Mar 292017
 

 

We have an exception to the porous rule in our site’s title — sort of. The song we’re bringing you is a piece of moonshine-swilling devil rock by the Norwegian band Devil. “Cemetery Still” comes from the band’s third album, To the Gallows, which will be released by Soulseller Records on April 21.

The production quality of this new album may not be as rough as the band’s first demo, and the influence of classic heavy metal may be eclipsing doom to a greater extent than on the band’s first two albums, but as “Cemetery Still” proves, Devil are still a sure-handed source of highly addictive riffs — and sinful vocals. Continue reading »

Mar 012013
 

Hey there dudes and dudettes. I’m just quickly checking in from the bottomless pit of my day-and-night job with a few goodies I discovered on a break early this morning.

PATHOGEN

Pathogen are based in the Philippines. Since forming in 2001 they’ve release an assortment of demos and splits and three full-length albums. The second one, Miscreants of Bloodlusting Aberrations, was self-released on tape in 2010 but was recently picked up for re-issue today (on CD and vinyl) by the German label Dunkelheit Produktionen. The release includes new cover art, which, as you can see, is fuckin’ aces.

This morning I came across a song from the album named “Atrocity Exhibit” that Dunkelheit put up on YouTube, and that led me into the rest of the album. Listening to Pathogen is like cracking open a subterranean vault and finding a tape created in the late 80s or early 90s in a rehearsal room. It has an authentic old-school sound reminiscent of Autopsy and Morbid Angel, with maybe a little Celtic Frost in the mix, too, and it’s catchy as hell. Continue reading »

Dec 082011
 

This is a different spin on Listmania. For this post, we’re jumping outside North America and landing in Norway. Also, this isn’t really a “Best Album” list. Let me explain:

NRK is the state-owned Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. It operates three main TV channels, three main radio channels, and several “niche” channels on radio and the internet. The NRK P3 radio channel is mainly aimed at younger listeners in the 15-30 age bracket, and of course, since this is Norway, it includes a healthy dose of metal. As far as I can figure out with help from Google Translate, “Pyro” is the name of the NRK P3 radio program that focuses mainly on metal and hard rock.

Last week, the Pyro web site rolled out its 2011 list of the most promising metal bands in Norway. I found out about this by seeing a Facebook post by a Norwegian band who showed up on the list. I got curious, and so I visited the site. Now, because this is radio programming, I figured the music wasn’t going to be quite as extreme as a lot of the metal that’s our bread and butter here at NCS. On the other hand, this is fucking Norway, and so I decided it would be worth spending some time exploring what they had to offer — and I guessed right.

I don’t speak Norwegian, of course. So, I used Google Translate. It rendered the Norwegian text on the web site into a kind of English . . . the kind spoken by people who’ve suffered some kind of severe trauma to the speech center in the brain. But I could get the gist of the text, and so I’ve tried my best to clean it up and make it mean what I think it means. But since this isn’t really a translation, I may have fucked it up. All errors are mine, not Pyro’s.

On the other hand, I’m not terribly worried about the text, because the site included music from each of the bands, so we’ve got music to hear, and the music is what counts, isn’t it? Continue reading »