Tag Archives: No Clean Singing

Happy (Belated) New Year!

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Cheers!

* Happy National Day (for those who live on the island of Menorca)!

 

* Happy Feast Day of Saint Achilles the Confessor (for those who follow the Eastern Orthodox Church)!

 

* Happy Birthday to Benjamin Franklin “The Guy on the Hundred Dollar Bill,” James Earl Jones “The Voice of Darth Vader,” comedian Andy Kaufman, bassist Andy Rourke, boxer Muhammad Ali, actress Betty White, FLOTUS Michelle Obama, and singer Eartha Kitt!

 

* Let’s also commemorate the passing of music producer Don Kirshner, chess player Bobby Fisher, and former U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes!

 
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If you can’t tell, I’m sort of reaching here, for any sort of a special occasion or commemoration to celebrate today. Since we’re now so long past the beginning of the year, I feel stupid saying “Happy New Year!” to you. But 2013 is still relatively new (and the majority of it is still yet to come), so I guess it really doesn’t hurt to still wish you a happy one.
 
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The Huge List of 2012 Year-End Lists!

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Well, friends, here we find ourselves in the waning moments of 2012. It’s been an interesting, eventful year that’s had lots of high and low points — a ton of excellent new music has been released and quite a few brand-new bands have emerged that I’d fully expect to be making some serious waves in the near future.

One of the best things about 2012, for me personally, was that I found myself (and my wife) going to lots more shows than in recent years, and as a result I’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of new people — as well as starting to take a way more active role in the local music scene.

Anyway, a few weeks ago I had a suggestion from one of those people I’ve gotten to know in the past year (I won’t say who — he said he preferred not to be given credit for the idea, although I will say that it’s somebody who contributed to this). The idea was to collect top-ten lists from various folks in the Pittsburgh metal community.

So I put out an open invitation for any musicians or other people who are involved in the scene in some way — I was looking for anything, whether it was the traditional “Top Ten Albums” or something totally off-the-wall like someone’s ten favorite sandwiches they ate during the year. Really, the only rules were that it had to be a list, and involve something from 2012.

 
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Borracho – Plunge/Return 10″ Single Now Available

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borracho-plunge-return

 

Borracho – Plunge/Return 10″ Single (Strange Magic Records, 27 November 2012)

 
So over the course of the past year or so, you’ve been following along with everything I’ve written, including all the mentions of Washingtonian heavy fuzz-rock band Borracho, right?

Including when I named their album Splitting Sky as one of my Top 11 of 2011 over at No Clean Singing? (Which reminds me, I promised to send them another list this year, so I guess I should start thinking about that, huh?)

Presumably, on my recommendation, you went straight out and bought a copy of that album. Now, if you got the CD or the digital download (including the download that comes free with the vinyl LP), then you are lucky enough to have the full album including the massive epic final track “Plunge/Return”.

However, if you do have that vinyl edition, you probably noticed that it’s about eleven and a half minutes shorter than the digital formats — because that last song just didn’t fit. And even though you have listened to the version you downloaded, the purist in you wishes that you had all of the album’s tracks on vinyl, right?

Well finally, your prayers have been answered.

 
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Upcoming Shows: Orwell to Embark on a West Coast Tour

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Hey readers! Here’s information about yet another tour that I’d like to share with you. Once again, this isn’t coming anywhere near my neighborhood, but the message I got from Orwell referred to visiting some foreign lands for the first time (this will be the Wisconsinians’ first trip to several of these western locales) and they politely asked for these details to be shared — which I am more than happy to do.

Any of you who live on the other side of the Mississippi, you need to check out the dates listed below. If, like me, you don’t happen to live near any of the scheduled stops for the band’s tour, you should still keep reading anyhow, because I’m also going to tell you how to grab a copy of their album A View of Heaven from a Seat in Hell totally free!

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Out Last Month: Ne Obliviscaris – Portal of I

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Ne Obliviscaris – Portal of I (11 June 2012, Code666 Records)

 
How’s it going, Dear Readers? I’ve got another amazing album I would like to share with you. I’ve been so fortunate with how much good stuff I’ve been coming across lately, I only wish that I had more time to write about it all so that you could have the chance to read about it and listen to it sooner! I guess what I’m saying is, it makes me feel guilty that my brain and fingers don’t work quite as fast as my ears sometimes…

Anyway, here we have Portal of I, the (relatively) new album by the Melburnian sextet Ne Obliviscaris. I usually have a pretty good memory when it comes to my history with specific bands, but to be honest I have no idea where or when I discovered these guys. Chances are, I probably read something about them over at No Clean Singing, or possibly at The Number of the Blog, since I’ve made an awful lot of discoveries through both of those places.

Oh and by the way, for all you former TNOTB readers who have been grieving since that website was lost in cyberspace, I hope you’ve started reading Oculus Infernus, the new home of head editor and writer Grover XIII. In case you haven’t seen it yet, the new blog can be found here. (And while we’re at it, No Clean Singing is over here.)

As I was saying, sometime, somehow I came across this group of Aussies, and I found them intriguing enough to “like” them on Facebook. Fast-forward to this May, when the band invited all their fans to “International Ne Obliviscaris Sharing Day” — when they planned to reveal an advance single from their then-forthcoming new album. I wrote about that impromptu holiday, and then shared the song (“Xenoflux”). Based on previous experience I had expected it would be good, but as it turns out, it was amazing!

