NO CLEAN SINGING

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): MESHUGGAH AND ASPHYX

Aug 252016

Earlier today I posted Part 1 of a planned two-part Seen and Heard round-up of new music, with the first Part prepared by my comrade DGR. What you’re looking at now isn’t the Part 2 that I had planned to write, because while I was toiling away on that, Meshuggah and Asphyx released songs from their new albums. Rather than tack them on to my original selection of cuts for Part 2, which is already pretty large, I decided to throw them at you now, and convert my original Part 2 into Part 3. Unless something else pops up and Part 3 becomes Part 4, because I haven’t yet figured out how to make time stand still.

MESHUGGAH

The title of Meshuggah’s eighth album is The Violent Sleep of Reason. Nuclear Blast plans to release it on October 7. That’s obviously a big deal, given how vastly influential Meshuggah has become over the years, not to mention the high quality of their music. The first single from the album, “Born In Dissonance” premiered not long ago at Rolling Stone, along with an interview of drummer Tomas Haake, who as usual wrote the lyrics for the song. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: HAUNTED

Interviews 3 Responses »

Aug 252016

(Comrade Aleks returns to NCS with another interesting interview. This time he talks with the Italian band Haunted.)

Haunted appeared in Italian Catania recently, and Twin Earth Records has already released their self-titled debut album. I was lucky enough to get it beforehand, and I must tell you – it’s something! Take Windhand stoner doom and crop their endless monotonous riffs, retaining those hypnotic female vocals and overall compositional frame; then add some charms and… and whatever else Haunted puts into their songs?… Yes, I had to find out their secret ingredients and I welcome you to share the pleasure of digging deeper in the Haunted territories. The whole band is here to tell about their brand new work. Continue reading »

LATEST ROUND OF BANDS ANNOUNCED FOR MARYLAND DEATHFEST 2017

Metal News 9 Responses »

Aug 252016

About an hour ago the organizers of Maryland Deathfest announced another round of bands confirmed to appear at the 2017 edition of the event. Here they are:

Batushka (Poland) (exclusive U.S. appearance)
Birdflesh (Sweden)
Chepang
Cognitive
Die Choking
English Dogs (UK)
Exhumed
Genocide Pact
Gorgasm
Malevolent Creation
Stormtroopers of Beer (official S.O.D. cover band featuring Dan Lilker and Jocke & Adde/General Surgery)
Suppression
UxDxS (Denmark) Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): ULCERATE, VADER, KINNEFRET, KUNSTZONE

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 5 Responses »

Aug 252016

DGR volunteered for round-up duty while the oaf who usually does this was furiously scribbling introductions to premieres over the last 48 hours. Said oaf is now working on his own round-up contribution, which will become Part 2 of this post later today. Meanwhile, here are DGR’s picks for noteworthy new songs and videos that emerged in recent days.

ULCERATE — EXTINGUISHED LIGHT

If you heard an immense boom recently and had to look around and wonder what the fuck was that?, it was likely due to the release of a new song by abyss-dwelling death metallers Ulcerate, from their October 28th album Shrines Of Paralysis. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: DAWN OF DEMISE — “THE SUFFERING”

Premieres 1 Response »

Aug 242016

On August 26, Unique Leader will detonate a brutality bomb, releasing a new album named The Suffering by the Danish punishers in Dawn of Demise. The album arrives in the 13th year of the band’s career and is the one about which they are most proud. When you hear it, it won’t be difficult to understand why they feel that way — and hear it you shall, because this post includes the debut of a full album stream a few short days before the official release.

The album includes 11 tracks, which were engineered, mixed, and mastered by Tue Madsen (The Haunted, Behemoth, Aborted, Leng Tch’e, Moonspell, et al) at his Antfarm Studios. And while the Unique Leader label has been home to some of the world’s most blisteringly technical death metal bands, you’ll find this album was cut from a different cloth. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VINTERBRIS — “GAZING AT A FALLEN SKY”

Premieres 4 Responses »

Aug 242016

In 2014 we wrote repeatedly about a superb album called Solace by Norway’s Vinterbris. What first drew our attention to the album even before hearing the music was the artwork created for Solace by an artist we greatly admire, Kim Holm. In addition to a cover piece, Holm created separate illustrations for each song on the album (which we collected in one place here). Having been lured into the album by this artwork, we found the music to be a treasure as well. We even included a song from Solace on our list of 2014’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.

