OVERFLOWING STREAMS: AETHERIAN, APHONIC THRENODY, ARKONA, ASCENDED DEAD, ASHBRINGER, DÅÅTH, DEATH OF GIANTS, HOLY DEATH, IMMORTAL, NOCTURNAL TYRANT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 222023
 

Saturdays are usually days when I pick a handful of new songs and videos to recommend, accompanied by some of my own peerless prose (HA!). But as I waded through possibilities this morning it quickly dawned on me that there was just way too fucking much stuff for me to pare down to a handful without experiencing some mental agony in making the choices.

So, I’ve thrown up my hands and resorted to this “Overflowing Streams” format, where you will find a lot more music than in the usual “Seen and Heard” columns, a lot fewer of my own words (dry your eyes), and very little cover art — other than Yoann Lossel’s stunning artwork “Les Fleurs du Mal”, which is on the cover of the new album by the first band in this roundup.

Today the musical arrangement is alphabetical by band name (heavily weighted by the A’s). I’m deferring most of the black metal discoveries until tomorrow.

AETHERIAN (Greece)

Wonderful news to see that this Greek melodic death metal band are returning with a new album, six years after their fantastic full-length debut, The Untamed Wilderness. They say this marks “the start of a new era for Aetherian“, and it appears that they’ve added a couple of new guitarists to an already formidable lineup. The first sign of what the new album brings is a lyric video for the song “Army of Gaia“. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ETERNAL STORM, HESPER PAYNE, THUNRAZ, BEFORE THE DAWN

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Apr 212023
 

Oh hell what a week it’s been. One of those weeks when I’ve barely had time to write up the premieres I agreed to do, much less focus on other new music and videos. So now I’m staring at all the links to the stuff I wanted to check out, featuring big names known to all and names I’ve never seen before. Time is still short, but I’d better make a start and then hope to fill in more tomorrow and Sunday.

ETERNAL STORM (Spain)

In 2019 we gave a lot of attention to this Spanish band’s debut album Come the Tide. It popped up on a lot of the year-end lists we posted, and a lot of year-end lists at other sites acclaimed it as well.

To quote only from our own staff, Andy Synn (who included Come the Tide on his list of 2019’s Great Albums) wrote that “if there’s one band who might just be able to kickstart a brand new Melodic Death revolution, it’s Eternal Storm“, and DGR (who put the album at No. 14 on his year-end list) summed it up as “a master class of progressive death and melodeath hybridization that makes an hour just fly by”. And for my part, I hosted a song premiere and then put a different song on our list of the year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ASBEST — “CYANIDE FOR BREAKFAST”

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Apr 212023
 

The Swiss noise rock band Asbest have been moving toward the May 19 release of their new album Cyanide in leaps and bounds. Beginning last fall they dropped a single, and then leaped… coming to earth a month later with another one… and then landing with another one a few months later… and another one a few months after that. Each one has been made available digitally, and each one has been an eye-opener.

The most recent of the singles is “Cyanide for Breakfast“. It landed last month. It might be the last single before the album release by A Tree In A Field Records / Czar Of Crickets Productions, but there’s still one more Asbest landing before then — a fascinating video for that same song that we’re presenting today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CORPUS NECROMANTHUM — “CORPUS TACTUS”

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Apr 212023
 

Today we want to focus your attention on two new songs from the forthcoming debut album by the Costa Rican black/death metal band Corpus Necromanthum, an album described as a conceptual work that leads us “through the harrowing story of a necromancer and his forced transformation into nothing”.

The first of those songs, “Tar Uritharhain“, has been out in the world for a couple of weeks. Its overture is made of simple ingredients — the reverberation of deep booming drum, with the space between them filled with gasping sounds that might be breaths or may be the wind, and by haunted wailing tones that might or might not be human — but it very effectively creates an unearthly chill.

Having thus set their stage in a supernatural dimension, the band begin to kick the adrenaline into high gear with vicious, head-hooking riffage and neck-snapping beats. From there, things get even more unhinged. The guitars come in attacking swarms, the drums spit bullets at high speed; and monstrously imperious roars rise up from abyssal depths and elevate further into terrorizing screams.

The changes continue. The layered guitars, while relentlessly frenzied, send flames toward the heavens and create an atmosphere of frightening splendor. The drums relentlessly switch gears, and so do the spine-tingling vocals (but they sound even more insane). Melodies of despair and agony flow through the tumult in piercing tones. There’s structure in the songwriting, but the feeling of destructive chaos never really diminishes. Continue reading »

THE PERILS OF AI: IS METAL IN THE CROSS-HAIRS?

 Mosh Pit  5 Responses »
Apr 202023
 


Painting by Paolo Girardi (for Voracious Lunacy, a 2022 split release by Heresy and Exorcizphobia)

These days a lot of people are expelling a lot of hot and cold air and a tremendous volume of written words about Artificial Intelligence (AI).  There’s no consensus about whether AI will be a boon to human life or a dire peril, but everyone paying any attention to the phenomenon seems to agree that the technology will bring about stunning changes — and damned fast, so fast that our slow meat brains won’t be able to react quickly enough to tame the wild dangers it could unleash.

Those of us who’ve been life-long consumers of science fiction already have vivid visions of both the utopian and the dystopian futures that AI could produce, but what used to be only visions are rapidly becoming realities. The scale isn’t yet vast, but in small ways and large, we’re getting there, and for most of us there’s not much we can do about it, for better or worse. Anyone who thinks unregulated markets can be trusted to prevent AI-spawned damage haven’t thought hard enough, but anyone who thinks government regulators can find workable and timely answers is probably equally oblivious.

