A TRIO OF SONGS FROM SUIDAKRA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 222011
 

We first discovered German’s SuidAkrA (damn, that’s hard to type) with the release of their 2009 album, Crógacht. Their blend of melodeath and Celtic-flavored folk metal proved to be appealing, and we went backward and became even bigger fans of Caledonia (2006) and Command To Charge (2005). Of course, that doesn’t exhaust SuidAkrA’s discography, since six more albums preceded Command To Charge.

The band’s tenth album of original music — Book of Dowth — is on its way, scheduled for release on March 25 via AFM Records. Within the last day, the band have made a total of three songs from the album available for streaming on their Facebook page, but we also have them for you here, in addition to the album’s eye-catching cover art up above. Belgian graphic artist Kris Verwimp created the cover, and is also credited with developing the album’s lyrical concept.

Speaking of that, the band has explained that the concept of Book Of Dowth “chronicles the mythology of a mysterious race of demonic beings known as the ‘Fomor.’ Starting with the discovery of an ancient book at the excavation of Dowth (a Neolithic passage tomb in the Boyne Valley, Ireland), it unveils the yet untold story of the rise and fall of the Fomorian horde throughout history and far, far beyond . . . .”

Man, yet another race of demonic beings we hadn’t heard of! Demonic beings must breed and inter-breed like rabbits, yet they seem to keep to themselves. However well-hidden, this race now has an album to memorialize their perfidity. After the jump, you can check out the new tracks and our take on them, plus a video of one of them, if you haven’t already seen it. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT, PART 9: OCEANS OF SADNESS

 Album Reviews, THE SYNN REPORT  1 Response »
Mar 222011
 

NCS contributor Andy Synn returns with yet another retrospective. This time the subject is Oceans of Sadness from Belgium.

Unfortunately, this edition of The Synn Report is a posthumous one, as Oceans Of Sadness recently announced their split. I had originally intended to write something about this band at a later date, hoping that they would have a new release by then as their last album (their sixth) was released way back in 2008.

Sadly, these Belgian visionaries have made the decision to part ways, leaving behind them six full-length albums of darkly romantic, proggy metal whose lack of boundaries makes their sound both fascinating and at the same time difficult to classify in its entirety. As such I’m giving each album its own recommendation separately this time around. Quick warning: the band relies primarily on clean vocals accented by some death metal growls and black metal shrieks, not the other way around!

To my mind there are (broadly speaking) two forms of progressive music, linear progressive music and spherical progressive music. The former usually involves bands moving in a linear direction away from their original forms, growing and evolving along the way, often to a point where their sound and style are totally different from that of their earliest releases. The latter involves a band carving out a sound with a large potential scope based on a central point of consistency – this allows the band to experiment within this sphere (which varies in size and scope depending upon genre limitations, technical and compositional skills, etc) whilst maintaining a core sound.

Neither of these forms is entirely mutually exclusive, as bands who have mined their sonic sphere of all possibilities can be seen to break out onto a linear path in response, just as bands who have made a career out of linear growth can eventually find a sphere to inhabit in which they are most happy to exist. (more after the jump, including songs . . .) Continue reading »

SET THE VOLUME TO “KILL”: ANAAL NATHRAKH STRIKES AGAIN

 Metal News  20 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

Four days ago we featured a new Anaal Nathrakh song called “Volenti Non Fit Iniuria” from their next album, Passion, which will drop on May 23. To use a phrase that only highly trained metal journalists such as those employed by NCS are sophisticated enough to use, it’s a fuckin’ destroyer.

We’re not even finished reeling from that first song, and lo and behold there’s another one out today. This one’s called “Paragon Pariah”. It’s streaming at the DECIBEL magazine web site. It comes with these instructions from vocalist Dave Hunt: “Set volume to ‘kill’ and press ‘blast’.”

Those instructions are just barely simple enough for me to follow, so I did that — and I’m still picking up my teeth off the floor. Fuck . . . . I didn’t even mind the clean singing.

I’m such a selfish asshole that I’d really like to embed the song right here for you, but I can’t do it yet. So I will grudgingly give you this link.

EXPERIMENTATION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

We are consumed, body and mind, in a never-ending search for ways of improving the NCS experience for you, our beloved readers, who thankfully have way too much time on your hands.

Actually, to be brutally honest, which is the only kind of honest we know how to be at this site, we don’t think much about improving anything around here because that would involve . . . well . . . it would involve thinking. Which is why almost nothing has changed since we started NCS, except on those rare occasions when someone else has basically done all the thinking for us, like when groverXIII (TNOTB) just up and re-designed our site banner out of the goodness of his black heart.

