SIGNINGS

 Metal News  12 Responses »
May 062011
 

Earlier this week, our bro BadWolf put up a note of well-deserved congratulations to Battlecross on their signing with the formidable Metal Blade label. Yesterday, we saw news of two other signings by bands we dig mightily — Fleshgod Apocalypse and Malfeitor. We’re mightily happy about that, especially because of the accompanying confirmation that we’ll have albums from both bands in our not-so-distant future.

FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE

On April 5, our favorite Italian metal band, Fleshgod Apocalypse, put up this note on their Facebook page: “We are really hard at work on a brand new album for a summer release. Ideally during Summer Slaughter Festival in North America. We are seeking a new home as well.” As of yesterday, they found their new home, with the announcement of a worldwide deal with Nuclear Blast Records. It’s worth remembering that these dudes have only produced two releases — Oracles (2009) and the Mafia EP (2010) — and yet they’ve ridden those attention-grabbing albums to considerable critical and popular acclaim, paving the way for this auspicious label signing.

And yes, yesterday’s announcement included the confirmation that  the band are currently wrapping up work on a second full-length album with an expected release date “sometime around this year’s Summer Slaughter Tour.” Which is just fuckin’ peachy. Truth be told, this band’s appearance on Summer Slaughter is what I’m most anticipating from that tour. It will be especially sweet to hear them play songs from a brand new album. Congratulazioni a Fleshgod Apocalypse!  (more after the jump . . . including tunes) Continue reading »

SAVAGE, SWEET, AND IN BETWEEN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  16 Responses »
Apr 302011
 

The weekend is upon us. Don’t know about you, but I’m fucking ready for it. Tonight I’m going to see Between the Buried and Me, Job For A Cowboy, The Ocean, and Cephalic Carnage, which is certainly one of the more diverse touring line-ups of the year, so far. I’ve seen three of those bands multiple times in the past, and they do not disappoint, and I’m very curious about the fourth, who I’ve never heard on stage — The Ocean.

I hope you’ve got something to look forward to this weekend, too. But even if you plan to wallow in misery because life decided to burn a bag of shit on your front porch, we can at least give you some new tunes to brighten the weekend outlook. Not knowing what kind of metal you may be into, I tried to round up a mix of styles, while staying with the theme of new music.

Maybe you enjoy having your face clawed off by demon spawn. If so, we’ve got yet another new piece of otherworldly scariness from Malfeitor (Sweden). Maybe that’s not enough, and what you really want is music that will leave your flesh so scavenged that even hyenas will lose interest in your carcass. We have an answer for that, with a compilation from CVlt Nation. Maybe you get your rocks off from technical guitar wizardry, with music that transports you into a sublime plane which makes you feel connected to something larger than your own feeble soul. If yes, then you’ll want to hear a taste (two tastes, actually) of the solo release from Christian Muenzner (Obscura).

And maybe you want something in between, something that captures the emotion of your life, with every high and low, from the rocket-ship into the stratosphere to the utter desolation of your worst depression, from the sunrise to the bottomless pit. Yeah, we have that too, from Germany’s Ära Krâ. But before that we have a brand new song from Origin, and we really shouldn’t have to explain how many kinds of awesome that means. Stay with us, after the jump . . . Continue reading »

A TETRAHEDRON FOR THURSDAY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Apr 142011
 

As expected, I haven’t had the time lately to do anything in-depth for NCS (and thanks again to all our guest post-ers for bailing me out) but I still do have time to put together quick items every now and then, just to keep the new metal flowing along its molten path from our ears to yours.

My original title for this post was “A Trio For Thursday”, because I’d heard new songs from three bands over the last 24 hours that got me excited. But then, as I was finishing this up, I came across a brand new fourth one that I just had to include. Not wanting to abandon my affinity for alliteration, I tried to think of a word beginning with “T” that means four of something.Voilà! In geometry, a tetrahedron is a shape composed of four triangular faces, three of which meet at each vertex — like a pyramid.

So, here we go — four songs, and I can guarantee you’ll like at least one of them, or your money back. The first is yet another new track from the UK’s Xerath from their forthcoming album II. The second is another track from Malfeitor, a Swedish death metal band whose new music we’ve already featured more than once recently. The third is a song by a group of Norwegian death-thrashers called Exeloume. And last, but not least, we’ve got a new song from a UK band called Detrimentum who we’ve been pumped about for a while.

