NO CLEAN SINGING

2016 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE GOOD ALBUMS

LISTMANIA 2016 54 Responses »

Dec 132016

(Andy Synn’s week-long series of year-end lists continues with his personal list of 2016’s Good Albums. Yesterday’s list dealt with Disappointments.)

So now we’re really starting to get into the meat of things.

Unlike tomorrow’s list of “Great” albums, the list of “Good” albums covers a bit of a wider range in terms of overall quality.

Some of these albums are ones I consider to be so good as to be almost “Great”, but which are perhaps held back from true greatness by one or two inescapable flaws.

Some of them are undeniably “Good” in the sense that we’ll all doubtless be coming back to them for a long time, but probably (if we’re being honest with ourselves) with some understanding that they don’t quite hit the highest possible standards.

And some of them… are just “good enough”. They’re certainly not bad albums and are more than enjoyable enough, but they’re probably not going to be winning any awards (apart from Revolver awards, but those don’t really count).

Of course your mileage may vary. Some of these albums you may think are the bee’s bollocks (that’s the phrase, right?) and deserve to be considered “Great” albums in their own right. And some of these albums you might actively despise and not understand why anyone could consider them to be “Good”. But I hope you know that I’ve tried to be as objective as possible here, and feel like I’ve given all these releases a fair hearing.

So why not click onwards, brave traveller, and see if anything in this list strikes your fancy? Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): EMPTINESS, HYPERDONTIA, ZOLOA, WIZARD UNION

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET 3 Responses »

Dec 122016

As the title says, this is the second part of a round-up of new music I thought was worth sharing to begin this week. As often happens, in between posting Part 1 and this Part 2 I came across some more new songs I thought were very good, and I’ve added one of them at the beginning of this post.

As explained in Part 1, this particular Seen and Heard includes more minutes of new music than usual because of the presence of numerous full EPs — three of which are to be found below.

EMPTINESS

This morning brought the premiere of yet another track from the new album by Belgium’s Emptiness. I’ve enjoyed all of them so far, but I think this one is my favorite. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NYN — “EMBRACE ENTROPY”

Premieres 6 Responses »

Dec 122016

(TheMadIsraeli brings us this premiere of a song from the new album by NYN.)

In the interest of full disclosure, the man behind the NYN project (Noyan) is both a fellow blogger (he’s a heavy hitter over at Heavy Blog Is Heavy) and a very good friend — but he’s also an insanely talented death metal maestro. Under the NYN alias he’s put out two albums so far. I keep meaning to write a feature on him and maybe I will sometime soon, but today I’m bringing you a song titled “Embrace Entropy” from NYN’s next album. The album itself is called Entropy: Of Chaos and Salt.

Both the song and the new album feature two notable collaborators, one being lead guitarist Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger, who was also a lead guitarist on Obscura’s latest album Akróasis, as well as the man behind Fountainhead, and Jimmy Pitts of Eternity’s End and Pitts Minnemann Project on keyboards. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: A YEAR-END LIST FROM NEILL JAMESON (KRIEG)

LISTMANIA 2016 6 Responses »

Dec 122016

(We’re happy that for another year Neill Jameson (Krieg) succumbed to our entreaties to share with us a year-end list of metal.)

2016 has been a strange year. Not just in terms of the cultural shifts that occurred, or the copious amounts of deaths in the arts community, or even Antifa stepping over the line and using violence towards bystanders. It’s also been an unusually shitty year for a lot of our private lives as well, it seems. We weren’t able to make it a week without news that our friends were burying someone or worse, we were planning a funeral ourselves. But this time of the year is one bound by tradition so I’m back for my yearly review of music released in 2016 that you need to check out.

For me personally I didn’t buy a lot of new records this year. I don’t have any excuse, really, I just spent more time digging into older records or following some of my favorites without really checking out anything truly new this year. Did I miss out? Probably, but I don’t really care. I also tried to use only Bandcamp links where I could so that you actually buy some of this, instead of putting it on a YouTube playlist, which’ll lose its atmosphere when you can’t skip ads for Valtrex. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE FUROR — “CAVALRIES OF THE OCCULT”

Premieres 4 Responses »

Dec 122016

The first week of March seems so far away that it’s like a shimmering mirage on the calendar, with a vast expanse of days to cross before we reach it. That happens to be the time when Transcending Obscurity Records will discharge the fifth album by Australia’s The Furor, the title of which is Cavalries of the Occult. It’s a long wait, but after you hear the album’s title track, which we’re premiering today, you’l probably need the next few months just to catch your breath.

