NO CLEAN SINGING

INCARNIA SWEEPSTAKES RESULTS

Aug 132010

Earlier this week we posted our laudatory review of a debut album called Proclamation by a Montreal melodic death metal band called Incarnia. In the review, we featured a song called “Yersinia Pestis”, which in addition to being the name of the song is also the name of the bacterium that causes the black plague. That song got stuck in our heads, and so we tried to decipher the lyrics by listening to the song repeatedly — because we didn’t have a physical copy of the CD with the lyrics and couldn’t find them posted anywhere on the netz.

We did our best, but we couldn’t make out all the words just from listening. And then we got the hare-brained idea to run a little contest. We invited our readers to e-mail us their guesses about the missing words, or to correct the words we deciphered if people thought we got them wrong. As a reward, we promised to send a copy of the Proclamation CD to everyone who submitted a correct guess.

We got what, for us, was a flood of hits on the Incarnia review, but we didn’t get many entrants in our lyrics sweepstakes. Possible explanations:

(a) Our readers are very shy.

(b) Unlike us, most of our readers aren’t obsessive enough to listen to the same song over and over and over again in an attempt to decipher a few missing words.

(c) Other people who listened to the song had just as much trouble as we did figuring out what the vocalist was singing.

But although we didn’t get a lot of submissions in our Incarnia sweepstakes, we do have two winners. After the jump, we’ll reveal their names, along with the correct lyrics to the song, which we got from the band. And because we think Proclamation is such hot shit, we’ll provide one more song from the album for you to stream. Continue reading »

WELL, HOLY FUCK

Aug 132010

The last couple of days my day job has had my head in a fucking vise. I’ve barely had time to create posts for this site, but haven’t had much time to browse other metal sites I usually frequent in order to keep up with what’s happening in the metal cosmos. I did a little catching up last night, and found two stupendous videos that have just been released over the last 48 hours.

Because I’m a little slow to find them, you may have seen the videos already, but I’ve got to put them up anyway because they’re both so cool — in very different ways. Both of them made me exclaim “Holy Fuck!” (hence, the really imaginative title of this post).

The first one is a video of “Alas, Lord Is Upon Me” from Behemoth’s most recent album, Evangelion. I saw a censored version of this video on a couple of other metal sites, but this morning I found an uncensored version that’s now out. The only difference from the censored version is that there are a couple of flashes of nudity (as a priest in his vestments has sex with a naked woman in a church). The images in this slick video (even when they don’t involve nudity) are striking.

The second video is a live pro-shot performance by the reconstituted Polish death-metal band Decapitated. I got excited about this one mainly because Decapitated’s heavy-grooved, technical music is just so damned awesome, and this performance appears to be the first since the awful 2007 van accident that killed the band’s drummer and left its vocalist in a coma.

In fact, the only original member of the band still left is guitarist Wacław “Vogg” Kiełtyka. But based on the evidence of this video, Decapitated can still kick your ass into the stratosphere. (both videos are after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

FATHER BEFOULED

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Aug 122010

In one of yesterday’s posts, we briefly mentioned a band called Father Befouled. We wrote that we’d have more to say — and so we do.

Relapse Records announced earlier this week that it had signed the band for release of their new album, which is the second full-length, following 2008’s Obscurus Nex Cultus. In between, the band released a couple of EPs and appeared on a couple of splits, and suffered the suicide of their drummer (Antichristus). The new album — Morbid Destitution of Covenant — will be released September 14 on CD, but it’s already available digitally on iTunes (as is the first album) and elsewhere.

The band appears to be composed of people who now live in Chicago and in Georgia. In an interesting interview that pre-dated completion of the album (here), Father Defouled’s guitarist/vocalist Ghoat identified Incantation and Immolation as the band’s principal influences. If you’re familiar with the work of those bands, they will certainly spring to mind if you listen to Morbid Destitution, and seeing those names will give you an idea what the music sounds like.

Let me try to give you a further idea by stringing together a whole bunch of adjectives instead of using them in separate sentences. The music is:

Oppressive, bleak, doomed, ominous, claustrophobic, jagged, intense, hopeless, grinding, serpentine, ponderous, funereal, black, crushing, and ugly.

At times, it’s also: Furious, razor-edged, insectile, shrill, vicious, harrowing, paranoid, and explosive.

