HEAD EXPLOSION: DECAPITATED PREMIERES OFFICIAL VIDEO FOR “HOMO SUM”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 262012
 

The band, playing against a black backdrop, filmed in black and white. The camera, cutting and moving like a hornet swarm. The song, both brutal and hypnotic.

In a nutshell, that’s the brand new video for “Homo Sum”, the fourth track off of Decapitated’s amazing 2011 album, Carnival Is Forever. The video was directed by Marcin Halerz of Redpig Productions.

On an album full of gems, “Homo Sum” has over time become my favorite track. It is the epitome of pummeling, but that guitar solo makes such a striking contrast. When that solo starts, my eyes begin to glaze over and a little drool starts to run down my chin (on both sides, because I am level-headed). And then the pummeling begins again, and I get whiplash. Doesn’t that happen to you, too?

Watch after the jump. Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL 2012 – DAY 3 – DECAPITATED, THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT, WITCHERY, ARCTURUS

 Concert Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 132012
 

(If this stuff weren’t so much fun to read, I’d be murderously jealous. Here’s Andy Synn’s review of the last day at Oslo’s Inferno Festival last weekend. His review of Day 1 is here and the Day 2 review is here. Okay, to be brutally honest, I’m still murderously jealous.)

So here we are at the final entry of my Oslo odyssey.  We spent the last day of our time in Norway exploring Oslo a little more, sampling its fine foods, visiting the art museum, tracking down the infamous Neseblod Record Store (grabbing myself an Antestor EP and two hard to find Urgehal albums in the process) and generally enjoying the fine weather and the experience of being in a foreign city (albeit one which I’ve now visited numerous times). But all good things must come to an end, and thankfully the festival had another stunning night of music left to send us off in good cheer (and with aching necks to boot!).

The rebirth of Decapitated has been one of metal’s most stirring tales of perseverance, returning from the depths of tragedy with a revamped line-up and a sound that builds even further on the group’s base template. Like an armoured tank, they roll unstoppably onwards, stoically bearing the brunt of what life throws at them.

Vogg’s riff-writing and playing style remains utterly unique, his squealing leads careening like a freight train up and down the fretboard, while angular mechanical chugging rhythms pound a cybernetic war drum into your brain. Songs like “404” see the man almost literally torturing his guitar, bleeding bone-scraping noises from his instrument like some demented guitar-wielding surgeon, while a track like “Homo Sum” allows him to flex his more melodically-inclined muscles, eking out eerie lead parts and swirling dis-harmonies amongst the pneumatic, drum-driven carnage.

Talking of drums, there are times tonight when Krimh’s inhuman technique and stamina seem right on the verge of spontaneous combustion, so unnerving is it to hear a single human being produce such an industrial cacophony of noise – people might speak mostly of his impressive ability to handle older material like “Day 69” (including its now infamous mid-song drum-solo) at a standard to match his predecessor, but it’s his work on the newer material that shows just how his style differs, and just what new avenues that will open up for the group in the future. Continue reading »

THEMADISRAELI’S TOP 15 OF 2011: “CARNIVAL IS FOREVER”, “WELCOME TO THE MORBID REICH”, AND “AGONY”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Feb 132012
 

(TheMadIsraeli forges ahead with his mission of reviewing or re-reviewing the albums on his personal list of 2011’s 15 best releases.)

I’m departing from my originally planned two-at-a-time format because grouping these three together seems appropriate to me.

Decapitated went through some hard times.  A van accident ended in the death of one of the most skilled drummers metal has ever seen and left their newly recruited vocalist in a coma (from which, to my knowledge, he still hasn’t recovered), and the remaining members seemingly left Vogg behind.

Who knows what caused Vogg to resist pronouncing the death of the band even though there was virtual silence from them for some time. But the even greater wonder is that Vogg was inspired to get back on the horse after not just being thrown off, but also being run over by a freight train along with the horse.  Was it his way of coping?  Was it just all he knew to do?  Regardless of the answer, it seems that out of a morbid tragedy laden with death and destruction, Decapitated has finally come to form.

Sure, the old shit was good — even great at times — but I would still classify the music as high-caliber standard death metal.  That was until Organic Hallucinosis came out.  It turned Decapitated’s sound upside down and right-side up again and produced a unique take on death metal — more groove-heavy, more experimental, and most importantly, not afraid to take note of modern convention. Continue reading »

THE OPHIDIAN TREK 2012

 Metal News  8 Responses »
Jan 312012
 

Some news about this tour has already trickled out, but I’ve now received an official announcement:  Meshuggah will be following up on the March 27 North American release of Koloss by launching a 19-city NorthAm tour — THE OPHIDIAN TREK 2012. It will begin on April 29 in Houston and conclude on May 23 in New York City.

And as strong as a Meshuggah tour will undoubtedly be, it’s stronger still because Poland’s Decapitated will be the opening act each night, and Baroness will also be in the line-up.

My own feelings were succinctly captured by this quote from Decapitated’s guitarist and founder Vogg: “FUCK YEAH! DECAPITATED with MESHUGGAH! We’re so proud and happy to be part of this amazing tour! It will be a huge honor to share one stage with such a great fuckin’ band! Cannot wait!”

The schedule for the tour is after the jump. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2011’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 7

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011  8 Responses »
Jan 012012
 

This is Part 7 of our list of the most infectious extreme metal songs released this year. 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 Introduction via this link. To see the selections that preceded this one, click the Category link on the right side of the page called MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011.

