NO CLEAN SINGING

LISTMANIA 2016: MATHCORE, MATH-ROCK MANIA, AND INSTRU-METAL (ANOTHER YEAR-END LIST FROM AUSTIN WEBER)

LISTMANIA 2016 2 Responses »

Dec 232016

(This is the third part of Austin Weber’s four-part year-end list series. To check out Part 1, which focused on variants of death metal, go here, and to see the lists focusing on black metal and grind, click this.)

As 2016 comes to an end, I remain quite thankful to Islander for allowing me to contribute here over the last few years. I really believe in this site and our mission of sharing more of what’s out there than most other sites. So with that in mind, if anyone about to intake this hasn’t seen my prior year-end lists here at NCS, I try to do something different than most people.

My goal is to bring you a massive alternative list of my favorite lesser-known releases of the year, divided into several parts. Which means I won’t post a lot of releases that you see on other lists. Not because I didn’t dig a lot of them, but because you already know about them and will be seeing a lot of the same names being repeated elsewhere.

Undoubtedly some of the releases will be ones you’ll know or heard mentioned in passing, but hopefully you’ll find more new bands and music you were unaware of overall. Quotes that appear below the following releases were pulled from my reviews, multi-band articles, and song premieres from music covered here at NCS and my 2016 posts from Metal-Injection. You’ll also find some new mini write-ups for releases I didn’t get a chance to cover anywhere this year, but loved as well. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA: THE TOP 10 SONGS I HEARD FOR THE FIRST TIME YESTERDAY

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 20 Responses »

Dec 222016

This time of year there are always a few people who ask whether I’m going to post my own list of the year’s best releases. Again, the answer is no, because making the effort would be too paralyzing. I have enough trouble deciding whether to wash my underoos or let them ferment for another week.

On the other hand, I do kind of feel left out of the year-end LISTMANIA frenzy, so I thought I’d put together a Top 10 list, but one that’s a bit easier for my overtaxed brain to process. These are the 10 best songs I heard for the first time yesterday.

Hey, don’t laugh! It wasn’t that easy — I listened to more than 20 new songs yesterday, so I did have to make some decisions. Of course, I couldn’t be bothered to rank these 10 tracks; there’s a limit to how far I’m going with this.

SHAARIMOTH

The first song is “Faceless Queen of Bloodstained Dreams”, which is from an album I’ve been anxiously awaiting — the second full-length by Norway’s Shaarimoth, which is arriving more than a decade after the first one. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: A TOP TEN LIST FROM TODD MANNING

LISTMANIA 2016 6 Responses »

Dec 222016

(We’ve rolled out some very long year-end lists, with more of them to come, but this one by NCS contributor Todd Manning is a compact, though varied, 10 items in length. Enjoy.)

As years go, 2016 has been a real kick-in-the-balls, and further down the road we probably won’t talk too much about the year in music, except maybe about everyone that died. That being said, it was the first year I really threw myself into writing about music on a regular basis and I have to thank No Clean Singing, AvantGarde-Metal.com, and Burning Ambulance for being willing to publish my semi-coherent ramblings. Doing a top ten list seems like a nice culmination to my efforts and a chance to interrogate all the music I’ve heard and see what really made an impression.

This list is as much for myself as it is for anyone else, though it has been a challenge to force myself to rank all the music I’ve heard this year. By my estimation, I’ve heard approximately 115 full 2016 releases, primarily from Metal and Hardcore. I can’t tell you how many individual songs I’ve heard, fragments of albums, and so on. It seems like a lot, but I’m pretty sure there are others who have listened to quite a few more.

I sketched out this list quite a few times and it kept changing from day to day. I decided it was time to just finish the damn thing, but will of course list a few runner-ups as well. So without further ado… Continue reading »

THE DGR-NCS HOLIDAY BUYERS’ GUIDE AND YEAR IN REVIEW FOR THE METALHEAD WHO HAS TO HAVE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING — 2016 EDITION (PART 4)

LISTMANIA 2016 6 Responses »

Dec 222016

(DGR created year-end lists of great length. He wrote many words about each listed item. Your humble editor feared that the site would collapse beneath this great leviathan of words if it reared its bulk in a single post, and therefore decided to split it up, with one part appearing each day this week. Follow these links for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

You knew this was coming, or you would if you had been around here the last few years. It’s been a long-standing tradition here at NCS that when the Listmania series happens, I take the filter completely off and just produce a gigantic screed of words that is occasionally interrupted with album art, music streams, and album titles with little numbers next to them. This year is no different.

