SHORT BUT SWEET: FALSE / BARGHEST SPLIT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  11 Responses »
Jul 212012
 

“U.S. Black Metal” isn’t a true genre term, because what American black metal bands have been doing in recent years with the basic Northern European template is too diverse. Some stick close to  the Scandinavian blueprint, of course, but others have spun out some really creative variations on the theme. The subjects of this post are two of the USBM scene’s rising stars.

False is a Minnesota band who turned a lot of heads last year with their Untitled 12″, released by Gilead Media and Howling Mine (for example, it took the No. 14 spot on DECIBEL’s 40 Best Albums of 2011). It consisted of two 12-minute songs that were a mixture of hate-fueled, punk-influenced mayhem and epic wall-of-guitar jams.

Louisiana’s Barghest are another band who hit lots of radar screens last year (including ours) with their self-titled debut album (also released by Gilead and Howling Mine). It had an old-school lo-fi vibe, and no bass, but it packed in some crushing groove along with the haze of tremolo picking and percussive blasting.

Thanks to NCS reader Ørsaeth, I’ve discovered that on August 21 Gilead Media will be releasing a new False-Barghest split (12″ vinyl only) and that the split’s contents are now streaming within the internest. It’s strong music that will only fortify the growing reputation of these two bands. Continue reading »

ROLLING WITH IT: SPASMODIC, COFFINS, AND DEMONIAC

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 212012
 

I suppose our first post for this Saturday could have been about something melodious and harmonious, but when you start Friday with Hellish Outcast and then move on to the likes of Hell United, Skeletal Spectre, and Sophicide, it’s tough to change course, especially after a Friday night of blowing it out for the weekend. So we’re just gonna roll with the feeling and stay immersed in the kind of metal that comes for you hard, with raking claws and gnashing fangs.

In this post, new music from Spasmodic (Sweden) and Coffins (Japan) and the re-issue of a classic by Demoniac (New Zealand).

SPASMODIC

Spasmodic gave the world a four-song EP in 2010 by the name of Carve Perfection, which was a compilation of earlier material. They have also finished recording an 8-song demo album called Mondo Illustrated, for which they’ve been seeking label support for a release.

Three days ago they unveiled one of the songs from the latest demo, “Wanda La Put”. It features guest vocals by Emperor Magus Caligula, formerly of Dark Funeral. It’s fucking nutz. It’s a blast furnace of big razor-edged riffs, pummeling rhythms, and wolf-bark vocals (the kind of wolves that leaped in packs out of Hades). The heat comes off this song in waves, and the groove carves like a megawatt laser. Continue reading »

HELL DIVERS: HELL UNITED, SKELETAL SPECTRE, AND SOPHICIDE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jul 202012
 

Each of the three metal bands featured in this post have new albums on the way. Each of them have publicly released one song from their new albums. None of them sound quite like the others, but they do have these two points in common: First, all three of the new songs are very fucking good. Second, all three of them will make you feel like you’ve just taken a deep dive into the bowels of hell.

HELL UNITED

Hell United are a band of veteran Polish musicians (two of them playing in an earlier incarnation of this band as far back as 1997) who recently signed with Hellthrasher Productions for the September 11 release of their second album, Aura Damage. Just a few days ago, Hellthrasher started streaming the new album’s third track, “Deathlike Cold”.

The evil in this track starts flowing immediately in the tremolo-laced death-doom chords of the intro, and then it turns into a flood, with a dense wall of spitfire riffing, machine-gun percussion, and vocal outpourings of genuine bestiality. This horrific onslaught of hybridized black metal and brutal death-doom may qualify as war metal (a term we’ve had fun discussing around here off and on). Whatever you call it, it cored out my skull and left me hungry for more. Continue reading »

HELLISH OUTCAST: “YOUR GOD WILL BLEED”

 Album Reviews  12 Responses »
Jul 202012
 

(NCS writer Andy Synn waxes viciously eloquent in this review of the 2012 album by an NCS favorite — Norway’s Hellish Outcast.)

Ah Norway. Home of black metal. Land of beauty and darkness… Where exactly are you pulling all these killer death/thrash bands from right now?! Just off the top of my head, the last few years have seen the return to life of Cobolt 60, and some truly awesome records by The Konsortium and The Wretched End. And now you can add Hellish Outcast to the mix as well.

While The Konsortium keep the black metal quotient pretty high with a heavy dose of dark, esoteric weirdness, and The Wretched End will always have sonic ties to Emperor, due to Samoth’s inimitable writing and playing style, Hellish Outcast have taken several further steps away from the sound of their homeland, creating a sound that’s all knives and knuckledusters, delivered with a cruel sneer and a priapic swagger.

