We can be mellow. It’s true! After all, I spent a lot of my vacation staring at clouds, and I wasn’t even high. That’s mellow, isn’t it? Plus, we get really mellow when we’re asleep (except when we’re thrashing around in a fever dream because we can’t get the latest Deathspell Omega album out of our heads).

Okay, to be brutally honest, here at NCS we don’t get mellow with our music very often. We prefer music that’s . . . whatever the opposite of “mellow” is. Wait a minute, let me look that up.

Okay, I looked it up, and the dictionary says the antonym of mellow is “harsh”. That’s the kind of music we prefer here at NCS — harsh music. Loud, harsh music — the kind that makes your hair stand straight up and causes the cat to spontaneously evacuate its bowels. Actually, we don’t like it when the cat does that, and I’m sure he doesn’t like it much either, which is why I usually listen to music through my earbuds, but you know what I’m talking about, right? Music that’s not safe for pets. Or small children. That’s what NCS is about, usually.

But every now and then, once in a blue moon, we stumble into mellowness, usually without meaning to. This morning was one of those times. We thought about just enjoying the brief mellowness phase and not sharing it with you, because we know most of you don’t come here to be dosed with mellow. But then we thought, maybe NCS readers get mellow every now and then, too. It could happen. It’s not likely, but it could. So, we’re sharing.

But to clear up any confusion, mellowness is a relative concept, and what we have for you is only relatively mellow — and it does feature the kind of wizardry that Harry Potter only dreams of, in this case, some genuine, no-bullshit, hot-off-the-presses guitar wizardry from Joe Satriani, and something older but very cool from Buckethead.  (after the jump . . .) Continue reading »