MATH METAL MONDAY

 Album Reviews, Listmania  2 Responses »
Dec 292009
 

Yeah, I know it’s not Monday. I was working on this piece with the intent of posting it yesterday, but got sidetracked on the actual Monday morning by some provocative comments from Elise at Reign In Blonde about my weekend rant on Ke$ha. Still, I like the alliteration in the title, so what the fuck — I’m using it anyway.

And this morning I’m thinking:  Enuf about Ke$ha.  Not enuf about math metal.  Need to fix that.  And voilà! (Doesn’t mean we’re dropping the conversation with Elise.  It’s too interesting to just let it go, and I think there’s more to be said — just not right now. In the meantime, you should read her latest observations here.)

As we draw close to the end of 2009, I’ve been thinking back on some bands we haven’t written about that made the year a great one for extreme metal.  This weekend, in an (unsuccessful) effort to cleanse my mental palate of the polluting effect of “Tik Tok,” I spent time listening again to three European bands that can be classified, for want of a better term, as “math metal” — Textures, Tardive Dyskinesia, and CiLiCe — and a fourth European band I used to classify the same way that has now swum deeper into the prog metal end of the pool — Hacride.

All four have often drawn comparisons with Meshuggah. Occasionally, some writers have even branded them as Meshuggah derivatives. Unfair criticism!  They each have their own sound, successfully blending highly technical instrumental work with melody, and they each produced awesome albums in 2009. [Correction: the Textures album was released in 2008.] (More after the jump — including streaming songs from each band) Continue reading »

THE TEN MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS OF 2009 (It’s a wrap . . . sort of)

 Listmania, MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2009  3 Responses »
Dec 282009
 

This past weekend we finished dribbling out our list of the Ten Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs of 2010. Here’s the final line-up:

1.  Asphyx: Scorbutics

2.  Mastodon: Crack the Skye

3.  Amorphis: Silver Bride

4. Goatwhore: Apocalyptic Havoc

5.  August Burns Red: Meridian

6.  Pelican: Ephemeral

7.  Scale the Summit: Age of the Tide

8.  Daath: Wilting On the Vine

9.  Molotov Solution: The Harbinger

10. Revocation: Dismantling the Dictator

Yes, the list is finished — and for your listening pleasure, we’ve added a playlist of the listed songs to our MySpace page — with one slight alteration:  we couldn’t find Scale the Summit‘s “Age of the Tide” on MySpace, so our playlist includes another of our favorites tracks off Carving Desert Canyons.

Even though we finished the list, your NCS Co-Authors had some infectious favorites that didn’t survive our final negotiations — but they just missed by a nose. So we’re going to roll those out later this week. It’s the next best thing to just reneging on our commitment to make this a list of the Top Ten and instead renaming it the Top Fourteen.

CONFESSION IS GOOD FOR THE SOUL (or, Casually Rapping White Girls, Part 2)

 IQ Subtraction  No Responses »
Dec 282009
 


Yesterday I posted a rant about a song by Ke$ha called “Tik Tok” that is the No. 1 selling single on iTunes and is at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. Among other things, I said it made me wanna claw my skin off in big hunks, that a whole album of similar songs would make me want to vomit up all my internal organs, and that it was yet another sign of the increasing idiocy of popular culture.

Elise from Reign in Blonde (one of the two sites that was our inspiration for NO CLEAN SINGING and one of our essential daily reads) posted this comment about the rant (and I hope she won’t mind that I’m featuring it here):

“I actually really like that “Tik Tok” song. I’m not saying YOU have to, but it honestly feels like too many people still MAKE metal or LIKE it just to “stick it” to other genres or to prove they’re better. Heavy music is fully capable of standing on its own. I like to think of myself as a peacemaker.”

