THE CROWN: DOOMSDAY KING

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Sep 292010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we have another album review from our guest contributor Andy Synn about the brand new album from a band near and dear to our own hearts . . .The Crown. Back in July, we hyperventilated about the band’s release of a song from the then-forthcoming album, and provided a brief history of the band (that post is here). Now, the album is here, and so is Andy’s review. ]

Do you like metal? Do you specifically like metal that is fast, heavy and so aggressive you’re actually slightly afraid to touch the cd with your bare hands?

If the answer is yes, stop reading this review. You don’t need to know any more. Simply get up and go buy the new album by The Crown. You won’t be disappointed.

Doomsday King is a masterpiece of wild fury and calculated aggression. Blurring the lines between razor-sharp thrash and full-speed death metal, the 5 members of The Crown (now including new vocalist Jonas Stålhammar) have all brought their ‘A’ game back to the table with this one. The ominous tolling bell that heralds the start of title-track “Doomsday King” immediately brings to mind the darker tonality of “Crowned Unholy”, before shifting into the band’s trademarked full-speed assault.

Immediately, the vocals of Stålhammar put to rest any misgivings I might have had about replacing Johan Lindstrand as his high-energy delivery, whilst being highly reminiscent of elements of both his predecessors (Lindstrand and Tomas Lindberg), is noticeably darker and perhaps even a shred more aggressive than either.  (more after the jump, including a track . . .) Continue reading »

FAVORITE WORDS

 Off Topic  9 Responses »
Sep 282010
 

 

The video above has nothing to do with metal. It’s simply a gentleman from Brooklyn expressing his feelings about our hometown icon here in Seattle (that would be Starbuck’s).  But if you’ve spent any time at all visiting NCS, you’ll understand why I’m putting it up here today. It made my Starbuck’s coffee come out my nose in a hot torrent.

Enjoy the rest of your fucking day.

HAGGIS AND BONG

 Album Reviews, Metal News  7 Responses »
Sep 282010
 

That got your attention, didn’t it?

Some small number of you might have been visiting this site back in January and some even smaller number might remember that we wrote then about a South African band called Haggis and Bong. Maybe more will remember than we think,  because that’s a name you don’t easily forget.

Back in January, when we first heard about Haggis and Bong, they were a 3-man show:  Angus “Haggis” Nixon on the Great Highland Bagpipes, Thomas “Bong” Hughes on the kit drum, and Dominic “The Dominator” Skelton on the Great Highland Bagpipes.

Yes, you read that correctly.  This was an instrumental metal band that consisted of nothing but bagpipes and drums. But man, could they rip the hell out of a song, combining a furious double-bagpipe attack with lots of blast beats and double-bass.

Now, the line-up has expanded, and Haggis and Bong have added a full-time bass-player, as well as guest musicians, including a trombonist.

Back in January, the band had released one album, brilliantly entitled Fire in the Bowl.  Only problem was that unless you could catch a live show in South Africa, there was no fucking way to get a personal copy of the music.

Ever since January, we’ve waited and watched and searched, and there has just been no fucking way to download the tunes, either legally or illegally. We were completely hostage to the Haggis and Bong MySpace page. Now, finally, that frustrating situation has changed! (more after the jump, including Haggis and Bong music to hear . . .) Continue reading »

NIGERIAN RICHES AWAIT!

 IQ Subtraction, Off Topic  12 Responses »
Sep 272010
 

When my comrades and I started this site last November, I set up an e-mail address to use for NCS-related stuff. It took about 6 months for the spam to start polluting my new in-box. I guess it’s remarkable that it took so long, but it’s now happening. Recently, I got a string of three e-mails in almost as many days that were so choice, both individually and in combination, that I just couldn’t resist answering them.

And now I can’t resist sharing the exchanges. This isn’t metal, but maybe you’ll find it amusing anyway, and we do have some musical accompaniment selected for the occasion. So, without further ado, here are those three messages I received, and my responses:

FIRST MESSAGE

From: Mrs. Bintu Mahmud <Bintumahmud@ymail.com>
Subject: **Assalamualaikum…..
Date: September 15, 2010 12:34:51 AM PDT

Assalamualaikum I am Mrs. Bintu Mahmud. Please contact my lawyer Ramli Sariman (ramlisariman@gala.net) for a very important thing ALLAH wants you to do for Him. May ALLAH be with you always.

