(written by Islander)
As you can see, I have a lot of new music to recommend today. I hope the volume won’t deter you from investigating each entry. I will say that I’ve arranged the selections in a way that my cause your head to whirl around as you move through them. At least I hope that will happen!
Because there’s so much to discuss, I’ll dispense with further introductory comments and get right to it. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
My spouse and I are going to an early lunch with a friend we’ve known for… ahem… decades. She’s always a ton of fun to be with, but the timing’s not great for this column. I had added dozens of new songs and complete releases arriving over the past week that I intended to check out. And I didn’t get a head-start yesterday because I spend a chunk of the afternoon and early evening watching a Mariners baseball game that was… ahem… dispiriting. Don’t ask me why I did that, because I knew our opponents were very good and the odds were very high that my team would… ahem… suck (again).
Anyway, I had a lot of hard choices to make this morning and a rapidly vanishing amount of time in which to make them and then peck out some thoughts. I hope I’ll be able to catch up with more new music for the usual Sunday collection. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Any chance we have to expose more people to the music of San Francisco’s Cartilage is a chance we will seize, even if it means having to spend hours washing the blood off our gore-drenched bodies after reveling in the band’s musical horrors.
Their newest death-grinding horrors are barely contained in a new album named Operating Altar that’s set for release on September 11th by Everlasting Spew Records. Unlike the previous abominations of Cartilage, this album narrates a single nightmarish tale, which they describe as follows: Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
We’re all about to roll into the weekend, and we hope it will be a good one for everybody. To help pave the way into it, and to make the weekend a better one for you, we’re premiering a song from Aspen Sanctum’s forthcoming debut album To Withhold the Need to Conquer.
Because this is a fairly new band, an introduction is in order. They are based in Kalamazoo, a town in southwestern Michigan that shares the Algonquian name for the river that runs by it. The band’s four members are Jared Koons, Jeremy Cronk, Tim Wicklund, and Bryan Neterer. Here’s their explanation for the band’s name, and for the title of their album:
Aspen forests are common to the upper Midwest. Known for their colorful autumn leaves and pale bark, the word “Aspen” serves as a reference to the region’s distinct seasons. “Sanctum” suggests a sacred, secluded space. Aspen Sanctum is meant to evoke a vision of the natural world prevailing in the face of time.
Embodying the beauty of the Northwoods, coastal Great Lakes, and rolling hills of the Midwest, while simultaneously resisting the innate human urge to dominate and conquer all that lies in view. Continue reading »
(“Fun” is a recurring word in Zoltar’s interview of Mike Borders, and “fun” is the operative word for what the interview will bring you, too. The focus is on Ravaged by the Yeti (Borders‘ band with Rogga Johansson and Jon Rudin), whose new album is being released today by Testimony Records, but it goes in other directions too. Enjoy!)
Few people do take a thirty-plus years leave of absence in death metal before going back at it in full swing. But Mike Borders ain’t no regular death metal musician either as he was part of one of MASSACRE’s earliest line-ups back in 1985. Yep, he played along Kam Lee, Bill Andrews, and future OBITUARY axeman Allen West before the latter was replaced by Rick Rozz, recording with them their first two proper demos before hanging up his bass to lead a ‘normal’ life.
That is until 2019 when Lee called him back, eventually becoming part of the team that would record and release the Resurgence album and a few subsequent EPs, including Mythos. Said team included Rogga Johansson from PAGANIZER and a zillion other bands with whom Borders would soon have a very special bond, leading to formation of RAVAGED BY THE YETI in 2023, right after his second and final exit from MASSACRE.
After a cool but nowhere-to-be-found debut on a rip-off label (Apex Predator) and a slight reshuffling of the line-up – gone are both WOMBBATH’s Jonny Pettersson and drummer Jon Skäre – RAVAGED BY THE YETI’s brand-new album Snowbound Horror on the far more reliable imprint Testimony Records is as dumb and fun as its title suggests and Borders doesn’t even try to pretend otherwise. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Horns of Abomination is the name of a new Southern California-based one-man audio terror. It is also the name of the band’s debut demo tape to be released by Sentient Ruin, and it’s the name of the demo’s opening song, which we’re now premiering.
