Nov 042020
 

 

(This is the sixth installment in a seven-album review orgy by our man DGR, who is attempting to free his mind for year-end season by clearing away a backlog of write-ups for albums he has enjoyed in 2020. With one exception we’ve been running these on consecutive days, and today’s subject is the latest album by the Dutch metal band Carach Angren, released in June by Season of Mist.)

Carach Angren armed with a budget is proving to be a dangerous thing indeed.

I can’t claim to have gotten in on the ground floor with these ghouls, but I can say that I showed up pretty damned close to it and have been following the group since then. It’s been fun to watch as they’ve grown in stature and advanced their career while at the same time maintaining a fair share of ‘camp’ in their music. Continue reading »

Jul 302020
 

 

(On June 26th Season of Mist released Franckensteina Strataemontanus, a new album by the Dutch symphonic horror metal band Carach Angren, and in this new interview DJ Jet caught up with guitarist/vocalist Seregor to discuss the album and many other topics of interest.)

 

Seregor, please give us a little history about Carach Angren, on how this band came about and what you wished to express through it.

Good day, we are a horror metal act from the southern parts of the Netherlands. Founded in 2003, we started off as a side project when we were active in former trash/blackmetal act “Vaultage”. As soon as this band seized to exist Carach Angren became fully operational as a three-headed formation and that machine never stopped roaring, going and growing. Ardek and I always had a distinct taste of how this band should sound, feel and look. Fast, high, blasts, low, complex, full, symphonic, emotional etc. Continue reading »

Mar 032020
 


photo credit – Nadja Geskus Photography

 

(Our Norway-based correspondent Karina Noctum forges ahead with her series of interviews of drummers, and here presents a discussion with Namtar, former drummer with the Dutch symphonic black metal band Carach Angren.)

2020 started with several losses of both musicians and bands in the metal scene. So to join the row of sad news it was announced that Namtar from Carach Angren was going to leave his band, and so I took the opportunity to talk to him.

Carach Angren had a pretty well-conceived and interesting concept, both musically and image-wise, that will continue for sure, but no two drummers are the same. So it remains to see who is going to take his place and how it will turn out. A new album called Franckensteina Strataemontanus to be released on May 29 has been announced, but the news is taken with mixed feelings of course. Continue reading »

Aug 172017
 

 

(In this long post we have not one but two extended reviews by DGR, one focusing on the 2017 album by the Greek band Nightrage and the second dwelling upon the 2017 album by the Dutch storytellers in Carach Angren.)

If there is one thing I’m a big fan of doing throughout the year, it’s the inevitable dive backwards into the earlier part of the year in order to play the increasingly desperate catch-up game, to write about releases I’ve been listening to, but never took the time out to say anything about. I’ve got a handful of those, and now that I have a little bit more free time from the day-job (which will be brief, let me tell you, the holiday season approaches) I can finally talk about two pretty constant spins from 2017 that NCS hasn’t had the chance to cover yet, completely glossing over the fact that I’m the guy at the site who will usually wave the flag for both bands.

The two this time around are melodeath stalwarts Nightrage and their seventh (!) album, The Venomous, and the latest batch of supernatural symphonic shenanigans from Carach Angren and their album Dance And Laugh Amongst The Rotten.

Nightrage – The Venomous

Without descending too much into an image of me in a room with newspaper articles and photos all connected with string in so many ways that I can barely move around inside of it, disheveled with a half-drunk cup of coffee that has somehow managed to turn semi-solid, screaming that “there has to be some sort of connection here!”, I’m starting to think that the melodeath crew of Nightrage have developed a pattern. It’s one I hoped that with the March release of their album The Venomous, the band would manage to break. Continue reading »

Sep 132016
 

Wormrot-Voices

 

(DGR steps forward with a round-up of new songs and videos. We will have a second round-up later today as well.)

Wormrot – Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Grind

If it feels like this summary is a little shorter than usual, it’s because the song itself is kind of like a car crash that you didn’t see coming. One moment, you’re blissfully unaware of anything around — then you blink, you see headlights and hear the crunch of metal, and that is the end. Such is the case with Wormrot’s new blink-and-you’ll-miss-it song.

Yes, the end of last week brought welcome news to the NCS fold in the form of new music from Singapore’s Wormrot. The newly released song, entitled “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Grind” comes off of the group’s new album Voices — due next month and their followup to 2011’s Dirge. Like many of Wormrot’s songs, “Spotless Grind” clocks in at just over a minute and is punchy as can get, having said all it needs to say in the meantime — which can mostly just be boiled down to “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH” over a series of unrelenting grind blasts. Continue reading »

Apr 162015
 

 

(DGR reviews the latest album by the Dutch band Carach Angren., which is out now on Season of Mist.)

One of the things I love about Carach Angren is how divisive they are amongst the staff at this site. For some, they’re “LARP-Friendly black metal” and for others they’re an enjoyable band. When it comes to a genre like symphonic black, I own up to it time and time again that I am, in large part, an idiot.

