MISCELLANY NO. 20

 Album Reviews, MISCELLANY  8 Responses »
Jan 222011
 

A month has passed since we ran our last MISCELLANY post. A month between these posts is way too long. With that kind of lag, we’re even more behind in checking out new bands. We may have to run a bunch of these posts next week in an effort to catch up.

For any new readers out there, here’s the drill: NCS keeps a running list of bands who look interesting based on band e-mails or MySpace friend requests, reader recommendations, press releases, or news blurbs, and then every so often I pick a few names off the list and go listen to a song (or sometimes two). In these MISCELLANY posts, I write about what I heard and give you a chance to listen, too.

Because we don’t know the music in advance, there’s no guarantee about the results, but we’ve had good luck in the past.  For today’s installment in this series, I listened to music from Achren (Scotland) and Giant of the Mountain (The Republic of Texas) — and was blown away by both. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

U CAN HAZ PITCHERS

 Welcome  37 Responses »
Jan 212011
 

If you’ve registered as a user at NO CLEAN SINGING and ever posted a comment, you know that the image accompanying your post is a random icon called a Gravatar. If you get tired having a computer algorithm pick your icon for you, and you’d like to pick your own image, you can.

Thanks to our buddy byrd36, who reminded us, the way to do that is visit the Gravatar web page (here) and register a profile by providing an e-mail address, and then picking or uploading an image to be your icon. For example, a bunch of bats hanging from a tree like putrescent fruit. If you’ve already registered here, I assume you need to use the same e-mail you used for the NCS registration if you want the image you choose at Gravatar to appear when you post comments here. Once you’ve created the Gravatar profile, the image you picked will appear anywhere else on the web when you post a comment using the same e-mail address, as long as the site is Gravatar-enabled (and all WordPress blogs, like NCS, automatically enable Gravatar).

Sorry about the lolcat-speak in the post title. Sometimes I can’t resist — especially since I read a few days ago this stunning piece of news: There’s a Seattle-based company called Cheezburger that owns the icanhascheezburger web site, plus a shitload of other idiotic sites, all of which collectively draw more than 16.5 million people a month and generate more than 375 million monthly page views; and on January 18, Cheezburger announced that it had raised $30 million from venture capital investors. Huh. You can make big money from lolcatz but not from playing in a metal band. Go figure.

SCRIBE UPDATE

 Metal News  3 Responses »
Jan 212011
 

One week ago, we posted a piece by NCS contributor Siddharth Darbha introducing us (and many of you) to an Indian metal band called Scribe. You can read Siddharth’s article here. Siddharth noted that Scribe’s 2010 album, Mark of Teja, had been nominated for Best Album at the 2010 edition of The Jack Daniel’s Rock Awards.

By way of background, this is the sixth year for those awards, which are organized in association with Rolling Stone (India) magazine. This year, 280 entries were submitted for the 16 award categories, including Song of the Year, Band of the Year, and Album of the Year. The editors of Rolling Stone whittled the list down to five nominees in each category, and those were then presented to a nine-member jury of judges. The award winners were decided by a combination of weighted jury votes and popular votes on a specially created web site. Bear in mind that the nominees for each award came from a range of genres — not limited, for example, to extreme metal.

Last night, the awards were announced at a live event at The Hard Rock Cafe in Mumbai. And guess what? Scribe pretty much ran the table, winning the Popular Choice awards for Song of the Year (“1234 Dracula”) and Album of the Year, as well as the Critics’ Choice Awards for Song of the Year and Band of the Year. Scribe’s Srinivas Sunderrajan also won the Bassist of the Year award. For all the results, go here.

Congratulations to Scribe for carrying the flag of Indian metal to the top of the heap — and congrats also to Demonic Resurrection for winning the Popular Choice award for Band of the Year. Pretty damn cool to see two metal bands like this being named Band of the Year against competitors from “more accessible” genres.

And along the same lines, did you know that on Monday of this week none other than Watain‘s album Lawless Darkness won the Swedish version of the Grammy award for “Best Hard Rock” Album of the Year? It did. “Hard rock” clearly means something different in Sweden than it does in the U.S. Holy shit.

QUICK TAKES: THE EVIL AMIDST

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Jan 212011
 

(Here we have the fourth installment in our week-long effort to catch up on albums we like with shorter-than-usual reviews.)