I usually prefer to impulsively shoot from the hip and then forget about whatever nonsense I’ve written, but Elise’s comment brought about some moments of self-reflection. That in turn caused me to confess some things to myself. And then I impulsively decided to share those confessions, after which I’ll forget abut the nonsense I’m about to write:

  • I listened to “Tik Tok” once before writing yesterday’s post (via this video of the song). I haven’t listened to it again. I don’t want to listen to it again. Unfortunately, 24 hours later, I still can’t get the damn thing out of my head. I listened to metal non-stop yesterday in an effort to cleanse my mental palate, but it hasn’t worked.
  • That doesn’t mean I like the song. But I confess I’ve got a Pavlovian response to just about any music with a compulsive groove in it (check out our recently completed list of The Ten Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs of 2009 if you have any doubts). Again, that doesn’t mean I think it’s good music. I just can’t help myself. Put a coconut cream pie in front of me and I’ll eat the whole thing, but that doesn’t make it good for me.
  • I confess that I went a little over the top when I said an album filled with songs like “Tik Tok” would make me feel like vomiting up all my internal organs into a steaming, slimy pile at my feet. Only a surfeit of tequila has ever made me feel that bad. But I still agree wholeheartedly with none other than the executive producer of Ke$ha’s forthcoming album, one “Dr. Luke,” that “a whole record of that might get annoying.” (More confessions after the jump)

    • Continue reading »

CASUALLY RAPPING WHITE GIRLS (or, Reason #8,467 For Why We Listen to Metal)

 IQ Subtraction  2 Responses »
Dec 272009
 

Yesterday, our post about female-fronted death metallers Bloodshoteye included a comment about the shortage of competent female death growlers howling their wares on the current scene. On the somewhat related but more general subject of last frontiers for female singers, this morning someone sent me a link to a story that popped up in today’s New York Times about a new pop star named Ke$ha and her single “Tik Tok,” which has soared to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. The Times calls it “one of the most successful white-girl rap songs of all time.” Here are a few more excerpts from the article:

This has been a banner year for white-girl rap, as these things go. There was the debut album by the Philadelphia rapper Amanda Blank, the relentless and suffocating “I Love You” (Downtown). On “Boom Boom Pow,” the pummeling Black Eyed Peas hit, the surprise twist was a rapped interlude by the group’s singer, Fergie. Even the country-pop singer Jessie James tried it out on “Blue Jeans,” a song that practically owes a publishing check to Dem Franchize Boyz for appropriating the cadence and concept of their 2004 song “White Tee.”

The white female rapper has been one of the last frontiers in hip-hop, but Ke$ha is reframing the conversation. “Her talky, blonde-y, white-girl rap thing, there’s no one else doing that right now,” said the producer and songwriter Lukasz Gottwald, a k a Dr. Luke, who signed Ke$ha to his imprint and executive produced “Animal.”

. . . “Being that she was willing to do that, and she liked it, I’m in support of it. A whole record of that might get annoying though.”

No shit “Dr. Luke.” But “annoying” is an understated adjective. “Tik Tok” all by itself makes me wanna start clawing off my skin in big hunks like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly. Thinking about a whole album of this stuff makes me feel like vomiting until all my internal organs are in a steaming, slimy pile at my feet.

The Times observed that “The very existence of the casually rapping white girl reflects decreasingly stringent ideas about race and gender.” No, what it reflects is the increasing idiocy of popular “culture.”

“A banner year for white-girl rap”? Really, who gives a flying fuck. Yet another reminder, as if I really needed one, that whenever I venture out into the world of what passes for pop music I’m almost always morbidly sorry I did.

Ima go listen to Bloodshoteye again.  Bye.

BLOODSHOTEYE

 Album Reviews, Metal News  2 Responses »
Dec 262009
 

Female death metal vocalists are few and far between. Frankly, I don’t understand how dudes can produce those sounds on a regular basis without destroying their voices. I know there’s a secret, I just don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because I haven’t yet watched Melissa Cook’s The Zen of Screaming instructional video.

