Dec 012012
 

In here: A few things I noticed this morning.

SOILWORK

Soilwork’s ninth studio album The Living Infinite, which will be a two-disc release, is now scheduled for release by Nuclear Blast on March 1 in Europe, and March 5 in North America. Late yesterday, the cover art was unveiled. The artist is Mnemic’s Mircea Eftemie Gabriel. He also created the artwork for Soilwork’s Stabbing The Drama album seven years ago. It’s a change from the style of the band’s last few covers, and I’m liking it. It seems to have a nautical theme; I don’t know how that connects to the music, but we’ll find out.

Nuclear Blast also released the album’s track list: There are a total of 20 songs. I’m sure there will be some catchy melodic ones in there, but I’m hoping for some old-school Soilwork head-wreckers, too.

TOMAHAWK

This morning I also saw four new music videos. The first one isn’t metal. It’s for a song named “Stone Letter” by Tomahawk, who we last featured here. Tomahawk consists of Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle) plus a bunch of other interesting musicians: Duane Denison (The Jesus Lizard, Unsemble), Trevor Dunn (Fantomas, Melvins Lite), and John Stanier (Battles, Helmet). Five years have passed since their last release, but they’ve got a new album coming in January called Oddfellows. Continue reading »

Nov 252012
 

Vocalist Som Pluijmers has left Scotland-based brutal death metal band Cerebral Bore.

As you may have noticed if you’ve been visiting NO CLEAN SINGING for more than a week or two, we spend very little time reporting on band drama. Musicians leave bands and join bands every day, and honestly, I’d rather be writing about the music. About the only time it matters is if a changing line-up has altered the music of a noteworthy band in some significant way, and that’s unlikely to happen in this instance — so far as I know, Som was not involved in writing Cerebral Bore’s music.

So why am I making an exception here? I’ll tell you in a minute. But first, the details. Here’s a statement that appeared on Cerebral Bore’s Facebook page about 5 hours ago:

Som walked out on us less than 24 hours before the US tour, and we were forced to either cancel or go ahead with it as an instrumental if need be. We didn’t want to let our US fans down, so we went ahead with our buddy Shawn Whitaker on vocals for the tour. Show us your support and make Shawn feel at home, he saved us from a disaster.”

Cerebral Bore began a U.S. tour on November 24 in support of Dying Fetus, Cattle Decapitation, and Malignancy. It’s scheduled to run through December 23. The Shawn Whitaker referenced in that statement is the sole member of a Houston band named Insidious Decrepancy. And now here’s Som’s response to the statement quoted above: Continue reading »

Nov 062010
 

For the last week we’ve gone off the NCS rails, focusing on long songs with either no singing at all or nothing but clean singing, plus offerings of “bedroom djent” and post-rock/post-metal (whatever the hell that means). And we’re not through. We have at least one more band that’s out-of-the-NCS box to write about before we disappear on that non-blogging vacation we wrote about earlier this week.

(Speaking of which, don’t forget our open invitation to send us your own blog posts so we won’t have to let NCS go dark during the hiatus.  We’ve received three so far, plus promises that more will be coming — but don’t wait too much longer if you want to do this. Details are here.)

But, as much fun as we’ve had exploring metal that’s not our usual fare, we do miss the kind of metallic extremity that shoves egg-beaters through the skullbone and proceeds to whip the gray matter into a fluffy merengue. So, we decided to take a little break from our adventures outside of NCS land and come back home for a helping of mind-fuckery.

The devilish cooks we found are a band from Glasgow, Scotland called Cerebral Bore (apparently named after a weapon in a video game) and their recently released debut album, Maniacal Miscreation. Oh yes, this is just the kind of cerebral drill-job we were looking for. Our brains are now satisfying disassembled and chopped up into the consistency of dog food. Awesome.  (more after the jump, including a song and a video . . .) Continue reading »