The second annual installment of Austin Terror Fest took place in the heart of Texas on June 15-17, 2018, proudly co-sponsored by NCS. It featured performances by 30 bands from around the U.S. (and outside it). It was a great event, and we’re already anxious for ATF 2019 (and yes, work is already under way to present the third edition of the festival next year). We were very fortunate that New Orleans-based photographer Teddie Taylor was there to document the fest through her lenses, and to share her photos with us so that we, in turn, can share them with you.
On Wednesday we presented photos from the first day of the festival, and today the focus is on the performances that took place on the second day, with sets by a dozen bands alternating between indoor and outdoor stages at Barracuda in Austin. And without further ado, here’s our selection from the many great images that Teddie captured during these performances:Continue reading »
For the second year in a row, NCS was proud to co-present Northwest Terror Fest, which took place this year on May 31 – June 2 in Seattle, Washington. Several of us in the NCS family helped organize and present the fest, and I guess that makes us a bit biased, but we’re not the only ones who thought it was a fantastic event. The feedback from bands, fans, and the venues has been uniformly very, very positive — so much so that we and our co-conspirators are already at work planning the third installment of NWTF for 2019.
We will of course be bringing you news about next year’s fest when the time is right, but now we want to take one more look back at NWTF 2018. And to do that, we’ve been fortunate to present some of the amazing photos that New Orleans-based photographer Teddie Taylor took while the festival was in progress. You can see her pics from Day 1here and Day 2here, and what follows are shots of the performances on the festival’s final day.
P.S. As of today, full pro-shot videos of almost all the performances at NWTF 2018 are now live, thanks to our ally Max Volume Silence Live, and you can find all of them HERE.Continue reading »
I’m in Oakland, California, this weekend for the second edition of California Deathfest, which began yesterday afternoon (Friday, October 14, 2016) and continues through Sunday. The photo above captures one of the sights that greeted me this morning a few steps from our waterfront hotel. I’m here with my NCS comrades DGR and BadWolf and some other good Seattle friends, enjoying some mild and occasionally drizzly weather while Seattle is getting beat to hell by a weekend windstorm. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.
Usually when I go to metal festivals I take lots of photos (and more recently videos) and try to write up reports on the performances for the site. This time, before leaving for Oakland, I decided not to do that. I decided I would just devote myself to watching the sets and talking with people and not worry about “work” for NCS. So far I’ve mostly kept to that resolution — but not entirely.Continue reading »
Happy Saturday and infernal hails to one and all. Yesterday, those who care about such things will have noticed that I didn’t post any year-end lists nor did I post a new installment of our 2015 Most Infectious Song list. This doesn’t mean that those year-end series have reached an end. I just got diverted by my fucking day job before I could get them done. I’m shocked, simply shocked, that some people expect me to work for what I’m paid.
We actually are nearing the end of our 2015 LISTMANIA series. I have in hand three lists from current or former members of our staff. I will post those on Monday and Tuesday. I might receive a couple more between now or then from people who told me they planned to send them in. Either way, we’ll finally finish the year-end list extravaganza by the middle of next week. As for the Most Infectious Song roll-out, I’ll catch up on Friday’s omission later today today and then resume the roll-out on Monday.
I’ve also got a lot of new music and videos I plan to throw at you this weekend, beginning with this post and continuing with one tomorrow. This post includes one new song and three new videos, all of which appeared yesterday — and thanks to DGR for alerting me to them. Because my fucking day job is compelling me to work even today, I don’t have time to introduce these with my usual garbled verbiage (please hold your applause). Somehow, you’ll have to figure out what these sound and look like on your own.Continue reading »
I have so much new music I’d like to tell you about, but not enough time for all the telling. Not for the first time, I thought about giving the tracks to the loris horde and letting them do the write-ups. Not for the first time, I came to my senses before it was too late. I’d still be waiting for their work product this time next year. So, with a sigh, I’ve randomly picked new music from four bands for now, and hope to write about more tomorrow (assuming I can finish a review I’m scribbling about something very surprising).
BAPHOMET’S BLOOD
On Saturday, Iron Bonehead Productions announced that on January 25, 2016, they will release a vinyl version of a new album by Italy’s Baphomet’s Blood. This is the band’s fourth album, and their first one in nearly seven years, and its name is In Satan We Trust. On they same day, we got the first advance track to stream, a whiskey-fueled rocker named… “Whiskey Rocker”.Continue reading »
Went out on the town last night with a bunch of good people to celebrate a friend’s 30th birthday. Had a blast, and got blasted. Today I feel like a demolition crew is excavating my fuckin’ head with dynamite. Honestly, listening to any kind of intense music right now isn’t an appealing idea. If there’s going to be any music in my near-future, it will be something like Hammock, a band Phro introduced me to. I’m guessing he must have been really hungover when he did that.
But even though I can’t bring myself to add any musical dynamite to the blasting that’s already going on in my cranium, I do want to contribute something to the blog today. So here’s how this will work: I saw three items this morning that I’m guessing are really good, but I can’t bring myself to listen to them. So do me a favor, will you? Leave a comment and let me know if my guesses are right or wrong.
ANTESTOR
This is a coincidence. Just yesterday we posted the milestone 30th edition of Andy Synn’s SYNN REPORT, the subject of which was the discography of Norway’s Antestor. We also reported that Antestor had recorded a new album entitled Omen — their first one in seven years — and that it’s scheduled for release on November 30, and that it uses a painting by NCS favorite Zdzisław Beksiński for the album cover. And here’s the coincidence: Today the band started streaming a track from the new album called “Unchained”.Continue reading »
I just wrote that post title in order to get your attention. I can’t really make you pick one. You could pick both, or neither. Actually, I could make you pick, because I know about that thing you did over the weekend that left a trace on your computer, but I’m not a bad guy, so you get a pass.
