SEEN AND HEARD: AT THE GATES AND ANAAL NATHRAKH

 Metal News  2 Responses »
Aug 212014
 

 

We have three music premieres coming your way today, but before we begin rolling them out, here are a couple of quick notes that caught my eye this morning.

AT THE GATES

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know by now that Sweden’s At the Gates have recorded a comeback album entitled At War With Reality that’s due for release by Century Media on October 27th in Europe and October 28th in North America. Today the band revealed the cover art for the album (above), which was created by one of our favorite metal artists, Costin Chioreanu (twilight13media.com). As for the relationship between the art and the album, and how Chioreanu came to be involved in the project, we received a press release that included these statements.

From AtG vocalist/lyricist Tomas Lindberg:

“The concept of At War with Reality is based on the literary genre called ‘Magic Realism’. The main style within this genre is the notion that ‘reality’ is ever-changing, and needs to be constantly re-discovered and re-conquered. We felt that Costin’s artwork style would be the perfect visual contribution to this album, so he became the natural choice…” Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: EMPTINESS, ANCESTORS BLOOD, AND ANAAL NATHRAKH WITH NIKLAS KVARFORTH

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Aug 192013
 

This is the second of two posts in which I’ve collected music I found last night in my searches for new things that would help put me in the right frame of mind for the new week. And by “right frame of mind”, I mean “take no prisoners”. Because it’s a goddamned Monday and I knew I would be feeling mean as soon as I saw the light of the new day. I’ve learned through experience that I do better adding fuel to that fire than trying to get in a compliant, accepting, quietly seething mood.

EMPTINESS

I found out about this Belgian band, which includes two members of  the excellent Enthroned, via a recent post on CVLT Nation. Their most recent album is 2012’s Error on the Dark Descent label, though they are now writing new songs. Error is available for streaming on Bandcamp, so I embarked on this phase of my listening session by starting at the beginning of it. Because my mission for the night was to sample a lot of bands I had heard about, I didn’t make my way through the entire album. But I did listen to the first five songs (which is four more than I intended to hear), and man was I floored by them.

The music is difficult to describe, drawing from a multitude of genres but with a healthy helping of death/doom, black metal, and sludge. The sound is deeply corrosive and destructive, a howling, vicious maelstrom of sound and fury. It’s massively heavy and violent, and choked with the black ichor of doom. Yet the songs include hugely compelling riffs and attractive melodies, and all of the instrumental performances are dynamic and technically excellent. Continue reading »

PURE AUDIO DESTRUCTION: ANAAL NATHRAKH LIVE AT ROSKILDE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jul 142013
 

On July 6, 2013, Britain’s Anaal Nathrakh played the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. The entire set was streamed live over the internet and it was filmed for posterity as well. The band received a DVD of the show and they’ve been “tweaking” the footage to improve the audio and alter the visual appearance a bit. Tonight they uploaded the first clip to YouTube, and more will be coming.

The first clip is the very beginning of the set and includes “Drug-Fucking Abomination” from their 2011 album Passion. The visuals have been given a kind of grainy, sepia-toned quality, which looks very cool. The sound is just absolutely obliterating.

For those of you unfamiliar with AN, this is a good example of the band’s cross-genre conflagration, and an introduction to the four different vocalists who live in Dave Hunt’s body. For those who are already fans, you’re gonna love this.

There is only one way to listen to the clip — VERY FUCKING LOUD. Boost that volume ’til the goo comes out your ears and you feel your internal organs beginning to liquify. Watch and listen/liquify after the jump. Continue reading »

TOURISM AND DE-TOURISM

 Metal News  2 Responses »
Jun 222013
 

Happy fucking Saturday to one and all. In this post I’ve collected information about a random assortment of new tours that have recently been announced. But first, I have to mention a tour that it seems was announced a bit prematurely.

FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE – ANAAL NATHRAKH?

Two days ago it was announced that Fleshgod Apocalypse would be leading ‘The Lords Of Extremity Tour‘ in the UK this October, with support from Anaal Nathrakh, Bound By Exile, and Scordatura. There were press releases, official-looking poster art, and sponsorship by the likes of Nuclear Blast and Terrorizer. And who in their right mind would miss the chance to see Fleshgod Apocalypze and Anaal Nathrakh on the same bill?

There was just this one little problem. Here’s a statement that appeared on Anaal Nathrakh’s Facebook page about 3 hours ago:

“For anyone hoping to see us in the UK in October: It appears we have been announced for a string of UK dates with Fleshgod Apocalypse in October. We did NOT agree to play these shows. Repeat: at no point have we ever said that we would play these dates, or that Mick would even be in Europe at the time. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2012’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 2

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2012  12 Responses »
Dec 292012
 

This is Part 2 of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. Each day until the list is finished, I’m posting two songs that made the cut. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the two we’re announcing today, click this link.

Picking the songs for this list is hard, but deciding how to pair them for these daily posts is a bit of a kick. It provides an opportunity for some small amount of creativity, which is the amount that I have. A small amount.

Sometimes, my creativity may be reflected in nothing more than pairing two bands who happen to be from the same country, or whose names begin with the same letter (see above re small amount of creativity). Sometimes, the two songs may be paired because of the musical contrast between them. And sometimes, they might be grouped together because there’s some kind of kinship the music shares — and that’s what’s going on today.