Well, recently we found out that some of you have been experiencing delays in streaming or downloading song files when we include a song-link in our posts instead of an embedded audio player. This could be explained by network congestion or your own bandwidth limitations, but I suppose it could have something to do with our file-hosting service. 

So, we decided to experiment and see what happens when we use a different service. We randomly picked two songs as the guinea pigs. Can you guess which album one of them came from? (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

NORTHER UPDATE

 Metal News  7 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

This kind of slipped up on me: There are now published release dates for Norther‘s new album, Circle Regenerated, plus the cool cover art has been revealed (chosen through a fan contest), plus pre-order options are now available for those of you who would be consumed by wracking guilt over the thought of an illegal download. Plus, there’s a tracklist which includes three bonus songs that come with the digipack. It includes a cover of a song by a band I’ve never heard of (which of course means absolutely nothing).

As aficionados of Finnish metal already know, this will be the first Norther album that doesn’t feature vocalist/guitarist Petri Lindroos. Instead, we will have former Imperanon frontman Aleksi Sihvonen, as well as Naildown guitarist Daniel Freyburg. Norther purists are undoubtedly still trying to adjust to the change in vocalists. We are not pure in any respect here at NCS, so we have already adjusted and will be looking forward to the album, regardless.

If you haven’t yet caught up to this song, here’s a track from the forthcoming album.  The release dates, track-list, and pre-order links are after the jump.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/10871071″] Continue reading »

MONDAY METAL: MALFEITOR, MACHINAE SUPREMACY, AND MARGIN OF ERROR

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

When things come together in a way that makes an an alliterative post title possible, it’s just awesome, don’t you think?

In the course of catching up on metal news over the weekend, we came across three items that caught our bloodshot eyes. Apart from the fact that they all concerned bands whose names begin with “M”, the music has nothing in common.

ITEM ONE: The first item concerned a band from Sweden called Malfeitor. There’s a black metal band from Italy with the same name, and a couple of long-defunct bands from Norway and the U.S. that liked the name, too — but this ain’t any of them. This band had its genesis in Sweden back in the early 90’s and then dissolved in 1994. But it’s become apparent that Swedish death-metal bands are like vampires – they never die.

In 2007, two of the band member — Benny Moberg and Mattias Parkkila — started another death metal band called Blood Mortized (along with ex-Amon Amarth guitarist Anders “Hansson” Biazzi), which put out a debut album in 2009 and is about to release a 3-song EP on cassette. Last year Moberg left Blood Mortized to resuscitate Malfeitor, and he has now been joined by Parkkila and drummer Janne (Rudberg) Björkenfjäll.

Malfeitor have recently started streaming their first new song in 17 years, plus they’ve got a teaser track that includes instrumental snippets from five songs on an album they plan to release in 2011 (the vocals haven’t yet been recorded for those songs). After the jump, we’ve got the new song and that teaser.

ITEM TWO: The second item concerns another band from Sweden — Machinae Supremacy — but they’re pretty far over toward the other end of the metal spectrum from Malfeitor. What grabbed our attention about these dudes is the fact that they’re one of the three support acts for Children of Bodom‘s “Ugly World Tour”, which began this past weekend — the other two being Amon Amarth and Ensiferum.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MISCELLANY NO. 28: THE SURGICAL BRUTE EDITION (Pt 1)

 MISCELLANY  16 Responses »
Mar 202011
 

We’ve got an NCS reader and commenter who uses the nom de plume “Surgical Brute.” Every now and then in his post comments, he’ll mention a band whose music is new to me. I usually try to check out those bands, and so far, he hasn’t steered me wrong.

Recently, I invited him to send us five new recommendations, because it’s pretty clear to me that my tastes and his coincide to a significant degree. He responded with five bands whose music I’d never heard. I’ve been saving up those recommendations for a MISCELLANY post, which is the series that recounts my adventures into the musical unknown. I’m splitting up those five bands into two MISCELLANY posts, with the second one to follow next weekend, if not sooner.

So, here we go: For each band, I’m including Surgical Brute’s brief description of the music, my own reaction to a single song (or two) picked at random from each band, and then the song itself for you to hear and judge for yourself. Here’s the line-up for today, in the order that Surgical Brute described them to me via e-mail: The Stone (Serbia), Graveyard Dirt (Ireland), and The Wakedead Gathering (U.S.). Bear in mind that I hadn’t heard the music before sitting down to listen for this post. It turned out to be quite a varied offering of music.

