SEEN AND HEARD: DÅÅTH, NOCTURNUS AD, OUBLIETTE, ROPE SECT, UFOMAMMUT, VALE OF PNATH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Mar 202024
 

It has been a very busy week for the release of new songs and videos, and the week is only half-way through. Some of my fellow NCS slaves have tossed a lot of them my way, and I’ve ferreted out others.

Even though I’ve included quite a lot of them in this roundup, more are still running around the prairies waiting to be corralled. I hope I can lasso a few more before the weekend, assuming my lathered-up pony doesn’t hit a gopher hole and pitch me over its head into a hard landing.

DÅÅTH (U.S.)

This site sprang to life in November 2009. Just a couple months later we published our first annual list of “Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs“, and Dååth‘s “Wilting on the Vine” was one of the 10 we selected. That’s how long ago we started following this Atlanta-based band, though they had been releasing music for six years before that. But after one more album in 2010, the band fell silent for what turned out to be a very long time. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, MAY 2022

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Jun 072022
 


Nechochwen

(With another month now in the history books, we welcome back Gonzo, who again has recommendations for you of wide-ranging albums released in the preceding month – somewhat delayed only because our editor completely lost track of time while at Maryland Deathfest.)

When doing the legwork that goes into these monthly columns, there are some months when I have to reach deep into the metal underbelly to extract whatever hidden gems I stumble across, and there are others where the onslaught of new releases just looks downright overwhelming and perhaps menacing.

May turned out to be the latter. I actually had to trim this one down from what I had originally planned out, if for no other reason than the fact that I’m disappearing into the mountains for most of the weekend without many plans to be in front of a computer. Fuck that nonsense, I say. I get enough of that during my 9-5 job, and any excuse to hit the road for an escape is a good one.

Read on and prepare to abuse your eardrums with the best of what I stumbled into through May. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: UFOMAMMUT, GALVANIST, MÅNEGARM, KATHAROS XIII, BOG BODY, SIGN OF EVIL, WOLFANGER & WOLFHEART, VREID, WORMROT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 192022
 


Ufomammut – photo by Francesca De Franceschi Manzoni

I hope your weekend is going well. Mine got off to a very good start this morning as I made my way through songs and videos that surfaced over the past week or so. By sheer good fortune, almost everything I listened to struck a chord, and the ones that rang loudest made its way into this big round-up.

I organized the selections in a way that made sense to me, capped by a shot of pure adrenaline. I’ll briefly tell you what to prepare for.

UFOMAMMUT (Italy)

Prepare for: a slow burn, a dreamy but sinew-triggering trip reminiscent of an old Pink Floyd space odyssey, with an increasingly fiery slug-fest as its destination. Continue reading »

NORTHWEST TERROR FEST 2018: A PHOTO RECORD (DAY 3)

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Jul 162018
 

 

For the second year in a row, NCS was proud to co-present Northwest Terror Fest, which took place this year on May 31 – June 2 in Seattle, Washington. Several of us in the NCS family helped organize and present the fest, and I guess that makes us a bit biased, but we’re not the only ones who thought it was a fantastic event. The feedback from bands, fans, and the venues has been uniformly very, very positive — so much so that we and our co-conspirators are already at work planning the third installment of NWTF for 2019.

We will of course be bringing you news about next year’s fest when the time is right, but now we want to take one more look back at NWTF 2018. And to do that, we’ve been fortunate to present some of the amazing photos that New Orleans-based photographer Teddie Taylor took while the festival was in progress. You can see her pics from Day 1 here and Day 2 here, and what follows are shots of the performances on the festival’s final day.

P.S. As of today, full pro-shot videos of almost all the performances at NWTF 2018 are now live, thanks to our ally Max Volume Silence Live, and you can find all of them HERE. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: UFOMAMMUT

 Interviews  No Responses »
Nov 132017
 

 

(Our contributor Wil Cifer usually brings us album reviews, but today he provides a most interesting interview with all three members of the distinctive Italian band Ufomammut.)

Back in September this Italian trio released 8 on Neurot Records, which has proven to be one of the year’s more interesting releases in heavy music with their blend of psychedelic sludge. I managed to catch up with them when they got off their most recent jaunt on the road to pick their brains about the creative process and what makes this band tick. The result is as follows.

******

The hardest part of being in a band can be interaction between other members over the years, so what has been the key to keeping the band together?