In my attempt to rationalize an enormous year of music, I’ve capped my list at fifty albums, ranked in order of whichever numbers my fingers were closest to on the keyboard. On top of that, I have my usual small collection of not-metal stuff, some fun stuff, my list of shame, a likely happy face where number 8 should be because I’m a moron and put the numbers in front of a parenthesis and WordPress translates that into an emoticon, and my personal favorite award that I hand out each year.

The 50-album list continues today, continuing the countdown through No. 11: Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: CVLLED KVLT COLD CVTS AND INTELLI-GRIND (MORE YEAR-END LISTS FROM AUSTIN WEBER)

LISTMANIA 2016 10 Responses »

Dec 222016

(Yesterday we began the roll-out of Austin Weber’s year-end NCS lists with a feature focused on variants of death metal, and here we present his second list, with a focus on black metal and grind.)

LISTMANIA 2016: YEAR-END LISTS FROM THEMADISRAELI

LISTMANIA 2016 9 Responses »

Dec 212016

(As LISTMANIA continues at our site, TheMadIsraeli provides his year-end lists in graphical form.)

2016 was a rough year for me that kept me from really submerging myself in music the way I would normally want to. While it seems that I managed to listen to many of the releases that really mattered, I do feel like I fell a bit short. I was, however, able to put together three lists: A top-10 death metal list, a melodic death metal list, and an overall top 10 of the year, which you’ll see in the Topster’s collages below.

A few ramble notes before the lists… Continue reading »

THE DGR-NCS HOLIDAY BUYERS’ GUIDE AND YEAR IN REVIEW FOR THE METALHEAD WHO HAS TO HAVE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING — 2016 EDITION (PART 3)

LISTMANIA 2016 9 Responses »

Dec 212016

You knew this was coming, or you would if you had been around here the last few years. It’s been a long-standing tradition here at NCS that when the Listmania series happens, I take the filter completely off and just produce a gigantic screed of words that is occasionally interrupted with album art, music streams, and album titles with little numbers next to them. This year is no different.

The 50-album list continues today, counting down through No. 21: Continue reading »

A ZHRINE TOUR DIARY (aka “THE EVERYTHING IS FINE TOUR DIARY”): EPISODE IV

Metal News 3 Responses »

Dec 212016

On November 2, the Shrines of Paralysis North American Tour launched in Los Angeles, headlined by New Zealand’s Ulcerate and also including the Icelandic band Zhrine, and Phobocosm from Montreal. While the tour was in progress we posted three installments of a tour diary (collected here) beautifully written by Zhrine’s manager Bogi Bjarnason. The tour has now ended, and we have been fortunate to receive one final episode of the diary.

These tour reports, which spanned the bizarre tumult of our presidential election in the U.S., have provided a fascinating and unabashedly opinionated outsider’s perspective on the crossing of our vast continent, and it’s even more timely now that we’re in the throes of year-end listmania in metaldom — which has seen the name of Zhrine’s 2016 album appearing with regularity.

Without further ado, we present the final chapter in the “Everything Is Fine” tour diary by Bogi Bjarnason, once again accompanied by his cellphone photos — along with one final request from this end: Yes, for fuck’s sake, do it again. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ASTRAL BLOOD: “FREE OF MY SCARS”

Premieres, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 1 Response »

Dec 212016

To celebrate the Winter Solstice today, the Minneapolis-based black metal band Astral Blood have just released the first single from their new album SYZYGY, which will be released in early 2017 by Throats Productions. The song’s name is “Free of My Scars” and it’s an irresistibly captivating track, one that’s both hauntingly atmospheric and electrifyingly vibrant.

SYZYGY is the band’s first full-length and follows the 2014 release of a self-titled EP. I started paying attention to the band when I learned that its line-up includes Joe Waller (ex-Amiensus, Adora Vivos, Sarasvati, Nuklear Frost) — who performed guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, and vocals on the new album — as well as vocalist/guitarist Andrew Rasmussen.

What you’re looking at above is the artwork for the single by Reuben Sawyer (Rainbath Visual), but also check out the wonderful cover art for the album by Jas Helena: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEPRAVITY — “NEW WORLD ORDER”

Premieres 1 Response »

Dec 212016

Necrophagist will probably never rise from the crypt where they have entombed themselves, but they seem to have been reincarnated in a new Polish band named Depravity, whose debut demo New World Order we’re premiering today.

Depravity is the solo project of a musician who calls himself Exile (also a member of the Polish death metal band Sphere). He performs bass, guitar, and gruff growls on New World Order, with a guest vocal appearance by Mikołaj “Rlyeh” Naklicki of T.S.M.E.D. and a guest guitar solo on one of the tracks by Marcin Budaj of Rockasta. Continue reading »

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