IN THE NEWS: DAMNATION FEST, A NAPALM SAMPLER, HIGH ON FIRE, AND KRALLICE

 Metal News  No Responses »
Jul 162012
 

Here are some things I saw while having my morning coffee. Wonder what the rest of the day will bring?

DAMNATION FESTIVAL 2012

This thing is scheduled to go off in Leeds (UK) on November 3.  Festival organizers had previously announced some of the bands, but a group of new eye-catching names were revealed today — and this list still isn’t finished. But as it now stands, this festival looks amazing, and talk about diversity!  Electric Wizard, My Dying Bride, Pig Destroyer (in their first UK show in 8 years), Primordial, Bossk, Belphegor, Extreme Noise Terror, Aura Noir, Textures, Devil Sold His Soul, Gama Bomb, 40 Watt Sun, and Wodensthrone.

For you lucky fuckers who are able to be in Leeds on November 3, go here for more info.

FREE NAPALM SAMPLER

Napalm Records has compiled a free sampler of music from their stable of artists. For my tastes, it’s a mixed bag, but it includes some winners as well as some bands whose music I’ve never heard, and therefore it offers some intrigue. Also, it’s free. To see the list and find out how to get the sampler, go past the jump. Continue reading »

HIGH ON FIRE: “DE VERMIS MYSTERIIS”

 Album Reviews  15 Responses »
Apr 162012
 


(Our guest groverXIII (ex-TNOTB) reviews the new album by High On Fire, which is out now on eOne Music.)

I’ve been trying to figure out a good way to review High On Fire’s De Vermis Mysteriis for a couple of weeks now, ever since Islander asked me to take a crack at it. I’m not really sure why it’s taken me so long. I mean, I loved Snakes For The Divine, this album’s predecessor, and really, High On Fire are probably the biggest name in stoner metal nowadays. And yet, something about De Vermis Mysteriis just failed to grab me the way that Snakes For The Divine did.

It’s fair to say that this album will be a bit of a divisive one for High On Fire’s fanbase, perhaps even more so than the previous one. Let me backtrack a bit. High On Fire was formed out of the ashes of stoner/doom legends Sleep by guitarist Matt Pike, while Sleep’s bassist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius went on to form Om. High On Fire developed a pretty solid following with its first four albums: The Art Of Self Defense, Surrounded By Thieves, Blessed Black Wings, and Death Is This Communion.

2010’s Snakes For The Divine, however, brought a change in labels (from Relapse to E1) and in sound, courtesy of much-maligned producer Greg Fidelman, best known for his clip-tastic contributions to Metallica’s Death Magnetic. Fidelman brought a new clarity to High On Fire’s sound, clearing away some (but not all) of the fuzz and dividing the fanbase between those who disliked the new sound and those who liked it. Snakes was certainly the album that took High On Fire’s profile to new heights, bringing in a large number of new fans, all of whom had to be heavily anticipating its follow-up.

And that brings me back to De Vermis Mysteriis. Continue reading »

TUNE-UP: NEW JAMS FROM HOUR OF PENANCE, ENTHRONED, HIGH ON FIRE, FOUL BODY AUTOPSY, AND JEFF LOOMIS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 012012
 

Lots of new music relevant to my interests debuted yesterday. Because it interests me, I presume that it will interest you, because of course if something is interesting to me it will necessarily interest you simply because I find it interesting. If you disagree with that statement, please keep it to yourself so that I can retain my high opinion of myself.

Because this post includes so much music, I will attempt to keep my verbal diarrhea in check by using the patented NCS butt plug, figuratively speaking of course. Not literally. Literally, I’ll limit my song descriptions to two words each.

HOUR OF PENANCE

We previously featured the artwork for this Italian band’s new album. It will be called Sedition and will be released on March 27 in North America, April 2 in the U.K., and April 6 in mainland Europe via Prosthetic Records.

HoP will be following the release of Sedition with a North American tour — their first — which will be headlined by The Black Dahlia Murder and will also include Nile and Skeletonwitch. I already climbed out on a limb and predicted that this will blow up Hour of Penance in North America much as their fellow Romans in Fleshgod Apocalypse blew up through NorthAm touring in the wake of last year’s Agony.