Feast your ears on the tunes after the jump. Or, more accurately, allow the music to feast on your ears. Continue reading »

WAKE THE FUCK UP!

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  26 Responses »
Apr 062011
 

I’m not suggesting you’re asleep. That post title is the message I gave to myself, over and over again, this morning. It’s the middle of the damned week, and somehow I found myself over-doing it with old friends way past my usual bed-time, and I’m moving reeeeeally slowly this morning.

What I needed was a good jolt, a nasty steel-toed kick in the ass, a bucket of cold water over the head, a brisk slap in the face. But I contented myself instead with the music we’ve got for you this morning. It certainly woke me the fuck up.

We’ve got four offerings of jolting, ass-kicking, bracing, face-slapping music, including two new videos and some free download options, from Pain (Sweden), Wormrot (Singapore), Malfeitor (Sweden), and Kataklysm (Canada). Let’s get to it:

PAIN

Peter Tägtgren is best known for his work as a music producer and as the vocalist and guitarist for long-running Swedish luminaries Hypocrisy. But he’s had many other projects as well, and one of them is an outfit called Pain. That band has been around a long time, too, though I don’t think I’ve ever listened to the music. That’s now changed. Their 7th album is scheduled for release on June 3, and there’s now a new song available for free download.  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

MORE 2011 SICKNESS (PART 4)

 Forthcoming Albums  15 Responses »
Apr 022011
 


Technically, we should have posted this yesterday, but yesterday was April Fool’s Day, and people might have thought we were making up some of this shit. But it’s all true, and nothing happens on April 2 to plant doubt about truth. Except for what causes doubt to be planted about truth on any other day of the year.

Here we are at the beginning of the second quarter of 2011 — the time when for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, spring is supposed to spring.  Where I live, spring has apparently been victimized by a brutal street mugging and is hospitalized at the moment.  A few plants have been deluded into thinking it’s spring, but for the rest of our local world, it’s still fucking winter.

Fortunately, the change of the seasons have fuck all to do with the release of metal. What we do with these installments of METAL IN THE FORGE is collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last 30 days (or in this case, the last 31 days) about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know them yet. And in this post, we cut and paste the announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

This isn’t a cumulative list, so be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming New Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported in previous installments. This month’s list begins right after the jump. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones. There’s some awesome shit on the way. Dive in after the jump. Continue reading »

MONDAY METAL: MALFEITOR, MACHINAE SUPREMACY, AND MARGIN OF ERROR

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Mar 212011
 

When things come together in a way that makes an an alliterative post title possible, it’s just awesome, don’t you think?

In the course of catching up on metal news over the weekend, we came across three items that caught our bloodshot eyes. Apart from the fact that they all concerned bands whose names begin with “M”, the music has nothing in common.

ITEM ONE: The first item concerned a band from Sweden called Malfeitor. There’s a black metal band from Italy with the same name, and a couple of long-defunct bands from Norway and the U.S. that liked the name, too — but this ain’t any of them. This band had its genesis in Sweden back in the early 90’s and then dissolved in 1994. But it’s become apparent that Swedish death-metal bands are like vampires – they never die.

In 2007, two of the band member — Benny Moberg and Mattias Parkkila — started another death metal band called Blood Mortized (along with ex-Amon Amarth guitarist Anders “Hansson” Biazzi), which put out a debut album in 2009 and is about to release a 3-song EP on cassette. Last year Moberg left Blood Mortized to resuscitate Malfeitor, and he has now been joined by Parkkila and drummer Janne (Rudberg) Björkenfjäll.

Malfeitor have recently started streaming their first new song in 17 years, plus they’ve got a teaser track that includes instrumental snippets from five songs on an album they plan to release in 2011 (the vocals haven’t yet been recorded for those songs). After the jump, we’ve got the new song and that teaser.

ITEM TWO: The second item concerns another band from Sweden — Machinae Supremacy — but they’re pretty far over toward the other end of the metal spectrum from Malfeitor. What grabbed our attention about these dudes is the fact that they’re one of the three support acts for Children of Bodom‘s “Ugly World Tour”, which began this past weekend — the other two being Amon Amarth and Ensiferum.  (more after the jump . . .) 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 »