(Andy Synn wrote this piece, reflecting on the passage of roughly seven years after the publication of his first piece at NCS — this one.)
…yada, yada, yada, you know the rest, right?
Seriously though, I recently passed the seventh anniversary of my coming onboard to write for NCS, and it’s caused me to reflect on my time here, and how lucky I am to have a platform where what I think and what I write can make a difference – if only a small one – to so many bands. Continue reading »
Happy Friday. And if you actually happen to be happy because it’s Friday, instead of boiling with rage because you’ve just endured four-plus days of bullshit, you may not relish the music you’re about to hear. On the other hand, maybe your preferred means of matching your happiness (or your rage) to music involves abrading your ear drums, losing your mind, and mercilessly kicking open the spigot on your adrenaline glands. In which case, brothers and sisters, you’re right where you need to be — right here.
This is Part 2 of a round-up I began yesterday (here). And even though I didn’t finish this in time to post it yesterday, it’s exactly what I intended to post then. In other words, I decided to close my ears to the flood of other new songs that surfaced between then and now. There’s always time to catch up with that on Saturday, though I have a bad tendency to wound myself with intoxicants on Friday nights, so I ain’t promising nothing.
HOODED MENACE
The fifth Hooded Menace album will arrive on January 26 via Season of Mist, with the title Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed and cover art by Adam Burke, who continues to kill everything this year. The first advance track, “Carnal Reflections“, debuted at DECIBEL two days ago. Or was it three? Continue reading »
As we all know quite well by now, black metal has blossomed over the decades like a spreading tangle of thorn trees, and now cuts the skin in many different ways. As that pestilential growth has occurred, the Italian band Malvento have persisted and pursued their own evolution of sound across the space of three albums and a handful of shorter releases dating back to their Camera Prima demo in 1999. And now, seven years after their last album, 2010’s Oscuro Esperimento Contro Natura, they are returning with a new full-length under the banner of Third I Rex.
The new album is entitled Pneuma, and from that album we bring you a track aptly named “La Via Sinistra“, as well as the reprise of a previously released track, “L’Incanto“. Together, these songs provide clear signs of the black magic that Malvento have conjured for this new release. Continue reading »
(We present the glorious 90th edition of THE SYNN REPORT, and on this milestone occasion Andy Synn reviews the collected discography of Desolate Shrine, including their brand new album Deliverance From the Godless Void, which will be released by Dark Descent on November 10.)
Recommended for fans of: Incantation, Bloodbath, Enthroned
I’m sure, like me, a lot of you have bands in your collection who you absolutely love… but whom you got into surprisingly late. Desolate Shrine are one of those bands for me.
Heavier than granite, nastier than gangrene, and grimmer than the reaper himself, the Finnish three-piece (mainman L.L. handling all writing and instruments, with vocal duties shared by R.S. and M.T.) were always a band on my radar, but it wasn’t until the release of their third album, The Heart of the Netherworld, that I really took a vested interest in them… and then started kicking myself for waiting so long.
Thankfully I was quick to correct my error, snapping up a copy of both …Netherworld and its predecessor The Sanctum of Human Darkness soon after, and eventually grabbing hold of their debut, Tenebrous Towers, not long after that.
Now, with the band’s fourth album, Deliverance from the Godless Void, set for release on November 10th, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to spread the word about the band’s brutal, black-hearted brand of Blackened Death Metal. Continue reading »
Are you starting to think about Halloween? Do you have your creepy costume all picked out? Started making bags of candy salted with broken glass for the neighbor kids? Wondering whether your little visitors will notice the stink from the bodies you buried under the house? I’ve got just the thing to help get you in the right mood, some music you can just keep running on a loop between now and sunrise on November 1 — although even if you listen to it just once, the odds are it will run on a loop in your head anyway, whether you want it to or not.
This song we’re premiering is a gnarly bit of nastiness, a real monster mash. I have no reason to believe it was written with Halloween in mind — in fact, the concept behind it is quite a different tale — but it really does seem perfect for the occasion. The title is just a Roman numeral — “IV” — and the diabolical creators are the two men behind Until the Sky Dies. It comes from their debut album, The Year Zero Blueprint, which Cimmerian Shade Recordings will release on November 3rd. Continue reading »
On October 27th — tomorrow! — the German label 7 Degrees Records will release a 12″ split by two explosive but unpredictable grind bands, Germany’s Wojczech and UK-based Krupskaya. What we have for you today is a double premiere, one song from each band’s side of the split.