Now we’ve got the first track from Sedition:, which Terrorizer premiered yesterday: Bone splintering. Continue reading »

NCS NEWS ROUND-UP: ASPHYX, HIGH ON FIRE, 7 HORNS 7 EYES, AND BEHEMOTH

 Metal News  1 Response »
Feb 232012
 

Quite a few news items were delivered to the NCS Island today via carrier pigeons, which are our preferred mode of news transportation. Unfortunately, a few of the pigeons dived left when they should have dived right and landed in the loris compound, where they were unceremoniously converted into squab tartare. We’ll never know what important messages those brave aeronauts were carrying. But the ones who made it safely to the NCS editorial offices revealed the following:

ASPHYX

Yours truly can testify that the new Asphyx album Deathhammer is a delicious serving of primal death-doom with more hooks than you’ll find in this guy. But you don’t have to take my word for it, because DECIBEL has started streaming the whole album here.

HIGH ON FIRE

High On Fire’s new studio album De Vermis Mysteriis has now been scheduled for an April 3 release by eOne Music. It was recorded in Salem, Massachusetts’ GodCity Studios with producer and Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou. The album title apparently comes from a fictional grimoire created by Psycho author Robert Bloch and incorporated by H. P. Lovecraft into the lore of the Cthulhu mythos.

According to the press release I got, “The album carries a deeply mystical undercurrent, incorporating fantastical themes and lyrics detailing, among other things, time travel, a serum called liao that is made out of a black lotus, and ‘a Jesus twin who can see the past through his ancestors’ eyes.'” However, portions of the release were obscured by pigeon dung, so I can’t swear I got the Jesus twin thing right. Continue reading »

2012: METAL IN THE FORGE (Part 1)

 Forthcoming Albums  28 Responses »
Jan 062012
 

December and 2011 are both over, and with the end of the last month, it’s time to round up what we saw over the last 30 days about forthcoming albums.

We usually try to post these updates on the first of the month, but the first of this month was New year’s Day, and I was moving kinda slowly that day. Plus, I’ve been focusing on year-end lists from a variety of sources, and, well, I’m late with this. I have more excuses, if you’d like to hear them.  No?  Okay, I understand.  I’ll just shut up and get going with this list.

So, here’s the deal:  In these METAL IN THE FORGE posts, I collect news blurbs and press releases I’ve seen over the last month about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like at NCS (including occasional updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know their music yet. In this series, we cut and paste those announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

Remember — THIS ISN’T A CUMULATIVE LIST. If we found out about a new forthcoming album before December, we wrote about it in previous installments of this series. So, be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported earlier.

This month’s list begins right after the jump. It includes some real eye-openers. In fact, it’s not too soon to say that 2012 is already looking like yet another royally skull-fucking year for metal. But as usual, this list is half-assed rather than comprehensive. I confess that in December I was even more half-assed than usual in keeping my eyes open for news about new albums. So, feel free to leave Comments and tell all of us what I missed when I put this list together. Let us know about albums on the way that  you’re stoked about, even if you don’t see them here! Continue reading »

SONG NAME FODDER

 Band Name Fodder  2 Responses »
Jan 192010
 

Every now and then we’ve told you about a word or phrase we’ve stumbled upon that has nothing to do with metal, but sounds exactly like it oughta be the name of an extreme metal band. We’ve stuck those posts under the category of “Band Name Fodder.” Now we’ve stumbled across something new: words and phrases that have nothing to do with metal but sound like they could be the names of brutal songs.

You know the kind of song titles we’re talking about — the kind that at first blush (and sometimes second and third blushes) make no sense, but just sound really evil, uncompromising, and vicious.  Songs like:

“Carrion Sculpted Entity” (Cannibal Corpse), “Megacosm of the Aquaphobics” (Cephalic Carnage), “Postmortal Coprophagia” (Devourment), “Prosthetic Erection” (Annotations of An Autopsy), “Diaboloical Submergence of Rebirth” (Goatwhore), “Intestinal Putrefaction” (Abominable Putridity), “Pestiferous Subterfuge” (Aborted), “Gestation of Malevolence” (Abysmal Torment), “Cyclopian Scape” (High On Fire), “Ceremonian Disembowelment” (Impetuous Ritual), “Gestated Human Slurry” (Infected Disarray), “Damnation Pentastrike” (Lightning Swords of Death), “Into the Qliphot of Golachab” (Malfeitor), “Fermented Offal Discharge” (Necrophagist), “Postmortem Dissection” (The Pathology), “Cataclysmic Purification” (Suffocation), “Contemporary Perception Narcotics” (Trigger the Bloodshed), “Cranial Media Parasite” (Magrudergrind). And so on.

Well, just in case the well runs dry for bands like these (or they lose their thesaurus), we’ve found a gold mine of source material. (see what we’ve discovered after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

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