Seriously, you probably ought to put on a crash helmet, fasten your seatbelt, and put on some flame-retardent outerwear before listening to this song. It’s an absolutely scorching, blindingly explosive, adrenaline-triggering rocket ride. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: EMPYREAN THRONE — “HAERETICUS STELLARUM PART II”

Premieres 2 Responses »

Dec 122016

On January 24, 2017, Empyrean Throne from Orange County, California, will release their debut album Chaosborne, which was produced and engineered by Mick Kenney. Today we bring you the premiere of an official video for an album track named “Haereticus Stellarum Part II“.

Conceptually, the album “tells the story of a hapless Templar knight in medieval Europe and his subsequent decent into the realm of Chaos”. In its sound, it powerfully combines a variety of ingredients, including orchestral and cello music — and they are on full display in the song and video we’re presenting today. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR, MESARTHIM, VENEFIXION, CENTENARY

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 5 Responses »

Dec 122016

There are more total minutes of new music in this round-up than usual, and that’s because this compilation includes five EPs, one of which is a single 21-minute track. There are two individual songs in here, too. I thought I’d make up for the fact that my meager weekend posts included a grand total of one song. On the other hand, there’s so much music in this collection that I decided to divide it into two parts, with Part 2 coming a bit later today.

Sadly, I don’t have time to write decent reviews of those five EPs and will only froth at the mouth about them briefly, hopefully just enough to induce you to listen to them for yourself. But before getting to those, let’s start with the first of those two individual songs.

THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR

Skadi is the name of the new sixth album by Colorado’s genre-bending The Flight of Sleipnir. It will be released on January 20 by Eisenwald. The first advance song from the album was released a couple of days ago, and its name is “Awaken”. Continue reading »

2016 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE DISAPPOINTING ALBUMS

LISTMANIA 2016 73 Responses »

Dec 122016

(This is the second installment in Andy Synn’s series of year-end lists, which began last week with a list of favorite EPs and splits. The opinions represent those of the author rather than the site as a whole, especially in the case of one of these 10 “disappointments”, the selection of which is an invitation to pistols at 20 paces come the dawn.)

…and so it begins.

For this year’s listravaganza I’ve decided to change things up a little by kicking off with the “Disappointing” albums, rather than the “Great” albums. It’s a small change, but it means we can build up towards the best of the year, rather than spiral downwards.

Now although we don’t do negative reviews here at NCS, I still feel like there’s a place for reasoned criticism in what we do.

That doesn’t mean tearing bands down or belittling their efforts, it simply means acknowledging that not every album is a 10/10, and that sometimes even the best bands slip up.

Ultimately this isn’t a list of “bad” albums. It’s just a bunch of releases from bands who could (or should) be able to do better. Continue reading »

BLOG BREAK (WITH SOME MUSIC BY AZELISASSATH)

Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 8 Responses »

Dec 112016

The last two days have been crazier than usual in the not-blog part of my life, the part that I usually succeed in squelching down into a tiny thing that whines for attention but doesn’t get it. Beginning two days ago, it became the mouse that roared.

The nastiness started when the web hosting service we use for NCS (Bluehost) somehow crashed their entire system around mid-day on Friday just as I had posted one premiere, with one more that I had still planned to post. I’m calm about it now, but I was punching walls for a few hours after that happened. Once it became clear that this debacle wasn’t going to be fixed any time soon I just said, Fuck It, and started drinking.

Ten hours later, Bluehost still hadn’t fixed the problem, NCS was still inaccessible, and I was pretty well hammered. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2016: ROLLING STONE’S 20 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2016

LISTMANIA 2016 40 Responses »

Dec 102016

No, we’re not being repetitive. Yes, we did post a year-end list by Rolling Stone magazine earlier in our LISTMANIA series, but that one was the magazine’s list of the top 50 albums across all genres of music that they care about. This, however, is a list in which metal isn’t elbowed aside by the likes of The Monkees, Elton John, and Brandy Clark, leaving only Metallica standing as the lone metal recognition.

This is Rolling Stone’s list of the “20 Best Metal Albums of 2016”, which appeared yesterday. And here it is: Continue reading »

Older Entries Newer Entries