Not only do Hellish Outcast not do black metal, they also don’t do nice. Or comfortable. Or anything less aggressive than a rabid pit-bull that’s been force-fed a diet of sand and barbed wire. In fact, this album is so damned aggressive, so utterly hate-filled, that it should come with a warning label along the lines of:

Danger – the levels of testosterone and aggression on this album could cause permanent damage to your underlying genetic structure.

Continue reading »

MDF XI: THE MARYLAND DEATHFEST ANNOUNCES THE FIRST 16 BANDS FOR 2013

 Metal News  32 Responses »
Jul 192012
 

It’s waaaaaaay past the end of our normal posting day, but I thought this news was significant enough to interrupt my regularly scheduled evening activities, which consist of lolling on a comfy sofa like a beached orca watching The Food Channel, taking frantic phone calls from world leaders, solving quadratic equations in my head for shits and giggles, and occasionally making lascivious remarks to my wife on the off chance that she might be in a frisky mood.

Yes, just hours ago, the best metal festival in these United State announced the first 16 bands to appear at MDF XI, which will be held in Baltimore on May 23-26, 2013 — and here they are:

VENOM (UK) – Exclusive US headlining show.
CARCASS (UK) – Exclusive US show.
MANILLA ROAD
RIGHTEOUS PIGS – Exclusive US reunion show.
PENTAGRAM
ANTAEUS (France) – Exclusive US show.
INTEGRITY
CONVULSE (Finland) – Exclusive US show.
AOSOTH (France) – Exclusive US show.
PELICAN
MIDNIGHT
!TOOH! (Czech Republic) – Exclusive US show.
MORGION
KOMMANDANT
AHUMADO GRANUJO (Czech Republic)
INGROWING (Czech Republic)

A few thoughts off the top of my head . . . after the jump. Continue reading »

TOUR NEWS (PRIMORDIAL, CORMORANT, AND YOB) PLUS NEW MUSIC FROM A MILLION DEAD BIRDS LAUGHING AND XAPHAN

 Metal News  16 Responses »
Jul 192012
 

Still plagued by the annoying intrusions of non-metal life (fuck non-metal life), your stupid friends at NCS have nevertheless found time to gather a few recent items of interest for your amusement and edification.

ITEM ONE

First item is above, presented to you as a public service, rather than because of my usual self-centered interests, since this tour isn’t coming remotely close to Seattle. But any U.S. tour involving both Primordial and Cormorant is by definition newsworthy. I don’t know While Heaven Wept, but they must at least be interesting or they wouldn’t be along for this ride.

Do pay close attention to the little asterisks, since not all bands will be at all dates.

ITEM TWO

The next item is also a tour announcement that also happens to be in September and also happens to include Cormorant (look closely at the dates for Sept 16-20 on the following poster) and also happens to be by-passing Seattle. On this tour, the headliners will be YOB and a band called Norska, which features YOB bass player Aaron Rieseberg and his brother Dustin and is described as a “progressive tech-sludge rock band.” Continue reading »

KHORS: “WISDOM OF CENTURIES

 Album Reviews  12 Responses »
Jul 192012
 

Khors are a Ukrainian band on the verge of a breakthrough. Though their star seems to have been rising steadily over the course of four albums beginning with The Flame of Eternity’s Decline in 2005, their signing with Candlelight Records in May for release of the band’s fifth full-length album will likely lead to significantly greater exposure, especially because that fifth album is so damned good.

Wisdom of Centuries tests the limits of genre classification. It combines elements of black metal, progressive metal, ambient music, doom, and to a lesser degree folk metal, producing something that is bleak, beautiful, and often mystical. Distancing themselves from the black metal label, Khors characterize the music as “heathen dark metal”. Perhaps that’s as good a shorthand description as any, since “dark metal” is so often used to describe music that doesn’t neatly fit anywhere else.

