Nov 062011
 

(Ramblings from TheMadIsraeli . . .)

Until yesterday, I’d been a bit scarce around NCS recently, mainly due to illness, school being fucking lame, and the well being rather dry in terms of good shit for me to review.  I’ve only got five major reviews on the horizon that I give a damn about at the moment — VallenfyreDemisery, Vildhjarta, Vektor and Ever Forthright.  So as you probably guessed, this ain’t none of that reviewin’ shit.  Instead I’m gonna just talk.  Talk about stuff within metal, within the scenes, share my thoughts.

I figured a good start would be to talk about this djent thing.  I just reviewed a djent album in Uneven Structure’s Februus (here), and two of my above-mentioned choices for future reviews, Vildhjarta and Ever Forthright, are also djent bands.  I know that before I hopped on board with NCS they covered Ever Forthright quite a bit here, though Vildhjarta not so much.  Fuck, part of the reason I think I was picked up to write for NCS was to be the designated “djent guy”, since it was an interest of mine outside the tastes I shared with the other writers.  So I thought, finally, I might try to collect my thoughts about djent. Continue reading »

Sep 062011
 

(TheMadIsraeli brings us this review of a new, free EP by Red Seas Fire.)

Red Seas Fire is the baby of Adam “Nolly” Getgood, a guitarist who was quite significant in the early development of the djent scene, trading ideas with other djent giants such as Misha Mansoor or Acle Kahney back in the days when they were just posting random shit on soundclick pages.  It’s been hard for him to be able to reach the point where he could finally produce a professional, totally put-together product to offer to the public, but now we finally have it in Red Seas Fire’s self-titled debut EP.

The EP begins with an instrumental intro that lulls the listener. It’s a bit of ambience, nothing special — that is, until “Epinephrine” comes crashing through your speakers with mammoth, down-tuned grooving assaults and crushes your balls with a sledgehammer.  From this beginning, however, it’s obvious that Red Seas Fire aren’t really a djent project anymore.

Yes, there is a metallic guitar tone and a heavy use of syncopated groove and polyrhythmic attack, but the music has far more in common with Scar Symmetry or Fear Factory then it does Meshuggah or CiLiCe.  The chorus of “Epinephrine” speaks far more of modern melodeath than it does anything else, and the riffs otherwise feel more like something that courses through the veins of brutal industrial metal.  The particular choice of electronic and industrial tones and noises throughout this song cements this impression even further to me. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »