Sep 162013
 

Over the last 36 hours, your humble editor has been preoccupied with matters of both great importance and trivial insignificance, i.e., one being Seahawks football and the other being the demands of my paying job, and of course you know which is which, am I right? While these matters were distracting me from the glorious world of metal, it turns out that a flood of new things swept through the byways of the interhole. At this point, I don’t have time to collect everything of interest that I found, but I thought I’d at least throw two of them your way, selected in order to provide contrast. I’ll round up the rest for a post tomorrow morning.

PYRE

In June I reviewed (here) a new split by Pyre from St. Petersburg, Russia, and Entrapment from The Netherlands. That was only the second release by Pyre (it followed their 2012 EP, Ravenous Decease), but I was mighty impressed. And now I’m impressed all over again.

Today they released a new 2013 demo track called “We Came To Spill Thy Blood”. So far, I haven’t found that any of my own has been spilled, but the song certainly did accelerate its transit through my veins and arteries. The song reminds me of Wolverine Blues-era Entombed. It has that old school guitar tone, riffs galore, and rhythms that will get your head nodding and your feet moving. The vocals still remind me of LG Petrov. Continue reading »

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 »

Dec 222009
 

Here at NCS, we’re putting a different spin on year-end listmania. Ours isn’t a list of the best metal full-lengths of the year. It’s not even necessarily our list of the best individual extreme metal songs of the year. Ours is a list of the most infectious extreme metal songs we’ve heard this year. We’re talking about songs that produce involuntary physical movement and worm their way into your brain to such an extent you can’t get ’em out (and wouldn’t want to).

We’re not ranking our list from #10 to #1 because that would be too much fucking work (and your co-Authors would still be arguing about it this time next year). So, our list is in no particular order. We’re also dribbling the songs out one at a time because your lazy Authors are still debating what belongs in the remaining slots. Our list heretofore:

1.  Asphyx:  Sorbutics

2.  Mastodon:  Crack the Skye

3.  Amorphis:  Silver Bride

4.  GoatwhoreApocalyptic Havoc

5.  August Burns Red:  Meridian

6.  Pelican:  Ephemeral

And to see our seventh entry on the list, continue reading after the jump. Continue reading »