AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LORD GORE — “SCALPELS FOR BLIND SURGEONS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Aug 062019
 

 

Think back to 2004, if you can. It was the year when Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, when Suddam Hussein was tried in Iraq for war crimes, when the summer Olympics were held in Athens, when Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, when Ray Charles died, Dimebag Darrell was murdered, and George W. Bush was elected President for a second term. Most relevant for present purposes, it was the year of Lord Gore’s last album before a lengthy hiatus.

Some bands should not attempt to revive themselves after nearly 15 years of silence. But we’re all better off because Lord Gore chose to do so. Their first album after that long slumber, Scalpels For Blind Surgeons, is, without exaggeration, the best thing they’ve ever done in an interrupted career that goes back to the ’90s. It’s also one of the most explosive, electrifying — and unabashedly ghastly — death metal albums you’ll hear this year. It will be released at the end of this week by Everlasting Spew Records, but it’s our ghoulish pleasure to bring you a full stream of all 11 tracks today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LORD GORE — “DAUDISKEGG”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Jul 052019
 

 

When DECIBEL premiered the first advance track off the first Lord Gore album in 15 years, the band introduced themselves to people who might still have been in diapers at the time of that last record: “Lord Gore is a pathogenic, mutated amalgam of deranged individuals who have produced grind and death metal in many bands from the Pacific Northwest since the mid-90s”. And who are these people? Gaze upon the line-up if you don’t already know:

Gurge – Eschatonic Ululations & Fugue-state strangulation inhales
Maniac Neil – 6 tentacles capable of inducing auditory convulsions & 4 rusty chains dripping gangrenous adipocere
Colon Bowel – Blunt Force Trauma & various Meat Beatings
Putrid Pierce – Barbed Wire Lacerations
Jesus H. Dump – Live Summoner of Sub-sonic Bowel Chowder

In addition to provoking chuckles, those descriptions will tell newcomers something about the music, and so will the new album’s spectacular cover art, rendered by Alex Tartsus. Even the album title provides a further clue: Scalpels For Blind Surgeons. We have an even better clue down below, because we’re premiering the stream of a second track from the record, this one named “Daudiskegg“, in the run-up to its August 19 release by Everlasting Spew Records. But before we get to that song, peep this shirt: Continue reading »

ANNIVERSARY REVIEWS BY WILLIAM SMITH: THE CLASS OF 2003

 Album Reviews, Listmania  2 Responses »
Jan 162013
 

(William Smith is the vocalist for Buckshot Facelift and a Long Island band named Artificial Brain that I’ve written about twice — here and here. He also writes a very entertaining blog called Vitos Squid Stop and Death Metal Museum. I asked him around this time last year if he would write something for NCS . . . and he gave us a 2-part list of “anniversary” albums — five albums recorded 10 years and 20 years earlier, respeectively. And this year he’s done it again. The first part appeared yesterday, and this post discusses metal gems from 10 years ago.)

…but then it came – the era of Chris Barnes as the Death Metal Elvis was dead – bloated on a toilet after a worldwide glut of gore.  George Fisher  took the flag and waved it through the fog of corpse paint and KORN, but the late nineties and early 2000s was an awkward,  diehard period when keeping it real was all about guttural slam metal, old guys ran out of ideas and started Impetigo worship bands, and all of a sudden cassettes just disappeared .

10 years after the Death Metal renaissance of ’93, the internet had established a stronghold on the underground scene. File sharing sterilized the fun out of tape trading and straight edge hardcore bands began using blast beats and guttural vocals for their own benign purposes. “Fruity Loops- Relapse message board computer grind” all but drowned out “sociopathic loner tape trader grind”, one of North Americas most unsung “KVLT” phenomena of the late nineties (re: Extreme Scene, Anal Birth, Slough, Dismembered Fetus, Vomit Spawn) and old school tech-Death pioneers began sounding more and more like Hatebreed.

To view in the context of history where some of the last holdouts from the 90s stood in this unsure era, I’ve raided my collection for 5 underground releases that have stood the test of time to still be personal Kult favorites a decade later. Continue reading »