WOJCZECH
If the folks at Metal-Archives have got their facts straight, this new release is the 17th split discharged by Wojczech (along with two albums, an EP, and a compilation) in a career that now spans more than two decades. The track we’ve got for you today is the third of the three Wojczech tracks on this new split, an unsettling mauler named “Stunde Des Wolfes“. Continue reading »
Ending Life Slowly is the eighth album by Connecticut-based Autumns Eyes, the solo project of Daniel Mitchell. Fittingly, it’s due for release on Halloween, when those of us in the northern hemisphere will find the door to the dead of winter opened by ghouls and goblins. Yet although Mitchell has frequently found inspiration from the changing colors and supernatural hauntings of late October, the new album was more inspired by what comes after. In Mitchell’s words:
“Living in New England has always made it easy to draw from the month of October for creative inspiration, with life breathing its flaming colors into all the surrounding trees. Unfortunately, these themes can only be revisited every so often before it becomes repetitive. That’s why I reached into the month of November for inspiration. A time when Fall is still thriving, but where color has faded and the trees are bare as skeletons.
“While a walk through the woods here in October can be a relaxing activity, doing the same in November carries an overwhelming sense of dread. You’re surrounded by death, and the trees no longer sway and breathe with the air. They’re cold, stiff, bare, and knock together like bones breaking in the sky. Continue reading »
Most of us search for beauty in life, dream of it, grasp it when we find it, hold onto it as long as we can. But the horrors of existence always intrude, whether in the form of the daily abominations practiced by some people against others or from the incurable fear that nothing we cherish will last and that nothing awaits us at the end of our lives but the yawning void of mere extinction. And in time, all human life will also end in ashes, without a trace, a converging of all striving in death. Against the depths of such terrors, tales of goblins and vampires, ghosts and golems, seem like child’s play.
In every form of art, people have been driven to give some shape to our deepest fears and most paralyzing disillusionments, to express implacable dread or the conviction that humanity itself is a disease that will ultimately eat itself, while also devouring everything around it. And the results of such efforts can be very uncomfortable to witness and experience. Given the nature of the drives that inspire such efforts, how could they not be?
Which brings me to the title track of Nekrasov’s new album, The Mirror Void, which we’re premiering today. Continue reading »
I started writing this round-up of new music two days ago, but was unable to finish it. It is now somewhat dated. But I’ve resisted the impulse to make it dramatically longer by adding everything I’ve discovered in the intervening days — I only added two new things. But since the collection has now ballooned up to music from 10 bands, I divided it into two parts
I really don’t believe that there is a higher or lower power organizing the events of my life, but I can understand why other people do believe that. Sometimes the shit rains down so hard and chokes the throat so completely that I think to myself, “This can’t possibly be a matter of chance!” And sometimes everything flows so shiny and chrome that I think I have done something right and some force recognizes that and bestows a blessed reward. Take last night, for example.
In making my usual rounds, in which I surf the effluent of the internet and our own in-box looking for musical revelations, I came across the following gems gleaming among the sewage. And it’s all pretty damned filthy, yet still gleaming, in the way that the best filth shines with a preternatural vibrancy.
And while I don’t believe in higher or lower powers, I do appreciate synchronicity, and so it proved to be that almost everything here was a form of death metal (though my later additions diluted the death a bit), and the excursion began and ended with scarecrows, which seemed so fitting less than one week before Halloween. Continue reading »
The Italian one-man black metal project Talv makes no secret about the atmosphere created by the new third album that’s set for release on November 3 by A Sad Sadness Song (a sub-label of ATMF). It is clearly displayed in the cover art, in the album’s title — Entering A Timeless Winter — and in the names of the songs (“Dreaming A Funeral In Another Life”, “A Sad Moon Concealed By Pines”, and Sidereal Hypothermia”), as well as in Tarv’s decision to end the album with an ethereal ambient-music cover of a song (“Winterreise”) by Coldworld.
In short, this is a bleak and wintry form of musical sorcery, and to hear it is to slowly drown in a vast and rising lake of tears, one that’s frigid enough to slow the blood, cloud the emotions, and carry the mind away to places we might not often visit. Continue reading »