Light the torches in a cave deep underground, let the cavern fill up with black smoke, tread carefully through the decaying skulls of those who were not worthy, and bow down at the altar of irresistible convulsion in the shrine of double-bass and the blackened riffing that cannot be denied. All ye acolytes of Immortal, Immolation, Incantation and Behemoth, take heed: The ceremony is about to begin, with the Lords of the Nine presiding.

That’s the name of the debut album by The Evil Amidst — Lords of the Nine. It was released in late September 2010, but we only discovered it recently. It’s a concept album about demon mythology in the realms of dark fantasy. It’s also so well-attuned to our tastes that it could have come out a decade ago and we’d still be writing about it.

The members of The Evil Amidst are well-practiced in the black arts of bone crushing: the line-up includes two members of Malevolent Creation – Gio Geraca on lead guitar and Gus Rios on drums; Kult ov Azazel‘s Xaphan on guitar; HatePlow‘s Lenny Warmbrandt providing the vocals; and Kamelot‘s Sean Tibbetts on bass. But from what we’ve read, this band isn’t just a one-off side-project, but a group that apparently intends to stay together, tour, and continue recording notwithstanding the members’ commitments to other projects. And well they should.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

HEAVINESS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jan 202011
 


This will be quick because my fucking day job calls.

“Heavy” is a word we apply to some forms of metal but not others. Howl is heavy. Very fucking heavy. Up above is video evidence of that fact. It’s high-quality footage of the band playing at SXSW. There are three songs on this video: “Heavenless”, “Oma”, and “Horns of Steel”.  If you’re interested in more info about this band, you can check out our review of their 2010 album Full of Hell here.

UPDATE: The fucking embed code to that Roxwel video doesn’t appear to work. You should still watch the video, though I almost hate to send you to the Roxwel site because they pretend to give you an embed code, but it doesn’t fucking work. But I like HOWL well enough to provide the link anyway. Here it is.

But wait, there’s more. After the jump, we’ve got a just-released song from Finland’s Rotten Sound off their forthcoming new album Cursed. Listen to it and let us know what you think.  Gotta go now. Continue reading »

QUICK TAKES: HAT

 Album Reviews  21 Responses »
Jan 202011
 

(This is the third installment in this week’s run of brief album reviews – or at least brief by our usual standards.)

Five days ago we posted a review of a forthcoming album by a long-running Polish death metal band called Hate. At roughly the same time as we were listening to that album, we were also listening to a new album by a band called Hat, which is the Norwegian word for . . . wait for it . . . hate. Actually, it’s the word for hatred, but close enough. So, you could say it was a hate-filled week at NCS, except what we’re feeling for the music of Hat is far from hatred.

The Norwegian word hat is pronounced like the English word “hot”, and that’s a good word for Hat’s forthcoming album, Vortex of Death: It’s hot. That is, if you like your black metal extremely old school and chilled down to the temperature of liquid nitrogen.

Hat is a two-man horde originally formed in 1993 by Nevresch and Undertrykker under the name Ravner. They were inactive from 1996 to 2006, and then reunited under that Norwegian name for hatred. They released a demo in 2008 called Livet Ebber ut (“life ebbs away”) and then a debut record in 2009 called The Demise of Mankind. Perhaps you’re beginning to get the sense that in the world of Hat, there is no sweetness and light. But the album has hooked us, and one unusual song in particular.  (more after the jump, including a track . . .) Continue reading »

OBSCURA RELEASES NEW SONG; WE WAIT FOR OUR HEADS TO FALL BACK TO EARTH

 Uncategorized  11 Responses »
Jan 192011
 

Two words: Obscura, Cosmogenesis.

If those words make you smile, you will want to read this post. If those words make you yell, “FUCK YEAH!“, you will absolutely, positively want to read this post.

You may have known that Obscura will be releasing a new album called Omnivium in North America on March 29. You may even have seen the cover artwork for the album (designed and laid out by Orion Landau).

But did you know that about 4 hours ago, Obscura released a song from Omnivium for the purpose of titillating the masses? We found out via an e-mail from NCS contributor BadWolf, in these words:  “Holy Shit. One song in and it’s an album of the year contender. One word: Opethcore. It exists now. And it is truly amazing.”