Urlo: A good dose of stoicism for sure… ahaha. I must say that we found a good alchemy between us. Poia and me are always together, we see each other every day, being 2/3 of the poster art collective Malleus. We’ve known Vita since a lot of years before we started the band. So… we three had great moments and bad moments, obviously. We all believe in what we’re doing, in one way or the other, so Ufomammut is what kept us together. And, at the end, after so many years, it’s been fun 🙂 Continue reading »

UFOMAMMUT: “8”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Sep 122017
 

 

(Wil Cifer review the new album by Ufomammut, set for relase on September 22 by Neurot Recordings.)

When I am searching for doom I want something that is just Black Sabbath worship. I’ve listened to those albums for over 35 years and can pull them off the shelf at any moment to revisit as needed… So it gets me excited to hear a band like these men from from Italy who must set bongs aflame across the world with their super psyche-filled doom.

Ufomammut take you out into the cosmos with a fuzzed-out density that is obscured by clouds of trippy haze. The vocals feel more Pink Floyd-like to me than carrying any kind of an Ozzy influence. Each song takes you further into the depths of their warped rabbit hole. Continue reading »

UFOMAMMUT: “EMPIREUM”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Mar 212012
 

February 22, 2012: a day that will forever after be remembered as U-Day.

Okay, well at least I’ll remember it because I was so damned clever in coming up with that post title for a Feb 22 feature about new sounds from bands whose names begin with U.

Okay, I probably won’t remember it either.  In fact, the only reason I remembered it at all is because one of those bands was Italy’s Ufomammut, and today brought us a new Ufomammut track in the form of an official video. The music is called “Empirean”, and it’s the first movement on an album titled Oro: Opus Primum — “primum” because it’s the first of two albums that together will form the Oro saga in 10 movements. Neurot Recordings will release the first one on April 17 and the second in September.

Ufomammut plans to release videos for each track from both albums over the coming months and then collect them in a DVD that will be sold with a limited edition vinyl on the band’s own Supernatural Cat Records.

Now, with those details behind us, let’s move on to “Empirean”. The video, which is embedded here after the jump, originally debuted today on a fascinatingly eclectic metal blog called The Obelisk that I used to read before I sacrificed most of my reading to NCS (and congrats to The Obelisk on landing the debut). “Empirean” is about 14 minutes long, and it’s a disturbing, hypnotic journey. Continue reading »

U-DAY: UNLEASHED, UNSANE, AND UFOMAMMUT

 Metal News  9 Responses »
Feb 222012
 

I swear, this was completely coincidental, just a pleasing serendipity (or synchronicity, or both): Yesterday afternoon I got press releases about three bands whose new albums I’m interested in hearing, and the names of all three bands begin with U. So, in this post I’ve collected (i) album art and other details about the next album from Unleashed (Sweden); a new song from Unsane (NYC); and a new video teaser from Ufomammut (Italy). Plus, I’m throwing in some additional music from two of these bands.

By the way, The Used also released a new single yesterday, but U know I ain’t goin’ there.

UNLEASHED

Can you believe that this band is about to release their 11th studio album? Not many extreme metal bands have had careers spanning such a length of time, and fewer still are capable of continuing to generate interest in what they’re doing. Conceptually, the new Unleashed album — Odalheim — will continue to tell the story from Norse mythology about the end of the world (Ragnarök) and what comes next.

The album art, which you can see above, was created by Sebastian Ramstedt. According to Unleashed vocalist/bassist Johnny Hedlund, it depicts the new world (Odalheim) built by the warriors who survived Ragnarök, shown “at the break of dawn at the Birka shores, and just before the attack of White Christ.” Continue reading »

MORE 2011 SICKNESS (PART 10)

 Forthcoming Albums  40 Responses »
Oct 012011
 

September is behind us. Here in Seattle, it was such a beautiful month that it seemed like nature’s compensation for how late the summer started. Unfortunately, with September’s end, we’re on a short track to the onset of winter, which means about six months of short, cold, grey, ceaselessly wet days. Ain’t that just fuckin’ great?

Well, bitchin’ about the winter ahead won’t change one fucking thing. I prefer to think instead about the deluge of new metal that’s headed our way and try (momentarily) to forget about the deluge of rain on the horizon. Which brings us to the latest monthly edition of METAL IN THE FORGE.

You know the drill:  In these posts, we collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last month about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including occasional updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know their music yet. In this series, we cut and paste those announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

Remember — this isn’t a cumulative list. If we found out about a new album before August, we wrote about it in previous installments of this series. So, be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported earlier. This month’s list begins right after the jump. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones. As usual, also feel free to tell us about how we fucked up by omitting releases that you’re stoked about. Continue reading »