DEATHSPELL OMEGA (MISCELLANY NO. 15 1/2?)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Oct 142010
 

Thanks to an exuberant Facebook post by The Binary Code‘s Jesper Zuretti, we learned within the last hour that French black metal band Deathspell Omega has just made available a new song from their forthcoming album Paracletus (due for release in the U.S. on November 9). Deathspell Omega is one of those bands we’ve been hearing great things about for a long time, but whose music we somehow have never actually gotten around to hearing.

Amazing, really, since they’ve been playing music since about 1998 and since they have one of the coolest band names in extreme metal. Anyway, that’s all changed now, because the Season of Mist label has made that new song available for free download, and we’ve now heard them. Should have checked out these dudes long ago.

The new song is called “Devouring Famine”. It’s a dense and immense piece of guitar-driven, progressive black metal. To string together some additional adjectives: It’s powerful, caustic, cacophonous, creative, rhythmically diverse, technical, discordant, and compelling. Unless you just can’t stand black metal, this is absolutely worth hearing. So, here it is:

Deathspell Omega: Devouring Famine

By the way, the Season of Mist site has lots of other free downloads available from label artists, including that brand new song from Atheist, “Second To Sun”, that we featured in a post last week, and a song called “Tired Climb” by Kylesa from their forthcoming new album Spiral Shadow. This link will take you to the index of available downloads from Season of Mist.

And if you haven’t already seen Kylesa’s video for that “Tired Climb” song, it’s definitely worth seeing. So here — see it (after the jump). Continue reading »

MISCELLANY (NO. 15)

 MISCELLANY  12 Responses »
Oct 142010
 

Yes, as promised, we have back-to-back MISCELLANY posts, still trying to catch up on bands we haven’t heard that for different reasons we put on our running list of music to check out. But it appears that even after running faster, we’re still pretty much in the same place. Between yesterday’s post and this one, we’ve cleared six names off the list. But since last weekend we’ve also added six more.

But do we care? Fuck no! Because taking pot luck with the music of new bands isn’t a chore, it’s an adventure! We have little or no idea what the music will sound like before we embark on a listening excursion, so it’s almost always a surprise to find out. Doesn’t mean it will be a happy surprise. It could be the kind of surprise you get when you find out your cat has thrown up in your bed (as happened to me last weekend).

And that’s the way MISCELLANY works: What we hear, we write about, even if it turns out to be cat throw-up.

Yesterday’s post and this one were based on a random selection of six bands we plucked off our list. I listened to a song from each band, in the order described in these two posts. Yesterday, we covered the first three listening experiences — all of them bands from the U.S. Today, we have a more international flavor. The subjects of today’s post are:

Vomit the Soul (Kuwait/U.S.), Deathember (Sweden), and Excrementory Grindfuckers (Germany).  (listening notes, and the songs we heard, follow after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MISCELLANY (NO. 14)

 MISCELLANY  13 Responses »
Oct 132010
 

I’m still trying to recover from the insanity of the comments on yesterday’s post. It’s apparent that all I need to do to open Pandora’s box is write some shit about band names. It’s like ringing the dinner bell for Pavlov’s dog — it apparently triggers a reflex of saliva and barking and the expulsion of bodily waste. Of course, that’s just what we hope for here at NCS, so it’s all good!

But I now tremble in fear, realizing that I hold the keys to a great convulsion of dementia. I’m concerned that all I have to do now is use the word “Jambalaya” or another word that shall not be mentioned but begins with “Va” and ends in “goo”, and the earth will open up beneath my feet and spill forth all manner of skittering, black-winged, red-eyed things that will jibber and vomit out terrible, terrible imaginings that involve ElvisShotJFK‘s mom. Fortunately, I know that with great power comes great responsibility, and so I shall keep these keys hidden away in a carved, ebony box with the numerals “666” carved in the lid, to be used only when I’m bored shitless.

But I am not yet bored today. Today is a new day, and I am content to do something more mundane, like write about actual music. So, it’s time for a little MISCELLANY.

I’m still playing catch-up with a growing list of bands who look interesting but whose music is unknown to us. We compile that list here at NCS based on press releases that come to our in-box, Blabbermouth blurbs, MySpace friend requests, and demos that arrive via the ether or in the mail from all over the world. If we had nothing but time, and an endless supply of your attention, we could run a MISCELLANY column every day. Alas, we can’t do that, but to help with the catching-up, we’re running two installments back-to-back, one today and one tomorrow.