THE STONE

This Serbian band formed in 1996, originally under the name Stone To Flesh, and in the following years they’ve produced quite a lot of music. Their most recent full-length — the band’s fifth — is called Umro (which seems to mean “died” or maybe “dead”). It came out in 2009 on Folter Records. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

THE OSEDAX

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Mar 192011
 

Most metal reviews are littered with cliches and overused words. I’m as guilty as anyone. Sometimes the explanation is laziness, sometimes a lack of imagination, sometimes limitations on the writer’s vocabulary. It’s not all bad, because sometimes the overused words function like a shorthand code: they quickly give readers a very general clue about whether it’s the kind of music that might suit their tastes. On the other hand, some of the words are so imprecise that they simply don’t do the music justice, or they can be downright misleading.

Let’s take “sludge” and “stoner metal”, for example. “Sludge” is a handy word to use, and most metalheads know what it connotes: down-tempo music with distorted guitars, heavy bass rhythms, and an air of doom. Sometimes the word is used in conjunction with “stoner metal”, which I guess happens when the music is less abrasive, maybe more psychedelic, maybe incorporating more instrumental jams, but I’m not 100% sure. By the way, does getting high and losing yourself in the music really correlate with one genre of metal more than another?

Anyway, on the subject of cliched, overused words, one thing I’ve noticed is that reviewers of sludge/stoner music can’t seem to resist throwing around “dirty” and “filthy” as adjectives. What the fuck does that mean anyway? I don’t listen to this kind of music often, but I listen enough to know that bands who wear the sludge/stoner label do not all sound alike, and calling their music “dirty” or “filthy” doesn’t help distinguish them. Does it?

These thoughts are running through my head because I’ve been listening to an excellent debut album called Delayed Response by a Virginia band called The Osedax. Their music gets labeled “sludge” and “stoner” — hell, those are the words the band themselves use. But this is a case where those shorthand codewords really don’t do the music justice — there’s a whole lot more to it than what those labels might make you think. There’s also nothing about it that’s mellow; it’s seriously disturbing.  (more after the jump, including a song and a download link . . .) Continue reading »

FILLER

 IQ Subtraction  16 Responses »
Mar 192011
 

I just woke up. My head feels like it has been converted into a storage facility for the spent fuel rods used in nuclear reactors. I did not finish today’s post before having my fun last night. I will finish it as soon as the room stops spinning around like a centrifuge. In the meantime, do what these creatures are doing:

REVELATIONS

 IQ Subtraction  43 Responses »
Mar 182011
 

The time has come. I’ve decided to expose myself. No, not like this dude. I mean, it’s time to expose my face, time to show everyone what I really look like. And yes, that’s me up above with my cat.

For months now, I’ve received a surging torrent of e-mails from NCS fans asking for a photo of my face, not just the icon of my inked arms that I use for comments, which some people think is unfriendly and off-putting. Many correspondents have wondered if I even have a head at all. Actually, all of those people were asking if I had a brain, but I’m interpreting those questions as asking for a head-and-shoulders shot.

Many other people have written to ask that I post a photo of my cat, since I mention him so often in NCS posts and comments. I thought the photo up above was a good pose, because my cat has a habit of climbing up on my shoulders when I’m trying to write at the keyboard. He also has a habit of drinking from my water glass when I’m not paying attention and walking across my keyboard and entering random commands that I then can’t figure out how to un-do, or sometimes just deleting what I’ve spent hours writing. He also throws up a lot. But I didn’t think a shot of me cleaning up cat vomit would be as appealing.

He’s not a popular breed of cat. The coat is kind of rough, and they eat a lot, plus they intimidate some people. But I can tell you from personal experience they make really affectionate pets and they’re good with children, especially if you don’t like children. All it takes is for them to bite off a visiting child’s foot just the one time and you won’t have to worry ever again about your friends bringing their kids over for a visit. Awesome.

Where was I? Oh yeah, the photo of me. Some of you may be thinking that’s a photo of Robert Pattinson, but it’s not. That dude is in such demand after the big Twilight cultural explosion that he can’t be everywhere he needs to be, so I stand in for him every now and then. Dude gets bored having his picture taken anyway, and it puts the extra cheddah in my pocket that I need to keep NCS going, so it’s a win-win situation for both of us. (unfortunately, there is more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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