It’s Halloween, bitches! Have some Helloween from ’87′s Keeper of the Seven Keys Part I.

We have more Helloween here and here. Facebook ‘em here or visit their official site here. Go read/watch!

Close your windows and curtains, lock your doors, turn off the lights and turn the volume down a bit. Make ‘em all think you’re not at home. You don’t want your neighbors to think you’re getting soft, because we’ve got a balad in position for you. Seriously!

We’ve got U.D.O. here, which is a nearly ancient German Heavy Metal band around frontman Udo Dirkschneider. You may know the dude as ex-Accept, the band that he founded in 1968 – then still under a different name – and is seen as the foundation of Speed Metal. He switched between U.D.O, which he formed in 1987, and Accept a couple of times, but as of latest he’s been with U.D.O. fulltime since 2005.

The list of releases is nearly endless and got one entry longer on May 20^th of this year, when Rev Raptor came out through AFM Records. For the balad I Give as Good as I Get they shot a very simple but very personal music video, credits to motig. Find it after the jump!

Finnish Power Metal from Sweden. Yep, it exists. In this case we’re talking about Oz, a Heavy Metal band formed in 1977 in the Finnish town of Nakkila. The band released albums from 1982 to 1991, then put a lid on it and quit.

Years and years passed, until in early 2010 the five-pieced group came back together, by now relocated to Sweden. Their first completely newly written song is a fact for some months now, and has been released in a music video that we’ll share past the jump. The single is just a first little appetizer for the band’s planned new studio album Greatezt Blitz, to be released in the spring of 2011. I guess that pretty much means any time now.

I’ve just found this full-length live show of Deicide playing at The Rescue Rooms. I have no idea where that is, so if you know please enlighten us. This is from the Earache Records website and I can’t tell how long they plan to keep it available, so we’re going to plant it right here for you for as long as it’s good for! Without further adieu, DEICIDE!!!

Update: NCS contributor Andy Synn has informed us that The Rescue Rooms is a venue in Nottingham, UK.

Yesterday’s review of the newest album by a classic Death Metal band, Deicide, oddly enough got me thinking about another of my old favorites, Baphomet. The two don’t really sound much alike, so I’m not sure why my half-broken mind made the connection, other than maybe general nostalgia. Baphomet is old-school thrashy Death Metal with deep gutteral vocals and inspires visions and feelings of darkness, maybe that’s what made the connection to Deicide in my head.

Anyway, I’ve always felt that Baphomet’s 1992 album, The Dead Shall Inherit, was an underappreciated classic. We’ve had a post before featuring the album’s opening track, The Suffering, and I’d like to expose you to a couple more from that classic album.

We do some Accepting today. We accept the fact that Accept is a great fuckin’German Heavy Metal band and although it’s not Death Metal – and so not particularly concrete-grindingly loud – we still fuckin’ love it! Rufio seems to agree as well, because he suggested we take a look at the band (thanks for that, mate!). The band may have taken a liking in ACDC in the past, because, as Rufio put it, “all I can think of while listening to this is that ACDC picked up some European influence”.

Well actually, it could’ve been the other way around – though it’s not. What I know for sure is that Accept was actually walking the earth a couple of years before ACDC, two or five years in fact, depending on whether you count them as the same band back in the days between 1968 and 1971 when they were still called Band X. That’s a shitty name, as we know they accepted and acted upon. For all the math wizards among us: ACDC formed in 1973, Accept/Band X in 1968. However, ACDC was the first to release an album, in 1975, while Accept needed until 1979.

In late 2010 German Speed and Power Metal pioneers Helloween released 7 Sinners their fourteenth full-length studio offering. Thirteen catchy anthemic Metal tunes for Metal fans who don’t mind having a little fun through their music. Don’t get me wrong, this is classic type Metal material, but it may leave you feeling a little uplifted. An example of this is the leading single Are You Metal? which is a song about Metal. How fuckin’ fun and Metal is that?

We’ve had Skinless here before but I was thinking of giving 2010 a bit of a brutal end. You know we can’t let it off easy. So I want to propose that we blast some more Skinless at the fucker on it’s way out!

I’ve had some spicy food yesterday and now I feel like thrash metal today. You don’t see the link? Neither do I. I just noticed the simultaneous occurence. So, let’s get some going. As you probably know, the genre was formed in the early 1980′s, with its roots primarily in the NWOBHM (New Wave of British Heavy Metal), speed metal and hardcore punk. In turn thrash was highly influential to Death Metal, hence the relevance. In the US, four bands were of primary and simultaneous importance to the development of thrash: Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica and Slayer. I’m sure you’re familiar with those big names, still currently collectively known as “The Big Four”.

So, in honor of the genre, we’ll have ourselves some thrash metal from three decades of the stuff. We’ll start with some late 1980′s Kreator, a thrash metal greatness from Germany, then followed by my all time favorite Slayer song from the 1990′s. From the 2000′s, we’ll throw in some Municipal Waste. Then, because I’m such an incredibly nice guy (you may vomit), I’ll serve Lazarus A.D. for desert, probably my favorite thrash metal outfit these days.