SHADES OF BLACK: AQUILUS, OPPRESS., AKVAN, NON EST DEUS

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
May 192024
 

I made a bare-bones start on the writing of this column yesterday, and then halted that in order to venture into downtown Seattle for what turned into a long night of talking, eating, and drinking with DGR and former NCS scribbler BadWolf.

I woke up very late this morning for me, head stuffed with fuzz, and feeling very tempted not to finish what I started yesterday. But since I missed doing this column last week due to Northwest Terror Fest and likely won’t do one next Sunday due to Maryland Deathfest, I forged ahead… sort of.

Instead of trying to put into words everything I have been feeling about the music I chose for today, I can only offer relatively short recommendations. The glass isn’t even half full, but at least it’s not an empty glass. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: THE TROOPS OF DOOM, SOL DE SANGRE, WEREWOLVES, COLDCELL, NIHILO, LACABRA, KYBALION, BALWEZO WESTIJIZ, KŌYA, WHARFLURCH, AMORPHIS

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
May 182024
 


Troops of Doom – photo by Cissa Flores

I wasn’t able to serve up a Saturday roundup last weekend due to working on Seattle’s Northwest Terror Fest, and it’s highly unlikely I’ll get one done next Saturday since I’ll be at Maryland Deathfest (if you’re there and spot someone who looks like a heavily tatted escapee from a nursing home, come say hi). So that makes this one kind of important, if only for me.

There’s gobs of new music to choose from, many more gobs than usual since I missed a week. And by the way, I’m using “gob” here as a word meaning “a large amount” and not its other meaning, i.e., “a lump or clot of a slimy or viscous substance”, though I have included a song off an album named Shittier/Slimier.

Ready, set, go! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PERVERSA — “THE TRIAL OF CHRISTIANITY”

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May 172024
 

On May 27th Satanath Records (Georgia) and Pluton’s Rising Productions (Poland) will co-release Under The Sign Of Blasphemy, the debut album from the Roman black/death metal band Perversa, and today we help introduce it through our premiere of an album track named “The Trial Of Christianity“.

The members of Perversa aren’t newcomers, having been involved in numerous other groups before this one, including Lord Vampyr, Malamorte, Handful of Hate, Massemord, Funeral Oration, and Iblis, but what brought these Italian musicians together under the banner of Perversa was a shared desire to practice satanic black metal in a most evil way — and that’s vividly borne out by the song you’re about to hear. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TLÖN — “THROUGH NEBULOUS SCARS”

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May 172024
 

In May 1940 the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, widely credited as a founder of “magical realism” in literature, published a story named “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius“. In that mind-bending tale Borges was himself a protagonist. The plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminates in a postscript, set in 1947. As summarized in The Font of All Human Knowledge:

“Told in a first-person narrative, the story focuses on the author’s discovery of the mysterious and possibly fictional country of Uqbar and its legend of Tlön, a mythical world whose inhabitants believe a form of subjective idealism, denying the reality of objects and nouns, as well as Orbis Tertius, the secret organization that created both fictional locations”.

That story inspired both the name of the new Scottish band Tlön and the lyrical themes of their debut EP Through Nebulous Scars — an astonishing mind-bender of its own that we’re helping spring upon an unsuspecting world today. Continue reading »

WASTEWALKER: “TRAPPED BETWEEN REALMS OF SUFFERING”

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May 172024
 

(In April of this year Sacramento-based Wastewalker released a new EP dedicated to their late guitarist Nate Graham, and long-time Wastewalker follower DGR delves into it in the following review.)

Sacramento’s tech-death group Wastewalker have been put through the wringer lately. The band, finally somewhat ascendant after the release of a solid sophomore album in Vengeance Of The Lowborn, suffered from the tragic passing of guitarist Nate Graham in mid-2023. While the band were never short on talent, the group were put in a hard place on multiple fronts, yet in that time somehow managed to soldier on. The band returned in early April of 2024 with a three-song EP entitled Trapped Between Realms Of Suffering – their first as a four-piece act.

Wastewalker have been a slow burn, launching out of the gate with Funeral Winds back in 2016 and then growing into their sound from there. Funeral Winds had an air of expulsion to it, like the band had to get a ton out of their system and exorcise a cadre of demons before they could truly evolve into what is Wastewalker. Funeral Winds felt like it was moving in twenty different directions all at once, overstuffed with ideas – and sometimes even lyrically – and interesting on the front that there was a lot of promise there; Wastewalker just had to hone in on what was really working within those bounds. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ROPE SECT — “ESTRANGEMENT”

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May 162024
 

Rope Sect is about seclusion.
Renunciation of society.
A dance on ruins.
A doomsday revel.
Naked spite.
Eleutheromania.
Obedience.

