AN NCS PREMIERE: KRIEG — “RETURN FIRE” (AND A REVIEW OF “TRANSIENT”)

 Album Reviews, Premieres  5 Responses »
Aug 192014
 

 

There’s a song premiere at the end of this post. It’s a really good song. Those of you who are squeezed for time or afflicted with attention deficit disorder, I won’t blame you if you jump to the bottom and press Play. But I’m going to have my say about the whole album, because Transient is one of the most interesting I’ve heard in 2014. It might even be the best album Krieg has yet produced in a career that’s coming up on two decades. And if you think that any one song on this album will faithfully represent all the rest, even the one we’re premiering, you might want to read on.

Increasing age is a double-edged sword for all of us, and it’s a particularly unpredictable blade for musicians, one that’s just as liable to cause self-inflicted wounds as to carve new trails through the underbrush. On the one hand, skills can improve and the accumulation of life experiences can add maturity and new depth to an artist’s creativity. But goddamn, it can also make you boring, or lazy, or both. Some bands are content to tread water, some of them try to force-feed a fire that died out long ago, and the sparks sputter instead of blaze. Transient is about the furthest thing you could imagine from that.

Neill Jameson (aka Imperial), the man behind Krieg, cemented his place in the black metal underground a long time ago. He’s older now. By the sounds of Transient, he might not be any happier, but he sure as hell isn’t treading water. What he’s done instead is to feed the smoldering fires of the black metal vehemence he has tended so well with an array of new and different fuels, producing flames of different colors, though the overarching emotional hue of the album as a whole is still mostly bleak, blasted, and broken. Continue reading »

KRIEG: “ORDER OF THE SOLITARY ROAD”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Aug 012014
 

I’m about to get really high. I’m guessing 35,000 feet once the plane takes off and reaches cruising altitude. I’m hoping it will land in Denver instead of disappearing. There seems to be a lot of that these days. If it doesn’t land, I’ll miss Denver Black Sky and this post will be my epitaph.

I intended to include more than just one song in this post, but one is all I’ve got time for before I have to run the TSA gauntlet at Sea-Tac Airport. So I’m going with Krieg.

KRIEG

Krieg’s new album is named Transient. It’s coming out September 2 on Candlelight. I haven’t heard it yet, but some of the people at Decibel have, and they say it’s “killer”. They say it’s Krieg taking their music to its “next logical place” — “further down the rat hole of desperation, frustration, and monochromatic hate.”

They said that by way of introducing their premiere of the first song from the album, “Order of the Solitary Road”. I don’t know about the rest of the album yet, but yessir, this song is killer. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KRIEG — “WORTHLESS NOTHING”

 Premieres  6 Responses »
Jun 252014
 

On July 15, Unholy Anarchy Records will release a four-song split by Krieg and Ramlord, and today we’re delighted to premiere one of Krieg’s two tracks, “Worthless Nothing” — a cover of a song from the 1993 LP The Greatest Invention by the seminal UK crust band Doom.

As I wrote in my recent review of this excellent split, Krieg’s decision to cover this particular song makes perfect sense in the context of this release. It’s a natural pairing with both Krieg’s other song, an original composition named “Mocking Dead Empires”, and the blackened crust-punk assaults mounted by Ramlord. “Worthless Nothing” drives hard and fast, propelled by a combination of virally infectious jumping riffs and doused in acid by one of the best voices in US black metal.

Krieg long ago cemented its place as one of the cornerstone bands of black metal in the U.S. After two decades in the trenches, Krieg has nothing left to prove — but the creative fires are obviously still burning hot and bright. Listening to Krieg turn back the clock to the spawning grounds of crust while putting the band’s own vicious stamp on the sound is proof of that, and it’s also an enticing tease for the Krieg full-length (Transient) that’s expected later this year. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: A WOLVHAMMER-KRIEG SPLIT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jun 242014
 

Two of my most highly anticipated 2014 albums are Crawling Into Black Sun by Wolvhammer (due for release by Profound Lore on July 8) and Transient by Krieg (coming from Candlelight Records in September). And today Broken Limbs Recordings has released a split by both of those bands that just provides more reasons to get stoked for the coming albums.

