SEEN AND HEARD: TAU CROSS, SÓLSTAFIR, TENGGER CAVALRY, TREST

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jun 122019
 

 

I had grand ambitions for this post, with many more selections than you’re seeing here. I also had the goal of posting it yesterday before I left for the airport to begin a trip to Iceland. That’s where I am now, having arrived foggy-eyed and fuzzy-headed at Keflavik Airport this morning after a red-eye flight. I obviously didn’t get this done in time for yesterday, and had to cut it back to finish in time for today,

TAU CROSS

I’m a huge Tau Cross fan, and therefore was excited to see yesterday’s announcement by Relapse Records that a new album named Messengers of Deception will be released on August 9th. Equally exciting, the band rolled out a video for a new song to mark the occasion. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CORPSESSED, SKELETHAL, NARTHRAAL, SKALLBANK, THE HU, TENGGER CAVALRY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 062018
 

 

I know there was a ton of new music released yesterday. I can tell just from rapidly scrolling through the 130 e-mails that hit our in-box between 12:55 a.m. and 10:35 p.m. yesterday (yes, I counted them). But (with two exceptions) I had already decided what I wanted to put in this round-up before any of those e-mails arrived, and I decided to just go with these and defer figuring out what Monday might have brought until another day.

The first of the two exceptions is one of the five recommendations I received yesterday from my Norwegian friend eiterorm. I suspect at least a few of the other four will also find their way into another round-up later this week. And that one exception led to a second. Most of the the rest of what I’ve collected below came out late last week or I discovered them last week.

CORPSESSED

More than four years ago, our former contributor Leperkahn introduced his brief comments about Corpsessed’s Abysmal Thresholds with these words: “I’ve been seriously hungering for some absolutely cavernous death metal, the kind of stuff that sounds like it was recorded in a Lovecraftian studio at The Mountains Of Madness”. And he found what he was looking for in this Finnish band’s debut album: “To put it succinctly, these guys play death metal that sounds straight out of the abyss. Since putting it on I’ve had to check a few times to make sure Cthulhu isn’t looming behind my back”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: TENGGER CAVALRY, AETHERIAN, OUTER HEAVEN, DYPHTÊ, FRAMEWORK, DREAMSHIFT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 162017
 

 

You may have noticed that my posts have been scarce over the last few days — nothing at all over the weekend (Andy’s Best of British kept us from going dark altogether) and only one post on Friday and one on Thursday. The reason is that last Thursday my employer hosted its annual retreat, which was in Montana this year.

As usual, it has a very good time. But between the travel, the work-related meetings, the staying up late while getting hammered with co-workers, and the watching of some playoff baseball, NCS temporarily fell far down the ladder of my life. I wasn’t even been able to keep up with our e-mail traffic or my usual daily searching through statuses of friends, bands, and labels on Facebook.

Needless to say, I’m way behind. So what I’m doing here is collecting some music I actually had planned to post last Thursday, but ran out of time before leaving Seattle — though I have added two more songs I became aware of since then. Continue reading »

A THANKSGIVING FEAST: NIDINGR, ENDALOK, DARKREVERIE, GRAVECOVEN, ECHELON, REVULSION, SLECHTVALK, TENGGER CAVALRY, MROME, MARIANAS REST, ID, HUKUTUS

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  11 Responses »
Nov 242016
 

thankskilling

 

Here in the good old U.S. of A. it’s Thanksgiving Day today, and so to all of our American readers, I want to wish you a happy fucking Thanksgiving. And if you’re puzzling over what to be thankful for, I have some new metal for you. You’re welcome.

That’s right, while the rest of the miscreants in U.S. metal blogdom are acting like normal, reasonably well-adjusted people and taking the day off, I’m still here like a good samaritan at the soup kitchen, feeding you nourishing metal so you won’t think no one cares about you, at least for today. As usual, I’ll also post something new on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of this long “holiday” weekend, not because I’m better than anyone else but because I obviously have an undiagnosed obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Because it’s Thanksgiving, this holiday edition of what we normally call Seen and Heard is overstuffed, which is the condition of most Americans by the end of this day. So get ready to gorge yourself through the earholes with music from a dozen bands. Continue reading »

RAPID ROUND-UP: MACABRE OMEN, TENGGER CAVALRY, MOONSORROW, AKHLYS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 152015
 

 

(Our Norwegian friend eiterorm has stepped up to assist with a round-up of recommended new music.)

While Islander is away on duties, I promised to do a quick round-up of some of the news I find. Due to my music-to-words converter running at low capacity at the moment, I’ll leave it to you to find descriptive words for the music. So if you find that adjectives and metaphors are lacking, feel free to add your own in the comment field below. Despite the scarcity of words in this post, however, all the music below is highly recommended. Don’t just take my word for it; stream it all and hear for yourself.

