THE NEAR FUTURE OF NCS: A FORECAST OF THE REMAINING WEEKS OF 2017 (AND SOME NEW MUSIC BY MARIJANNAH)

…a photo from a place I’m about to visit again…

 

I’m never sure how many people make visits to our site a clockwork part of their day, like a piss upon rising, or a morning coffee, or a shot and a beer at the end of the workday, or a way of re-setting the mind before entering the Land of Nod at night. But I like to think it’s more than a few of you, and so in fairness to those people, I’m writing this post.

Today is the last day of November, and so one month remains in the countdown of our completely arbitrary but ingrained measurement of a milestone in our lives — the passage of one more year. Because this is a metal blog, that means we are about to enter, in full force, our year-end LISTMANIA. But this year will be different.

 

On Sunday I’m doing something that only the old-timers will remember, because I haven’t done it in three years: I’m leaving the NCS compound to the tender mercies of the loris horde who guard me, and I them, for a winter vacation. I used to take off for 10-12 days every November. I used to invite people to send me guest posts so our site wouldn’t go dark, because I rarely wrote anything while on vacation, and now it’s about to happen again after a long hiatus.

And so, between December 3 and December 15, I plan to write almost nothing. I do hope to devote a small amount of time each day to editing, formatting, and posting what our regular staff and other people might send me (including the first of our year-end list posts). But because I, under the compulsion of Ms. Islander, will not be spending time listening to new music and writing about it, whether in the form of premieres or round-ups or otherwise, the daily volume of posts will inevitably decline.

It will probably take me a day or two to get back in gear even after I’m back, because the lorises will no doubt have done their best to burn everything to the ground in my absence, fiends that they are, and I can only be thankful that they are slow.

 

 

And so, I have three things to say now:

First, if any of you would like to send me something to post, along the lines of what we usually post, that would probably be welcome (I say “probably” because although I have set the bar pretty low to the ground in my own work, we do still have some rudimentary standards that even worms must crawl over.) Even if you’ve never published any writing about metal before, that shouldn’t deter you. My e-mail is islander@nocleansinging.com.

Second, I do have a shitload of premieres to post between now and my departure on Sunday afternoon, and might have time for a round-up as well.

And third, I do intend TOMORROW to post our annual request for year-end lists by our readers. That is always a highlight around here, and always seems to provoke an enthusiastic response. It will give me a lot of good reading to digest while I’m on vacation, though undoubtedly I’ll experience the annual depression that descends when I realize how many good releases I’ve missed despite the preceding 11 months of frenzied investigation I devote to finding gems in the unending flow of metal.

So, for those of you who visit us as regularly as you do the toilet upon rising, you now have a preview of some alterations in our daily routine, though hopefully they won’t be as traumatic as a bladder blockage requiring catheterization.

 

 

To conclude, here’s some new metal. This is “Snakecharmer“, a mind-warping, body-mangling, eye-frying track by the Singaporean stoner/doom band Marijannah, which includes members of two of the island’s hardest groups, Wormrot and The Caulfield Cult. As the pusher always says, this is good shit, but this time it’s a damned true statement, and (in a wild, uneducated guess) it puts to shame about 95% of the new music you’ll hear in this genre.

P.S. I owe a big fuckin’ thank-you to Ryan Schutte of Seattle’s LB! for telling me about this track.

P.P.S. This song comes from the band’s debut record, Till Marijannah, which is set to be released in February 2018 on Pink Tank Records. You can download this godsend at Bandcamp, and you can follow Marijannah on Facebook. The links are below.

Bandcamp;
https://marijannah.bandcamp.com/track/snakecharmer

Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/marijannah