REPLY:

Dear Mrs. Mahmud, thank you for your interest in NO CLEAN SINGING and for your warm personal salutation, which I understand is a phonetic rendering of the Arabic greeting, “Peace be upon you”. I am all in favor of peace being upon me, and I’m sure the more people who say that to me, the more likely it will be to happen, especially when it comes from someone so obviously sincere and kind-hearted as you are, and with a direct channel to ALLAH.

We would be happy to listen to the new music, which I’m sure is fucking sick, and yes, we would be fucking stoked to write about the songs here at NCS, especially because it appears that ALLAH wants me to do that for Him.

Is this actually ALLAH’s music?  Because, y’know, if it is, I am really fucking stoked that He would pick our humble site out of all the metal blogs in metal blogdom to hear His latest sick tunes. Is it deathcore?   (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MISCELLANY (NO. 12)

 MISCELLANY  28 Responses »
Sep 262010
 

Yes, it’s time for more random fucking metal, selected in completely impulsive and unpredictable ways for your listening and viewing enjoyment.

Okay, that’s not exactly true. Yes, we acted impulsively and unpredictably, but no, we didn’t select any of this for your listening and viewing enjoyment. We don’t know whether you’ll enjoy any of what we have for you today, and we didn’t select any of it with your enjoyment in mind.

To be fair, we didn’t select it with our enjoyment in mind either. That’s not how this MISCELLANY series works. The way it works is this: I keep a list of new music from bands I’ve not heard before, and then on a given day (yesterday, as it happens), I start checking out their music and/or videos at random, and I include in this blog exactly what I heard and saw, regardless of the outcome.

As regular readers know, we usually have pretty decent luck, because I don’t put anything on the list that doesn’t look interesting for some reason, even though I don’t know what the music is going to sound like. On the other hand, I don’t exclude anything I heard, even if it proved to be disappointingly ghastly.

In this installment of MISCELLANY, I checked out the following bands from the following places:  Drag the Lake (England) (pictured above), Kunvuk (Australia), Winterfylleth (England), and Elvenking (Italy). So, gird your loins, and follow along after the jump . . . Continue reading »

GOAT THE HEAD: DOPPELGÄNGERS

 Album Reviews  25 Responses »
Sep 252010
 

We are so very fucking grateful to Goat the Head. Before we discovered these Norwegian troglodytes in mid-July, we had an aching void in our lives, an unfilled longing for contemporary primal caveman death metal. More than that, we wanted primal caveman death metal played in a contemporary way by cavemen who would be equally comfortable wearing either spacesuits or animal pelts.

And then we found Goat the Head, and it was as if all our feverish prayers had been answered. Suddenly, that void in our lives was filled, and we became complete, at least briefly.

But we owe Goat the Head our gratitude for more than their primal caveman (but contemporary) music. For so many years, we had wondered about the fundamental mysteries of the universe: Where did television come from?  What enabled our primitive ancestors to play the electric guitar?  What causes trailer homes to spontaneously explode?  Goat the Head answered those questions, too.

Thanks to a short but eye-opening documentary film by the band, we now know the answers — and in fact, it turns out that all those questions (and many more) have the same answer: The fucking cube. It all makes so much sense now.

There was only one problem: Back in mid-July, we only had access to two of the songs from a new Goat the Head album (called Doppelgängers) that was then scheduled for release on September 13. It would have to do, but we knew then that only a full album’s worth of material would fully eradicate our painful longing, and hopefully stop our bed-wetting at the same time.

And September 13 came, and as promised, so did Doppelgängers. We have heard it, and it is all we hoped for, and so much more. (our review continues after the jump . . . ) Continue reading »

MORE FRIDAY VIDZ!!

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 242010
 

Well, fuck it. This is clearly new-video Friday. Seems like about every hour of the day so far a new video has popped up on our radar screen. And there’s really no reason why we should stop with those Animals As Leaders videos we put up earlier today. We’ll just continue putting up videos for as long as we see new ones to put up. How ’bout that?

Just tell your boss or your teachers or whoever is attempting to control your lives today to just fuck right off, get yourself a big ol’ fucking bag of popcorn, and just veg out and watch metal videos all day. Because at this rate, we’ll find a dozen more new ones before we call it quits today.

So, here’s what we’ve got so far: A brand new video for the title track from the new album by The Absence (“Enemy Unbound”); a brand new performance video from August Burns Red off their forthcoming live CD/DVD (the song is “Barn Burner”); and a new video from a California black-metal band called Valdur (the song is called “Vicious Existence”). Get the popcorn and go see ’em after the jump . . . (and don’t get faked out by our screen capture up at the top — clicking on that arrow won’t start the video, which is after the jump). Continue reading »

AAL LIVE!

