LISTMANIA 2018: A YEAR-END LIST FROM GRANT SKELTON

 LISTMANIA 2018  12 Responses »
Jan 032019
 

 

(We present a 2018 year-end list by NCS contributor Grant Skelton, which consists of 15 miserable, mutilating, and mesmerizing titles, not all of which are metal.)

Salutations fellow metalheads! My choices this year were a bit more of a mixed bag than in previous years. Per our usual MO here at No Clean Singing, I tried to focus on bands whose albums seemed to slip into the proverbial cracks. I hope you find something you like here, and by all means leave me recommendations in the comments. Continue reading »

ULVESANG: “THE HUNT”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Mar 132018
 

 

(A guest writer, who we shall call Conchobar, and who has been a source of excellent recommendations to our hapless editor, returns to NCS with this review of the new album by the Nova Scotian band Ulvesang, which will be released on March 16th).

 

If metal has a sense memory, an auditory genealogy that really hearkens and calls upon us almost somatically, subconsciously, its True Name surely falls under the lunar auspice of “folk”.

Despite pretensions of elitism and subgenre supremacism that contaminate a lot of the current would-be politico-rhetoric in metal, this art form, both in composition and inspiration, has always been one built from solidarity in solipsism: we are people, alone, together. These roots are almost proto-human: more than us, beyond us, before us.

That essence, the axiomatic foundation of what draws us in to listen to music by blazing hearths or over beers, has been tapped eloquently and elegantly on Ulvesang’s sophomore album, The Hunt. Continue reading »