To make a long story short, soon after that, the album was released in Australia and New Zealand on Welkin Records, a small, independent label run by one of the band members; right around the same time it was announced that Ne Obliviscaris had signed on with Italy’s Code666 Records for the rest of the world. This made perfect sense to me, since I’ve always found that Code666 tends to work with very good — and very unique — bands. So then the album was available all over the world, and about a month later, it’s finally time for me to share this masterpiece with you.

 

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Free Music Alert: Azoic – Gateways

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Azoic – Gateways (Self-released, 20 June 2012)

 
Hello readers! Since it’s been 90-whatever degrees here in Pittsburgh lately, and I’ve been sweating my ass off, sometimes it’s nice to think about people who live in other parts of the world, where it isn’t so infernally hot and humid this time of year. Now I’ll admit, I don’t really know that much about the climate in Iceland, but c’mon! They’ve got “ice” in their name! Even just thinking about that makes me feel better.

I don’t know what the weather is like wherever you are right now, Dear Reader, but in any case, wouldn’t your week start out a lot better if you had some new, FREE music to listen to?

Yeah, I thought so. I can help you out with that.

 
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A short while ago, I was contacted by a nice Icelandic gentleman, who said he noticed that there was no marker for Iceland on my world map of bands. Sadly, this was indeed the case, so he pointed me in the direction of the band Azoic. Right around the same time, our friend Ben who maintains the Church of the Riff blog also contacted me, mentioning that I should check out this great band. If that wasn’t already enough, right after that I discovered that Phro, who writes short fiction on his own blog PhroMetal, had written about this same band in a guest post over on No Clean Singing!

Well with that many endorsements, I became really curious and had to check these guys out for myself. I’m glad I did, and I think you will be too. Late last month they announced that they were releasing the album to be freely downloadable, so keep on reading and I’ll tell you where to get it.

 
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Get ‘em While They’re Hot: Free Downloads from Klonosphere and A389 Records!

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Free music! Always a good thing, right?
 

The French label/promoter Klonosphere recently announced an 18-track sampler of their associated bands that you can download for free!

The bands include: Trepalium, Hypno5e, Memories of a Dead Man, Jenx, Pictured, Hyperdump, The Mistaken Sons of Alabama, Jumping Jack, Wild, Weaksaw, Nojia, Step in Fluid, Nephalokia, Dwail, Klone, Nami, Noein, and The Brutal Deceiver.

The comp is available right here (a direct link to the RAR file), but before you jump right in, click here for a much better write-up that the good folks at No Clean Singing have put together — including sound samples, links to reviews or profiles of some of the bands, as well as links to websites or Facebook pages of ALL the bands! (Because they apparently have more free time than I do, or something.)

Klonosphere: website, Facebook

 
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And what’s better than free music? MORE free music!!
 

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Hey, Look: A New Borracho Video (Plus Drinking Game)!

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You remember Borracho, don’t you? Their debut LP Splitting Sky landed on my Top 11 of 2011 list which was ever so graciously published by No Clean Singing. In that list, I referred to the band as “Fuzzy, grungy, balls-out stoner metal from the District of Columbia,” because that’s exactly what it is.

 

Anyway, just yesterday they sent out an email announcing that they were releasing the first official video from that album, for the single “Concentric Circles.” The video “frames the band’s live show energy and punctuates it with vintage clips of destruction, atrocity and mayhem,” and those clips are the key to the drinking game that accompanies it! As they explained:

… it wouldn’t be a proper Borracho project without an official drinking game to go along. So before you press that play button, grab many beers, assemble a throng of your closest head-banging friends and challenge them to a round of “Boom!” – a beer down for every explosion you see. That’s right! We’ve got your buzz all worked out: every time something blows up, you drink! It’s that easy.

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True Norwegian Black Metal: Download a Free Blodsgard Video!

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The Blodsgard song “Mentalt Minefelt” was selected by No Clean Singing as one of 2011′s “Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs” and in thanks for that honor the band is giving free downloads of the video for that song. Christianity gets a comeuppance courtesy of the Swedish cult film Häxan‘s Devil, and Blodsgard provides the crushing soundtrack. Click the link below to go to the video page and get the free DL for your computer or your smart phone.

This is the email update that I recently received from Norwegian black metal miscreants Blodsgard (which translates to “blood farm”). If you aren’t familiar with the band, I can’t think of a better way to get acquainted than to check out this video, and then you can grab your very own copy if you’d like.

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The VoS Top 11 of 2011 – Published at No Clean Singing

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Hey.  You should already know this, because you should already be reading the No Clean Singing blog.  But in the event that for some reason you missed this, yesterday morning they published a list that I threw together, summing up some of the top new releases of the past year.  The list represents my eleven favorite albums that I heard, that were released in 2011 by bands I had never heard prior to last year.  I also chose to exclude albums I had already written about here at the Valley blog, because I didn’t want to bore you by just rehashing the same thing over and over again.  I hope you enjoy the list, or at least find something there you might not have heard before.  Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, either here or there.

Thanks for reading!