The ABOMINABLE SNOW TOUR: LIVING SACRIFICE, WAR OF AGES, SHAI HULUD HIT THE ROAD

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Dec 172009
 

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We’ve been writing about Living Sacrifice quite a lot recently, but that’s because there’s been a lot of Living Sacrifice news recently. Oh yeah, and they’re also a killer band. And we’re writing about them again today because, why? Well, because there’s more (good) news of course.

Living Sacrifice and War of Ages will be co-headlining “The Abominable Snowtour” during the month of February, with Shai Hulud, Lionheart, and The Great Commission rounding out the line-up. There will be 21 shows in 23 days. No stops in the Pacific Northwest, or West of Texas for that matter, but we will be patient. All good things come to those who wait. On the other hand, good things sometimes also come to those who push and whine and nag the shit out of everybody.

Now, where was I? Oh yeah, the “Abominable Snowtour.”  You can get all the scheduled dates and places after the jump. Continue reading »

THE TEN MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS OF 2009 (Part 1)

 Album Reviews, Listmania  No Responses »
Dec 162009
 

AsphyxBand

It’s the time of year when “Best of 2009” lists are popping up everywhere. As we’ve observed before, one worthwhile reason for reading these lists (and maybe the only worthwhile reason) is to discover good metal releases you might have missed — and with about 5,000 new metal full-lengths appearing annually, it’s easy to miss shit that you might really like.

Here at NCS, we’re 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 our list of the best individual extreme metal songs of the year. That would tax our brains way too much work, and frankly this is the time of year when devoting serious effort to anything is just fucking difficult.

Ours is a list of the most infectious extreme metal songs we’ve heard this year. We’re talking about songs that produce involuntary physical movement. Even on a crowded bus, subway, or ferry, your head starts banging, your fingers start tapping, your foot starts thumping, your legs start twitching — different people have got different body parts that start convulsing when they hear something that’s got a groove to it.

And to be one of the most infectious songs of the year, it’s got to be something that worms its way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get it out (and wouldn’t want to) — you mentally replay it at unexpected times and you go back to the song repeatedly. You know, when the shit is sick. When it infects you like a disease with no available cure. Again, not necessarily the best of the year, but the most infectious. (And because this is NO CLEAN SINGING, it’s got to be NCS Metal or an “Exception to the Rule” to make our list.) (Read more following the jump and see our first entry on the list . . .) Continue reading »

BINARY CODE — HURRY BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!

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Dec 162009
 

Binary_Code_photo

Metal Sucks is currently streaming the debut release from New Jersey’s Binary Code. But they say they’re only doing it for 24 hours — and they started streaming yesterday. So time is flying. Which is why this post is so short. We wanted to help get the word out before the freebie disappears and you actually have to spend a little money to listen. And why do we care? Because we’ve listened to that stream, and this shit is amazing. Technical death metal that will knock your socks off. And because we’ll get the chance to see these dudes live in Seattle on Jan 26 (check out our NW Metal Calendar).

Do it! Go here now! You won’t be sorry.

UNEARTH’S PANTERA COVER IS UP

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Dec 162009
 

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Your NCS Authors are big Unearth fans, and fans of Pantera too. You may have heard that to commemorate the 5th anniversary of Dime’s death, Metal Hammer magazine brought together a group of well-known artists to record covers of Pantera songs for a CD that ships with the mag. Unearth was enlisted to cover “Sandblasted Skin,” and the band has just now put that song up on their MySpace site for public consumption. “Sandblasted Skin” captures a lot of what Pantera was all about, and Unearth’s cover does it complete justice. Don’t know about the rest of the covers on the Metal Hammer collection, but this one slays.

So, down below, after the photo of Dime, check out a 1996 live Pantera performance of “Sandblasted Skin” and then run over to Unearth’s site and listen to what they do with the song.

