The London Burlesque Festival, a celebration of the art, humor, music, and beautiful people of modern burlesque, is gearing up for its seventh iteration. The festival runs from May 10-19 this year, and tickets are going fast.
KEN Mode cover artist Ben Bonner discusses his crazy, massive “cloud ghoul” sculpture
KEN Mode: Entrench (Season of Mist, 3/19/13)
“Counter-Culture Complex”
KEN Mode: “Counter-Culture Complex”
If you’ve picked up Entrench, the latest from Canadian sludge-core band KEN Mode, you likely noticed the artwork — featuring an amorphous creature made of tentacles, bones, and bubbling muck strolling through the dark with a tiny catlike figure perched atop it. This deceptively large piece, Cloudghoultrillghost, is the work of sculptor Ben Bonner, who was asked to lend it for cover photos. We talked to Ben about his creative process, the story behind the sculpture, and how humor and darkness go hand in hand.
WTF? Wednesday: Folk-metal fanatics Trollfest brutalize Britney Spears’s “Toxic”
Trollfest: A Decade of Drekkadence (March 2013)
When you’re listening to Norwegian metal, do you ever think to yourself, “I’m actually beginning to understand these vocals; I wish there was a band out there who would sing in some sort of fictional language, so I would feel completely lost in the fantasy they’ve created”?
Enter Trollfest.
Begin the ritual: A coven enrobes in Ghost BC’s “Year Zero” video (NSFW)
Have Swedish metal occultists Ghost BC offered up their identities in the video for “Year Zero”? Probably not. But it offers a dose of flesh, young and old, as a ritual is begun.
Video Premiere: Tim Fite’s “Hold Me All Night” finds sex, love, and death in the Marble’s Continuum
Tim Fite: Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t (Anti-, 3/6/12)
Singer-songrapper Tim Fite has a unique way of bringing together humor and painful observation. His most recent album, Ain’t Ain’t Ain’t, focused on the joy and heartbreak of the teenage years, and in a wonderfully weird video combining hand-drawn and stop-motion animation, Fite puts visuals to his call for acceptance and love.
Got rhythm? Taiwanese thrashers Chthonic challenge fans with mobile game
Taiwanese extreme-metal band Chthonic’s latest album is in the bag, and while it’s being mixed in Sweden, the band is taking care of other business — notably, promoting its recent mobile game, Rhythm Crusher. It’s similar to other play-along games on the market, but it features Chthonic’s brutality and metal background art. And the band is promoting it in a unique, take-it-to-the-streets fashion.
MP3 Premiere: Folk duo Brown Bird heads East with “Nine Eyes”
“Nine Eyes” is an example of folk duo Brown Bird’s varied influences, as Eastern rhythms mix with upright bass strums, psych-rock guitar, and vocal harmonies.
I know what you did last album: Get a tease of Shining’s video for “I Won’t Forget”
Shining: I Won’t Forget single (Universal Norway, 2/8/13)
Following the band’s superlative, groundbreaking album Blackjazz in 2010, progressive metal outfit Shining (the Norwegian former jazz band, not the Swedish suicidal metal band) is back this year with a new full-length, One One One. Its first single, “I Won’t Forget,” is still en route to America, with a seemingly spectacular video to match a gnarly rock/metal tune. Get a glimpse of the futuristic, industrialized visuals, directed by Kyrre Larsen (who also did “Fisheye”), and get ready.