SHADES OF BLACK: VESTÍGIO, VARE, DEEMTEE

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Nov 122023
 


Caio Lemos

Welcome to another Sunday edition of this column dedicated to black arts. It’s not as extensive as I’d hoped this time, because after finishing yesterday’s very large “Seen and Heard” round-up of new songs and videos I had to do some paying work, took a two-hour nap (I did wake up at 4 a.m. yesterday), and then drank way too much wine last night with my spouse.

Also the Seahawks are playing right after lunch today and I want to watch, even though I have serious doubts whether they’ll win. Also I have to figure out how to change the battery in the key fob for my car, and the dishes aren’t going to wash themselves.

See, I do have a very exciting life outside of NCS. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SATYASENA, DAWN OF A DARK AGE, OBSCENE WORSHIP, HOLDLAJTORJA, THE SEPT, MYAELIN, SANGUINARY EMPEROR

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Nov 112023
 

I have a lot to recommend today. I made some of these choices and wrote some of these words earlier in the week. I have to hurry through the rest of it this morning because a wind storm is in progress outside and the branches bombarding the roof are beginning to sound like a war zone.

Cozy inside, I can tolerate that, but where I live near Puget Sound the power lines are overhead, cradled by forest limbs, and when the limbs go down (as they will, somewhere on this little grid), the power and the internet will go out too. So, I’m hurrying now….

SATYASENA (U.S.)

The first song I chose is just gloriously wild, a high-speed roller-coaster for your mind that should leave it yelping with glee.

If I were a kinder person and more capable of self-restraint, which I’m not, I’d just stop there and not spoil the fun, much of which comes from being surprised by what happens in the song. On the other hand, I doubt that any preview words can really spoil the thrills of “My Passion“, so here goes: Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HATRED REIGNS — “AWAKEN THE ANCIENTS”

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Nov 102023
 

About five years ago, after becoming immersed in the debut death metal EP of Hatred Reigns from Ottawa, Ontario (whose title was Realm: I – Affliction), we lauded “the band’s ability to join together murderous brutality and impressive technical fireworks,” “whipping the listener through a vortex of sound that is somehow both chaotic and machine-precise”.

Consisting of three tracks, that EP was released to provide a preview of a future concept album. Now,  on the other side of a lot of hard work, and hard times brought about by the covid pandemic, Hatred Reigns are at last ready to release that concept album on December 1st, and its name is Awaken The Ancients.

To help pave the way, today we’re premiering a video for the album’s title track, which also opens the album. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VARGSHEIM — “THE THIRD EYE”

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Nov 102023
 

Near the end of December 2022 the Crawling Chaos label released In the Tower of Ivory, the fifth album by the German band Vargsheim. In the run toward that release we premiered a video for a song that all by itself demonstrated how diverse this trio’s musical interests are, and how adept they are at bringing them together.

As we wrote then about that song (the album’s title track), “You’ll get a feeling of free-ranging but carefully thought-through experimentation at work…. As it slowly builds and then begins to morph and contort you can pick out bits and pieces of doom, psychedelia, prog, and rock, entwined like vines through a daunting framework of black metal”.

Now we’ve got a reminder of Vargsheim‘s talents with yet another video premiere (this one a lyric video) for a song off In the Tower of Ivory. This one is the album’s penultimate track, “The Third Eye“. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, OCTOBER 2023

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 102023
 

(With October now behind us and November well on its way, our friend Gonzo returns to NCS with reviews of some October releases that made a very positive impression.)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all the ways music connects us as a people. The metal community is, more often than not, a refuge for this kind of thinking. It’s especially noticeable when everything else in the world starts to suck.

A couple of weeks back, I saw Blackbraid open for Wolves in the Throne Room. The former’s unapologetically indigenous approach to their music was, and always is, a great reminder of how heavy music isn’t just for one group of people. It’s for everyone. Hearing such music in a live setting, in the company of other like-minded humans, was refreshing. It reminds me why I make time to write about this shit in the first place.

And I know I’m not alone in saying that it’s all too easy to go down a doom-scroll rabbit hole these days. Between that sense of existential dread and the aforementioned gratitude for metal, I had plenty of inspiration for this month’s roundup. I was right – it turned out to be a real fucking doozy.