The rules of the game: I pick names off the list at random and listen to the band’s music, usually only one song per band, and record my impressions in an installment of this series. More often than not, I find good music that’s worth sharing. But the way this game works, I share exactly what I hear, even if I wish I hadn’t heard it.

The MISCELLANY installments today and tomorrow are based on listening I did last weekend. I checked out six bands, and today we have the results of the first three. All three of these bands are from the U.S., and they each occupy very different locations on the metal spectrum: Quarter the Villain (U.S.), Winterus (U.S.), and The Browning (U.S.). Continue reading »

WHAT’S IN A NAME (Part 2)?

 Metal News  58 Responses »
Oct 122010
 

About a month ago, we mused about how much a good band name has to do with a band’s success. We considered some ass-kicking bands with ass-kicking names, some ass-kicking bands that have succeeded despite piss-poor names, and some bands whose names are just perplexing — and that led to one of the most interesting comment sessions we’ve ever had at this site.  (The whole post is here.)

Yesterday, we saw the latest line-up of confirmed bands for the 2011 edition of the Maryland Deathfest, and that got us thinking about band names again. Actually, to be brutally honest, it got us laughing like hyenas circling a fresh carcass.

Not that we intend to make fun of the Maryland Deathfest — far from it. That festival is the closest thing in scope to the big European festivals that the U.S. has to offer, and if it weren’t so damned far away from Seattle, we’d be there next May in a heartbeat.

But the line-up of bands includes some names of bands we’ve never heard before that deliciously embody the general middle-finger-giving, batshit-craziness of metal that we love so much. And so, after the jump, we’ll review the current line-up with you, focusing on some of those fucktastic names, and we’ll include a song or two from the band whose name we like the best. Continue reading »

GOD DETHRONED: UNDER THE SIGN OF THE IRON CROSS

 Metal News  9 Responses »
Oct 112010
 

We’ve been fans of God Dethroned for a while, but were late-comers to the wonders of the band’s 2009 release, Passiondale. Late or not, we splashed our admiration for that unusual album all over these pages in January (here). But you can be damned sure we won’t be late again when God Dethroned releases its next album on November 23.

It will be called Under the Sign of the Iron Cross, and like Passiondale, it will be another concept album about World War I. Singer/guitarist Henri Sattler has explained that the fires of his continuing interest in that conflict were stoked by his reading of In Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel), Ernst Juenger‘s journal of his daily experiences in the trenches during the war.

Today, Metal Blade began streaming the first song from Under the Sign of the Iron Cross. The song is the title track, and holy hell, is it heavy as fuck. It’s fitting that we put it up here for your listening pleasure today, on the heels of our post about Autopsy, because it’s a bludgeoning piece of blackened death metal, as extreme as anything God Dethroned has done in many moons.

But . . . it’s also beautiful.  (more after the jump, including that song to stream . . .) Continue reading »

AUTOPSY

 Album Reviews  29 Responses »
Oct 112010
 

If you’re a death-metal freakazoid like me, then you need no introduction to Autopsy. But in case you’re not, how ’bout an introduction?

Autopsy was originally formed in 1987 by Chris Reifert and Eric Cutler, shortly after Reifert left the legendary band, Death. Danny Coralles joined Autopsy a year later, and after a couple of demos, they released their debut album Severed Survival in 1989. Three more influential albums followed, but Autopsy disbanded in 1995. Before its dissolution, Reifert and Coralles had begin a side project called Abscess, and that became their main musical vehicle in the many years that followed.

All sorts of death-metal icons, including Entombed, Cannibal Corpse, and Deicide, have named Autopsy as an influence on their music, and many more have covered Autopsy songs, including Immolation and Dismember. If there is a death-metal pantheon in hell, Autopsy reigns proudly within its smoking pillars.

So much for the history lesson. Fast forward now to June 3, 2010, the date on which Chris Reifert announced (a) that after 16 years of performing, Abscess had officially broken up, and (b) that Autopsy had been resurrected “to resume their mission of gore-soaked death metal brutality.” That cackling sound heard in the dark places underground on June 3 was the rejoicing of the hellish hordes at the rising again of Autopsy.

