SHADES OF BLACK: IFRYT, PA VESH EN, THE END OF SIX THOUSAND YEARS, WILCZYCA, DÉMONOS

 SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Apr 302023
 

Even on Sunday mornings my paying work can rear its ugly head and steal away my time (world leaders looking for advice on how to clean up the shit they’ve made tend to be impatient). This happened to me today. The result is a more abbreviated roundup of blackened tonalities than I had hoped for, but I’m still enamored of all of it. You’ll see that it’s all pretty adventurous as well.

IFRYT (Poland)

Doom metal bands don’t have a monopoly on 10-minute tracks. Sometimes black metal bands make them too, especially when the bands are inspired by a bushel-full of music from well beyond the traditional boundaries of black metal, as Ifryt clearly is.

After releasing an 11-minute demo on Christmas Eve, 2017, this Polish solo project (the creator is Bartosz “Kuna” Mokr) now has a record named Płuca (“Lungs”) set for release on May 12th via Godz Ov War Productions. The first song to be revealed is the 10-minute “Straszne Rzeczy” (“Terrible Things”). It’s so utterly wild that if I had any sense (which I don’t), I wouldn’t even attempt to describe it. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: KRYATJURR OF DESERT AHD, OXBOW, BALMOG, SARVEKAS, HOST, ÚZKOST

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Apr 292023
 


Balmog

Happy Saturn’s Day (and good wishes to the dead Romans who named it.). For me, paying work was all-consuming during the first part of this past week, but it was sheer laziness that kept me from compiling a roundup of new music in the closing days. Those two phenomena were connected of course. After some NCS editorial work and some premieres during the days when the paying work relented, I felt like I’d earned the right to stop scurrying and attempt a mind-meld with sloths.

With no head-start behind me, here I am with a giant slag-pile of new music and videos to go through, and great risk of cutting myself followed by infection as I try to paw through it. But paw I did (thankful for band-aids), and the results are presented below. It doesn’t include everything that grabbed me, but to include everything would have left me still writing come sundown. I don’t want that. I want time to go outside and enjoy the warmest day of the year so far here in the Pacific Northwest, or more likely just take a nap.

As if I didn’t have enough picks already, this morning brought a new installment of Renni Resmini’s starkweather substack, and as usual I hadn’t heard the majority of those selections, and as usual his writing compelled me to check out some of those, which has made this roundup even longer. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LUX NIGRUM — “OMNIA AB UNO, OMNIA AD UNUM”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 282023
 

Lux Nigrum‘s 2019 debut EP Burning the Eternal Return (which we reviewed and premiered here) made a striking impression. The music channeled chaos, but not in the sense of some flailing, disorganized cacophony. There was a palpable sense of fierce wildness and burning devotion in the music, but an equal devotion to the crafting of excellent riffs, which had both emotional power and magnetic musical appeal.

And so it was very welcome news to learn that this Chilean band would be returning this year with a debut album named Omnia Ab Uno, Omnia Ad Unum. The band describe it as “a conceptual album based on the Acausal Spirituality and the mysterious duality of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death, dealing with the unification of everything as One, and its own dissolution towards Ain.”

In February we had the pleasure of premiering a lyric video for the song “Adamas Voluntatem“, and today we’re equally pleased to bring you the sounds of the entire record on the day of its release. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NON SERVIAM — “APOCALYPTIC LUST”

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Apr 282023
 

Many musical extremists add new layers of brick and mortar to old walls surrounding well-established genre structures, and some of them are such good crafts-people that they still deserve applause for their renewal of the fortifications. On the other hand, the anonymous Parisian collective Non Serviam take a wrecking ball to genre walls.

No doubt, what they do with their noise scandalizes some listeners, but as their name suggests, they’re dedicated to being confrontational — conventions be damned — and their confrontational nature extends to the anarchist and antifascist convictions that inspire their music. We have a prime example of all this in the video we’re presenting today for the furious Non Serviam tirade called “Apocalyptic Lust”. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MMXX

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Apr 282023
 

(During the uncertain and unnerving depths of the pandemic lockdown three experienced musicians from different sides of the Atlantic joined forces to create MMXX, and during the last 18 months Candlelight Records has released their debut album and a follow-on EP. These prompted Comrade Aleks to reach out for the following extensive interview, which included all three of the band’s members.)

One of the key US melodic death-doom bands, Daylight Dies, has been silent for nearly ten years. And to my surprise I’ve found the band’s rhythm section, Egan O’Rourke (bass) and Jesse Haff (drums), in the company of Andrea Chiodetti, the former guitarist of the Italian gothic doom band The Foreshadowing. Actually, it was the interview with Mick Moss of Antimatter where I learned about MMXX, as Mick recorded vocals for two songs on MMXX’s album as the guest vocalist.

