Apr 052010
 

In varying degrees of intensity, your three NCS Co-Authors are all baseball fans. And for baseball fans, today is a magical day, just as it is every year, because today is Opening Day of the Major League Baseball season. (Yeah, we know the fucking Yankees played the fucking Red Sox last night — and they’re welcome to each other — but that didn’t make yesterday “Opening Day”).

The slate of the preceding season is wiped clean, all things are new, and all things are possible. Of course, none of that is really true, but it’s the fate of diehard baseball fans to get their hopes up as Opening Day approaches, even when the rational part of their brains tells them to wise-the-fuck-up.

And so it goes here in Seattle. Our beloved but hapless Mariners had an unexpectedly improved season in 2009, the team was upgraded (at least on paper) in the off-season, and we’re hoping for bigger and better things this year (while trying to ignore the truly sucky offensive showing in spring training).

Off the top of our heads, we don’t know of any extreme metal songs about baseball to commemorate this occasion. Do you? But one association between baseball and metal does come to mind, so we’ll go with that. (see what we mean, after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

Dec 142009
 

livingsacrifice

Tonight: Long miserable day at work ends. I trudge homeward in the dark under a leaking sky. I fire up the computer and check the news headlines, just to see if something really earthshaking has happened while I was being miserable at work — you know, like if the U.S. got into another war, or swine flu has really turned out to be the no-shit, unstoppable killer we were told it would be, or my utility rates are going up again. Fortunately, none of these things has happened. All I see on a quick look is this:

Twenty-two million missing Bush White House e-mails found (what a shock), Obama begs top banks to start lending money again (that’s probably not going to work), new computer modeling shows that Arctic ice cap may completely vanish by 2014 (we’ve got plenty of polar bears in zoos anyway, right?), Italian prime minister Berlusconi hospitalized in Milan after man hits him in the face with a souvenir statue (I was wondering when someone was going to hit that disgusting fucker in the face with a souvenir statue).

I finish reading the headlines and I breathe a big sigh of relief:  as they say in the Army, Situation Normal (All Fucked Up).

I turn to the real news of the day:  metal news! And what do I see almost immediately?  Living Sacrifice has put up yet another new song on their MySpace page.  We here at NCS had barely finished drooling over the band’s new single “Rules of Engagement” and now we’ve got yet another teaser for their forthcoming full-length, The Infinite Order (scheduled for a Jan 26 release). I check out the new song — and damn! It’s even more hot shit than “Rules”! Continue reading »