Now, fast-forward once more to October 5, 2010. On that day, Peaceville Records released an EP of brand new Autopsy music called The Tomb Within — five new songs, which we have now heard. Those hopes that burst to life on June 3 have been fulfilled: Autopsy has risen again in a display of monstrous death-metal glory.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” – BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (No. 17)

 That's Metal -- But It's Not Music  10 Responses »
Oct 102010
 

Fair warning: We kinda went overboard with this edition of “THAT’S METAL!” We decided it was time to peak into the awful world outside our metallic island home, just briefly, just long enough to find a couple of news items that would make us say, “Shit! That’s metal!”, even though it’s not music. And we just kept coming across bizarre stories, one after another. Rather than attempt to winnow down the items we found, we just decided to put them all in here. We realized that you could stop reading if it got to be too much.

Because we have so many items today, let’s just jump right in without further ado. There’s no charge for our accompanying commentary.

ITEM ONE

Halloween is fast approaching, and Halloween is one of our favorite nights of the year. One reason we like Halloween so much is because of pumpkins. Big, fucking pumpkins carved to resemble ghoulish heads, with candles inside that cause them to emit a hellish glow through the carved eyes and mouths. In this first item, we have a pumpkin lover’s wet dream.

1,674-pound SD pumpkin just shy of world record

October 8, 2010
The Associated Press

This pumpkin weighs nearly enough to be Cinderella’s coach. South Dakota farmer Kevin Marsh of Parker knows his 1,674-pound pumpkin isn’t pretty – it’s won an ugliest pumpkin award at a Colorado event. But it’s also only 51 pounds shy of the world record listed by the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth.

A 1,674-pound pumpkin is fucking metal, don’t you think? But so is the idea of a Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. I would like to visit the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. I might even like to become a citizen.  I bet the national anthem is a metal song.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

FAST, THEN SLOW

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  17 Responses »
Oct 092010
 

A couple days ago we put up a post called “Slow, Then Fast”, the focus of which was a temporal experiment that our fellow metal bloggers at Death Metal Babboon conducted with a piece of doomy sludge (or sludgy doom) by a UK band called Blut. DMB honcho Niek took a cut from one of Blut’s very loooooong songs and sped it up by a factor of three, and reported on the results. We, in turn, put those same two tracks up on our site in order to share the interesting outcome of Niek’s experiment.

This gave us ideas. Because we do most things ass-backwards, we thought it would be interesting to flip Niek’s experiment around. We wanted to take a really fast song — a nice piece of balls-to-the-wall grindcore — and slow it down by a factor of three.

The original plan was to do this with a purely instrumental track, because we thought the slowing down of the music might make the vocals sound fucked up. But after reading the comments on that “Slow, Then Fast” post, we decided to use a track with vocals in addition to one without.

So that’s what we did. We used the same audio-editing software that Niek used, and we applied its magical tools to two songs: “Cemetery Road” by Pig Destroyer and an instrumental track called “Scepters” by Behold the Arctopus. The results surprised the hell out of us. Hear what happened . . . after the jump. Continue reading »

NEW ATHEIST MUSIC: SECOND TO SUN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Oct 082010
 

Earlier today, Atheist put up the first song for streaming from their forthcoming album Jupiter. If our math is correct, Jupiter will be the first Atheist studio album in 17 years.

Some bands who’ve produced no new music in 17 years should just stay dead.  But this is Atheist, one of the true progenitors of tech-death and experimental metal. We relish the idea of a new album. We relish the thought even more after listening to the new song, “Second To Sun”. It’s a mighty fine piece of ear candy. Hear it for yourself:

DYNABYTE

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Oct 082010
 

I think I’m in love.

Okay, maybe I’m not really in love. Maybe I’m just in lust. Not with a person, but with a voice. With the voice on DyNAbyte‘s new album 2KX. Which will be released on Sunday — two days from now.

You might think Sunday is an odd day for an album release, but only until you realize what Sunday is. It’s 10-10-10. There’s probably a name for dates like that, but I’m too lazy to track down what it is. We’ll have two more like it in the next two years (11-11-11 and 12-12-12) and then we’ll have to wait until 2101 for the next one. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be here to see that one.

Fuck, come to think of it, I may not be here to see the one next year either.

There’s probably some Mayan astrologer who predicted the world would end on 10-10-10. I doubt that will happen, but we’re not there yet, so who knows? It’s safer to just blow it all out for the next two days. That’s my plan, at any rate. Better to ask forgiveness than to ask for permission.

Where was I? Oh yeah — the new album by DyNAbyte. They’re from Italy. They’re also giving a big Italian “fuck you” to all the usual distribution channels for music (at least for now). They’re releasing their album exclusively on a USB key, which you can order only from them.

Why bother?, you may ask. Well, that’s the point of this post, idn’t it? To tell you why to bother. Because you should. Because of that voice (among other things).  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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