But what I really don’t understand is how any woman can produce those harsh, deep, gutteral, death growls — at all. I could tick off on the fingers of one hand the women who are currently carrying it off reasonably well (if I had a six-fingered hand): Angela Gossow of Arch Enemy, Grace Perry of Landmine Marathon, Elizabeth Elliott of Dreaming Dead, Mel Mongeon of Fuck the Facts, Krysta Cameron of iwrestledabearonce, and occasionally Alissa White-Gluz of The Agonist.

As of this morning I need to add a seventh name: Jessica Desjardins of Canadian deathcore band Bloodshoteye.   (More after the jump, including some video) Continue reading »

THE TEN MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS OF 2009 (Part 10)

 Listmania, MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2009  No Responses »
Dec 262009
 

Here at NCS, we’ve been putting a different spin on year-end listmania. Ours isn’t a list of the best metal full-lengths of the year. It’s not even necessarily our list of the best individual extreme metal songs of the year. What we decided to do was create a list of the most infectious extreme metal songs we’ve heard this year. We’re talking about songs that produce involuntary physical movement and worm their way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get ’em out (and wouldn’t want to).

We haven’t ranked our list from #10 to #1 because that would be too much fucking work (and your co-Authors would still be arguing about it this time next year). In addition, when we started naming our entries on this site, we hadn’t yet figured out the whole list. So, we’ve been dribbling them out one at a time, in no particular order.

Of course, only after naming the first 9 entries did it dawn on us that we only had one spot left. If only our tiny brains hadn’t been hard-wired with the decimal system we could have made this “The Fourteen Most Infection Extreme Metal Songs of 2009.” But you reap what you sow. With only one spot left, and still lots of songs on our collection of candidates, picking #10 proved to be especially vexing for your Authors. But now it’s done.

Our list heretofore:

1. Asphyx: Sorbutics

2. Mastodon: Crack the Skye

3. Amorphis: Silver Bride

4. Goatwhore: Apocalyptic Havoc

5. August Burns Red: Meridian

6. Pelican: Ephemeral

7. Scale the Summit: Age of the Tide

8. Daath:  Wilting On the Vine

9.  Molotov Solution:  The Harbinger

And to see our tenth and final entry on the list, continue reading after the jump. Continue reading »

TRYPTOPHAN COMA

 Band Name Fodder, Mosh Pit  2 Responses »
Dec 252009
 

I’ve taken some shit for the photo of the slit-throat turkey I used in our posts on both Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. So this time, I picked the handsome specimens above. Still metal, and still alive (at least temporarily).

I’ve been thinking about turkey because, having finished Christmas Day dinner, my body is now about 75% turkey and I’m in a tryptophan-induced coma. I got into a debate with one of my NCS Co-Authors about whether the common wisdom is correct that turkey contains high doses of tryptophan and causes drowsiness when consumed in mass quantities. IntoTheDarkness insisted that was B.S. I insisted it was true. To resolve the dispute, I consulted The Font of All Human Knowledge. Turns out the answer is sort-of yes and sort-of no.  I know you’re dying to find out the facts. Details after the jump. Continue reading »

CHRISTMAS DAY RECAP

 Metal News  No Responses »
Dec 252009
 

Yesterday was a banner day at NCS. More posts in a single day than we’ve managed before. In the category of listmania, we reported about Decibel‘s list of The Top 25 Most Anticipated Records of 2009 and Revolver‘s list of The 20 Best Albums of 2009, and we added the 9th entry to our own list of The Ten Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs of 2009. We gave you a Brutal Truth update, the latest burning-goat news from Gavle, Sweden, and a little something to make you nervous on Christmas Eve. Just goes to show what we can accomplish when we get a break from the day jobs. Maybe you now wish we’d get fewer vacation days.

Today your NCS Authors are resting from our labors — except for arguing about which song should be our tenth and final entry on the Most Infectious list. Assuming we can sort that out and there’s still one of us alive to post the result, we’ll do that tomorrow.

In the meantime, the turkey awaits, and he’s looking kinda nervous.

Hope all of you have a peaceful day. Come see us again tomorrow.