(more after the jump, including a track to hear . . .) Continue reading »

WE MAY HAVE TO STOP MAKING FUN OF 70,000 TONS OF METAL

Metal News 8 Responses »

Aug 112010

When we first heard about The 70,000 TONS OF METAL cruise way back in February, all we could think about was what could go comically wrong. Really, just think about the concept: 40 metal bands and 2,000 metalheads sailing around the Caribbean with non-stop performances, bars that stay open all night, and a stop at the Mexican island of Cozumel, where the tequila flows like water.

So of course, assholes that we are, we immediately started making fun of the idea — imagining in detail all the ass-ripping things that could go wrong. That was the subject of our first post about the cruise (here). That was in February, when only six bands had signed up to play for this floating festival.

We wrote an update post about this thing in late May, still sorta making fun, but also starting to imagine the things about this idea that could — we emphasize could — turn out to be awesome. By that point, 18 bands had signed on to play.

Well, this morning we got a press release from the organizers announcing the latest edition to the line-up — the 22nd band, to be precise. And the new addition is none other than Sweden’s Marduk. Now, we’re really going to have to start thinking about taking this cruise seriously. Marduk is the first black-metal addition to the line-up. We figured there was no way the organizers could convince a top-flight, no-bullshit, black-metal band to jump on this thing.

A grymm cruise? Fans in corpsepaint and spikes mingling with beardos mingling with thrashers mingling with fans quaffing their brew out of drinking horns, and so on. Boggles the mind. For the current line-up of 22 bands, continue after the jump. Now we’re really getting interested in seeing who the next 18 bands will be. Continue reading »

PENDULUM → IN FLAMES → PITCHSHIFTER → SYBREED → FATHER BEFOULED

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 1 Response »

Aug 112010

The human brain, if left to its own devices without a lot of external distractions or things to focus on, and if not previously saturated with intoxicants, will jump around from place to place in all sorts of unpredictable ways. That’s kind of what happened to me and my tiny brain last night. Except I was mildly intoxicated. By the end of this post, you may think I’m still intoxicated.

It all started with a fan-filmed video of a U.K./Australian band called Pendulum playing a song called “Self Versus Self” on stage at the U.K. edition of the Sonisphere festival, which took place on July 30 – August 1. I’d never heard of Pendulum. They’re not a metal band. According to the Blabbermouth blurb that featured this video, they’re a drum-and-bass band.

What caught my eye was that, according to the blurb, Anders Fridén of In Flames joined Pendulum on stage for the performance of that song.

As it happens, all of us here at NCS are big In Flames fans. We’re still fans despite the slagging the band has suffered from some In Flames purists over the musical direction of their last few albums. So, I decided to watch the video, while at the same time wondering, “What the fuck is Anders Fridén doing on stage with this Pendulum band?”

The quality of the video isn’t that great, but I liked the song. So, after a little research, I found out that the song is on a Pendulum album released earlier this year called Immersion — and it turns out that In Flames recorded the song with Pendulum. Which led to another “what the fuck?” moment.

We’re clearly late to this party, because we discovered that lots of other metal blogs tumbled to this strange collaboration months ago. So we’re not just a little late to the party, we’re the kind of late where you show up and all that’s left is a bunch of people passed out in their own piss. But hey, better late than never, right? (more unpredictable jumping around, including video and music, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

INCARNIA SWEEPSTAKES!

Album Reviews 3 Responses »

Aug 102010

If you’ve read our earlier post today with our review of the debut album (Proclamation) by Montreal’s Incarnia, you know that we’re hooked on the band. You also know that we’ve been trying to decipher the lyrics to a killer song from the album called “Yersinia Pestis”, which you can hear via our earlier post.

To incentivize you readers to help us fill in the missing lyrics — because it’s driving us crazy — here’s what we’re gonna do: For every reader who correctly fills in one of the missing blanks in the lyrics as they’re currently set out in our original post — or accurately corrects any lyrics that we were wrong about — we will send you a physical copy of the Proclamation CD. Even if some other reader also makes the same correct guess you do, you still win.

Of course, our ability to determine whether you’re right or wrong depends on our success in trying to contact the band and get the actual lyrics. But surely, we will hear from them eventually . . . .

You may ask, “How can NCS make this offer when it doesn’t have any physical copies of the Proclamation CD?” (Because, if we did, we might already know the lyrics.) For the answer to that astute question, and more details about our offer, continue reading after the jump . . . . Continue reading »

INCARNIA

Album Reviews 14 Responses »

Aug 102010

Do you like keyboard-driven, Gothenburg-style melodic death metal that’s catchy as ebola and both beautiful and evil enough to keep a serrated edge on it? Well, if you do, have we got a band for you: Incarnia.

