SEEN AND HEARD: THE OCEAN, BEHEMOTH, OBLITERATIONS, SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jan 152014
 

Satan has been a busy little sulphurous bee this week. So many newsy metal announcements, so many new metally songs, more than my addled brain can keep up with. Here are a few of the items I spied over the last 24 hours that I thought were worth sharing. More will come in another post today.

TOURISM: THE OCEAN / SCALE THE SUMMIT / THE ATLAS MOTH / SILVER SNAKES

Who are these people who are constantly blaring that “Metal Sucks” and why are they associating with miscreants such as The Ocean, Scale the Summit, The Atlas Moth, and Silver Snakes? I must add that question to the long list of life’s mysteries to which I must devote my investigative energies. Whoever those people are and whatever obscure impulses motivate them, they are presenting a U.S. tour of the afore-mentioned miscreants, wisely choosing to launch it in The Emerald City, for which I will give thanks by sacrificing a neighbor’s child under the next full moon.

Other less important cities will be visited by this very impressive line-up, and I will list them after the jump for those whose eyesight isn’t sharp enough to discern them on the tour poster above. And speaking of the line-up, though I have been savaged by the first three bands in previous musical performances, Silver Snakes have not had the pleasure of savaging me before, and in fact I was unaware of their existence before those people who blare “Metal Sucks” presented them in this new tour, though I sometimes see silver snakes while on the verge of a blackout drunk. Therefore, along with the dates I will provide a bit of their music, which involves clean singing along with heaviness and lightness. Continue reading »

CATCHING UP (PART 2): SOREPTION, VADER, WATAIN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Dec 112013
 

Continuing my effort to catch up on news and new music I missed while on vacation the last two weeks, here are three more items of interest, again presented in alphabetical order.

SOREPTION

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen the phrase “long-awaited and highly anticipated” in a press release about a new album, I could buy a nice new car, or maybe two. But it’s a phrase that absolutely fits this Swedish band’s second album, Engineering the Void. More than three years have passed since the release of their excellent debut album Deterioration of Minds. Even when the band finally released an exciting teaser of new music last June, there was no release date.

Finally, while I was away, the band announced that the album would be released by Unique Leader Records on February 18, and then just two days ago we got a lyric video for the first full advance track from the album, “Breaking the Great Narcissist”, and goddamn, is it good. Continue reading »

TEASED: BLODSGARD AND SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jun 162013
 

In recent days two bands I’m very high on have released teasers of music from albums I’ve been waiting on for a long time (with a level of eagerness that hasn’t diminished as the months have rolled by).

BLODSGARD

Norway’s Blodsgard haven’t yet released a full-length album, only three demos — but the debut album is on the way. Its title is Monument and it will soon be made available both digitally and on CD via a label called The Oath (an exact release date hasn’t been announced). Yesterday, the band unveiled the killer cover art for the album (above), created by one of my favorite metal artists, Mark Cooper (Mindrape Art), as well as excerpts of all the songs.

When I first found out about Blodsgard in September 2011, the most recent demo — a four-song offering called Solve et Coagula— hadn’t even been released for public distribution, and the band had no plans to do so. I got a chance to hear it and then obtained permission to provide a link to a special 3-song download for our readers, which included two tracks from Solve et Coagula plus another even more recent song, as a companion to my review. All three songs, which are still available for free, will appear in remastered form on the forthcoming album. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, AZURE EMOTE, AND SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jan 082013
 

Yesterday brought many items of news and new music that caught my attention, so many that I’m funneling them your way in a couple of posts this morning, this being the first.

THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER

Last night the above image appeared on the Facebook page of The Black Dahlia Murder, with no further explanation. Preceding the appearance of this visual announcement, the gents at Metal Sucks posted some studio photos and a few more details, speculating that the band would have a new album ready by June — which turns out to be a good guess.

Presumably, the above image is simply a flyer of sorts and not the album cover, yet I’m intrigued by the absence of color and by the album’s title — Everblack. Not that I really needed anything further to cause eager anticipation for the band’s next work. That was a given.

