing, but usually fast, with a vibrating wash of melody-tinged, ass-grinding riffage; scarred, banshee-style vocals; and some sweet, flickering, weaving guitar solos that will put a big fucking smile on your face. They do a very effective job of immediately triggering the headbang reflex and rattling your skull  . . . viciously.

This new video is for a song called “Psychosis Warfare”, which is pretty much what Mondays are all about, right? It was directed and produced by Iwona Kusion and that most awesome album cover artist Michal “Xaay” Loranc, who also did the cover for Apocalyptic. Go past the jump and watch it. Fuck Mondays. Continue reading »

MONDAY IS VICIOUS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 282011
 

Almost no one likes Mondays. What you have to do is usually so much worse than what you did on the weekend. But almost no one likes to hear you complain about Mondays either. They’re suffering, too, and hearing you bitch doesn’t make it better. Still, something must be done. Complaining doesn’t help, but suffering in silence is still suffering.

You could just gut up, accept your fate, and soldier on, but fuck that stoic, stiff-upper-lip mentality. Let’s try an alternative: wallow in your suffering, but don’t do it in silence. Instead, do it with musical accompaniment that’s just as vicious as you feel. In fact, let’s kick our Monday squarely in the gonads with some music by a band that’s just perfectly named for the occasion — Vicious Art. And then let’s follow that up with some Sumerian thrashing black metal, as inflicted (viciously) by Melechesh in a brand new video.

Are you ready? But of course you are — why else would you be here? So let’s get to it.

VICIOUS ART

The members of this Swedish band paid their dues playing in the likes of Grave, Entombed, Dark Funeral, and Obscurity. We’ll save the rest of the background info about Vicious Art for just a few minutes, just long enough to get you in a properly vicious frame of mind, with this brand new song called “Chaos Confirmed”:

[audio:https://www.nocleansinging.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Vicious_art_chaosconfirmed.mp3|titles=Vicious Art: Chaos Confirmed]

Of course, there is more after the jump . . . Continue reading »

TROLLS COME OUT TO PLAY!

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 272011
 

It’s a well-known fact that trolls live under bridges, and in caves, and in your basement if you’re not careful. But we now have actual video evidence that trolls come out to play every now and then.

These are Norwegian trolls and they play metal, too. They call themselves Trollfest. We wrote about them last July (see this post) when they released a single from an album they were then starting to shop around to labels. The song is called “Die Verdammte Hungersnot”. The official NCS translation of the song title is “Hungersnot, Dammit!” However, it actually seems to mean “the damned craving” or “the damned hunger”. Kick-ass song, whatever the title means.

Because we’re lazy, we’ll use the description of the music we concocted for that previous post: “speed metal plus oompa music plus Balkan folk tunes plus middle eastern melodies plus Converge-style hardcore shrieking plus more speed metal plus beer and vodka plus more speed metal.”

That was then, this is now. And in the here and now, Trollfest has found a label (NoiseArt Records), and that album (En Kvest For Den Hellige Gral) will finally be released on April 29. To help promote the release, the band are uploading weekly videos between now and the release date. The first one just went up. It’s a “tour diary” of a German tour that Trollfest did last December with fellow Norwegians Pantheon I and Germany’s Finterforst.

The video is shocking, I tell you, simply shocking: It appears that there is snow in Germany during the winter! And European airlines don’t work any better than U.S. ones. And it appears that Norwegian bands never stop drinking, ever. It also appears that they know how to fucken party, both on and off-stage. Check out the video after the jump, plus music, plus other shit, including a picture of a snot otter . . . Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 32)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  6 Responses »
Mar 272011
 


We could call this installment “The Phro Edition” of THAT’S METAL!, because he contributed our lead item for today — and it doesn’t even involve tentacle porn. But it’s still nasty.

For any newcomers in the audience, this series of posts focuses on random things out in the non-metallic world that we think are metal, despite the fact that they’re not music. We run these posts on an irregular basis primarily because we don’t enjoy venturing out into the non-metallic world any more than absolutely necessary. We find that world, more often than not, to be depressing, needlessly cruel, and often astoundingly stupid, even by our own primitive standards of intelligence. To be clear, we’re talking about the human non-metallic world, which perhaps explains why so many of out THAT’S METAL! items involve the non-human world.

Today, we have four items for you: slaughter on an epic scale by creatures that are beyond moral judgment (unlike humans who engage in slaughter on an epic scale); images from the artistic tradition of memento mori (new and old); two girls and a box (uh huh); and a breathtaking slideshow which proves that maybe human beings aren’t complete wastes of oxygen.

ITEM ONE

Th Phro contribution we’re featuring is a video of 30 giant Japanese hornets slaughtering 30,000 European bees in the space of 3 hours. You’ll see at the end why they did this. It’s fucking brutal — made even more brutal by the verbiage in the narration. (follow along after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

THANKFULLY, SCUM WILL RISE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 262011
 

Okay, I’m fully awake now. I was getting there rapidly after listening to that new song from Tombs (see immediately previous post today). And then I saw this new video from California’s Nails, and that brought me to a state of full alertness, or at least as alert as I ever get, which come to think of it is only about as alert as a pupa in a chrysalis.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the new video from Nails. It’s for the song called “Conform/Scum Will Rise” from their killer album Unsilent Death on Southern Lord. It’s about a minute-and-a-half of rancid grindcore with a nice little change of pace at the end. It will tear the skin from your face. What a nice way to wake up (thank you Metal Injection).

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