“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (NO. 28)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  21 Responses »
Feb 082011
 

Time for another of our irregular installments in this series, which features things we’ve recently read or seen that we thought were metal, even though they aren’t music.

We have three items for you today: A bit of education about an ancient form of swordplay that we didn’t know existed, including a video demonstration set to metal; a piece of news about an unusual (and nasty) form of political protest; and our prize for the most metal ad from Super Bowl XLV.

ITEM ONE

For this first item, we owe our thanks to long-time NCS reader and commenter tabiris. He e-mailed us about a form of fencing we’d never heard of before. When we think of fencing, we think of those matches included in the Summer Olympics, with men and women wielding whispy implements called foils, or sabres, or épée, with points scored by a “touch” using an electronic scoring apparatus. (Kendo also comes to mind, but that’s another story).

That stuff is undoubtedly very difficult to do, but it doesn’t look metal. Seems like it’s all finesse, and although finesse has its place in metal, it’s a small place. Well, there’s another kind of fencing that certainly involves skill and finesse, but it looks a whole lot more metal than Olympic fencing.  (more after the jump, including our typically tasteless commentary . . .) Continue reading »

MID-DAY DIVERSIONARY TACTICS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Feb 072011
 

I just took a break from what I usually do during daylight hours to check happenings in the world of metal, and that proved to be quite a long and interesting diversion. It may not be mid-day where you are, but maybe you still need a diversion or two, or three. That’s what we’re here for — to divert you, for better or worse, depending on your alternatives.

DIVERSION ONE

Regular NCS visitors know we’ve got a pathological weakness for anything Finnish, so when I saw a come-on for a new video by a Finnish band called Mygrain, of course I had to watch it. Besides, I’ve been meaning to check out this band ever since I read about the release of their self-titled third album on January 12 (via Spineform Records) — especially because it was mixed and mastered by Dan Swanö (Edge of Sanity, Bloodbath, Nightingale).

The video is for a song called “Trapped In An Hourglass”. Very cool music — fast-paced, Finnish-style melodic death that’s both catchy and cathartic, with two admirable guitar solo’s (one of which is a jazzy bit of picking at about the 3:00 mark), some clean vocals that even I like, and evidence that Finnish howlers can even shriek underwater.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

ESSENCE OF THRASH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Feb 072011
 

The three of us who started this site are not big on thrash, which is probably obvious since we write infrequently about straight thrash-metal bands. It’s not that we judge it to be a lesser form of metal. It’s just a matter of taste. Speaking for myself, I like the energy, the speed, and the riffing style, but I’m not crazy about traditional thrash vocals and I tend to get bored with the sameness of the songs on many thrash albums. I’ve found that I like thrash a lot more live than I do on recordings (for example, I thought Exodus and Death Angel put on two hellaciously good performances in Seattle last year).

Needless to say, the re-thrash movement has held little interest for us. There’s nothing wrong with a band immersing itself in its influences, but when you tend to get bored even with the old masters, you tend to get really bored with rank imitators, even talented ones.

I still try to sample new thrash releases every now and then, hoping for a pleasant surprise. For example, I’ve been listening to the new album by Lazarus A.D. (Black Rivers Flow). I’m not sure I like it as much as the band’s debut (The Onslaught), but a couple of the songs are sticking with me (the title track and “The Strong Prevail”). Still, although I think devotees of thrash will probably enjoy this, on the whole this album isn’t ringing my chimes.

Still, I persevere, and sometimes it pays off. For example, over the weekend I gritted my teeth and started watching a new video from a Danish thrash band called Essence, while preparing to stop it quickly. But the song turned out to be different from what I was expecting, and not just different but really good — thrash with some unusual and original ingredients in the mix.  (more after the jump, including the video . . .) Continue reading »

BLOOD MERIDIAN: ELEMENTS OF BRUTALITY

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Feb 072011
 

(NCS contributor Siddharth Darbha returns with his review of a debut EP from India’s Blood Meridian)

Just around two years and a few shows old, Blood Meridian are the new kids on the block. They’ve got things to prove and stereotypes to shed. Elements Of Brutality is their first offering. I’ve always been a fan of anything related to words, and I fell in love with their band name despite what some would call a childish EP title. Initially, they gigged with a drum machine and a stand-in bassist, only completing their line-up much later and starting work on the EP in August 2010.

A first listen introduces you to a technical death metal outfit, quite a good one at that. The drummer, Pushkar Joshi, springs forth in the mix. He seems like he knows what he’s doing and he’s doing it good. The vocalist is a weird one — as in one would either like his vocals or hate them. Bhaskar Baruah, on the mike, tries very hard to cover a spectrum of low growls and high squeals, and though he pulls them off decently, there is a certain thrust lacking in his emissions. After multiple run-throughs of the EP, however, one would get quite comfortable with the vocals, too.

Aurko Mukhopadhyay and Anuj Gupta on guitars gel well and come up with quite a set of sweet riffs. Nile, Decapitated and some more bands influencing them, they sound good as long as one doesn’t concede to tagging them ‘confused’. The tones are rawer than one would expect in today’s times — the mixing is not up to the mark. The guitars are quite subdued and should have been, in amateur terms, louder. The bass, as fingered by Ashwin Shriyan, seems to have been almost irrelevant in the mind of the mixer, Arun Iyer (Devoid). Overall, it is evident that finding a signature sound for the band was a very involved effort. No lasting harm done, yet no cookies in place for the production either.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MISCELLANY NO. 23

 MISCELLANY  No Responses »
Feb 062011
 

Well, I thought I’d be able to get up another MISCELLANY post during the past week to help myself catch up, but that obviously didn’t happen. (Yesterday’s MISCELLANY post was a hybrid, since I already knew two of the bands, so that didn’t really count.) At least this time I didn’t let two or three weeks go by before readying another installment.

This time I visited four more bands whose music I’d never heard, and it turned out to be an unusually diverse listening experience — and in one case pretty far outside the usual bedlam of the NCS asylum. Per the usual MISCELLANY rules, I randomly picked these bands off our running list of music to check out and tried to limit myself to one song per band (and failed). After the jump you’ll get the chance to hear the music for yourselves if the write-ups get you interested enough.

Today’s picks are Shroud Eater (U.S.), Eschaton (Austria), and The Omega Experiment (U.S.) — and in a late addition, The Villain Avian Symphony (Canada). If nothing else, these bands have a knack for picking good names, don’t you think? And, as a bonus, it turns out that almost all the music is free.

(Yes, this is a lengthy installment, but for fuck’s sake, it’s Sunday. What else have you got to do? Oh wait — it’s Super Bowl Sunday. Well, fuck me, maybe people outside the U.S. will wade through this . . .) Continue reading »

ANOTHER FINLAND METAL WEEK!

 Metal News  3 Responses »
Feb 052011
 

Our metallic blog sister from New Zealand, Steff Metal, is just finishing a Finnish Metal Week tribute on her site that I’ve been enjoying day by day as it has unfolded. The posts have been fun and informative, including a “Heavy Metal Travel Guide to Finland“, which I hope someday I’ll get to use. Two of her posts will be of extra-special interest to aficionados of Finnish metal:

Kimmo Kuusniemi of ground-breaking Finnish heavy-metal band Sarcofagus (which, btw, is still up and running) and his wife Tanja returned to Finland from where they now make their home in England to film a documentary about Finnish metal called Promised Land of Heavy Metal. According to Steff’s posts, one of which is an extensive interview with Kimmo and Tanja, they interviewed hundreds of metal musicians across diverse genres, metal fans, and music professionals about the scene, both past and present — including an interview of Finland’s president, Tarja Halonen!

The documentary is now available on DVD, and international distribution is just starting. Based on Steff’s interview and her separate review of the film, I’m stoked to see this thing. Steff’s posts about the film include instructions on how to order directly from Kimmo (which NCS has already done) — so if you’re a fan of Finnish metal (and who isn’t?), go check out Steff’s interview and review and the rest of her posts on Finnish metal here.

MISCELLANY NO. 22 (CYCLONE EMPIRE EDITION)

 MISCELLANY  4 Responses »
Feb 052011
 

Just in case you didn’t get enough of a beat-down from that new Deicide track we debuted yesterday, this post ought to finish off the job of putting you in the hospital (or an asylum).

Early yesterday morning we received three e-mails in a row from a most excellent German label called Cyclone Empire. This label has got a kick-ass roster of artists and provides distribution for many more, and those three e-mails were about bands that have really peaked our interest.

This isn’t really a typical MISCELLANY post, because we knew something about the music of two of these bands before we started, but at least we hadn’t heard the precise songs we’re featuring here today. So, it’s kind of a hybrid MISCELLANY post.

