Jan 012017
 


Partied hard, smiling big.

 

Happy New Year to one and all. I hope you survived whatever you did last night, intact and with only a modicum of blood loss and brain-cell death. I would tell you in detail what I did but I’m not sure you could stand the excitement. Even I was so drained after both putting down the robot uprising and preventing the savagery of the loris horde’s celebration from overflowing their compound, armed with nothing but a few blow darts, that I was asleep by 10:30, stone cold sober and vomit-free.

I’m beginning the new year at NCS the way I ended the old one (here), by assembling a giant batch of the new music I heard in recent days that I thought would be worth your time, plus one older release I came across only recently.

As a trained medical professional (ha!), I’ll warn you that if you did suffer more than a modicum of blood loss or neuronal cell death, you might want to wait another day before exploring what awaits you below. It won’t help your recovery, and it’s no sane person’s idea of a hangover cure. Damned good metal, though.

I’ll also mention that because this post takes the place of my usual Sunday Shades of Black feature, the music is mainly in a blackened vein, though not entirely. Continue reading »

Nov 242016
 

thankskilling

 

Here in the good old U.S. of A. it’s Thanksgiving Day today, and so to all of our American readers, I want to wish you a happy fucking Thanksgiving. And if you’re puzzling over what to be thankful for, I have some new metal for you. You’re welcome.

That’s right, while the rest of the miscreants in U.S. metal blogdom are acting like normal, reasonably well-adjusted people and taking the day off, I’m still here like a good samaritan at the soup kitchen, feeding you nourishing metal so you won’t think no one cares about you, at least for today. As usual, I’ll also post something new on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of this long “holiday” weekend, not because I’m better than anyone else but because I obviously have an undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Because it’s Thanksgiving, this holiday edition of what we normally call Seen and Heard is overstuffed, which is the condition of most Americans by the end of this day. So get ready to gorge yourself through the earholes with music from a dozen bands. Continue reading »

Nov 202016
 

lhomme-absurde-monsters

 

As you can see, this is the second part of a two-part post that I began earlier today (here). Both parts were combined in a single post as I originally wrote it. But even though I throttled back my usual wordiness in order to get it finished and make it more digestible, I eventually concluded that a 10-band post was still too much for a single serving.

Part 1 of this post focused mainly on advance tracks from forthcoming albums. Now I’m moving away from individual songs and into full album and EP streams — which means I’m really giving short shrift in my words to music that’s deserving of more fulsome praise. I do wish I had time to say more, because although the band names may be obscure, these releases are really very good. I hope you’ll make time to give each of them a fair listen.

L’HOMME ABSURDE

Album: Monsters
Release date: October 25
Country: Russia
Order link: https://lhommeabsurdebm.bandcamp.com/album/monsters Continue reading »

Nov 072015
 

Archivist-ST

 

Greetings from Anchorage, Alaska, where I’m still mired in a day-and-night project for my day job that has pared my blog time to the bone. Because my free time is so limited, I’m doing something we almost never do around here: Just throwing some recommended music streams your way without writing much at all about the music.

ARCHIVIST

The first recommendation is a self-titled album released through Bandcamp in June by a multinational group called Archivist. Continue reading »