MORE SEEN AND HEARD: GHOST B.C., IMPENDING DOOM, MAGENTA HARVEST, AND VHOLDGHAST

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Sep 262013
 

I know that I’ve already posted one round-up today, but I found more things I wanted to share. So, here goes:

GHOST B.C.

I have an extremely powerful attraction to Ghost’s music, even though I listen to almost nothing else that comes within ICBM range of it. So, I was drawn like a fly to honey when I saw that a new Ghost video had premiered yesterday at Rolling Stone. It’s a professionally filmed clip of the band performing the infernal carnival of “Secular Haze” at a sold-out Webster Hall in New York. It reminds me of how damned much I’ve enjoyed the multiple live Ghost performances I’ve seen.

So, of course, I’m embedding the video here. Watch it next. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2012’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: THE FINAL SIX

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2012  7 Responses »
Jan 312013
 

Welcome to the 22nd — and final — part of our my list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. In each installment, I’ve been posting at least 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 six I’m announcing today, click here. And in the near future I’ll compile all the songs in a single post.

That’s right — six songs, because 666. Have you figured out yet that I’m really terrible at making choices among things I really like? Do you begin to understand why I don’t compile my own year-list of the best albums? I mean, shit, this thing has grown to 22 installments and the only reason I’m finally stopping is because the month of January is over today and even I realize that it’s getting out of hand.

But we’re going out in a blaze of glory — a blaze of death metal glory, with six songs representing six different flavors of the genre, beginning with who else but . . .

CANNIBAL CORPSE

TheMadIsraeli reviewed this legendary band’s latest offering for us (here) and included this summing up: “Torture is the latest crusade in Cannibal Corpse’s tyrannical campaign to rule over everyone and everything with audio carnage so visceral that simply listening creates a serious risk of blood-vomiting convulsions.  But Torture?  Torture is officially the best album of the Corpsegrinder era yet.” Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: MAGENTA HARVEST – “APPARITION OF ENDING”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 092012
 

We seem to be living in an era where extreme “technicality” has infiltrated almost all genres of extreme metal. Rapid riffing and picking and barely human drum assaults seem to be a formula of choice employed by many bands to “modernize” their sound, almost regardless of the sub-genre in which they dabble. I’m not complaining, because I happen to enjoy bursts of flash and thrash, but it’s a refreshing change of pace, in a way, to find a newer band who create appealing music without resorting to pyrotechnics, acrobactics, and contortion and rely instead on the ability to write good songs and perform them capably. Magenta Harvest are one such band.

This Finnish group is composed of current and former members of Finntroll, Chthonian, Mygrain, and …And Oceans. They released a debut EP, A Familiar Room, in February 2011, which I really enjoyed — reviewing it here and including one of the EP’s songs in our list of 2011’s “Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs” here. Late last month, they self-released a second EP, Apparition of Ending.

Stylistically, it’s in the same vein as A Familiar Room — a dark form of melodic death metal that’s both viciously heavy and massively infectious. The changes from the first EP to this one are not huge — the most noticeable change is in the sparing but effective use of keyboards, courtesy of Finntroll’s Aleksi Virta. But the band’s songwriting flair is still very much in evidence, and in only four songs the band offer a lot of variety. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2011’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 12

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2011  1 Response »
Jan 062012
 

This is Part 12 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.

Once I’d decided to include today’s two songs on this list, combining them in a single post was an obvious call: Both bands are from Finland (if you get tired of hearing about Finnish metal, you’re obviously at the wrong place); both songs have almost exactly the same name; and of course both songs are awfully catchy.

MORS SUBITA

Human Waste Compression, the 2011 album by this band (whose names means “sudden death”) was one I reviewed in October (here), but that wasn’t our first mention of the band last year. In May,  I saw an official video for a song from the album called “The Sermon”, and it really got me all fired up with enthusiasm and the words spilled out in a post. At that point, Mors Subita was unsigned and holding up release of the album while they sought label backing.

In August, Violent Journey Records announced that they had signed Mors Subita, and it was cool to see some of my gushing words from May quoted in the Violent Journey press release. At the same time, the band released their second video for Human Waste Compression, and of course I had to write about all that here. 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 »

FINNS FOR FRIDAY: MAGENTA HARVEST AND NORTHER

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  5 Responses »
May 062011
 

This seemed like a good day to check in with some Finnish metal bands. Actually, every day is a good day for that, Finland being the most metal country on the planet, human pound for human pound. We picked two bands to feature in this post. The first one, Magenta Harvest, I’ve been meaning to write about for months. I continue to tell myself that late is better than never, which is true of many things, not including rectal cancer.

The other focus of this post is Norther. We knew their next album was coming out sometime soon, but it still managed to sneak up on us, notwithstanding our ninja-like senses. Last month, Circle Regenerated was released in Finland first and then elsewhere in Europe before April ended. I still haven’t found an official North American release date from Century Media for the CD yet, though it’s now available as an import — and the digital album has been available at Amazon MP3 and iTunes since April 19.

Unfortunately, I only got the album yesterday, so I still haven’t listened to the whole thing, but we’ll have some Norther music to finn-ish off this post anyway.  But first, let’s talk about . . . Continue reading »