We now have a fine occasion to revisit Solace because Triton’s Orbit will be reissuing the album next month in a slipcase edition featuring Kim Holm’s artwork, and in advance of that release Vinterbris have also made available their first lyric video, for a song on Solace called “Gazing At A Fallen Sky” — which we are happily premiering below. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ULTAR — “AZATHOTH”

Premieres 8 Responses »

Aug 242016

It’s so nice when the sights and sounds of a music video come together in a well-crafted partnership, when what you hear and what you see each proves to be engrossing and when, together, they complement each other. That’s the kind of success achieved in the new song and video we’re bringing you from the Siberian band Ultar. The song’s name is “Azathoth” and it appears on the band’s new album Kadath, which will be released on October 21 by Temple of Torturous.

Ultar is a new name for the band, who previously were known as Deafknife. They make their home in the town of Krasnoyarsk, nestled among howling Siberian woods and red mountains. Their album is described in concept as “a journey of a young man to the Kadath -– Lovecraftian divine City of Gods, hidden in the Land of Dreams”, but also as the great lifelong journey that we each make in “search of ourselves and our inner freedom that will light the way”. Continue reading »

HEAVEN SHALL BURN: “WANDERER”

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Aug 242016

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Germany’s Heaven Shall Burn.)

Recipe for success: one part Bolt Thrower, one part Earth Crisis, one part Swedish Death Metal (of the more melodic variety), and a heavy helping of Germanic thrash. Garnish with relevant philosophical and socio-political themes and roast for 15-20 years in a blaze of righteous fury.

It’s a recipe which has served Heaven Shall Burn extremely well over the years, and, though there have certainly been some valid criticisms of the band for sticking too closely to their own formula at times, it’s one that’s been responsible for keeping the German firebrands right at the forefront of the European Metalcore scene (which, with its slightly more raw and Death Metal influenced sound, I’ve often considered to be subtly distinct from its eventually more commercialised American cousin).

So I don’t think it would have surprised anyone if, on their eighth full-length album, the band had simply elected to continue with the same sound which made Iconoclast, Invictus, and Veto so successful. Why fix what isn’t broken, after all?

But… unexpectedly… that’s not exactly what happened… Continue reading »

OVARYROT — “SUICIDE IDEATION”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 2 Responses »

Aug 242016

(DGR prepared this review of the new album by the Swedish/U.S. band Ovaryrot.)

This disc sounds like a goddamned nightmare.

Every once in a while we’ll come across a release that makes the hair fly back from minute one and then leaves us glued to the wall for the entirety of its run. Not that it is usually a mark of quality, but sometimes from the first moment an album will start out sounding like someone taking a saw to sheet metal and somebody else hammering on a trash can behind it. Sometimes the music is so abrasive that you kind of can’t help but be entranced by it; judgments of quality usually come after the second or third listen, which is just about the time when you parse out exactly whatever the fuck that previous forty-some-odd minutes of whirlwind was.

Ovaryrot’s Suicide Ideation — which came out on August 14th — is one of those albums. Not that we would ever expect a band who go by the moniker of Ovaryrot to play nice; we’ve learned our lessons there before. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BOB MALMSTRÖM — “MANCHURIETS SLAVAR”

Premieres 1 Response »

Aug 242016

It won’t be too much longer now. On September 9, Bob Malmström will be back with a new album. The name of this one is Vi kommer i krig (We Come In War). If you know anything about the band’s previous releases, you have to be curious not only about what kind of new musical mayhem they’ve chosen to stir up, but also about what will happen in the band’s next video — because Bob Malmström’s videos are always a kick in the head to watch.

We can satisfy some of that curiosity today, because we have for you not only a song from the new album but also a new video to go along with it. The song is “Manchuriets slavar” (Slaves of Manchuria), which reflects some of the band’s thoughts about “China as a nation and a spiritual entity”, based on two extensive tours of the country that the band undertook in 2014 and 2015. Continue reading »

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