Andrea, Egan, and Jesse formed this studio project during the Covid quarantine and it resulted in the full-length album Sacred Cargo released in November 2022, where guys were accompanied by ten guest musicians, including violin and cello players. The other eight guests are vocalists, and among them you’ll find not only Mick but also such names as Aaron Stainthorpe (My Dying Bride), Mikko Kotamäki (Swallow the Sun), and more. Together they recorded the inspiring album Sacred Cargo and the following EP The Next Wave came out on the 14th of April.

Andrea, Egan, and Jesse tell the MMXX story tonight. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PUNEBRE — “HELE HELE”

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Apr 272023
 

As you can see, we’re about to bring you another premiere. As you can see, it’s from a record with an out-of-the-ordinary piece of cover art, especially for a slab of monstrous death metal. So let’s start with that artwork.

Obviously, it looks like a comic book cover — a strange one, to be sure, with an attractive young woman swaddling a Lovecraftian nightmare spawn, and some other inhuman figures in the corner presiding over the torching of a church. There’s a tiny logo in the other corner with “HM-2” in the center. And then there’s the comic’s date: April 02 1973. What is the significance of that?

Well, it turns out to be a tribute to the late Leif Cuzner, who was born on that day. A bassist and guitarist for the enormously influential Swedish band Nihilist, he is widely credited as the inventor of the legendary “buzzsaw” guitar sound, created by turning up all the knobs on his Boss HM-2 distortion pedal to the maximum.

Paying attention to all the clues in the unusual cover art tells you many useful things about the record itself, which is the debut album of the Filipino death metal band Punebre. Entitled Ang Nasa Dako Paroon, it will be released on May 15th by the Mexican label Death in Pieces Records. But through our premiere of the album track “Hele Hele” we have an even better clue. Continue reading »

NIGHTMARER – DEFORMITY ADRIFT

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 272023
 

 

(Andy Synn embraces the suffering with the upcoming new album from Nightmarer)

For some people the entire Dissonant Death Metal scene can be summed up by one band: Ulcerate.

It’s understandable. After all, not only did they effectively set the template for the style (at least in its modern incarnation) with 2011’s Destroyers of All, they then re-defined it once more with Stare Into Death… in 2020.

But I’m here to tell you that there’s far, far more to the Disso-Death movement than that, from similarly foundational records such as Flourishing‘s The Sum of All Fossils and Ageless Oblivion‘s Penthos, to genre-expanding albums from Ingurgitating Oblivion and Light Dweller, to promising debuts from potential future-leaders like Growth, Barús, and Aeviterne.

And then there’s Nightmarer, whose name should already be on your mind whenever you think about the best and brightest of the new wave of dissonant dissidents… and if they weren’t before, then they definitely will be after you hear Deformity Adrift.

Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ELITIUM — “TASTELESS”

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Apr 272023
 

After quickly turning out a pair of EPs in 2012 and 2014 (Transcendence and Ataxia), the Portuguese band Elitium fell silent… for a long time. We don’t know all the details about how the last 9 years were spent, but no doubt there were trials and tribulations of various kinds — as well as a lot of work on new music.

That work has borne extravagant fruit, because at last Elitium are returning with an explosive debut album named Wrong that will be released by Gruesome Records, and today we’re presenting an electrifying album track named “Tasteless” accompanied by an excellent music video. Continue reading »

METASPHAERA: “METASPHAERA”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 272023
 

(DGR unexpectedly fell into the self-titled debut album by the “insanely talented” German technical death metal band Metasphæra, released near the end of March, and as you’ll see from the following review, he’s damned glad he did.)

There are a few patterns that have developed throughout my years writing for this site. One of the main ones occurs during the bit of a lull that leads up to May’s sort of panicked backfilling of the site as we launch fully into festival season, a lull wherein we have the ability to fall down a whole lot of rabbit holes.

Much as we as a site will shovel song after song in front of you as we discover music that we think might perk a few ears, so too do we enjoy having that done to us – somewhat – and one of those main methods comes from entering the whirling vortex of metal across social media and seeing what it kicks back at us.

YouTube is often one such source, and such was the case with German tech-death group Metasphaera (typeset Metasphæra) and their self-titled album. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DJINN-GHÜL — “OPULENCE”

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Apr 262023
 

The last time we heard from this Denver/Bolíver axis was through their 2021 EP Mechalith, a record our own Andy Synn put on his year-end list of top 10 EPs, even though it had just come out the day before he finished the list. Why did it make such an impact (like a meteor crater)? Andy explained:

“[I]f you’re looking for something that exists purely to pulverise your ear-drums – blasting and bludgeoning and breaking-the-fuck-down without mercy or restraint – but also has a few clever cyber-synth tricks up its heavily armed and armoured sleeve (also drawing comparison, in places, to the extremophile excess of our old friends The Monolith Deathcult), then you should definitely give Mechalith a shot.”

About 2 1/2 years later, here we are, confronting another imminent meteor strike. Which is to say that Djinn-Ghül are back, this time with a full-length named Opulence. You’ve still got a little while to prepare — there might be time to build an underground bunker before the July 14 release date scheduled by Vicious Instinct Records — but you better not waste time. Dig deep and harden that shelter as if your life depends on it. Continue reading »

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