SATYRICON: DETAILS REVEALED ABOUT THE BAND’S NEW SELF-TITLED ALBUM

 Metal News  5 Responses »
Aug 072013
 

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear to me, much of the metal community seems to believe that if a band who’ve been around for a while decide to use their own name, and nothing more, as the title of an album, it better be a superior achievement, a defining moment for the band’s sound, a blockbuster. Norway’s Satyricon have now walked straight into the teeth of such expectations. Their new album will be named Satyricon, and it is now scheduled for release on September 17 via Nuclear Blast.

This will be the band’s eighth studio album, and given their influential history, expectations would be high even if it weren’t self-titled. But the band aren’t backing away from those expectations by one inch — they’re embracing them. Here’s what frontman Satyr is quoted as saying in a press release:

“We are back. Sorry it took so long, but we needed the time to be able pull off a record like this. Comparing this one to previous records is time wasted, it is SATYRICON; constantly on the move. Naming this record Satyricon was the most obvious thing in the world. We have never done a record which captures the spirit of this band in such a way. Ever. It will demand a lot from you as a listener, but I know you will love it. It will grow on you and that is why it will stay with you forever. We won’t tour as much in the future as we used to, and that will just make every tour more special. This album is for you and ourselves. It is our moment!” Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL – DAY THREE

 Concert Reviews  8 Responses »
Apr 052013
 

(NCS writer Andy Synn has returned from Oslo’s Inferno Festival, held on March 27-30, 2013, and brings us a multi-part report of what he saw and heard, along with photos. This is the final installment. Check out the three previous parts here.)

Well here we are, the final day of the festival. With fatigue setting in (wallet-fatigue as well as physical fatigue) this was also – fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you chose to look at it – the day with the fewest bands who I really wanted to check out.

The first band of the evening I was lucky enough to see were underground black metal legends Hades Almighty (pictured above). Though the Norwegian triumvirate describe themselves on their website as “The heaviest black metal three-piece in the world”, after seeing them live I’m far more inclined to agree with the assessment of the immortal Metal-Archives and say that the group are more of a Progressive black metal band than they are a particularly heavy one.

Their distinctly old-school vibe is coloured and individuated by twisty-turny song-structures and liberal applications of atonal, semi-melodic riffs that strangely enough put me firmly in mind of American tech-thrashers Believer. Continue reading »

FIVE OF MY FAVOURITE . . . B-SIDES

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Dec 142012
 

(In this post, NCS writer Andy Synn provides another installment in his “Five of My Favourite” series, with five killer b-side tracks from Himsa, Satyricon, Setherial, Skeletonwitch, and Marduk.) 

Ah, the humble b-side. The bonus track. The Japanese exclusive. How they toy with our emotions and loyalties. How many copies of an album are you willing to buy to get just the right track-list? How completest/obsessive are you? Is that itunes bonus track worth the extra dough? Have the band offered up these extra tracks for free download (some do, you just have to look for them)? Is there ANOTHER Roadrunner digipak re-release on the horizon, scraping the archives for all that they’re worth???

Anyway, recently I’ve started a slow but steady purge of my itunes library, removing the b-sides, bonus tracks and covers which I don’t consider worth the bit-space. This comes after several years of obsessive-compulsive trawling of the internet for downloadable versions of these extra special bonus tracks, or (even worse) buying up another, “better” copy of a cd I already own, just to have the completist’s wet-dream of an exhaustive track-list.

After several intense bouts of therapy I’ve made the first step in getting rid of these superfluous extra tracks that do nothing but clutter up my library and, at their worst, detract from or disrupt the intended track-listing of some of my favourite albums.

But it has also given me a chance to appreciate those b-sides which deserve their time in the spotlight – the very best of which I can’t help but wonder WHY they didn’t make the final cut, in many cases as they’re better than some of the actual album A-sides! So here we are, five of my favourite non-album b-sides. I’ve purposefully excluded covers and re-recordings, and just focussed on five original tracks that honestly deserved to be on an album! Continue reading »

SEPULTURA AND SATYRICON

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  33 Responses »
Jul 192012
 

We’re all toiling away here at NCS on various projects, none of which are quite yet finished for this morning. Actually, to be brutally honest, I was sleeping instead of toiling away, and before that I was fucking off. I have no idea what the other idiots who work here have been doing, and I use the term “work” loosely, since nobody gets paid shit for scribbling about metal at NCS. Actually, I do have an idea what they’ve been doing, and it’s called “life”, which is bullshit because having no life is one of the key qualifications for “working” at NCS, and they all checked the “has no life” box on the NCS “employment” application, so what’s up with that?

Anyway, I haz nothing at the moment, so I’m doing this: I’m playing for you two excellent old songs plus some covers of them that I found this morning. I love these songs, and so it goes without saying that you love them, too. So we will all feel the love this morning, and then we can all do what we do when we feel the strong love, which in most cases will involve some kind of autoerotic satisfaction (and yes, you may take photos, but you may not send them to me because I don’t want to spoil my appetite before breakfast).

The first song is “Slave New World” by Sepultura, and I’m talking old-school Sepultura, from 1993’s Chaos A.D. You, of course, know this song and love it as much as I do, because it is such a great fuckin’ metal song. I think you will also like the cover of the song that Norway’s Dead Trooper did back in 2010, because I like it a bunch. I like it better than the cover Trivium did (also in 2010), though their cover still sounds good, because the riffs in this song are so damned compelling. I just like the original Max Cavalera vocals and the Dead Trooper vocals better.

The second song is “Forhekset” by Satyricon, from their 1996 Nemesis Divina album. It’s another great song, though I’m guessing many people would pick “Mother North” as the best song on that album. But anyway, today I saw a new video by a Québec band named Haeres performing a cover of “Forhekset” live back in March. I really like the cover — it’s not a carbon copy of the original, and it sounds really good. Continue reading »

 Newer Entries