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Sep 242010
 

Not long ago, we posted a video retrospective of the meteoric career of multi-instrumentalist Navene Koperweis. When we did that, we had trouble finding a decent performance video of Animals As Leaders — the band in which Koperweis plays drums with the godlike Tosin Abasi on guitar. Now, METAL INJECTION has remedied that problem.

They were on hand when AAL played the Sonar in Baltimore on the SUMMER SLAUGHTER 2010 tour and filmed some of the band’s performance using multiple cameras. The video quality and the sound quality are both far superior to any other videos currently available of AAL playing live.

The one at the top of this post is the song “Tempting Time”, and after the jump, we’ve got a second METAL INJECTION video of “Wave of Babies”. If this doesn’t make you come, then it’s possible you were neutered in your sleep last night.  Plus, when’s the last time you saw a metal guitarist playing in a polo shirt and white shorts? Continue reading »

MORE TALENTED METAL BANDS RISK CATASTROPHE AT SEA

 Metal News  17 Responses »
Sep 242010
 

For eons, humankind has had a fatal attraction to the sea. The oceans are vast, uncontrollable, and unforgiving. They have snuffed out countless thousands of human lives over the centuries as we would swat pesky flies into oblivion without the slightest thought. And yet, people continue to throw themselves out upon the waters, because the oceans beckon with inexplicable but irresistible power. Perhaps it’s because all life originated in the seas and, at some mitochondrial level, human beings still feel a magnetic pull toward the ancestral home of our single-celled forebearers.

What else can explain why people would shamble forth in single files to board giant floating hotels called cruise ships, to live cheek-by-jowl with complete strangers for some assigned period of time on a watery world that permits no escape?

Granted, the advancement of technology has greatly reduced the risk of ocean-bound catastrophe. People who long for the sea no longer must risk life and limb on board vessels made of little more than oak and tar. Instead, they cross the ocean depths on massive structures of steel guided by precision electronics and powered by engines the size of houses. And yet, and yet, the oceans are still the great leviathans of our planet, and in their realm, we are still as insignificant as insects.

Which brings us, with evil glee, to our latest update about THE 70,000 TONS OF METAL cruise. Since February, we’ve been having fun monitoring the developments of this extravaganza and imagining all that could go wrong. But more than a month has passed since our last update, and with recent announcements from the promoters, it seems like an appropriate time to revisit the subject.

The original goal of the organizers was to set sail in January 2011 on a Caribbean cruise of five days and four nights with a cargo of 40 metal bands and 2,000 metalhead fans. And son of a bitch, they’ve now actually signed 30 of the 40 bands they’re targeting. That’s 8 more bands than the last time we checked. This thing has more than passed the critical mass necessary to make it a reality. There has been nothing like it in the history of metal — and there may be nothing like it ever again.  (more after the jump, including the current line-up of bands . . .) Continue reading »

DIMMU BORGIR: ABRAHADABRA

 Album Reviews  17 Responses »
Sep 232010
 

(EDITOR’S NOTE: As we’ve done on other occasions, we invited one of our readers and commenters, the UK’s Andy Synn, to write whatever his black heart desired as a guest contributor to this site, and this is his first contribution. So, apart from our earlier brief post about Revocation’s new video, we’re stepping aside today to make way for Andy’s review of the forthcoming new album by Dimmu Borgir.)

Morning/afternoon/evening all. Islander’s been kind enough to offer me an open slot for posting as and when possible, and whilst I’m working on a more substantial column I thought I’d jot down a quick review of the new Dimmu album, as I don’t expect a review of it to appear on here otherwise.

Generally I find myself gravitating more towards reviewing slightly more “major” releases  these days (and “major” is definitely a relative term here, the metal bands we all think of as “big” really, really aren’t when placed in the wider scheme of things) as I find it easier to be subjectively critical and/or complimentary about a band that already has such wide exposure. Firstly, because the smaller bands will feel the weight of a bad or badly written review far more heavily, and secondly because the more “major” releases often receive a ton of criticism from questionable sources simply by virtue of their own existence.

Now I was sincerely disappointed with In Sorte Diaboli as I felt that (vaguely sketched conceptual themes aside) their attempt to prove their mettle/metal by bringing forth the more basic metal elements ironically resulted in an album that was very forced and extremely paint-by-numbers. However I’m happy to say that Abrahadabra appears for all intents and purposes to be an album made by the three core members primarily for their own artistic reasons. (much more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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