MITCH LUCKER OF SUICIDE SILENCE PASSES AWAY AT AGE 28

 Metal News  11 Responses »
Nov 012012
 

I just received this press release from Nuclear Blast, which floored me:

It is with great sadness and regret this morning that we have to report that Mitch Lucker, vocalist of SUICIDE SILENCE, passed away a few hours ago due to injuries sustained during a motorcycle accident.

NUCLEAR BLAST would like to offer our condolences to his family, friends, band members and fans worldwide who are affected by this loss.

He left us doing what he loved to do most. He was 28 years old and will be sorely missed.

Fans are encouraged to share their memories, photos of Mitch and condolences on the band’s official Facebook page: www.facebook.com/SuicideSilence

A few more details that I found in a local newspaper report are after the jump. Continue reading »

BIG CHOCOLATE AND SUICIDE SILENCE INFLICT HUMAN VIOLENCE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  16 Responses »
Jun 172011
 

The Black Crown is the third album by Suicide Silence, scheduled for release via Century Media on July 11. I’ve started listening to it, and so far, so good. I’m especially enjoying a song called “Smashed”, which features the inimitable Frank Mullen (Suffocation) on guest vocals.

We’ll get around to reviewing the album eventually, but that’s not what this post is about. This post is about a remix of one of the album’s songs called “Human Violence”. That was the record’s first single, released for streaming on May 13. What we discovered yesterday is that Cameron “Big Chocolate” Argon has remixed “Human Violence”, and the remix is available for free download.

Big C has done this before, remixing a Suicide Silence single called “Disengage” about a year ago (we featured that here). You probably remember that he also collaborated with Suicide Silence frontdude Mitch Lucker on a project called Commissioner. Now he’s brought his remix skills to bear again — and what he’s done with “Human Violence” is a fuckin’ kick in the head.

Big C brings a fluctuating industrial vibe to the original song while preserving the screaming, groovy fury of the original. It will make you want to bounce, careen off walls, punch things, whip your head all the way around. Check it out after the jump, and then we’ll let you know how you can download the thing for yourselves. Continue reading »

THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS DAN WANTS TO EXPAND YOUR HORIZONS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Dec 272010
 

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Back in November when I was away on an undeserved but still enjoyable vacation and unable to blog, lots of good people stepped up and contributed posts of their own so that NCS wouldn’t have to go dark while I was gone.

One of those contributors, The Artist Formerly Known As Dan, took a running head start on year-end album lists and became one of the first writers in metal blogdom to stake out a position on the year’s best metal (here). That post scored a massive number of hits, no doubt due in part to the fact that it was featured on MetalSucks.

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, we asked Dan if he had made any revisions or additions to the list he prepared a month ago. What we got from him was this.]

So, I hope all the NCS readers aren’t bored with me after my first list. I thought my picks for the best of 2010 were pretty solid, but reading lists can get old, so now I’ll try to focus my attention on one subject. That subject is potential musical recommendations for my NCS brethren that are outside the realm of metal.  I have a pretty wide range of tastes, but I thought that at least some of my “other” music might interest a few of you, specifically because it generally follows the NCS manifesto:

-it’s not pop music

-it has at least one or more of the following characteristics: fast, punishing, cathartic, dark, powerful, crushing

-there is no clean singing

So let’s get started.  (after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

DISENGAGE

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
May 222010
 

In yesterday’s post, we focused on recent news about Cameron Argon (a/k/a “Big Chocolate”), a dude that our bonded-in-blog bros over at Metal Sucks aptly called a “Renaissance Man.” What prompted our feature was Argon’s separation from Burning the Masses, a death-metal band with whom he’d recorded a forthcoming album and toured throughout Europe earlier this year. But at the tail-end of yesterday’s post, we also mentioned that in his “Big Chocolate” persona, he had remixed a Suicide Silence song called “Disengage”.

Century Media has released that remix, along with the original song, as a “single.” It’s available in two formats — as a digital download from iTunes and as a 7″ blue vinyl from CM Distro. Joshua Andrew Belanger created the cover art for the single, which you can see above.

Off and on yesterday, we listened to the original song and the remix back-to-back. The more we listened, the more we got into both versions of the song. The original Suicide Silence track shifts back and forth between a pulsing distorted riff and a dissonant, squealing guitar lead, and then up-shifts the tempo before crashing the pace down into a broken-down crawl. Following the breakdown, the tempo continues to shift back and forth, and throughout the song Mitch Lucker growls and shrieks mercilessly until the track finishes with 15 seconds of solitary drums.

In the remix, Big Chocolate has done more than separate and reshape the sounds present in the original. He’s applied a variety of electronic effects to distort and change the vocals and instrumentation, injected samples, added scratching and electro drums, messed with the rhythms so that they generate more of a dance-beat, and done a hundred other things that we’re not expert enough to figure out or describe.

The resulting music is drenched in wild sound effects, more aurally dense than the original, but still recognizably “Disengage” and still recognizably metal. I don’t listen to electro house or dubstep, but one of my collaborators (IntoTheDarkness) is getting into those genres and I’ve heard a few things he’s recommended. Snatches of the “Disengage” remix sound like those styles, but I really don’t think a genre name has yet been invented for the results of what Big Chocolate did with the Suicide Silence material. Anyone out there have a suggestion?

Ater the jump, you can listen to both songs back-to-back. And then after that, we’ve got a “mixtape” for you that was inspired by “Disengage”. Continue reading »