Mar 052010
 

We’ve had a weakness for Seattle’s own Demon Hunter since, well, forever. We can hear you saying, “What the fuck? Weren’t these NCS whackjobs gushing about Rotting Christ just a couple days ago? And isn’t this site called NO CLEAN SINGING?”

Yes and yes, guilty as charged. And to pick a few more polar opposites, we’ve also written about how much we like Living Sacrifice and Gaza. When it comes to metal, we don’t have an ideological litmus test. We listen, and we like or we don’t like. And while we mostly can’t stand clean singing, we’ve said from the beginning that we make allowances for Exceptions to the Rule.

We might be guilty of some local prejudice in Demon Hunter’s case (you can barely make out Puget Sound in the background of that photo above). We might also be influenced by the fact that although Demon Hunter almost never tours, they do play in Seattle from time to time and we’ve seen them on stage a couple times — and they know how to put on a kick-ass live show.

Yes, it’s true that on most Demon Hunter songs, vocalist Ryan Clark mixes clean singing along with harsh, hardcore vocals. But DH’s songs are so damned infectious that we can’t help but be seduced by the music despite the clean singing.

Having said that, what’s got us particularly interested in the band’s forthcoming (March 9) release of its new album, The World Is A Thorn, are a few songs from the new album that have been streaming on the band’s MySpace site that are heavy as shit. (more after the jump, including a brand new video of a particularly infectious new Demon Hunter song . . .) Continue reading »

Dec 102009
 

livingsacrifice2

Resurrected death/thrash band Living Sacrifice has just released a new single, “Rules of Engagement” in advance of their forthcoming CD, The Infinite Order, due for release on January 26. It’s streaming on the band’s MySpace page, it’s available on iTunes, and it kicks ass.

This Arkansas band originally formed in 1988, broke up in 2002, and reunited in 2008 with a six-week US tour (“Stronger Than Hell”) headlined by Seattle metalcore band Demon Hunter. I had lost sight of the band during their hiatus and had not paid any serious attention to them even before the break-up — frankly, because of preconceptions based on their categorization as Christian metal. But I caught the “Stronger Than Hell” tour when it passed through Seattle, and their performance that night was one of the best I saw that year.  Hell, one of the best in many years. They totally tore up the place, and a worshipful packed crowd at El Corazon went crazy over them. So did I. Continue reading »