But here’s the choice:
HATEBREED
Hatebreed have recorded a new studio album, The Divinity Of Purpose, which is now scheduled for release by Razor & Tie on January 29, 2013, in North America and on January 25 in Europe. Of course, it comes out earlier in Europe because Hatebreed are a European band. I’m sorry, what did you say? They’re not a European band? Well then, what the fuck is up with those release dates? I think maybe you need to double-check your facts.
In addition to announcing the release info, Hatebreed also revealed the album’s cover art (above), which was created by one of my favorite artists, Eliran Kantor. I’d like to study this artwork without the Hatebreed logo, and I’m curious about how it relates to the lyrical content of the album, particularly in light of the album’s title.
But I have to say that otherwise I’m having kind of a meh feeling about this news. When Hatebreed were a relatively new band, I thought they were hot shit. I’ve cooled considerably on them since then. Should I be getting more excited about this? Are you?
In 2005, Relapse Records released a double-CD album by Agoraphobic Nosebleed titled Bestial Machinery. It collected all of the band’s recorded material before their Relapse debut, Honkey Reduction, including tracks from the Agoraphobic Nosebleed splits with Cattlepress, Laceration, and Enemy Soil, plus out of print material and previously unreleased tracks.
Now, if you’re unfamiliar with ANb, it is the mutated offspring of the infernally talented Scott Hull (Pig Destroyer) and a drum machine from Hell. The rest of the line-up (mainly vocalists) has varied over time, and I don’t think the current group was around when the material on Bestial Machinery was recorded. And what’s on Bestial Machinery is a rampaging cybernetic grindfreak on steroids, just as violent and otherworldly as Florian Bertmer’s magnificent album cover.
The main reason I’m posting about an album that’s now about seven years old is that I just discovered that it’s available for download on Bandcamp. I’m not sure how long it’s been there, but I think the addition is pretty recent.
Also, I’m posting about it because the album consists of . . . wait for it . . . 136 tracks!!! Now, a bunch of the songs are less than 10 seconds long, and the vast majority clock in under a minute, but still.
I can’t resist embedding all 136 tracks here at NCS, because that’s what having the album on Bandcamp permits me to do. The player is after the jump. Go listen and get fucked hard in the head. Should you choose to buy the album, you may do so HERE.Continue reading »
So, yesterday we threw together a hodge-podge of new music and videos that proved very diverting to us, and maybe to you, too. And then, in an awesome display of synchronicity — or serendipity, or kismet, or some other word that’s supposed to signify things that are coincidental but maybe were meant to happen — more new music appeared on our NCS radar screen, as if sent from an all-knowing über-mind that tracks and understands the strange and twisted paths of our neural connectivity.
Here’s how this happened. One of the bands we included in yesterday’s post was Outcast, from France, and their new song “Elements”. The music put us in mind of some other bands, one of which (as we said) was Tardive Dyskinesia — a Greek band whose music we’ve been hooked on for a while. And then the next thing we knew, we got an e-mail from none other than Tardive Dyskinesia giving us (and everyone else in the world) an entire live album to download for nothing, nada, bupkis. Fuck.
And that was just the start. We then got another e-mail telling us that one of our grindcore gods, Agoraphobic Nosebleed, had put up two new songs from a split they’ve done with a band called Despise You. Fuck.
And then we got another e-mail from Misha, the vocalist/guitarist for Akelei (a Dutch band whose very impressive 2010 debut album we reviewed here) asking us to check out Carceri, a death-metal band in which Misha’s brother Josha is the drummer, and in which Misha also used to play. In his e-mail, he used words like “fast”, “brutal”, “technical”, and made reference to “twisted lyrics”. Fuck. That pushed all the right buttons for me. And there you have the story of how today’s post took shape. (more after the jump . . .)Continue reading »
Scott Hull is a fascinating dude. He’s the guitarist and producer for the blazingly awesome Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed. He’s an incredibly knowledgeable observer of the most remote corners of the underground metal scene. He’s smart as a whip and very articulate. He works as an IT specialist when he isn’t creating furious, brain-scrambling music. He’s a father and he lives in a nice suburban home in the D.C. area.
If you’ve got more time to burn after you finish this post, you oughta read the feature on Hull, Pig Destroyer, and the grind scene that was published, of all places, in The Washington Post‘s Sunday magazine last August. It’s fascinating to read a non-metalhead reporter’s peak inside the world of a band like Pig Destroyer, trying to describe the experience for the kind of people who read The Washington Post (i.e., people unlike you and me) (“As the band ripped into the first song, I had the sensation of standing under a bridge as it was being torn apart.”) It’s long, but worth reading through to the very end. Check it out here.
In 2008, Hull pulled together a collection of music from multiple underground bands and brilliantly named it This Comp Kills Fascists. It featured material from acts like Insect Warfare, Magrudergrind, Weekend Nachos, and Kill the Client, as well as the first new music in more than a decade from legendary grind militia Brutal Truth. It served as something of a launching pad for the careers of all those bands and more. It included 51 tracks of music from 14 collectives.
Now, Hull has done it again, with This Comp Kills Fascists 2 — except more so. The new compilation is set for a June 28 release on Relapse Records and is available for pre-order at this location. It’s an international grab-bag of brain-coring grindcore, powerviolence, hardcore, and metal from bands you’ve probably never heard of — 19 of them to be precise, playing 74 tracks of music. That video at the top of this post is a trailer for the album, and after the jump, we’ve got more news about the project — and a widget that will allow you to stream the whole ear-bleeding thing right here.Continue reading »