To the extent one seeks guidance from lyrics in helping to understand the inspiration behind the music, the quest will be difficult because this is the first album in which all the band’s vocals are in their native tongue (though the song titles are translated). However, Khors have explained that Wisdom of Centuries “is dedicated to the 95th anniversary of Kholodny Yar Republic, to its founders and defenders.” My own feeble research indicates that this refers to a rural partisan uprising against the Bolsheviks and the Russian Red Army occupying the Ukraine, which ultimately failed — and then the Iron Curtain descended

Fittingly then, the emotionally resonant, atmospheric music on the album creates moods of longing, loss, and anguish. But calling it “depressive” would go much too far, because the songs are as melodically rich and vibrant as they are melancholy and wistful. Wisdom of Centuries has the feel of a journey through memory, an exploration of a tragic but heroic past that lives on in spirit.  Continue reading »

SEPULTURA AND SATYRICON

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  33 Responses »
Jul 192012
 

We’re all toiling away here at NCS on various projects, none of which are quite yet finished for this morning. Actually, to be brutally honest, I was sleeping instead of toiling away, and before that I was fucking off. I have no idea what the other idiots who work here have been doing, and I use the term “work” loosely, since nobody gets paid shit for scribbling about metal at NCS. Actually, I do have an idea what they’ve been doing, and it’s called “life”, which is bullshit because having no life is one of the key qualifications for “working” at NCS, and they all checked the “has no life” box on the NCS “employment” application, so what’s up with that?

Anyway, I haz nothing at the moment, so I’m doing this: I’m playing for you two excellent old songs plus some covers of them that I found this morning. I love these songs, and so it goes without saying that you love them, too. So we will all feel the love this morning, and then we can all do what we do when we feel the strong love, which in most cases will involve some kind of autoerotic satisfaction (and yes, you may take photos, but you may not send them to me because I don’t want to spoil my appetite before breakfast).

The first song is “Slave New World” by Sepultura, and I’m talking old-school Sepultura, from 1993’s Chaos A.D. You, of course, know this song and love it as much as I do, because it is such a great fuckin’ metal song. I think you will also like the cover of the song that Norway’s Dead Trooper did back in 2010, because I like it a bunch. I like it better than the cover Trivium did (also in 2010), though their cover still sounds good, because the riffs in this song are so damned compelling. I just like the original Max Cavalera vocals and the Dead Trooper vocals better.

The second song is “Forhekset” by Satyricon, from their 1996 Nemesis Divina album. It’s another great song, though I’m guessing many people would pick “Mother North” as the best song on that album. But anyway, today I saw a new video by a Québec band named Haeres performing a cover of “Forhekset” live back in March. I really like the cover — it’s not a carbon copy of the original, and it sounds really good. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: CULTFINDER – BLACK THRASHING TERROR

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jul 182012
 

The three songs on Cultfinder’s new EP fly by, but not like an exaltation of larks or even a murder of crows on the wing. Black Thrashing Terror flies by like a squadron of screaming Luciferian attack jets on a strafing run, spitting high-caliber ammo straight at your pathetic flesh.

Just seeing a piece of Mark Riddick artwork on the front, you could lay good odds that what lies within will take no prisoners, and you’d be right. The title track gives you a good head-fake at the start, crunching along ponderously like a death-doom golem, but then — true to the track’s name — Cultfinder begin to rip hell with a high-tempo whirlwind of distorted, punk-influenced, thrashy chords; hammering crashing percussion; and screeching, clawing vocals. There’s a reprise of that sludgy intro and then a spitfire finish.

“Archangel Burial” has its own little groaning-chord intro, and then the band let fly again, this time throwing in a wall of tremolo mayhem to spice up the rapid-riff pummeling.

And to finish off this brief offering of the devil’s music, “Witching Curse” gives you another good horse-whipping with a studded flail, pausing only long enough with a couple of doomy breakdowns and a moaning guitar solo to let you cry a little before the lacerating resumes. Continue reading »

SHIT SEEN AND HEARD: SONNE ADAM, ERUPTED, SILENT PATH, AND REIGN OF THE ARCHITECT

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Jul 182012
 

Collected in here are items I randomly happened upon last night while browsing the internest and checking out links sent in by our ever-vigilant readers.

ITEM ONE

Sonne Adam are an Israeli death/doom band whose 2011 Century Media debut, Transformation, garnered a lot of critical praise. It was also one heavy motherfucker. Yesterday, I saw the news that the band’s first two-song EP, The Sun Is Dead, has been released by Van Records as a 7″ vinyl with that new cover art you see above.

Sonne Adam are also now working on a new EP to be entitled Doctrines of Dark Devotion, and yesterday they started streaming (for a limited time) a rough mix of a new track called “Bestow the Crown of Death”. Shit sounds heavier than oceans, darker than your worst nightmares. Guitars grinding on HM-2 overdrive; awesome reverberating vocals, deep as trenches and cracked like the windows in an abandoned warehouse; eerie guitar instrumentals swirling above the massive grinding noises underneath.

This is a very cool song and makes me tumescent for the new EP. Stream it right after the jump. Continue reading »

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