So say this clandestine German band in their own words. They also say this about their new album Estrangement, which you’re about to hear:

“It can be seen as a reflection of all the ruins we are surrounded by, the increasing reign of pessimism over optimism in a world that seems to have doomed itself as well as expressing a sense of not belonging and the connected urge to escape all this and live by your own rules in your own little world, passing all the warning signs of human kind going astray.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FEED THEM DEATH — “DELETERIOUS”

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May 162024
 

As you can see, we’re premiering a song from a new album by Feed Them Death. There is so much we would like to say about it that it’s hard to know where to begin. But we decided to begin with the lyrics.

To be honest, lyrics are often an afterthought in extreme metal of all stripes, put to paper after the music has been created and not worth much attention even in the rare cases when you can make out the words. Not so in the case of Feed Them Death. The lyrics on all the songs in their new album The Malady are poetic, politically charged, and thought-provoking, well worth reading and pondering (though they’re expelled with such super-heated fury in the songs that reading them is what most people will need to do).

Here are the words to “Deleterious“, the song we’re premiering, written by the band’s founder and principal musician Void: Continue reading »

PARTY CANNON: “INJURIES ARE INEVITABLE”

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May 162024
 

(DGR fires off the following review of the latest discharge from the Scottish band Party Cannon, which is out now on the Unique Leader label.)

The thing to keep in mind when listening to Party Cannon and their newest release Injuries Are Inevitable is that it is a supremely stupid collection of music. This has been the band’s M.O for the course of their career; the logo proclaims it, the album art proclaims it, and their album titles and song titltes spell it out for those of us denser than the band.

Granted, proclaiming yourself as being massively moronic does not make yourself critic-proof and portraying your music as being the cranial equivalent of an empty, infinite void doesn’t excuse endless braindead riffage – but it does soften the blow quite a bit.

You know upon entrance that Party Cannon‘s music will not be a high-minded exercise in philosophy. It is not something you’ll be sitting down to with a nice glass of sipping whiskey and a pipe full of fine tobacco and ‘appreciating’. Unless, your idea of this exercise involves putting all those things in a bowl, smashing it with a rock, and eating the shards and splinters.

Injuries Are Inevitable is an exercise in ‘dumb’ and just the group’s latest exploration in how far they can push that particular label without morphing into something completely different. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: YAKOR

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May 152024
 

(We present Comrade Aleks‘ interview of Vadim Baev, guitarist from the Russian doom/death metal band Yakor (Яkорь).)

Onega is a town in the northwest of Russia, situated not far away from the White Sea. And Yakor / Якорь (translated as “the anchor”) is probably the only doom metal band in this entire region. The band was formed in 2016 with the following lineup: Vadim Baev (guitar), Vitaly Rudy (guitar), Sergei Belov (vocals, bass), Sergei Kostin (drums). Evgeniy Zhuravsky from the Trawler band took the second guitarist’s position when Vitaly left, but that’s not the point of this interview. It’s just that from the very beginning, Yakor was strongly inspired by the melodic doom influenced KYPCK, and these men didn’t hide this influence.

However, with the release of the third album under the ambiguous name Russkaya gotika / Russian Gothic (and that’s not about gothic metal or whatever) through Soundage Productions, the rules of the game seriously changed, and the band’s individuality looks clearer and sharper.

This short interview with Vadim Baev will answer some questions that arose while listening to the new songs. Continue reading »

RIVERS OF NIHIL: “CRIMINALS”

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May 152024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of a new EP by Pennsylvania-based Rivers of Nihil, which is out now on Metal Blade Records.)

Strangely enough, writing about Rivers Of Nihil‘s newest EP Criminals feels like a little bit of a ‘gimme’. The three songs on Criminals – none of which is a cover of the titular Katatonia song – were all ostensibly recorded during the same experimental session for the band, one which saw the newly restructured lineup of the group getting together to see just what they could do and where they might be headed post-The Work.

They were then slowly drip-fed to listeners over the course of a little under a year, so listeners will have an immediate familiarity with prog-rock minded “The Sub-Orbital Blues” and the slightly more recent stomper in “Hellbirds”, which means the big draw for most people will be the unveiling of “Criminals” as a song, as well as the ability to take in all three in one go, providing an intriguing glimpse at Rivers Of Nihil‘s current headspace and lyrical inspirations, as well as peek through a smudged lense of where their future paths may take them. Continue reading »

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