DECAPITATED

Carnival Is Forever wowed a lot of the folks whose year-end lists we’ve published at NCS. The Demonstealer (Demonic Resurrection) wrote: “The album is brilliant, the guitar playing is phenomenal, and so is the drumming. For me this album sets the benchmark for audio production, it is brutal as fuck but yet so organic.” Exo (Noctem) called it “the result of a brutal procreation between old Decapitated and Meshuggah.” Tamás Kátai (Thy Catafalque) ranked it No. 6 on his list, finding it much better than the band’s older work.

Our own Andy Synn named it one of the year’s Great Albums and rated it No. 5 on his Critical Top 10, writing that it “stands as one of the finest and most intriguing experiences I have had with modern death metal in a long time.” The album also made TheMadIsraeli’s Top 15 for the year and he summed it up this way in his NCS review: “This kicks ass. This destroys universes. This is the purest, blackest, weightiest form of sonic nihilism laid to audio I’ve heard all year.”

The album is indeed deserving of all the praise it’s received here and elsewhere. It’s technical, progressive, brutal, and heavy-grooved all at once. It includes two songs that I put on my “master list” of possibilities for this MOST INFECTIOUS series — “United” and “404”. Continue reading »

THE TOP 10 LIST OF TAMÁS KÁTAI (THY CATAFALQUE)

 Listmania  11 Responses »
Dec 192011
 

(Tamás Kátai is the man behind a Hungarian band called Thy Catafalque, whose fifth album Rengeteg is one of my favorite recordings of the year,  for reasons I’ll be explaining in a forthcoming review. Also, a song from that album will appear soon on our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. So of course, as part of our Listmania series, I asked Tamás to contribute his list of the year’s best albums — and here we have it.)

10. Baaba Kulka – Baaba Kulka

A Polish band with early Iron Maiden covers up to Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son album. Why it’s interesting and worthy of note is that they handle the task with exceptional freedom and taste. My faves are the trip-hopish “Aces High” and the beautifully low-key “Flight Of Icarus”. True Warriors Of Heavy Metal keep out!


Continue reading »

ANDY SYNN’S CRITICAL TOP 10 OF 2011

 Listmania  18 Responses »
Dec 152011
 

(This is the fourth in Andy Synn’s week-long series of posts looking back at albums released this year. Andy previously provided his lists of the year’s Great albums, the Good ones, and the most Disappointing ones, and tomorrow we’ll have his Personal Top 10. Today, we have his list of “The Critical Top 10”. For more explanation of what all this means, plus Andy’s picks for the year’s best EPs, visit this location.)

So here’s the penultimate list of the week, the first of two ranked top-tens. This list will include the albums that I think are the very best of the best, the ones that best combine creativity, artistic ambition, song-writing, and performance. Regardless of my personal feelings and preferences, these are the albums that I think are critically superior to others. Though the ranking of them was difficult (as it always is when trying to compare artists and albums across metallic sub-genres), I’ve tried my best to give a sense about the critical and objective factors that led to each record earning its respective position on this list.

Although the potential candidates for the list were unavoidably influenced by my own listening tastes — I do, after all, only really tend to select the albums that I feel best qualified and most inspired to review – I have done my best to keep personal preference as far away from these judgements as possible, something that I hope will become clear when you see tomorrow how different the list of my top ten “favourite” albums of the year is from today’s list.

So here are the ten releases I think best represent the year critically. The ten that, ultimately, would be my choices to represent the year in metal music for posterity. Some of them have appeared quite commonly on other lists, albeit perhaps weighted differently, while others have largely been ignored by other sources thus far. Enjoy . . . Continue reading »

CATCHING UP

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Oct 222011
 

Because of work-related travel and longer hours than usual this week, I didn’t have time for my usual daily interhole browsing for metal news and new music. So I did that this morning, while listening to the last piece of music in this post. I found a half-dozen items that I thought were well worth sharing, and they’re collected in this post. Almost all of them are new videos, and there’s tremendous diversity in the music. The subjects are Vallenfyre, King Conquer, Devin Townsend (with a new song), Shining, Decapitated, and finally, William Basinski.

And yeah, the meerkats are still secretly controlling the world, according to the NCS lorises. They think they’ve identified the kingpin. I don’t buy this nonsense for a minute, of course, because, really, this one looks way too young to be the kingpin.

VALLENFYRE

In our continuing coverage of Vallenfyre (UK) and their forthcoming album, The Fragile King (due for release on Oct 31 in Europe and Nov 1 in North America), I found a video preview that surfaced yesterday on Metal Injection. It was filmed during the making of a music video for a song from the album called “Cathedrals of Dread” and features comments from each of the band’s members about how this “supergroup” came together and about the genesis of the music. It also includes snippets of the song, which provide further confirmation (though none is needed here) that this album will be a must-hear release.

Our most recent previous posts about Vallenfyre can be found here and here. The video preview is right after the jump. Continue reading »

BE STILL MY BEATING HEART: DECAPITATED, DECREPIT BIRTH, AND FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE ON TOUR!

 Metal News  27 Responses »
Aug 032011
 

I just saw the news about a new tour beginning at the end of September, and I was so excited it nearly gave me heart failure. Our friends at MetalSucks are sponsoring the 2011 CARNIVAL IS FOREVER NORTH AMERICAN TOUR, headlined by Decapitated and including Decrepit Birth, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Rings of Saturn, and The Haarp Machine.

For my tastes, that is just a stupendously strong line-up. Though I haven’t yet heard The Haarp Machine, I will now hunt down their music with interest, and as for the rest of the bands, well I’m not going to make reference to boners or cum because that would be inconsistent with my previously expressed opinions on the use of such words in metal writing. I will just say that something wet has happened and I am unable to stand up.

After the jump you can see the schedule. I believe it is a fine schedule, because it includes a stop in Seattle. Continue reading »

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