“HE KNOWS WHEN YOU’VE BEEN BAD OR GOOD” (we’re all hosed)

 Mosh Pit  No Responses »
Dec 242009
 

Yes, Christmas Eve is upon us again. Unless you’re very lucky, you’ve already heard during this holiday season a rendition of “Santa Clause Is Coming to Town” by one or more of the thousand douchebags who’ve recorded it.  First performed in November 1934 on Eddie Cantor’s radio show, and the fucking thing just won’t go away. The song has been inflicted on generations of kids, basically as a way of scaring them into being “good.” You know the lyrics:

He sees you when you’re sleeping,
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows when you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness sake.

Seriously, that’s some nasty shit.  And you, gentle readers — that song can’t make you feel very cozy. If you’re reading this site, then you can’t possibly have been very good — and as the perpetrators of an extreme metal site, it goes without saying that we hope you’ve been very, very bad.

Of course, that means your home won’t be visited tonight by the jolly old elf with the rosy cheeks and the “Ho! Ho! Ho!” You’ll be visited by the nasty looking orc up at the top of this post who’s decided your liver would taste yummy with a nice chianti and a side of fava beans. When he shrieks “Ho! Ho! Ho!”, it’s an accusation.

Santa Claus appears to have his roots in pre-Christian pagan traditions prevalent in Northern Europe. (See, e.g., our post earlier today about burning the goat.) So if even the jolly Santa is fundamentally a pagan figure, just imagine how brootally pagan Evil Santa is. No doubt the soundtrack accompanying his grisly visit to your abode tonight will sound something like this:

Marduk: Into Utter Madness

And in case you have trouble deciphering the lyrics from Evil Santa’s aforesaid theme song, here’s a taste:

Ever faithful — to unfaithfulness
Endlessly truthful — to untruthfulness
[We’re skipping this line to, uh, protect the children]
Thus my Ascension bound — to boundlessness

Nighty night! Don’t let the bed bugs bite.

BURNING THE GOAT

 Mosh Pit  No Responses »
Dec 242009
 

The charred remains of a Christmas straw goat stands in the town center of Gavle, Northern Sweden, on Wednesday Dec. 23, 2009.

We couldn’t make up stuff like this if we tried. We’ll just quote the whole Reuters story verbatim. It’s pretty fucking funny from beginning to end. This is definitely metal.

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) – Arsonists set fire early on Wednesday to a giant straw statue of the Swedish Yule goat, a forerunner to Santa Claus in Sweden, defying security measures for a third year in a row.

Police in Gavle, north of Stockholm, said an unknown number of attackers had torched the goat in the early morning hours, leaving a blackened skeleton standing in the town square.

“It’s a tradition to burn it down,” Lofberg said. “It’s happened an untold number of times since the 1960s … it’s been burned down more years than it’s survived.”

Burning the goat has been a popular, and illegal, tradition in Gavle since the 1960s when an advertising executive first came up with the idea to endow the city with a giant replica of the goat, a Christmas decoration common in many Swedish homes.

There were no witnesses, but a bottle of lighter fluid was found near the goat’s frame, which stood about 12 meters tall at the apex of its horns, police told Reuters.

“We have some leads,” said Stefan Lofberg, who is leading the investigation for the Gavle police.

Police have tried a range of tactics to stop would-be arsonists, including posting guards near the straw goat, coating it with flame retardant and training security cameras on it.

But vandals have usually found a way around the foils and their assaults have become more elaborate: in recent years the goat has been run over, dragged into a river and attacked by arsonists dressed as Santa Claus and the Ginger Bread Man.

Flame retardant coating thwarted attempts to burn the goat in 2006, but the group sponsoring it then stopped flame-proofing it because of the ugly, brownish tinge its straw took on.

Goats have special meaning in Swedish Christmas tradition. Before Santa Claus became ubiquitous at the turn of the 20th century, men would dress up as goats and hand out presents to well-behaved children. Bad children received lumps of coal.

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