CATTLE DECAPITATION

As in the case of our first two song selections, this one comes from an album that was a big hit at NCS (see our review here). Of course, it was a big hit just about anywhere you looked this year, and it’s now popping up on tons of year-end lists, including our own. To quote from our latest list posted earlier today, Monolith of Inhumanity is “a bona fide classic”. Continue reading »

FIVE OF MY FAVOURITE . . .UNEXPECTED COVERS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Oct 172012
 

(UK-based NCS scribe Andy Synn makes an appearance with another five-fold list of “favourite” things.  Such wasteful use of vowels.)

I realise I’ve been off the grid for a bit now (though I am working on some reviews, a 30th edition of The Synn Report, and an awesome interview) so in between balancing all that, work pressures, and 2 bands, I thought I’d drop you another irreverent column on five of my favourite things.

 

BEFORE THE DAWN – BITTER END (PLACEBO COVER)

Such an odd choice, but one which works perfectly, taking the darkly gothic atmosphere of the original and replacing its more pop orientation with some heavy metal riffage and a meaty drumming backbone. The vocal interplay is also sublime, the predominant clean croons matched with a bullish, anguished growl from Tuomas Saukkonen. Continue reading »

ANAAL NATHRAKH: “VANITAS”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Sep 282012
 

(Andy Synn reviews the highly anticipated new album by the UK’s Anaal Nathrakh.)

“The more things change, the more they stay the same“ is usually used in a negative context. Not here. The consummate ease with which Anaal Nathrakh vomit up quality album after quality album, all without straying too far from their core sound, makes that statement one of unshakeable intent, reaffirming the band’s commitment to sheer sonic superiority.

It takes a masterful band to truly embrace their sound and continue to push it for all it is worth, without falling into a comfortable rut or succumbing to the lure of the ‘new’, but Anaal Nathrakh have always been anything but comfortable. Masters of the lethal musical arts, with each album their unholy fusion of blackened fury, grinding filth, and industrial-strength death metal power is re-tooled and reworked to further plumb the depths of humanity.

With Vanitas Anaal Nathrakh have produced their most melodic, yet also most blackened, record in years, with a heavier focus on intense, virulent remolo melodies and bleak, haunting moodscapes. Closest in character to Eschaton, the main touchstone for the music is the work and sound of Emperor; the soaring, almost arrogant, clean vocals recalling Ihsahn at his finest, while their juxtaposition against flaming torrents of scalding riffage and twisted, contorted song structures echoes a similar ability to effortlessly strike multiple targets at once – the melodic, the blistering, and the crushingly heavy – without weakness or hesitation. Continue reading »

ANAAL NATHRAKH RELEASE THE FIRST SINGLE FROM “VANITAS”: “OF FIRE AND FUCKING PIGS”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  18 Responses »
Sep 252012
 

Candlelight Records will be releasing Anaal Nathrakh’s new album on October 15. Its name is Vanitas. Earlier in September, Candlelight released a teaser clip of samples from the album (which we featured here). A few hours ago a single from the album appeared on the UK version of iTunes. Its name is “Of Fire and Fucking Pigs”, which is an evocative song title if there ever was one.

There was no fanfare about the release of this single, as far as I can tell. No advance announcement. No press release. And no official song stream of the song. I found out about it through posts on the Facebook pages of Candlelight and the band. I presume there will be a press blast later this morning.

Unfortunately, for now the song can only be downloaded by denizens of the UK — and those denizens can go here to do that. However, the interhole being the interhole, someone has procured the track and uploaded it to YouTube. This may not last long, so you might want to catch it quick — after the jump. By the way, the song is stupendous.

UPDATE! AN also just announced a Canadian tour — details after the jump. Continue reading »

THE LATEST MESSAGES FROM HELL: AN ANAAL NATHRAKH “VANITAS” TEASER AND “WIDOWMAKER” IS ABOUT TO BE DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  19 Responses »
Sep 052012
 

The two items in this post both appeared this morning. I thought their near-simultaneous appearance was ominous, as if constituting a kind of queasiness-inducing evidence that there really are Great Old Ones in the Earth, and they are beginning to rouse themselves from their slumbers.

Both Anaal Nathrakh and Dragged Into Sunlight are from the UK, they are both favorites of this site, and they both create brilliant, hellish, obliterating music — though not of the same kind. As I wrote the last time we paired news from these bands together, “Anaal Nathrakh give you a nightmarish rocket-ride into the abyss, and Dragged Into Sunlight trap you there in a vat of acid sludge that slowly liquifies your flesh.” Here’s the latest news from both bands:

ANAAL NATHRAKH

As we reported four days ago (here), Candlelight Records will be releasing Anaal Nathrakh’s new album on October 15. Its name is Vanitas, and for that earlier post we even managed to find a small image of the album cover (which has now “officially” surfaced on the band’s Facebook page).

As of this morning we now have a teaser clip of music from the album. It’s harrowing stuff (and we would expect nothing less) — a catastrophic blast of infernal grind that sounds terrifically pissed off; the vocals are intense, even by Dave Hunt’s previous standards. Check it out next: Continue reading »

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