I scratch the surface of the genre but it has been a huge blind spot for me, as has black metal as a whole; when it comes to the great divide of metal, between the black metal and the death metal guys, I tend to fall on the death metal side of the spectrum. I like my fair share of death metal bands masquerading as black metal groups, but rarely the traditional, ethereal, and anguish-fueled howls or the purposefully roughly-produced walls of sound of the early generations of proper black metal — which roughly translates to me being perfectly OK with Carach Angren and their symphonic horror tomes.

I think a large part of this is how you see the band. For me, Carach Angren are a group of storytellers who happen to really love their camp. They’ve never been the most black metal thing out there, and frankly, their stories have never been the most traditionally black metal out there, having covered a battlefield or two and even doing a nautical-themed disc, though the latter has become a bit more common and has been done increasingly well by other bands. The only thing you can be sure of is that the body count on a Carach Angren disc is probably going to be high and no one is going to escape happily. I’ve never had a thought of , “Well, this oughta end just swell for this character!”, when listening to a Carach Angren album, instead just counting down the minutes until their inevitable end. Continue reading »

Aug 112014
 

Collected in this post you will find news of three U.S. or North American tours. News about the first two is still somewhat incomplete, and I’m a bit late reporting on the third one. All three are enticing.

“IN THE MINDS OF EVIL”

Last month news surfaced about a tour to be headlined by Deicide, named after their most recent album, In the Minds of Evil. Last night Inquisition posted an announcement on their Facebook page about the tour, which was interesting because when the tour was announced last month Marduk was named as one of the support bands, but now it appears that Marduk are out and Inquisition are in. In addition, Abysmal Dawn have been added to the line-up. Here’s the complete list of bands:

DEICIDE
SEPTICFLESH
INQUISITION
ABYSMAL DAWN
CARACH ANGREN

An updated official tour flyer hasn’t been released yet, so I decided to use a photo of an embryo of the short-tailed fruit bat (embryonic stage 19).

Inquisition also included an initial schedule of dates in their FB post, while noting that more dates will be added. Here’s the schedule so far: Continue reading »

Apr 042013
 

(NCS writer Andy Synn has returned from Oslo’s Inferno Festival, held on March 27-30, 2013, and brings us a multi-part report of what he saw and heard, along with photos. Check out the previous installments here and here.)

Day 2 of the festival had fewer bands I was particularly dying to see, so I decided to check out some different acts I’d never seen before, so as to make better use of my time and to fulfil my journalistic pretensions a bit more.

We decided to have a later start to the day, arriving in time to see Aeternus hit the stage and introduce the crowd (if any introduction was needed) to their twisted take on the darker side of the black/death metal aesthetic. Drawing liberally from all the various spheres of the metallic spectrum, the group performed like a well-drilled musical machine, though their focus on slippery shifts between styles meant that their live stage presence was a little more unassuming than most.

Though the band last played here 11 years ago, there was very little rust to be found on them, as they bled their instruments dry of every hypnotic riff and spiralling, dissonant lead they could wring out of them. Continue reading »

Feb 182013
 

Hey, happy fucking Monday to all you brain-dead metal heads. Here’s a big collection of new music and news that I came across at the start of my bleary-eyed morning today.

LOST SOCIETY

I’ve confessed before that straight-up old-school thrash is not among the metal genres that are nearest and dearest to my black heart. In addition, I’ve become even more numb due to the avalanche of re-thrash releases by many new bands who all sound alike to me. But with that said, I’m digging the shit out of a new song clip that premiered today by a Finnish band named Lost Society.

The song title alone hooked me: “Braindead Metal Head”. And then the music Finnish-ed me off. It’s a jet-fueled, out-of-control thrash rocket with multiple warheads. The riffing is catchy as fuck, the vocals are pleasingly drunk on the high energy, and the obligatory guitar solo is a first-class trip to shred city. This is speed metal I can get behind.

The video strings together words of high praise by the likes of Mille Petrozza (Kreator), Schmier (Destruction), Andreas Kisser (Sepultura), Craig Locicero (Forbidden), and Kragen Lum (Heathen), and they might know what they’re talking about. Continue reading »

Feb 072013
 

Here are a duo of new videos I spied yesterday and this morning that I thought were worth sharing. They stood out because the visuals enhanced the music and were actually very entertaining to watch, which I honestly can’t say about most metal videos.

BLUE STAHLI

I discovered Blue Stahli thanks to an interview with him that DGR did for us last year. I’ve been following his social media and music releases since then, and it’s obvious that he’s a clever, creative, slightly unhinged dude, and I like his style, even though the kind of music he makes isn’t my usual kind of thing.

This morning, Bloody Disgusting premiered a music video for the song “ULTRAnumb”, which comes from Blue Stahli’s 2011 self-titled album, which you can acquire here. The song is a catchy piece of work with an industrial beat and harsh vox that remind me of Devin Townsend’s, plus clean crooning that doesn’t make me run for the exits. And the video . . . the video is a complete head trip, most of it funny as hell, and ultimately full of gore, too. Continue reading »