And what are my reasons for posting this on a metal blog? Continue reading »
Feb 142013
Jan 182013
(Wayne Barlowe: “Unholy Communion”)
Here’s how my week is going.
On Sunday I went to the airport in Seattle. I got on an airplane and I flew for about 3 1/2 hours to a place. I got off the airplane and I went to a hotel. I met up with other people and worked Sunday night. I went to sleep. I woke up and worked all day Monday and until late on Monday night. I did the same thing again on Tuesday. Tuesday night I kicked back a little with the people I had been working with. I went to sleep. After getting shit-faced.
Early Wednesday morning I went back to the airport and flew for another 3 1/2 hours to a different place, even farther from Seattle. I got off the airplane and went to a hotel. I met other people and worked until late Wednesday night. I went to sleep. I got up on Thursday morning and did the same thing, except at the end of the day I got on a train and traveled for 1 1/2 hours to another place.
I met other people there who I work with and had dinner with them, got shit-faced, and then I went to a hotel. It was late by then. I went to sleep.
It’s now Friday morning. I’m about 2,000 miles from home. I think I’ll do some work today. Tonight I’ll be going out to dinner with people I work with. Most likely I will get shit-faced. Most likely I will go to sleep after that. Continue reading »
Jan 102013
Briefly departing from our usual focus on metal, I thought I’d mention that the nominations for the 85th annual Academy Awards were announced this morning by actress Emma Stone and Oscars show host Seth MacFarlane. As usual, many of the the nominations were predictable and expected and some weren’t. And once again, there were omissions that will get many movie fans riled up and pissed off.
Not surprisingly, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln leads this year’s Oscar race with 12 nominations, including best picture, best director, best adapted screenplay, and acting nominations for Daniel Day-Lewis, Sally Field, and Tommy Lee Jones.
Surprisingly, Life of Pi picked up a whopping 11 nominations, including best picture, best director for Ang Lee, best adapted screenplay, and a shitload of technical nominations.
The best actress nominations included both the youngest and the oldest nominees in the history of the category: 9-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis for Beasts of the Southern Wild” (she was 5 years old when the movie was filmed) and 85-year-old Emmanuelle Riva for the Austrian drama Amour. The other nominees are Jessica Chastain for Zero Dark Thirty, Jennifer Lawrence for Silver Linings Playbook, and Naomi Watts for The Impossible.
As mentioned, Daniel Day-Lewis picked up a predictable best actor nomination for Lincoln, but so did Hugh Jackman for Les Miserables, Bradley Cooper for Silver Linings Playbook, Joaquin Phoenix for The Master, and Denzel Washington for Flight. Now for a few oversights . . . Continue reading »
Dec 312012
Here in the Great Pacific Northwest, we’re still 13 hours away from the turn of the old year into the new one, and the obligatory celebrations haven’t yet begun on our metallic island. But due to the mysteries of time zones and datelines, it appears that 2013 has arrived or is about to arrive elsewhere — and how the fuck does that work?
Anyway, with the dawn of a new, arbitrary calendar date fast approaching, we want to thank all of you for your support of NO CLEAN SINGING during 2012. It was a great year for metal and a great year for us as a site.
We’re looking forward to what 2013 will bring. We already know it’s going to bring even more outstanding music — we will soon be publishing a list of forthcoming albums that we’re eagerly anticipating, with an invitation for you to add to that list based on what you’ve seen and heard.
And we hope the New Year will bring you fortune, fame, lasting love, happiness, multiple orgasms, a job, a fast getaway, the utter destruction of your enemies, or whatever else your heart desires. Continue reading »
Dec 152012
I wanted to write about metal today, as always, but I failed. My mind was still trying to wrap itself around something else, namely, 20 innocent children and six innocent adults gunned down at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, USA, on December 15, 2012.
I don’t know about you, but I’m old enough that I feel pretty hardened against the horrors of the world. Tragedies, big and small, are part of daily life. The world is more interconnected than ever before, and we can read about and watch bloodbaths like this one every day if we want to — because somewhere in the world, each day brings a fresh horror of some kind.
There’s only so much individual human tolerance for bad news. If you don’t armor yourself to some degree against the pain of other people, it’s damned hard to put one foot in front of another and keep going.
But the death of children . . . the unnecessary, unpredictable death of 20 children . . . is especially hard to take. You have to have really thick armor to deflect something like this.
I know that, somewhere, children die in droves every day, usually in places where disease or starvation or grotesque neglect claim them. But like all horrors, the closer to home they are, the more you feel them. It’s just easier to imagine that they could happen to you, or your children, or your friends, or their children. Evolution is probably to blame for both our increased sensitivity to tragedies that we can more easily imagine as happening to ourselves or those we love, and our comparative indifference to more remote instances of catastrophic loss. Continue reading »
Oct 262012
I made this.
For the last 24 hours we’ve done nothing on the site but play videos and write about videos, so why stop now? Maybe we’ll do something different tomorrow, but let’s have one more video before we stumble headlong into the weekend.
I don’t know about you, but most metalheads I know inhale their food. They devour it like hyenas who know that any minute the lions will be dropping by for their turn at the carcass. Just shoveling the food in and swallowing, without bothering to expend much energy on needless activity like chewing.
I don’t mean to exclude myself from this description. I try damned hard never to eat when there’s a mirror in the vicinity, for fear of scaring the shit out of myself.
But this is not how we’re supposed to eat. Nutritionists and weight-loss specialists say that you should eat slowly, using small bites and chewing the food well. They theorize that this gives your body time to realize that you’re getting food into your stomach and produce those hormones that tell your brain, “STOP, YOU GLUTTONOUS FUCK! YOU’RE FULL!” As opposed to getting those signals only after you’ve rapidly eaten twice what an entire tribe in the Amazon consumes in a week.