Small ways and large… In the grand scheme of things, what AI will do to entertainment, and more specifically to the creation of music, ranks on the smaller end of the scale. But in that niche the changes wrought by AI may occur as fast as anywhere else. As we shall see, the changes have already begun. Although those changes don’t yet seem to have made a noticeable impact in the micro-niches of extreme metal, the possibility provides food for thought. My own thought is that the risks to the kind of music we pay attention to at this site are likely to remain low (though I admit this might be wishful thinking). Continue reading »

CHROME WAVES – EARTH WILL SHED ITS SKIN

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Apr 202023
 

(Andy Synn continues our long-running relationship with Chicago’s Chrome Waves, whose new album is set for release next week)

It’s crazy, when you think about it, just how long we’ve been writing about Chrome Waves, publishing our very first post about the group – then made up of The Atlas Moth‘s Stavros Giannopolous, ex-Nachtmystium guitarist Jeff Wilson, and former The Gates of Slumber drummer Bob Fouts (RIP) – in December 2011.

And while things have certainly changed quite a bit since then – the group essentially began all over again in 2018, with Wilson and Amiensus vocalist/guitarist James Benson forming the new core of the band’s ever-evolving line-up, which now also features bassist Zion Meager and drummer Garry Naples – we’ve continued to follow their career with both fascination and appreciation aplenty over the years.

But what’s particularly fascinating about their upcoming fourth album, Earth Will Shed Its Skin, is the way in which it attempts to weave the two most distinctive aspects of the band’s sound – the cathartic “Post-Black Metal” side that appeals to fans of Tombs, Deafheaven, and the like, and the shoegaze-y Alt-Rock side that recalls the best of acts like Hum and Catherine Wheel – into a single, coherent whole.

Does it succeed? Or does it shatter under the weight of everything it’s trying to achieve? Let’s find out!

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CAEDEOUS — “MALUM SUPPLICIUM”

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Apr 202023
 

Our first in-depth exposure to the music of the Portuguese symphonic black metal band Caedeous was last year, when we premiered their third album, Obscurus Perpetua. When we did that, we advised listeners “to take your seats and get a firm grip on something solid before embarking on this journey”, because we found the album to be “a dazzling, diabolical, and disorienting trip through the imperiums of Hell”:

“The music is elaborate and unpredictable, theatrical and bombastic, sometimes breathtaking in its splendor but always as scary as your worst nightmares. Fascinating music, to be sure, but also demented and intensely unnerving.”

And now we’re re-connecting with Caedeous just one year later because they’ve made a new album, and once again we’re hosting its full streaming premiere. The name of the new one is Malum Supplicium. Like its two predecessors, it’s a concept album, one that “thematically tells horror stories inspired by Lovecraft, Barker and Alighierie‘s works — the eternal struggle between good and evil, angels and demons, heaven and hell”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SATANATH — “IMORARTO”

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Apr 202023
 

The solo project Satanath, formerly based in Russia and now ensconced in the nation of Georgia, is returning with a new album set for release on April 25th. It’s named Posthumous Album, which most people would interpret as a sign that Satanath has succumbed to death and that these tracks were left behind.

But it turns out that the meaning isn’t literal. As explained by the project’s creator Aleksey Korolyov (the owner of Satanath Records, a member of Abigorum, and former keyboardist of Taiga): “The album is posthumous in a figurative sense, since recently we all experienced death in one form or another, saying farewell to the past life.”

The title has another meaning as well. It signifies that Satanath has also moved away from the sounds of previous albums. The music on the new album is still electronic/ambient, and still carries forward the space themes of previous releases (all the songs, for example, have titles that “are made up in a complex language from the world of the Universe from where Satanath came to us”), but the style of the music is indeed markedly different, even as compared to Satanath‘s often evil and always frighteningly head-spinning 2022 album Metallized Arena – and pretty far away from anything else you’ll hear at this site Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WHYTHRE — “SCORPIONS OF SINAI”

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Apr 192023
 

We’ve been eagerly following the progress of the Seattle-based melodic death metal band Whythre ever since discovering (and then writing about) their 2018 single “Savage“, which followed up their 2015 debut album Hel’s Hollows. The next year we reviewed and premiered their explosive new EP Stillborn World here, which we introduced with these words (among many others):

“If your ass has been dragging, beaten down and disgusted by the daily grind, strapped for sleep, short on cash, and your reservoirs of hope running low as well, we’ve got a sure-fire antidote for most of those ails…. On top of recharging the energy in your depleted batteries, the songs on this EP also turn out to be damned addictive. It’s very easy, at the end, to just go back to the beginning and ride this lightning again… and again.”

And now we happily continue to follow the progress of Whythre, because they’ve got a new album on the way named Impregnate My Hate, and today we get to do another premiere — a lyric video for a track from the new album named “Scorpions of Sinai“. Continue reading »

CISZA – SHE YEARNS FOR OTHER WORLDS

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Apr 192023
 

(Andy Synn breaks his silence on the first full-length album from Poland’s Cisza)

Ok, I promise… this is going to be the last of the Black Metal oddities that I write about for a while.

Probably. Maybe. Almost certainly.

That being said, I couldn’t let the opportunity pass by without writing about Cisza‘s intriguing debut album.

After all, while it may not be as overtly “odd” as most of the releases I’ve covered recently it is, however, a record which certain people are more likely to deny actually is Black Metal, due to the fact that its blend of echoing tremolo melodies and rigid rhythmic patterns errs closer towards the punchy, Post-Black approach of bands like Agrypnie, Downfall of Gaia, and Harakiri for the Sky, than it does anything remotely “trve” or “kvlt”.

Continue reading »

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