BLACK METAL NAVEL-GAZING

 Metal News  10 Responses »
Dec 152009
 

Immortal

I don’t read The New York Times regularly. I’ll make a wild guess: I bet most visitors to this site don’t read it either. If you do, you need to rearrange your priorities. There are only so many hours in the day, and you’d be happier if you spent more time here at NO CLEAN SINGING, or any of the linked sites over to the right, and less on The New York Times. But though I don’t read that paper regularly, I’ve got friends who do, and three of them e-mailed me about an article that appeared there today entitled “Thank You Professor, That Was Putrid.”

The word that first came to mind after I read it was “bizarre.” The second word was “fucking pretentious.” The article describes a six-hour symposium on black metal held last Saturday afternoon at Public Assembly, a bar and nigthtclub in Brooklyn. The symposium, called “Hideous Gnosis,” was attended by an odd combination of pointy-headed academics (including two who traveled from England for the event), music critics, and at least one actual black metal musician, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, the frontman and guitarist from Liturgy. (That can’t possibly be his real name, can it?  Gotta be a black metal stage-name.)

The academics presented papers with such mouth-watering titles as “The Counter-Reformation in Stone and Metal: Spiritual Substances,” “Anti-Cosmosis: Black Mahapralaya,” and “Perpetual Rot: Obsessive Cycles of Deterioration.” I can sum up my reaction like this: “Reading About Hideous Gnosis: Regurgitating in My Lap.” Continue reading »

LIVING SACRIFICE UPDATE

 Album Reviews, Metal News  4 Responses »
Dec 142009
 

livingsacrifice

Tonight: Long miserable day at work ends. I trudge homeward in the dark under a leaking sky. I fire up the computer and check the news headlines, just to see if something really earthshaking has happened while I was being miserable at work — you know, like if the U.S. got into another war, or swine flu has really turned out to be the no-shit, unstoppable killer we were told it would be, or my utility rates are going up again. Fortunately, none of these things has happened. All I see on a quick look is this:

Twenty-two million missing Bush White House e-mails found (what a shock), Obama begs top banks to start lending money again (that’s probably not going to work), new computer modeling shows that Arctic ice cap may completely vanish by 2014 (we’ve got plenty of polar bears in zoos anyway, right?), Italian prime minister Berlusconi hospitalized in Milan after man hits him in the face with a souvenir statue (I was wondering when someone was going to hit that disgusting fucker in the face with a souvenir statue).

I finish reading the headlines and I breathe a big sigh of relief:  as they say in the Army, Situation Normal (All Fucked Up).

I turn to the real news of the day:  metal news! And what do I see almost immediately?  Living Sacrifice has put up yet another new song on their MySpace page.  We here at NCS had barely finished drooling over the band’s new single “Rules of Engagement” and now we’ve got yet another teaser for their forthcoming full-length, The Infinite Order (scheduled for a Jan 26 release). I check out the new song — and damn! It’s even more hot shit than “Rules”! Continue reading »

DARK TRANQUILLITY UPDATE

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Dec 142009
 

Dark+Tranquillity

Last week I saw a snippet on Lambgoat reporting that Killswitch Engage had announced national tour dates with support from The Devil Wears Prada.  The tour dates included a March 10 stop here in the Emerald City at Showbox-SoDo.  My reaction?  Meh.  There was a time when the chance to see KsE would have elevated my pulse rate.  Not so much any more.  Not even sure they still qualify as NCS Metal at all.

But KsE has now added a new blog entry on their MySpace page about the same tour, and guess what? That update says Swedish melodic death titans Dark Tranquillity will be opening all shows on the tour. Now that caused my pulse rate to go up! In an ideal world, a legendary, groundbreaking band like Dark Tranquillity wouldn’t be an opening act for the likes of Killswitch Engage and (worse still) The Devil Wears Prada. They’d be headlining.  But beggars like me can’t be choosers. At least DT will get back to the US and the fans will be assured of some decent venues.