Next, we move from a band whose name has become something of a household word in the realms of extreme metal to one I had never heard of before last night — and whose new album I’m now anticipating just as eagerly as new BDM. Check out this arresting album cover: Continue reading »

A FRIDAY FLOOD OF NEWS AND MUSIC: MORS PRINCIPIUM EST, BLUT AUS NORD, SOREPTION, XENOCIDE, THE FEVERED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 192012
 

For me, where I’m currently located, Friday has barely begun, but it has already brought a flood tide of news and music that I think are worth sharing. So much, in fact, that the only way I can squeeze it all into a single post is to cut my own verbosity to a trickle. This is painful, of course, because it goes against the grain. But I will do my best to be brief.

MORS PRINCIPIUM EST

In late July, I posted a bunch of news about this excellent Finnish band, which included the fact that they were finally recording a new album after many long years following the release of 2007′s Liberation = Termination. And then in August, I learned the album’s title (…And Death Said Live), I found out it would be released this December (on AFM Records), I found the cover art (which you can see above), and I posted about all that news.

At that point I also learned from the band that the album will include guest appearances from shredders Ryan Knight of The Black Dahlia Murder and Jona Weinhofen of Bring Me the Horizon and I Killed the Prom Queen.

And today, finally, we have music from the album. Or to be more precise, Metal Injection has music from the album — a song named “Destroyer of All”. The song kills. Go HERE to listen, and then please come back and give us your reactions. 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 »

SOREPTION: DETERIORATION OF MINDS

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 022010
 

Here at NCS, little whispery things nag at the back of our diseased brains. We’re not talking about the transmissions from space — that’s another story. We’re talking about things we’re supposed to remember. Like paying some fucking bill, or feeding the cat, or checking in with the parole officer, or seeing if some new album we wanted to hear has finally been released (because we’re not hot-shit enough for labels to send us advance review copies of everything we’re interested in).

Half the time we don’t remember stuff like this until it’s too late. But sometimes the truly important items break through the cranial fog. Case in point: Soreption. We wrote here about Soreption’s ass-kicking 2008 EP Illuminate the Excessive. And then we wrote two more updates here and here about the band’s progress on their debut album. Guess it’s evident we’re a tad obsessive about this band.

And so earlier this week we remembered that Soreption was supposed to release their debut album in March. We checked, and sure enough — it’s now available (iTunes and Amazon MP3). And now we’ve heard it.

A few days ago, we got immersed in exotically melodic new metal from Romania’s Negura Bunget, and we waxed rhapsodic about its powerful allure. But Soreption’s new album, Deterioration of Minds, isn’t about melody. It’s all about the rhythm. Therefore, we need to change our vocabulary to talk about this carnivorous beast of technical death metal. How about this:

It. Fucking. Rules.

(more after the jump, including a song to stream . . .) Continue reading »

MORE 2010 SICKNESS (Part 2)

 Forthcoming Albums, Listmania, Metal News  No Responses »
Feb 232010
 

We’re now almost two months into 2010, and it’s already time for our second update to the list of forthcoming new albums we posted on January 1.  (See the original list here and the first update here.) Below is a list of still more projected new releases that we didn’t know about on January 1 or at the time of our last update about a month ago — and there’s a lot of them.

Once again, we’ve cobbled together news blurbs about bands whose past work we’ve liked, or who look interesting for other reasons. Needless to say (but we’ll say it anyway), these are bands that mostly fit the profile of music we cover on this site.

So, in alphabetical order, here’s our list of cut-and-pasted blurbs from various sources over the last month about forthcoming new releases:

1349: “Prosthetic Records will release the brand new album from Norwegian black metal legends 1349 in North America via an agreement with Indie Recordings. The new CD, which promises ‘a return to the band’s more traditional, raw-yet-technical black metal sound,’ is due on April 13. In support of the yet-to-be-titled record, 1349 will embark on a North American tour in April and May as the support act for CANNIBAL CORPSE (alongside SKELETONWITCH and LECHEROUS NOCTURNE).”

