Mar 162012
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the debut offering from a Russian band called Evil Shine.)

The Russians are currently producing some of the most interesting music in the metal landscape.  The way the scene has exploded in recent years (and especially in recent months) has been quite astounding.  I now have another excellent discovery from the land of the former Red Army: Evil Shine.

I recommended the video for the song “I Hate Your Kind” to Islander, and he included it in a post not too long ago.  Evil Shine play a style of primal, weighty, beefy, groove metal with a very tribal characteristic to it.  This stuff is an acquired taste, but my opinion after several listens to their debut The Evil One is that this is some intense, brutal, terrifying shit.

The opening instrumental simply called “Intro” is a haunting piece that has the oddity of being done using really shitty MIDI.  And it works.  It’s a very creepy, eerily foreboding piece that leads into the true opener “The Primal Hunger” excellently.  In that song, the riffs and drums sound like they’re rising up from a swamp or a sewer full of liquefied human flesh. As it unfolds, the sound is that of a grotesque giant with a jackhammer for one fist and a sledgehammer for the other coming straight at you. Continue reading »

Mar 042012
 

You didn’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway: I woke up this morning at the obscene hour of 3:30 a.m. and couldn’t go back to sleep. Unfortunately, this happens to me frequently, but it really chaps my ass when it happens on a Sunday morning.

So I got out of bed, made a pot of black, sludgy coffee strong enough to wake the dead, and decided to catch up on recent NCS e-mails that I’d either neglected or overlooked. And then my sleep-deprived brain had the idea of turning that into fodder for this MISCELLANY post: I decided that I would include in this post the first five pieces of new music I came across, regardless of what they were (and by “new”, I mean new to me).

It seemed like a good idea at the time, because the last MISCELLANY post I wrote was on December 4, and shit, three months is a pathetically long time to go between installments of this series. Now, it’s not like I didn’t have plenty of fodder for a MISCELLANY post already. I already have hundreds of bands on our running MISCELLANY list of music to check out, all of whom I’ve been sadly neglecting. But logic gave way to impulse, as it usually does in my case, and so here we have offerings from the first five bands whose music I came across in my e-mails this morning: Seed (South Korea), Evil Shine (Russia), The Great Sabatini (Canada), Scourge Schematic (Seattle), and Nylithia (Canada, again).

SEED

The first e-mail I found had arrived from NCS contributor Rev. Will overnight (or what little of the night existed during my abbreviated nappy time). He pointed me to a YouTube song clip with these words: “I think this song will make you buy a new pair of boxers!” Well, nothing will make me buy a new pair, since the underoos I have are now seasoned just the way I like ’em, capable of standing up even when I’m not in them. But I decided to check the song anyway. Continue reading »