Here’s what we’ve got: Another hell-on-wheels song off the debut album by Sweden’s Puteraeon, which was just released in Europe late last month; two new songs from Finland’s Before the Dawn that appear on Cyclone Empire’s European release of a special CD/DVD combo called Decade of Darkness; and a track from a brain-scrambling French band called Sideblast off their just-released second album, Cocoon.

Get a good daily fix of mayhem and melody to start your weekend off right . . . after the jump.  And tomorrow, we’ll have a proper MISCELLANY post with music from an international line-up of bands we really had never heard before. Continue reading »

GAS UP THE CHAINSAWS! (NEW VIDZ FROM THE CROWN AND PUTERAEON)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Feb 042011
 

All death metal, all the time — at least for today. We started with Deicide, and now we’ve just seen two new death-metal videos from the other side of the Atlantic. We can take the hint: The metal gods have commanded that we give equal time to the Swedish school of cranial carving.

Our first offering is from The Crown — a band whose 2010 Century Media release, Doomsday King, made a big impression on us and found a place on lots of the Best of 2010 lists we published at this site. The new video is for a song called “Falling ‘Neath the Heaven’s Sea”, which appeared on a 4-song bonus CD that came with the digipack version of Doomsday King. It’s a surprise compared to the songs on the album proper — but a nice one — and the video is an engaging montage of tour photos.

Our second offering is from another Swedish band called Puteraeon, whose debut album The Esoteric Order was released in Europe not long ago on German label Cyclone Empire. We have Johan Huldtgren (Obitus) to thank for turning us on to this band in one of his comments to an earlier post. We’re still waiting for our copy of the CD to arrive, but this new official video for the song “Coma” is proof that the wait will be worth it.  (We were saving this video for a special edition of MISCELLANY tomorrow, but we’ll find something else juicy from Puteraeon for that post.)

Both these bands carry the banner of Swedish death metal proudly, and the songs featured in these videos are excellent. Watch ’em after the jump. Continue reading »

AN EXCLUSIVE NCS PREMIERE: DEICIDE’S “HOW CAN YOU CALL YOURSELF A GOD?”

 Metal News, Premieres, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Feb 042011
 

On February 15, the infernal majesty of DEICIDE will unleash hellfire on our fragile world with Century Media’s release of the tenth album in their storied career, To Hell With God. Today, we are proud (and duly humbled) to provide the exclusive premiere of the closing track from the new album, called “How Can You Call Yourself A God?”

As we wrote yesterday, this is a red-letter day for us. Not only is this our first world premiere of a song, it’s a song by one of death metal’s true icons — a band whose name every devoted deathmetalhead knows, a band who helped brick and mortar the foundations of a genre on which so many other bands have built their own work.

Deicide put the “fuck” in “I don’t give a fuck”. They put the “bad” in “bad-ass”. They may have put the “ass” in “bad-ass”, too. They represent all that is unclean about NO CLEAN SINGING. In a nutshell, for us, getting to premiere a Deicide song is like a fever-fueled, ringing-wet, nightmarishly horrific dream come true.

In debuting a track from the new album, we’re joining MetalSucks, who premiered “Hang In Agony Until You’re Dead”, and Invisible Oranges, who premiered “Into the Darkness You Go”, in helping to introduce the new album to all of you. We have a few words about the song itself — plus the fucking song — right after the jump. Continue reading »

TOMORROW IS A RED-LETTER DAY

 Metal News  23 Responses »
Feb 032011
 

Yes, tomorrow is a red-letter day here at NCS.

And the red letter is “D”.

We have been given the chance to exclusively premiere a track from a forthcoming new album by a band that every true metalhead will know immediately, and it happens to be one that is near and dear to our nasty, black NCS hearts.

We don’t know what we did to deserve this. It certainly wasn’t the result of clean living and good works. Maybe all those weekly animal sacrifices finally paid off. Anyway, we’re humbled, honored, and highly excited about tomorrow. Since we really have all you readers to thank for giving us this chance, we hope you’ll get something radical out of it, too, just as we have.

So, don’t forget to stumble by NCS tomorrow for some good ear-shredding and brain-scrambling as we deliver the world premiere of an ass-burning song by a legendary band. And, in honor of the occasion, feel free to etch that letter “D” into your forehead with a rusty, blood-caked razor-blade, just like your friends at NCS have done!

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