(After a two-month break, Father Synn returns to NCS, ready to cleanse you of your manifold metal sins. Prepare to share your putrid failings in the Comments and accept the penance.)

Repent!!! Repent all ye sinners and sodomites!!! Repent and confess, for Father Synn has returned from his long pilgrimage in the vast and godless wilderness, eager to hear your tales of woe and transgression once more.

As always, let mine own flaws and failings be a lantern, leading you along the path of redemption! Continue reading »

a pleasant slumber

Hey there, happy Friday. I got back home late last night after a short out-of-town trip for my fucking day job. I didn’t write anything to post this morning before crawling into bed and sleeping like a dead man. By coincidence, none of our other regular writers sent me anything last night or this morning. So, basically, I got nothing right now.

I do have a very nice album premiere planned for today, but I haven’t finished writing it yet. In the meantime, rather than just have the site sit here with nothing on it except yesterday’s posts (as good as those are), I thought I’d try something out for a change — basically, the idea is to see if you’ll do my work for me.

One thing I haven’t managed to do this week is put together a round-up of new songs and videos. So, what I’d like to propose is this: Continue reading »

You may have noticed that over the last day and a half it has been difficult to connect to our site. You have probably been getting messages that tell you there has been an error establishing a database connection. Sometimes, with persistence, you can get through, and sometimes you can’t. The reason this is happening is… well… fuck if I know!!!

Your humble editor has spent significant amounts of time with our web host’s tech support people, who have given conflicting and inconsistent explanations and no useful advice about how to correct the problem. At one point they thought the issue was caused by the fact that our dedicated web server was running an out-of-date version of the MySQL database software. They upgraded that… and it didn’t help.

Then they informed me that we have been experiencing frequent spikes in the load on the server that it is unable to handle. Initially they had no explanation for that, but later told me that it appears we’re being deluged with spam comments. Our spam filter prevents them from appearing in the Comment sections, but they’re still incapacitating our server — at least that’s the best guess I was offered by those tech support people. Continue reading »

(DGR reviews the new EP by Worse.)

“No, there is nothing”

There’s something under the currents of the latest release by San Francisco-based grind band Worse, To Be Alive Is To Be Alone.

Grind, I’ve hypothesized before, is one of the ultimate plug-and-play genres — loaning itself incredibly well to expulsions of anger and violence. We like to parrot the phrase that a huge chunk of heavy metal’s appeal comes from the cathartic release aspect, and the grind and powerviolence genres remain high on the menu for doing that.

Worse, whose self-titled release I pounded out a review for last year, was a vortex of sound. In that review I compared their release to the sound of someone kicking their instruments down a flight of stairs. To Be Alive Is To Be Alone, is a wholly different beast, one that is more composed, and this time around, more prone to self-harm, and more inwardly explosive than before. Continue reading »