Also, when we inhale food, we don’t really taste it. Of course, given the utter crap food that many of us eat, maybe that’s not a bad thing. Continue reading »
Oct 222012
This is the latest in a series of increasingly depressing articles we’ve published about Facebook’s manipulation of Page posts in an effort to “monetize” their business. For more detailed background about changes that have come to light earlier this year, go here, here, and here.
The latest development: It strongly appears that in late September 2012, Facebook again changed the complex “EdgeRank” computer algorithm that it uses to decide what appears in its users’ news feeds so as to reduce the reach of so-called “organic” posts, i.e., un-paid posts, while it continues to push Page sponsors to pay Facebook in order to reach readers. If you’re a FB Page admin like me and you’ve noticed a dramatic recent decline in the number of FB users who see your posts, now we know why.
In this article, we’ll summarize the evidence of this change (with all sources listed at the end) and also discuss some ways of circumventing Facebook’s strategy, including one that’s increasingly being suggested around the web — use of Facebook’s “Interest Lists” feature.
This article may prove to be of general interest, but as usual, we’re writing from a narrow perspective: We’re addressing these issues as a non-profit metal blog whose mission is to spread the word about underground music made largely by broke-ass bands, distributed by largely broke-ass labels, and loved by largely broke-ass fans.
We use Facebook for much the same reason that our constituents do — to interact with the community of metal and to publicize what we’re doing. Making money isn’t in our mission statement, and although many metal bands and labels do use Facebook in an effort to generate sales of music, merch, and show tickets, it’s not like they’re raking in the big stacks. Which is why anything Facebook does that pushes metal-oriented Pages to pay for reaching their fans is particularly damaging to our (broke-ass) community. Continue reading »
Oct 092012
This is way off-topic, except it does have singing and music. Also, I laughed until I pissed myself. So I thought I would feel even more comfy as I soak in my own urine if I knew that you were pissing yourself, too. In fact, I do feel comfy already! Continue reading »
Oct 052012
Yes, I’m afraid it’s time for another rant about Facebook. The pressure was building, and I needed to vent for fear that otherwise I’d have an attack of explosive diarrhea.
The last time I had to resort to this kind of diarrhea remedy was in June, when the subject was an exploration of the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine who gets to see Page posts and the rollout of Facebook’s Promoted Posts feature. In a nutshell, if you’re the admin of a Facebook Page and you add a Page post, Facebook doesn’t deliver your post to the news feeds of all your Page fans. At one point, Facebook reported that on average only 16% of your fans will see any given post.
Facebook does give you the option of paying them to expand the distribution of your posts. That’s the Promoted Posts feature. We’ve used that feature only for certain posts at the NCS FB Page — when we want to spread the word about a song premiere or new album stream here at the site — and, unsurprisingly, it definitely does work. The stats we get from FB show that our posts reach a much larger percentage of our FB fans, as well as FB Friends of our fans, though the reach is still not 100%.
But we’re not a business, we get no revenue from anyone for running NCS, and so there’s a limit to how much money we’re willing to spend to spread our content around the FB community. Impecunious metal bands aren’t any more likely to fatten up Facebook’s bank account in order to reach more of their fans either.
But it turns out that with Promoted Posts, Facebook was only getting warmed up. On Wednesday of this week Facebook rolled out a new “test” in the U.S. (they’ve been doing it longer than that in other countries). Now, even individuals get the awesome opportunity to pay FB in order to increase the visibility of shit like your wedding photos, pics of your newborn brat, where your band is playing next weekend, and big news like what you ate for breakfast. Wheeeeeee!!! Continue reading »
Aug 302012
(In this post TheMadIsraeli brings us a fascinating change of pace, with a review of classical music composed by Nick Vasallo.)
Today we aren’t reviewing a metal album. Today we’re reviewing a classical album. We at NCS are classy men anyhow, so why not?
Though in all seriousness, classical music has been (dare I say it) the foundation of metal (not rock) as we know it. Yes, there is no doubt that Blues was as integral to metal’s development, but I think classical is an even bigger part of the equation. You can take even brutal tech-death like Cryptopsy or Suffocation and find a way to draw parallels with baroque, classical, or even romantic-era music. This shit flows through the veins of the most brutal of music, so in my mind it actually seems entirely relevant that this kind of music should be reviewed here.
Of course, I didn’t just go and pick something out of the blue; this album is even more related to metal than most of its genre. Why? Because the Vasallo in question is Nick Vasallo — one-third of up-and-coming tech-deathers Oblivion (whose three-song demo I reviewed in February — it fucking owned). I was quite surprised to find out that he’s a classical composer and that this is actually his musical forté (maybe even over metal?), although it’s quite obvious in his work that he tries to incorporate his love of metal into this niche, as well as both Western and Asian classical music.
This creates an interesting dynamic. Usually we humans take the old, the established, and try to find ways to keep them fresh, yet grounded in convention. Vasallo does the opposite, taking a tried and true ancient form of music that brought us some of the greatest masterpieces ever written and breathing new life into it by reversing the roles, where the orchestral instrumentation is made a student of the metal. I realize that sentence sounds garbled as fuck, it may not even make much sense, but it’s the best I can do at the moment.
So, in essence, what does metal have to bring to this table? I suppose it should be noted that in my dialogues with Vasallo, death metal seems to really be his thing. So, to rephrase the question, what does death metal offer? What does it capture that’s relevant to these compositions? Continue reading »