As usual, Sentient Ruin has crafted its own vivid prose to describe what happens on the demo:
Treading a liminal outer realm of ear-splitting chaos where bestial war metal and pure noise converge into experimental derailment riding the confines of sanity, Horns of Abomination establishes an audial conquest of unprecedented cruelty and destruction. Obsessive, maniacal, barely coherent rhythmic pulsations plumbing a bloodbath of distortion; assaultive, chainsawing guitars creating berserk repetitions against a foul regurgitation of bestial, disemboweled vomits.
Of course, we have some descriptions of our own to offer. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Not for the first time, an extreme metal band has used excerpts from The Passion of Joan of Arc to illustrate one of their songs. This time it is the Croatian black/death metal band Defiant, who commemorated their 20th year of existence in 2025 with the release of their fifth album, Mammon Mantra. But in the video we’re premiering for their song “Caesars Messiah” from that album, Defiant aren’t celebrating the famous martyr, but using the scenes for a different purpose.
The Passion of Joan of Arc is a 1928 French silent film directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and starring Renée Jeanne Falconetti. It focuses on the time that Joan of Arc was a captive of England and depicts her trial and execution for heresy by French clergymen loyal to the English. It is rightly regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. Even seeing only the excerpts used by Defiant, you can get a sense of why that is.
But, as suggested above, the lyrics of “Caesars Messiah“, which you will also see in the video, seem to have a different moral than the injustice visited upon Joan and the reasons for her ultimate elevation to sainthood by the church. Continue reading »
(We present Daniel Barkasi’s evocative review of a new album by the Czech band Inferno, which will be released on July 17th by Debemur Morti Productions.)
If you search for a band named Inferno on Encyclopedia Metallum, you’ll unsurprisingly get a lot of results. All of these are not created equal, of course. When we think of a band of that name, there’s only one that comes straight to mind – the gnostic black metal Inferno hailing from Czechia.
Having been in existence for over three decades, their works speak for themselves, though they’ve experienced quite a musical metamorphosis over those years. Earlier releases were much more straightforward second-wave black metal with a certain rawness and regional authenticity that added to their proverbial charm. A hint of a more expansive direction could be sniffed out on Black Devotion in certain aspects, but that change truly came to fruition on the nightmarish Omniabsence Filled by His Greatness in 2013, a record filled with dreary, unpredictable atmospheres resembling a thick fog that gives no chance of seeing anything but nothingness.
From that release, Inferno have been wildly experimental, carving out a truly singular sound and presence, not unlike contemporaries Blut Aus Nord, Cult of Fire, and a select few others. They also don’t tinker for the sake of it – the upper crust quality of each release exemplifies creative zeal to a level that few achieve. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
The best anime death metal from China! That sounds like a narrow niche, doesn’t it? It’s also a description that leaves some big unanswered questions about what the music sounds like – questions we will help answer today.
But first, there’s a question about the meaning of this band’s name – Dehumanizing Itatrain Worship. They have answered that question: “The band name ‘Itatrain’ actually comes from a viral 2012 incident in Shanghai: a fan was caught kneeling and worshipping a train decorated with ‘LoveLive!’ characters. We thought that kind of fanaticism was both stupid and hilarious at the time, so we decided to name the band after it.”
The LoveLive! multimedia anime universe has also played a role in the music of Dehumanizing Itatrain Worship. Their vocalist Kiryu Zhang admits that “on our previous efforts, people probably saw us as just that ‘weird anime slam band’ sampling LoveLive! for shock value.” But what began as a “meme” bedroom project has survived for a decade, and the music has considerably evolved as well.
Perhaps one sign of that is the fact that it’s our site that was invited to premiere the band’s new album, 2D Complex (二次元コンプレックス), in advance of its July 10 release by Stillbirth Records and Gore House Productions. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn has four more albums from last month that he needs you to check out)
I’m in a bit of a rush today, so don’t have time for much of a preamble here… suffice it to say that June was a very busy month, for everyone here at NCS, which has left us with a lot of stuff to catch up on.
Which is why you’re getting a second edition of “Things You May Have Missed” today, following on from last week’s equally killer quartet of recent releases.