Y’know, we really don’t need to say anything more about this song other than to say that we’re just as fucking enthusiastic as our bro BadWolf. Zip on past the jump and hear it for yourselves. Fuuuuuuuuuck yeah. Continue reading »

QUICK TAKES: ERIMHA

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Jan 192011
 


Yesterday’s installment in our week-long attempt to catch up on album reviews by being atypically brief was a blast of bleak brutality from Contaigeon. Today, we’re swinging the pendulum back over to the more melodic end of the metal spectrum with an unsigned band from Montreal called Erimha, whose music we heard after getting a MySpace friend request from them.

Every band has to start someplace, but some bands (few of them) start fast. With their debut album, Irkalla, Erimha bolts from the starting blocks like they’ve been shot from a gun. Irkalla is an epic blend of melodic black-death metal — dramatic, haunting, memorable, and remarkably assured both in the songwriting and in the execution.

If references help you, the music reminded me at different times of Insomnium, Keep of Kelessin, and even Behemoth. There’s a grim grandeur to the musical style. It achieves dramatic power through its dark melodies without ever veering into cheese, and it manages to retain an icy edge despite its often panoramic sweep. I could be justly accused of excessive enthusiasm over many things, so you may have to take this with a grain of salt, but I’m completely taken over by this music.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

TODAY’S “A” LIST: AMON AMARTH, ARCH ENEMY, AND ARCHSPIRE

 Metal News  46 Responses »
Jan 182011
 

Yeah, I know I’m taxing your attention span with our third post of the day, but I continue to see eye-catching items and just can’t resist. But I will keep this one short and sweet. It’s about breaking news from three of our favorite bands.

ITEM ONE

You’re looking at Item One: The just-released cover art for Amon Amarth‘s new album, Surtur Rising. Talk about a fucking metal album cover. The art is by Tom Thiel. The album will be released in North America on March 29, 2011 via Metal Blade Records.

The track listing for the album is out, too, and includes such juicy titles as “Destroyer of the Universe”, “Live Without Regrets”, “For Victory Or Death”, and my favorite: “A Beast Am I”. I’m expecting epic levels of epicness.

Did you know that Surtur was (is?) the leader of the fire giants of Muspelheim (“flame land”) and the oldest being in the nine worlds of Norse mythology? Oh, fuck me, sorry about that; I said I would keep this short. On to the next item (after the jump). Continue reading »

MOVING PICTURES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  37 Responses »
Jan 182011
 

I go through stretches when I fall behind in reading other metal blogs because I get too distracted by other things, like this blog — which I know all of you read every day, without fail, even if it means skipping a meal or a shower or letting your cat/dog fend for itself. Yeah, right. But I do always read Steff Metal‘s regular feature called Linking Horn because there’s always something interesting in there that I’d otherwise miss.

Her current Linking Horn feature linked to a Metal Insider piece I hadn’t seen which summarized a recent Nielsen Music and Midem report about music consumption habits. Some of what’s in that report wasn’t surprising — like the data showing that almost 50% of online users obtain their music from the internet without paying; the report found that neither digitally downloading a full album nor a single track reached 20%. What a shock.

But one item did surprise me: The survey showed that 58% of online users consume music by watching music videos through the computer and 20% watch music videos on their mobile phones. Granted, the survey wasn’t limited to any particular musical genre, and the numbers could be entirely different if you were to conduct a survey limited to metalheads. I know I don’t watch metal music videos that often because, mainly, they suck.

Usually, the videos are so bad that they detract from good songs and do nothing to make mediocre songs better. Instead, they seem to function more as bait than actual entertainment — a way of luring you into listening to a song or  a band for the first time out of curiosity (because it’s faster than downloading), though sometimes I’ll watch one for a song I already know just to see what the band looks like. But I don’t claim to be like most people, and the study seems to verify that most people like to consume music (and probably print) when they can see pictures at the same time — which is why moving pictures make such attractive bait.

All of which is a windy lead-in to the real point of this post. Over the last couple of days I took the bait and watched some new just-released music videos, and for different reasons, I thought they were worth sharing.  They feature music from Vreid (Norway), Stigma (Italy), Semargl (Ukraine), and members of Dreaming Dead (U.S.).   (after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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