ABACABB: “ABACABB are currently out on the road headlining the Hot Dice On Black Ice Tour featuring Upon A Burning Body!. The tour just hit Texas and will be in California this weekend. Following the tour ABACABB will enter the studio with producer Will Putney at Machine Shop in New Jersey and will have a new album to be released sometime this summer.”

AEON: “Swedish death metallers AEON have set Path Of Fire as the title of their third album, due later in the year via Metal Blade Records. The CD was recorded in September 2009 at Empire Studio in Östersund, Sweden and was mixed the following month at Mana Recording Studios in St, Petersburg, Florida by Erik Rutan (HATE ETERNAL, MORBID ANGEL, CANNIBAL CORPSE). The mastering was handled by Alan Douches at West West Side Music (CONVERGE, HATEBREED, THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN) in New Windsor, New York.”

AMORPHIS: “AMORPHIS will release its first-ever live DVD, Forging The Land Of Thousand Lakes, in early June via Nuclear Blast, in time for the band’s 20th anniversary. The filming took place on November 20, 2009 at Club Teatria in Oulu, Finland, where AMORPHIS was supported by STRATOVARIUS and BEFORE THE DAWN. In addition to the full-length live show, the anniversary DVD will include plenty of bonus material documenting the band’s impressive career.”   (much more after the jump . . . ) Continue reading »

SOREPTION UPDATE NO. 2

 Metal News  No Responses »
Jan 222010
 

These dudes have really let me down.

In one of our previous Math Metal Monday features, we wrote about Swedish tech-death band Soreption and their awesome June 2008 EP Illuminate the Excessive. Illuminate included only four tracks, creatively entitled 1, 2, 3, and 4. Then we saw (and wrote about) a report that the band would be releasing their debut album, Deterioration Of Minds, on March 3 via Ninetone Records — and that the tracks would be entitled 5 – 12. How perfect!

We were crushed to discover this morning that the band has sold out: They’ve decided to use actual song names for the tracks on Deterioration Of Minds, instead of numbers. And they didn’t even use any of our shark cartilage song names. I bet the label made ’em do it. According to the band’s blog, the tracks will now be called:

01. Suppressing The Mute
02. The Hypocrite, Undying
03. Breeding Exile
04. …To Dim The Aching
05. A Wolf Among Men
06. Deterioration Of Minds
07. By Venom Entitled
08. March Of The Tyrants

I already miss the old song titles. Plus, I think this is really confusing. I mean, they’ve previously released four songs on the EP, but this full-length begins with Track No. 1 instead of No. 5. What’s up with that?!

On the bright side, Soreption has posted a brief portion of one new song, “March of the Tyrants,” for streaming on their MySpace page. And short as the clip is, it’s definitely Soreption — which means it’s definitely awesome.

Maybe they’ll decide to tell the label to fuck off and change the album title from Deterioration Of Minds to 2.

SOREPTION UPDATE

 Metal News  No Responses »
Jan 172010
 

In one of our previous Math Metal Monday features, we wrote about Swedish tech-death band Soreption and their June 2008 EP Illuminate the Excessive. Illuminate included only four tracks, creatively entitled 1, 2, 3, and 4.

We didn’t discover these guys until sometime in the middle of 2009, but from the first listen, we realized these guys were turning out some genuinely original music. Only problem was that those 4 tracks flew by way too fast.

Now we have some very welcome breaking news about Soreption: the band will release their debut album, “Deterioration Of Minds”, on March 3 via Ninetone Records. The tracks will be entitled 5 – 12. But hey, if the full-length really picks up right where the EP left off, we could hardly be happier.

These dudes have excellent technical chops and songwriting ability. This is fast, intricate, brutal music that you should check out here if you haven’t already. Or go back to our earlier Math Metal Monday post and stream the track we made available then.

And then start counting the days to March 3.

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