AN NCS PREMIERE: VIMUR — “CONSUMED BY THE SOURCE”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Jan 292019
 

 

Welcome, brothers and sisters, to another thrilling excursion into musical lands of fire and ice, with guides from Atlanta, where the people are no strangers to heat and may soon also find themselves enveloped in ice, thanks to the impending assault of a new polar vortex.

“Consumed By The Source” is the name of the song you’re about to hear, and it’s one of seven tracks of ravaging black metal on Triumphant Master of Fates, the new second album by Atlanta’s Vimur, who curse the wretched earth and seek salvation beyond the stars, in death. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VÉHÉMENCE — “PASSAGE DANS LES DOUVES”

 Premieres  10 Responses »
Jan 292019
 

 

Par le Sang Versé is one of the most thoroughly entrancing and gloriously vibrant metal albums I’ve heard in years, regardless of sub-genre. It seizes ancient folk traditions and hurls them forward into the modern age, but without letting go of the intense devotion to the centuries-old well-springs of inspiration that gave birth to this record. I do think it’s impossible not to be moved in some significant degree by this fervent music, and likely that most listeners will simply be swept aloft and carried away, as I’ve been.

Granted, this writer tends to get swept away by a wider range of extreme music, and perhaps more often, than many of you, yet the conviction is strong that the eight songs on this new second album by the French medieval black metal band Véhémence are so powerful in their capacity to ignite passion and fire the imagination that the band’s own unmistakable passions become highly communicable, if not irresistible.

Have I fallen whole-heartedly within the embrace of a seduction that you could shrug off? That’s a question you can answer for yourselves, because you’ll have the chance to listen to a new song from the album following a lot more introductory verbiage, plus three more tracks that were previously released in advance of the record’s release on February 10th by the distinctive French label, Antiq. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 16): SARGEIST, DEITUS, HEGEMONE

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  5 Responses »
Jan 292019
 

 

Unlike some people I know, I have zero problem with current bands slavishly devoting themselves to the sounds of black metal from the early-mid ’90s, as long as they’ve got the talent to express their devotion in credibly cold and grippingly hostile fashion.

But it so happens that the black metal songs I’ve added to the list today (which are among my favorites of the last year) aren’t of the slavishly old-school variety, yet no one would accuse any of the bands of being new-school posers either, with merely a trim-picked riff or two as the basis for claims of “blackened” sound. The albums in which these tracks appeared were also uniformly excellent.

SARGEIST

Unbound was the creation of an (almost) entirely new incarnation of Sargeist, with only mainman Shatraug remaining from the line-up which gave us such gems as Disciples of the Heinous Path and Let The Devil In, but it too turned out to be brilliant. Given that the new line-up included a guitarist from Nightbringer, a bassist who dwells within the Saturnian Mist, and two members who provide bass and vocals for Desolate Shrine, all of whom (along with Shatraug) stand out in the sharpened production of this record, that should have come as no surprise. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 15): IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT AND KRIEGSMASCHINE

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  No Responses »
Jan 282019
 

 

The two tracks I’ve added to this list today are diabolically inventive, and in different ways they awaken primal fears and desires. They also happen to include lyrics of rare eloquence and evocative power.

IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT

“Built around a core of discordant, dissonant Black Metal, but embellished and expanded by a freakish array of jazzy elements and avant-garde ingredients, Vile Luxury is an album which revels in its own chaotic contradictions as a way of challenging and exploiting the expectations of its audience.”

Those were among the impressions my friend Andy provided in his review of the 2018 album by New York’s Imperial Triumphant. “By turns unsettling and off-kilter, moody and malevolent”, he wrote, “its warped blend of jarring juxtapositions and stark contrasts sees the group… making purposeful use of both harsh shifts in tone and smooth segues between styles to keep the listener on the edge of their seat and to maintain an aura of potent unpredictability”. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BACKSTABBER — “GEO ENGINEERING”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Jan 282019
 

 

We live in an age when conspiracy theories of all stripes seem to have reached a zenith, and the Canadian death/thrash band Backstabber (from northern Quebec) seem to have embraced the ethos (or at least fervently portrayed it) in their debut album Conspiracy Theorist. Consisting of 10 tracks that explore themes of scandal, critiques of mainstream media, and of course conspiracies, the album will be released on February 15th.

Today we present a lyric video for one of their murderous aural attacks. Entitled “Geo Engineering“, it was inspired by a speech delivered at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2016 by then-CIA chief Paul Brennan. In the speech, Brennan spoke of a program that had attracted his personal interest called “Stratospheric Aerosol Injection”, through which seeding the stratosphere with reflective particles could reduce global temperatures at an estimated annual cost of $10 billion.

Though Brennan touted the idea as a means of combatting global warming, Backstabber foresee a different and more devastating outcome. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SE LUSIFERIN KANNEL — “VALTAKUNTA”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  4 Responses »
Jan 282019
 

 

As you prepare to begin listening to this album, imagine finding your seats with other members of the audience in the midst of a blasted concert hall, surrounded by the ruins of a dead civilization (your own), beneath a roiling red sky streaked with cascading black clouds. Soon you will be enveloped by dense waves and gales of sound, as Se Lusiferin Kannel perform four larger-than-life symphonies of Luciferian exaltation and lunacy, apocalyptic catastrophe, and the heart-ache of death and desolation on a massive scale.

These four compositions, each of them as long as an EP, make up the body of Valtakunta (a Finnish word for “kingdom”), the 71-minute debut opus of these mysterious visionaries. It was first self-released digitally in October 2017, but on February 1st it will be presented by Signal Rex on CD and double-LP vinyl formats, remastered by Stephen Lockhart at Iceland’s Studio Emissary and featuring new cover art by Heresie Graphics. Continue reading »

WITCHGÖAT: “EGREGORS OF THE BLACK FAITH”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jan 282019
 

 

(Todd Manning wrote this review of the debut album by the band Witchgöat from El Salvador.)

With a name like Witchgöat, it’s safe to say we are probably not dealing with the latest Avant-Garde, Prog Metal sensation to sweep through the scene. Instead, these Salvadorians lay waste to everyone and everything in sight with their brand of Blackened Death/Thrash. Originally the brainchild of guitarist P. Scyther in 2016, the group issued their debut demo Umbra Regit via Morbid Skull Records, and now they are poised to release their full-length Egregors of the Black Faith on February 13th, also on Morbid Skull.

With their grim-as-hell artwork and general presentation, one might expect these guys to produce a whirlwind blast of Blackened noise a la Revenge or Conqueror, but that actually isn’t the case. While Witchgöat certainly owe a debt to ripping Black Metal, tons of molten Old School Metal and Thrash slag flow through their veins. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2018 WRAP-UP

 LISTMANIA 2018  6 Responses »
Jan 282019
 

 

There’s a possibility that at this late date I might still receive another year-end list or two (and I do expect that Andy Synn will deliver his list of favorite songs from last year), but we’re close enough to the end of our 2018 edition of LISTMANIA that I’m ready to provide this wrap-up.

As in years past we posted an extensive series of lists. As usual, some of them were re-postings of lists that appeared at “big platform” web sites and print magazines, and others were prepared by our own stable of race-horse writers. But once again we had a large group of lists from invited band members and assorted other guests. Plus, we’ve again received valuable, extensive lists in reader comments on THIS POST (and new lists can still be added there).

In this article I’m collecting links to all of the 2018 year-end lists that we published, divided into categories and listed within each category in the order of their appearance. For people who are looking for the best metal that 2018 had to offer, these lists and our readers’ lists provide a tremendous resource, as they have in past years. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SUNDAY: THE MOTH GATHERER, LEPROUS, COLD COLOURS, ETHEREAL DARKNESS, HEAUME MORTAL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jan 272019
 

 

If you came here this Sunday expecting the usual SHADES OF BLACK column, I’m sorry to disappoint you. The post you’re about to read is one I intended to publish yesterday before turning to the next SOB column, but I didn’t get it finished in time before turning to certain long-planned weekend activities. Those same activities prevented me from giving much thought to SHADES OF BLACK yesterday, and will probably make it tough to get that column done today either. Only time will tell.

I checked out all the following new videos and songs on Friday, and then revisited them this morning. It was one of those listening sessions where the stars seemed to align. Though the genres represented here are different, the music flowed in such a good, atmospherically dark way, in part because (as I hear them) they all incorporate ingredients of doom, without any of them really being what most people would call doom metal.

THE MOTH GATHERER

To open this collection I chose “Motionless in Oceania“, the first “single” from the new album by the Swedish band The Moth Gatherers, whose line-uo has changed a bit since their last record. Esoteric Oppression is the group’s third album, and it will be released by Agonia Records on February 22nd. It’s so immensely powerful that I felt flattened and stenciled by the sounds, like a thin sheet of tin beneath an industrial-strength die stamp. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: ENDOLITH

 WAXING LYRICAL  No Responses »
Jan 262019
 

 

(For this week’s edition of Waxing Lyrical, Andy Synn posed the now-familiar questions to vocalist/lyricist Frode Hofsøy of the Norwegian band Endolith.)

What more can I say about Endolith that I haven’t already said (here and here)?

I’m not even sure any more, to be honest. I mean, if you haven’t checked out this three-person Prog-Metal powerhouse – perfect for fans of Meshuggah, Devin Townsend, Arcturus, Fear Factory, and Strapping Young Lad – yet, then perhaps you never will?

Still, let’s hand things over to the band’s vocalist/lyricist Frode Hofsøy, and see if he can’t win you over himself! Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries