Aliases Archives - NO CLEAN SINGING

SENSELESS RAMBLES – DJENT

Nov 062011

(Ramblings from TheMadIsraeli . . .)

Until yesterday, I’d been a bit scarce around NCS recently, mainly due to illness, school being fucking lame, and the well being rather dry in terms of good shit for me to review. I’ve only got five major reviews on the horizon that I give a damn about at the moment — Vallenfyre, Demisery, Vildhjarta, Vektor and Ever Forthright. So as you probably guessed, this ain’t none of that reviewin’ shit. Instead I’m gonna just talk. Talk about stuff within metal, within the scenes, share my thoughts.

I figured a good start would be to talk about this djent thing. I just reviewed a djent album in Uneven Structure’s Februus (here), and two of my above-mentioned choices for future reviews, Vildhjarta and Ever Forthright, are also djent bands. I know that before I hopped on board with NCS they covered Ever Forthright quite a bit here, though Vildhjarta not so much. Fuck, part of the reason I think I was picked up to write for NCS was to be the designated “djent guy”, since it was an interest of mine outside the tastes I shared with the other writers. So I thought, finally, I might try to collect my thoughts about djent. Continue reading »

ALIASES: “SAFER THAN REALITY”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Aug 072011

(Israel continues to pump out the reviews. Here’s his take on the latest from UK tech-metallers Aliases.)

I love SikTh. I don’t think any band is ever going to be able to recapture the sense of quirkiness and eccentricity they had in their unique sound. People have been waiting for them to reform. It hasn’t happened YET, and I’m more or less reconciled to it never happening. So now what?

Well… one of the masterminds, if not THE mastermind, behind SikTh, guitarist Graham “Pin” Pinney, has formed a new project by the name of Aliases. What is Aliases you ask? The initial reaction would be, most definitely, to brand them as djent, although this isn’t entirely fair. Graham’s signature style of guitar playing is indeed on display here, but the man has obviously evolved beyond his initial roots in SikTh to something, dare I say, more sophisticated.

Aliases is comprised of guitarists Graham and Leah Woodward, Jay Berast on vocals, Darren Pugh on drums, and Joe Heaton on bass. All are extremely proficient at what they do, all definitely in it to win it. So the question is, just how good is the music found on Aliases’ debut, Safer Than Reality?

What do you think? (hold that thought until you see what comes right after the jump) Continue reading »

MORE 2010 SICKNESS (Part 11)

Forthcoming Albums 18 Responses »

Dec 012010

November is now in our rear-view mirror. December lies ahead of us: A perfectly good stretch of road marred by the speed bumps of the cataclysm that is Christmas. And on the other side of those speed bumps is the end of the year – the roadkill that is New Year’s Eve. And you know what the run-up to year-end brings — year-end lists. It’s already started, but the coming weeks will bring us a slew of Best of 2010 album lists. We’ll probably do our own Best of 2010 list — not the best albums of the year, but, as we did last year, the most infectious extreme metal songs of the year.

But we’re not quite ready to launch that list. Instead, we’re looking off into the future, not backward at the music that’s rattled our skulls over the past year. Yes, it’s time for another monthly installment of METAL IN THE FORGE, in which we cobble together a list of forthcoming new albums, cribbing like rag-gatherers and lint-pickers from PR releases and metal news sites like Blabbermouth in order to construct a line-up of new music that we’re interested in hearing.

All of our previous monthly updates can be found via the “Forthcoming Albums” category link on the right side of our pages, and because we’re not keeping a cumulative list, you might want to check the last couple months of these posts if you want to get a full picture of what’s coming. The list that follows, in alphabetical order, are albums we didn’t know about at the time of our last installment, or updated info about albums we’d previously heard were on the way. After the jump, of course . . .