Even more exciting is that DT has scheduled the US release of their ninth studio album, We Are the Void, for March 9 — the day before their Showbox performance in Seattle. Full tour dates available after the jump. Continue reading »

IN FLAMES NEWS (or news in flames)

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Dec 132009
 

in flames

Swedish melodic death metal pioneers In Flames will always hold a special place in my heart.  They were my introduction to extreme metal, and though their music has become poppier over the years, I still love what they do.  I’ve been lucky enough to see them play in the Northwest on three occasions and to meet the guys in person on one of those tours (and they’re about as nice and unpretentious a group of dudes as you could hope to meet).

Guitarist Jesper Strömblad is one of the founders and the only remaining original member of the band. So it was with some trepidation that I read in February of this year that he’d checked himself into a rehab clinic to get treatment for alcohol abuse and would therefore miss the band’s Australia/SouthAmerica/Japan tour. A significant and positive step for Jesper, but one that raised some questions about how it would affect the future of In Flames.  In March, drummer Björn Gelotte gave an interview in which he had this to say about the situation:

“Well, as with every problem of this kind, it’s not something that you want to tell everybody. It is something that you are sort of embarrassed about, but we’ve been living around this problem now for many many years. The thing is that with something like this you can’t really force anybody to go to the doctor or to feel better. You have to wait until this person realizes that himself. And what happened is that it got to be too much and he had a breakdown and he realized when his body said, “This is it.” He had to go and get medication, get some treatment and lock himself in for a couple of weeks and take it easy and take care of himself. And this is the only way of waking up, I think. I don’t know how it is with other abuses, but with this one — it’s kind of embarrassing. It’s tough for him to realize it, but when he finally did it, now he’s doing something about it. But it takes time to get back.”

I hadn’t heard much more about this situation until today, when I saw a story that really brightened up my Sunday morning.   Continue reading »

MARDUK

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Dec 122009
 

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The day job has had my head in a fucking vise for the last week but now that’s passed. To celebrate last night, I had a few adult beverages with a couple of buds and then some total immersion in Wormwood, the latest offering from Swedish black metal band Marduk. You know what I mean about total immersion. Get either semi- or completely wasted, get comfortable on the floor in a chair or bed, crank up the volume past NIOSH limits, close your eyes, and then just focus your brain on the music. Well, Wormwood turned out to be just what the doctor ordered — if your doctor’s last name happens to be Frankenstein or Faustus. Continue reading »

2010 WHIPLASH THREATS

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Dec 112009
 

MetalFans2

This post is a two-fer.  Part 2 concerns the photo above and the story in UK’s The Independent that it accompanied.  But first, Part 1:  Elise over at the excellent Reign in Blonde site put up an initial list of 2010 winter/spring tours rolling through the NYC area that she’s stoked about, and asked “What’s on your calendar?” On our NW METAL CALENDAR page, we’ve got a pretty complete list of tours scheduled for touch-down in the Seattle area so far, and here are a few I’m particularly psyched about:

JAN 26:  Hypnose, Revocation, Binary Code

JAN 27:  Nile, Immolation, Krisiun

FEB 6:  Arch Enemy, Exodus, Arsis, Mutiny Within

APR 21:  Finntroll, Moonsorrow, Swallow the Sun, Survivors Zero

Gonna be some serious headbanging at those shows.

Now for Part 2:  A year ago The Independent reported the results of a psychological survey of 36,000 music lovers.  (OK, yeah, it’s old news, but I just saw the story.) The survey showed a definite correlation between people’s personality traits and the style of music they enjoy. Check it out:

Fans of indie music, for instance, were found to have low self-esteem and little motivation, but described themselves as creative. Rap enthusiasts, on the other hand, tend to think a lot of themselves and are extremely outgoing. . . . But the study’s most remarkable discovery is that refined lovers of classical music share a high number of personality traits with those who prefer rocking out to heavy metal.

ClassicalFansAnd here is the study’s summary of classical and metal lovers’ personality traits:

Classical: Classical music lovers have high self-esteem, are creative and at ease with themselves, but not outgoing.

Heavy metal: Very creative and at ease with themselves, but not very outgoing or hard-working.

Kinda cool right up til the end, huh?

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