Jan 292018
 

 

I’m continuing to stack these installments of the list pretty deep, in an effort to prevent the onset of depression when I have to stop it. However, I’m confident I’ll be depressed and frustrated anyway, because I’ll still be forced to leave a lot of great 2017 songs on the cutting-room floor when I do stop.

Today you’ll again notice some stylistic connections among the songs I’ve packaged together, and because of that I again think I’ve compiled a grouping that makes for a nice, stand-alone playlist.

EVOKE THY LORDS

The first song in this collection is another rare example of a long-form track that I think is immensely infectious despite its significant length. It hooked me the first time I heard it, and I’m still hooked. Continue reading »

Oct 182017
 

 

(Last summer we premiered a song from the new album by Planet Eater from Regina in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, and now we present Andy Synn’s review of the album.)

As much as we enjoy a lot of fancy progressive, forward-thinking, paradigm-evolving bands here at NCS… sometimes we all just want something that rips.

Enter Western Canada’s (fantastically named) Planet Eater and their debut album, Blackness from the Stars. Continue reading »

Jul 272017
 

 

Not long ago I happened upon a song named “The Boats” that hooked me right in the gills, and I included it in a round-up here at our site. It’s the opening track on Blackness From the Stars, the debut album by Planet Eater from Regina in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, who based their name on that destroyer of worlds out of the Marvel universe, Galactus. And now we get to bring you the premiere of another track from the album in advance of its August 4 release. This one is “Cold Confines“.

There is a bit of a chill in the song, thanks to the spooky, cosmic ambient sounds that accompany a syncopated percussive beat at the outset and reappear again near the end, as the song ascends into darkness before a final bout of brute-force hammering. But there’s a lot more heat in this track than sensations of cold, the heat thrown off by a big turbocharged engine with the throttle wide open. Continue reading »

Jul 212017
 

 

Do you groan when you see these big round-up posts? Especially when they come three in a row, day after day? Is it too much to process? Do you feel overwhelmed by the volume?

These are what are known as rhetorical questions, i.e., a figure of speech in the form of a question that isn’t intended to elicit an answer, e.g., “Can’t you do anything right?” Right or wrong, too much or too little, on we go… this time with new or newly discovered metal from seven bands.

HATE MOON

Fólkvangr Records tells us that “Hate Moon is a Norse-Gael symphonic black metal band hailing from Pennsylvania”, formed by “two Irish American descendants of Norse Vikings” (Tuathail and Tohmar) who have created music that “romanticizes the ancient Celtic world through a soundscape of historical fantasy”. Their debut album is The Imprisoning War, and the first item in today’s round-up is an album track named “Mountain of Death“. Continue reading »