Incarnia is from Montreal, Scandinavia. Okay, maybe Montreal is in Canada (we read that somewhere), but Incarnia’s musical hearts reside in the land of bands like Dark Tranquillity, Insomnium, late-stage Hypocrisy, Mors Principium Est, and (more recently) Zonaria.

My sometimes collaborator IntoTheDarkness urged me to listen to Incarnia’s just released debut album, Proclamation (on Panoptic Records). His tastes and mine don’t always mesh, but man, they sure did this time.

For a young band’s debut release, Proclamation is a remarkably assured, remarkably sophisticated offering of melody-drenched melodeath that also triggers the headbang reflex quite nicely. The more we’ve listened, the more massively hooked we’ve become (more after the jump, including a sample track to hear . . .) Continue reading »

LORISES

Off Topic 11 Responses »

Aug 092010

One of my largely behind-the-scenes collaborators on this site (Alexis) saw my totally random use of a loris photo in a recent post and sent me the video up above. I just about busted a gut laughing at it. It’s got nothing to do with metal, and I promise I’m not going to make a habit of showing cute animal videos on this site. Just this one time. Just couldn’t resist.

I still don’t think I’d want a pet that has hands. That would make me nervous. On the other hand, I think I’d prefer the kind of tricks this loris can do to my cat’s favorite trick — which is to jump on my keyboard while I’m in the middle of writing and delete everything.

This video has 3,117,938 hits on YouTube, which is about 3,117,900 more hits than we have on this NCS site. Fucking lorises. I wonder if a video of someone scratching my pits would increase our traffic. I could make my eyes really wide while being scratched. What do you think?

I did find one related video on the YouTube sidebar after I watched this one. It’s the same loris, but at feeding time. This one is somewhat more metal. You can see what I mean — after the jump . . . (UPDATE: now with suitable musical accompaniment) Continue reading »

WRETCHED

Album Reviews 3 Responses »

Aug 092010

Just when we were beginning to think it was a law that all metal bands from North Carolina south to the Florida border had to sound like Mastodon or Baroness, we discovered Wretched and their new album Beyond the Gate (with that very cool Dan Seagrave album cover). Not that we have anything against Mastodon or Baroness. In fact, we’re fans. But Wretched ain’t cut from that cloth, not by a long shot.

Instead, in their new album on Victory Records, North Carolina’s Wretched are wearing the mantle of melodic, technical death metal with some interesting progressive threads woven into the fabric. Think about bands like The Faceless, Veil of Maya, and Black Dahlia Murder, and you’ll start to get close to Wretched’s musical territory. But there are also some big surprises in store.

Seven of the album’s 11 songs are fast-paced and feature shuddering rhythms with jolting staccato bass lines and weaponlike drumming, intricate math-metal riffs, and fire-breathing guitar leads and solos. The vocals are predominantly mid-range growlers, but they occasionally drop lower or vault higher into cutting shrieks.

But those seven songs aren’t simply exhibits in a case of “let me prove how fast I can play.” They’re actual songs, with structure and melody, that happen to be executed with a lot of fancy fretwork and blazing double-kicks. Wretched also spices up a few of those songs with some attention-grabbing surprises, like the brief extract from a Cuban folk song at the end of “Birthing Sloth” or the cello-and-guitar outro at the conclusion of “The Talisman”.

But there are four songs left to be discussed. They’re all instrumentals, and they’re not at all what you would expect from the musical style of the other seven. (more after the jump, including a sample track and more examples of Dan Seagrave’s eye-catching album covers . . .) Continue reading »

“THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC (No. 11): THE TOE SNACK EDITION

That's Metal -- But It's Not Music 3 Responses »

Aug 082010

Usually when we put together these “That’s Metal!” posts, we collect an assortment of news items from a random day’s worth of reporting. But today’s piece of news is just so fucking over-the-top that we think it deserves to stand alone, without being diluted with any other stories.

It’s really a classic example of something that isn’t music but made us exclaim “Shit, that’s metal!” It’s so bizarre that there’s probably an even chance you’ve already seen it. So we’ll try to spice it up with some tasteless commentary, and of course, we’ve chosen some musical accompaniment that will follow the story.

When we saw the piece, it appeared under the following headline:

Dog chews off Michigan man’s toe, saves his life

Wed Aug 4, 4:47 pm ET

DETROIT (Reuters) – A Michigan man credited his dog with saving his life by chewing off his diseased big toe as he lay passed out in a drunken stupor.

(Bet that got your attention. More after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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