(As I’m typing this, at least one person is secretly jotting down “Doom Scroll Rabbit Hole” for the name of their one-man psychedelic black metal project.) Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PLAGUE RIDER — “CHALLENGER’S LECTURE”

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Nov 092023
 

A decade after their debut album, with a couple of EPs in between, the UK death metal band Plague Rider will see the release of their second album Intensities tomorrow, courtesy of our friends at Transcending Obscurity Records.

So close to its release, the album has already received a flood of reviews, all of them favorable so far as we can tell, and most of them striving to underscore just how unorthodox and unpredictable the album is, how devoted it is to turning listeners inside-out and upside-down.

Words like “twisted”, “challenging”, and “avant-garde” pop up, which are usually warning signs that you won’t be banging heads and humming tunes as you go, but you might already get that idea just from James Watts‘ impressionistic cover art and its interweaving of very dark and vivid colors.

Obviously you won’t have to wait long to hear all 7 tracks for yourselves, but we do have one more to premiere before the whole thing comes uncaged tomorrow. It’s the record’s penultimate gauntlet of madness, “Challenger’s Lecture“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LEFT EYE PERSPECTIVE — “CONUNDRUM”

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Nov 092023
 

Sometimes comparisons of one band’s music to the music of other better-known bands works pretty well. Other times you scratch your head or vigorously shake it — what the hell was that writer thinking?

But in the case of the Belgian band Left Eye Perspective, their label Argonauta Records hit the nail on the head: The band’s debut album Conundrum really does sound like someone gene-spliced Mastodon, Gojira, Baroness, and The Ocean.

Or to frame the matter differently, their music proves to be a highly contagious alchemy of sludge, stoner rock, progressive metal, and grunge. Adventurously executed with a lot of instrumental and vocal flair, it brings powerhouse grooves, flights of head-spinning elaboration, mood-moving atmospheres, and plentiful doses of lysergic acid diethylamide.

You’ll see for yourselves what we’re getting at, because today we’ve got a full stream of this magnetic album on the eve of its release. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: PLEIADES, SEA MOSQUITO, WARCRAB

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Nov 092023
 

(Andy Synn presents three more metallic morsels from his green and unpleasant homeland)

As always I’ve done my best to cover as many of the homegrown acts from here in the UK who have released albums this year and, ultimately… have probably only written about a small fraction of them.

But that’s always going to be the case, I suppose. I’m just one person after all (at least, I think I am) and can only do so much with the limited time that I have.

Plus, to be brutally honest, because I only write about albums I actually like that means some good stuff that I, personally, just don’t really rate is going to end up getting left by the wayside.

So consider this my apology to every band and artist I wasn’t able to feature this year. It’s not you, it’s me.

Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ENGULF — “BELLOWS FROM THE AETHER”

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Nov 082023
 

For three years in a row beginning in 2017 the one-man New Jersey death metal band Engulf released EPs.

We caught up to what the band was doing when Engulf released its second EP, 2018’s Gold and Rust (which we premiered), and enthusiastically stayed with it when the third EP Transcend came out the next year (reviewed here).

Andy Synn ended that latter review with a wish:

“Hopefully one day soon we’ll get a comprehensive full-length album from Engulf, as there’s a very good chance it’ll be a modern day classic when we do.”

There was reason to expect that Engulf‘s mastermind Hal Microutsicos was at work on an album when that year-over-year release of EPs stopped, and the months ticked by without something new (granted, those ticking years included the depths of the pandemic).

And at last we do indeed have a debut full-length from Engulf on the far horizon, an album named The Dying Planet Weeps that Everlasting Spew Records will launch on January 12th. To help introduce it, today we’re premiering the second track in the running order, “Bellows From the Aether“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AZATHOTH’S DREAM — “THE MOOR”

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Nov 082023
 

There is a world of the imagination in which the clock of the seasons has frozen and moves no longer, in which the freezing dark of winter is endless. Technology works no longer, and decay is the order of the day. What human life remains is now huddled around fires, and beyond those shrouds of light terrible predatory things wait in the endless night, inhuman and ascendant.

It is a world of dream, a nightmare for huddled humans but a hideous glory for the dreamer, if the dreamer were something like the horrid ruler of the Outer Gods. The imagining of such blood-freezing dreams may have spawned the name chosen by the project whose music we’re premiering today — which is indeed Azathoth’s Dream.

Other nightmare dreams of endless night may explain the title of the project’s debut album — Nocturnal Vampyric Bewitchment. But regardless, that title is well chosen because the music is all of those things — deeply nocturnal and viciously vampyric, and yes, also frighteningly bewitching. Continue reading »

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