AN NCS INTERVIEW: DEFILED

 Interviews  No Responses »
Jun 162026
 


(all photos by Fukcrec Hbk)

(On June 12th Season of Mist released a new album by the long-persevering Japanese death metal band Defiled, and in advance of that our Comrade Aleks conducted an exceptionally good interview with Defiled founder/guitarist Yusuke Sumita, which we at last present today.)

Having started out in 1992, Japanese tech-deathsters Defiled have changed their lineup, sound, and, to some extent, style several times over the years. The last decade of the band’s career has been marked by a fairly regular stream of new releases, and their ninth full-length, Altered State, arrived right on schedule.

Although guitarist Yusuke Sumita is the only founding member of Defiled still in the fold, his three bandmates are also seasoned veterans, having spent between seven and thirteen years in the band. But even yet another lineup change is unlikely to derail Yusuke’s locomotive, which he, with gritted jaw, drives at full speed, demolishing barriers with concentrated, intense, and thoroughly technical death metal.

It’s barely a surprise, but despite its reputation and ambiguous cover art, the core motifs of Altered State are Orwellian visions of a present/future, but in the form of an open-to-interpretation idea of ​​the general psychological pressure and discomfort that society and the world inflict on us. At times this material sounds like an intense CrossFit workout, and while it’s sometimes hard to enjoy with such a tough workout, it’s achievable with the right amount of practice.

I’m glad that we had an opportunity to interview Yusuke, and I’d like to thank him once more for in-depth answers, which made this interview a pretty rewarding experience. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): SEPULTURA, DEFILED, OATH OF CRUELTY, PORTA NIGRA, SORXE, OBRIJ

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Nov 082019
 

 

Happy Friday to one and all. Although I continue to be distracted with personal obligations (I’ve become a caregiver to an injured family member, which is something that will persist for at least another month), I found time to do some scattered listening last night and this morning. Even with a lot more listening yet to do, that yielded a cornucopia of good finds, six of which you’ll find below.

The reference to “Part 1” in the post title is more a sign of optimism than a present reality. And if I can get it done at all, it might not arrive until Saturday.

SEPULTURA

To get your motor running hot and fast before moving into everything else in today’s compilation, I picked a new song and video by Sepultura, which is the one item in this collection that I caught this morning. It sure as fuck got my motor running, and the video is kind of spectacular too. Continue reading »

SHUFFLE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHUFFLE  17 Responses »
Aug 112012
 

As much as I like working on this blog, it has changed my listening habits. One of our missions is to stay abreast of song and video premieres and new albums, sifting through the flood of new metal to find things we believe are worth recommending and reviewing. So I spend almost all my listening time nowadays checking out metal I’ve never heard before. The cost, unfortunately, is that I rarely listen to what’s in the library of albums I’ve accumulated over the years. No more “oldies but goodies” for me.

But yesterday, on a whim, I decided that I’d spend the time walking to and from my job listening to what was on my iPod already, and I used Shuffle to pick what I heard. My iPod Classic is full. It has 22,331 songs on it, and almost all of the shit is metal. To put a new album on there requires that I delete another one, which is horribly painful to do. That process has made the library more top-heavy with newer music over time, which may explain why most of the Shuffle choices turned out to be of relatively recent vintage.

Anyway, it turned out to be a blast, because the first five songs that Shuffle picked were all really good and really beastly. The next couple weren’t as killer, so I decided to just go with the first five in this post. Oddly, two of the five turned out to be from Japanese bands.

DISMEMBER

Fuckin’ Dismember! What an auspicious way to start the Shuffle medley! I didn’t need reminding about how completely amazing Like An Ever Flowing Stream was — and still is — but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve listened to “Skin Her Alive”. What a thoroughly skin-flaying, meat-grinding experience. Continue reading »

MORE 2010 SICKNESS (Part 10)

 Forthcoming Albums  12 Responses »
Nov 022010
 

Another month has passed. Another Halloween has come and gone. Here in Seattle, we are looking forward to what is supposed to be an especially wet, dark, cold, sucktastic winter — which is really saying something, given that all Seattle winters are wet, dark, cold, and sucktastic. If they weren’t, we would have the population of Los Angeles, so there’s a silver lining to that massively dark cloud.

Yes, the seasons come and they go, the great wheel of life rolls forward, and we are all one month closer to our end, whatever it may be. But as time inexorably passes, new things happen. In particular, we find out about new metal gestating in studios around the world, struggling and kicking and yearning to erupt into the air, screaming like a banshee.

And that brings us to another monthly installment of METAL IN THE FORGE, in which we cobble together a list of forthcoming new albums, cribbing like rag-gatherers and lint-pickers from PR releases and metal news sites like Blabbermouth in order to construct a line-up of new music that at least we’re interested in hearing, even if no one else is.

What we do in this series of posts is update the list of forthcoming new albums we first posted on January 1. (All the other updates can be found via the “Forthcoming Albums” category link on the right side of our pages.) After the jump, in alphabetical order, is a list of still more projected new releases we didn’t know about at the time of our previous updates, or new info about some of the previously noted releases. Continue reading »