Macabre Omen

Macabre Omen was founded in 1994 on the island of Rhodes in Greece. For the next decade, they recorded a variety of demos and splits until their debut album, entitled The Ancient Returns, was released in 2005. Now, another decade later, the Hellenes have unleashed their sophomore album upon us. The new opus, entitled Gods of War – At War, is an hour-long collection of epic hymns to Hellenic warfare, in the musical vein of Bathory. The entire album can be streamed below for your auditory pleasure. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: A RELAPSE RECORDS SAMPLER, BEYOND CREATION, TENGGER CAVALRY, DEIVOS

 Metal News  6 Responses »
Feb 182015
 

 

A lot of exciting things have happened in the world of metal over the last 48 hours, despite the fact that I haven’t had time to write about them. Yes, amazingly, it’s true: When trees fall in this forest, they make a sound even if you don’t hear them (or read about them) on this putrid blog. I will mention a few of the occurrences in this post, and then collect more for a post tomorrow.

RELAPSE RECORDS: 25 YEARS OF CONTAMINATION

Yesterday Relapse Records released a digital sampler that, at least in my memory, is the most humongous collection of songs yet released in a digital format. And on top of that, it’s a “pay what you want” offering.

It’s part of the label’s celebration of its 25th year in business, and it includes more than 180 tracks, one from almost every band that has released an album or EP on Relapse since 1990. The sampler can be streamed and downloaded via Bandcamp at this location: Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2014’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 23

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2014  5 Responses »
Jan 202015
 

We now come to Part 23 of our list of 2014′s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. For the other songs we’ve previously named to the list, go here.

In most of the installments of this list, I’ve tried to pair songs together that have something in common. Not today. Not only are these two songs unlike each other, they’re both unlike anything else I’ve selected for this list so far. But they’re both damned infectious, so there’s that.

TREPALIUM

When I first saw and heard Trepalium’s video for a single named “Moonshine Limbo” off their 2014 EP Voodoo Moonshine, I got the biggest grin on my face.  It still makes me smile — and want to jump! — even when I’m in the midst of a truly shitty day. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: VINTERBRIS, BINAH, TENGGER CAVALRY

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  15 Responses »
May 122014
 


Vinterbris — drawing by Kim Holm

A lot of music and videos reached my ears and eyes over the weekend and today, and I’ve been collecting the best of what I heard in a series of posts. I guess I could have called all of them “Seen and Heard”, but I labeled the first one today “Videography”, and the next one (to be posted tomorrow) will be “Shades of Black”. Here are the next three goodies:

VINTERBRIS

I first came across this band from Bergen (Norway) last month after discovering that the very talented Norwegian artist Kim Holm had created the cover art for their forthcoming new album, Solace. I found an advance song named “Fathoms”, liked it a lot, and featured it here. (You can listen to another one at Pitchfork, where Kim Kelly spotlighted it.)

Today Vinterbris unveiled a wonderful music video for another new song, “Dysphoria”, which fittingly features Kim Holm’s creation of artwork for the songs on the album. As the band have explained, nothing in this video is sped up or otherwise altered. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 9

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  9 Responses »
Jan 232014
 

Welcome to Part 9 of our list of the year’s most infectious extreme metal songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the two I’m announcing today, click here.

Both of today’s songs are folk-influenced examples of epic melodic death metal — albeit from widely separated corners of the world. They’re both highly infectious, too.

WOLFHEART

When Finland’s Tuomas Saukkonen announced about a year ago that he was shutting down all of his many musical projects — Before the Dawn, Black Sun Aeon, Dawn of Solace, Routasielu, and Final Harvest — it rocked me and many of his other fans, and not in a good way. But what Saukkonen put in their place turned out to be something quite excellent — a new solo project named Wolfheart. In the band’s debut album, Winterborn (reviewed here), he took the best elements from what he had done before and interwove them in this new work, while also finding ways to stretch his talents in new directions.

With lyrics full of imagery of ice and snow, deep woods and frozen lakes, wolves and warriors, darkness and frost — and with dramatic, sweeping, intense music that captures the magnificent purity of loss and longing, struggle, and sacrifice — the album is a collection of highly memorable anthems. Saukkonen has always had a talent for writing powerful, often folk-influenced melodies, and Winterborn has them in spades. Sometimes languid, sometimes erupting with compelling urgency, they are woven into the fabric of the music. The album is an epic achievement, and one of the best releases of 2013. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC FROM TENGGER CAVALRY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Nov 232013
 

In the daily discourse about metal, whether it be online, in print, or in face-to-face conversations, it’s common for the music to be described in physical terms. In fact, I can’t think of any other genre of music where fans, critics, and musicians so frequently discuss and describe what they’re hearing by reference to the physical sensations that the sound triggers in their imaginations.

For example, when someone describes a song as “galloping”, most metal heads immediately have at least a general idea about the pace and rhythms of the music. And that word is always the first one that springs to my mind when I listen to China’s Tengger Cavalry — and not just because the word “cavalry” appears in the band’s name or because their music is so heavily influenced by Mongolian culture, in which the horse occupies such a central place (The Font of All Human Knowledge tells us that nomads living in the traditional Mongol fashion still hold more than 3 million horses, which outnumber the country’s human population).

Tengger Cavalry have completed recording a new album entitled Ancient Call that will be released on February 1, 2014, and thanks to a tip from my NCS comrade DGR, I learned that they’ve just made it available for pre-order on Bandcamp and have started streaming two new songs (which can be downloaded immediately by those who pre-order the album). Continue reading »

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