WOLVHAMMER

Wolvhammer’s contribution to the split is “Slaves To the Grime”, an alternate version of a track that will appear on Crawling Into Black Sun.

I’ve heard the album version, which is a standout song — a body-moving bulldozer of concrete-heavy riffs and vocals that are acid enough to etch glass, with other alternating segments that lumber into a sludgy, soul-sucking abyss and gallop like a hell-horse. The version on the split is, if anything, even more thoroughly pulverizing. The production gives it a thoroughly radioactive quality, and it’s shot through with bolts of squealing, squalling lead guitar, like that crazy part of your brain trying to get out of its prison. And man, when it hits those doomed, dragging segments, it falls like granite blocks dropped from a great height.

Truth be told, I like this version even more than the album track (and I’ve been a big fan of that one since the first listen) — completely crushing, but also infectious enough to warrant a call to the Center for Disease Control. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: NEILL JAMESON (IMPERIAL) OF TWILIGHT, KRIEG

 Interviews  6 Responses »
Mar 042014
 

(NCS writer BadWolf interviewed Neill Jameson of Krieg and Twilight, whose third and final album is due for release in a couple of weeks. To say it’s a wide-ranging, no-holds-barred discussion would be an understatement. You don’t want to miss this.) 

When it comes to the US Black Metal movement, few individual musicians have made as much of a splash as Neill Jameson. He released his first demo tape as Imperial in 1995—just a year after Mayhem’s De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas. In the nearly twenty years since, Jameson has produced raw and honest “bedroom” black metal as the sole member of Krieg. Many consider his 2004 LP The Black House to be essential USBM listening. There will be a new Krieg album this year on Candlelight, but first Jameson needs to live through the press cycle for the third Twilight album, III: Beneath Trident’s Tomb.

Jameson had his hands full recording III, dealing with a rotating cast of characters. Twilight has been blighted by negative media attention since the arrest of founding member Blake Judd (also of Nachtmystium). Judd is now out of the band, but Thurston Moore of esteemed noise-punk outfit Sonic Youth is in. Alongside them stands super-producer Sanford Parker, as well as Stavros Giannopoulos of The Atlas Moth and Wrest of Leviathan. These five musicians are giving Twilight the swansong the project deserves.

Jameson took time out of his busy schedule as proprietor of a record store (the man’s Facebook posts, often putting his own customers on blast, are among the funniest you’ll read) to talk with NCS about the tumultuous story of Twilight, from beginning to end. Continue reading »

THE LATEST WORD IN THE COLD HARD TRUTH (FROM CHRIS GRIGG)

 Mosh Pit  44 Responses »
Nov 022012
 

After the nearly three years since I started NO CLEAN SINGING, what I know about the economics of extreme metal has multiplied by orders of magnitude. There are two caveats that go along with this statement:

First, when I started this blog what I knew about the economics of extreme metal wouldn’t fill an ant’s ass, so what I know now is all relative to that barren starting point.  Second, since I’m not a musician, a producer, a promoter, or involved in running a label, even what I know now is second-hand, incomplete, and undoubtedly inaccurate in at least some respects. My learning has come from a lot of reading and a fair number of discussions with musicians, but that still ain’t the same as living the life. I watch, while others do.

I’m still curious and I’m still trying to learn. My latest bit of learning comes from a long piece written by Chris Grigg, posted on his personal blog last night. Chris Grigg is the founder, vocalist, and guitarist for Woe, a Philadelphia-based black metal band that also includes members of Rumpelstiltskin Grinder. Their last album, Quietly, Undramatically, was released by Candlelight Records in 2010 and they’re working on a new one now. Chris has also been involved with Krieg and The Green Evening Requiem as well as a grindcore outfit named Unrest.

Chris Grigg also runs a recording studio and holds down a full-time job with an IT services company.

In the article I read — which is entitled “The Music Industry Is A Fucking Pit” — he explains in detail why independent musicians do not make money, and who does. He summarizes his thesis thusly:

The music industry, as it has existed to date, is a fucking pit. It is a dead-end. Anyone who expects to play rock music in 2012, follow all the old rules about touring full time and signing with a label and all that shit, AND live off of it is living in a dreamworld because by the time the purse floats down to the bottom of the river, everyone along the way has reached in and taken their share. There is nothing left for you. 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 . . .

Continue reading »

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