Islander

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CHANGELING — “CHANGELING”

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Apr 242025
 

(written by Islander)

We don’t need to be mind-readers to fathom why Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger named his new project and its debut album Changeling. Like the legend from European folklore, it has the musical presence of a supernatural shape-shifter whose diabolical essence diverged from the shapes that disguised it in place of the humans spirited away — except there’s no real disguise here, because the music strikingly and abundantly seems well beyond the capabilities of base-level humans.

Changeling is an entirely fitting name, but Fountainhead might also have chosen the name Phileas Fogg, the adventurous creation of Jules Verne who accepted a wager to go Around the World in Eighty Days. That idea comes to mind because the album, in its many changing escapades, in some ways does seem like a globe-spanning, head-spinning tour by ground, air, water, and subterranean passages, spanning different cultures, different sights, and different dangers.

Except this grand tour will only take you an hour, an hour very well spent, as you’ll discover today through our complete premiere of Changeling in advance of its April 25th release by Season of Mist. Continue reading »

FLESHBORE: “PAINTED PARADISE”

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Apr 242025
 

(January releases sometimes get overlooked. DGR doesn’t want that to happen in the case of the new album from Indiana’s Fleshbore, which Transcending Obscurity Records brought us in the first month of this year, and he explains why at length below.)

February brought us a new release in the tech-death world from Indiana’s Fleshbore. Painted Paradise is only the group’s second album but already has them on a strong trajectory. The issue for the band right now is that they’re competing in an incredibly crowded and flush sphere of the musical world and at such a time in which even a genre like tech-death, long known as being the swirling mass of instrumental craziness, has long since codified into something fairly recognizable.

We have labels that even specialize in this sort of thing and, depending on which one a band is on, you could even guess with about eighty percent accuracy as to what they sound like based on that idea alone. Painted Paradise, then, is an interesting release because it is an album where you can understand almost immediately why someone would want to throw their weight behind it.

One of the biggest challenges for a modern day tech-death group is differentiating themselves within the wider genre-sphere and escaping the wall-of-notes stereotype or the rapidly shifting guitar dynamic that often has parts quickly devolving into auditory mud. Yet somehow – even with a healthy dose of influence worship – Fleshbore do so on Painted Paradise, but the bigger question of how may take a little more explanation than what an opening segment may allow. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OMINOUS RUIN — “ETERNAL”

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Apr 232025
 

(written by Islander)

After a run of short releases beginning in 2011, the Bay Area band Ominous Ruin released a debut album in 2021 via Willowtip Records, Amidst Voices That Echo in Stone, that quickly attracted a lot of enthusiastic attention. As our own DGR wrote in his NCS review, “The band’s sound is one of multiple extreme genres in all-out combat with each other, fully unloading from the hyperactive Tech Death scene even as it drains the arsenal from a very Brutal Death inspired segment as well.” But he also highlighted the even further progressions that the album included as it moved forward, becoming more labyrinthine, more ominous, more unpredictable.

And now Ominous Ruin are returning, again on the Willowtip label, with their sophomore album Requiem. No less technically impressive or brutally bludgeoning than their debut, it nevertheless represents a noticeable evolution, providing an even more expansive array of sensations and moods (including ambient and acoustic passages) in a way that makes the album even more emotionally involving — and mind-bending — than their first one.

This was evident in the first video/single off the album, “Staring Into the Abysm,” and today we have further compelling evidence in our premiere of Ominous Ruin‘s video for the song “Eternal“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BRÜKA — “ENVY THE LIFELESS”

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Apr 232025
 

(written by Islander)

Last September the Central Texas black metal band Brüka released their debut album Death’s Promise in cooperation with Khaoszophy Records and Pest Productions. Usually powered by viscerally propulsive rhythms and fronted by scalding vocal ferocity, it provides a twisting and turning experience.

At times the album provides sweeping melodic ice-storms in the vein of Dissection and Emperor, bleak and daunting but expansive, creating keyboard-enhanced soundscapes that engulf listeners, albeit with attention-grabbing bass nuances and vivid drum variations. At other times, the music attacks with barbaric savagery and monstrous death-metal roars, with maniacally boiling fretwork and earth-shaking cannonades.

At still other times, Brüka let the music extravagantly ring (and warp) like hellish and hallucinatory chimes or to become soft, mysterious, and elegantly haunting before exploding in feral and fierce attacks.

And then there’s the song “Envy the Lifeless“, which is the subject of the video we’re premiering today and a vivid sign of just how varied Death’s Promise is. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: POSTMORTAL — “DECAY OF PARADISE”

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Apr 232025
 

(written by Islander)

Funeral doom is a venerable but narrow musical niche, now old enough to be well-established and highly regarded by its adherents, but many caverns below anything that would pass as “popular”, even among most fans of extreme metal.

The signature tropes of the sub-genre are by now well-known: long song-lengths, glacial pacing, abyssal atmospheres of sprawling scale, often titanic heaviness, often monstrous vocals equally abyssal in depth. Of course there are variations: trappings of spectral elegance and haunting beauty; singing instead of growling; the occasional roaring upheavals instead of the slow, quaking pace of massed mourners or wounded giants. Sometimes you might even hear whispers of hope, like tiny moths drawn to a candle that will be found dead by morning.

Where does the Polish funeral doom band Postmortal fit within this old and deep but narrow musical crevasse? Early signs appeared in their Soil EP in 2018, but the lineup has changed since then, diminishing to the duo of lyricist/vocalist Dawid Dunikowski and musician Michał Skupień. Current signs are available in the debut album made by these two, Profundis Omnis, which re-states some of the band’s early compositions and is now set for release on May 9th by the UK label Aesthetic Death. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): STRUCTURE — “HERITAGE”

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Apr 222025
 

(written by Islander)

In the moments of silence, when we have slipped from rooms and the gaze and demands of others, we can wander through all that has been, hold the precious, present moment in our hands and weigh both our delights and despair with reasoned measure.

Those are the words that serve as a preamble to a forthcoming debut album named Heritage that we found in press materials for the album. The album, which we’re now premiering in full, is the work of a project named Structure, one established in 2021 by Dutch musician Bram Bijhout, who is perhaps best known for his guitar work with Officium Triste, whom he served for seven years.

That preamble and the album’s name (and its cover image) point toward what inspired it, as Bram has explained: Continue reading »

CYTOTOXIN: “BIOGRAPHYTE”

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Apr 222025
 

(On April 11th the German destroyers in Cytotoxin independently released their new album Biographyte. For our friend Professor D. Grover the XIIIth it was one of his most eagerly anticipated albums of the year, and now we have his review of it.)

Finally, it is here. Rejoice!

Greetings and salutations, friends. My early exposures to Cytotoxin generally revolved around me hearing the early moments of the Gammageddon album, with its overwhelming flurry of guitar notes and pig-squeal vocals, just enough for me to decide that this sort of brutal tech probably wasn’t my kind of thing. It wasn’t until I dove into 2020’s Nuklearth, an album that sanded down a lot of brutal death metal’s rough edges, that Cytotoxin really clicked for me, and while it finished fourth on my year-end list for 2020 (a fascinating read four years later, and one that would likely undergo some restructuring with current hindsight), in the years that have followed it’s easily the album from that year that I’ve listened to the most.

My initial misgivings with brutal death metal stemmed from the more over-the-top elements of the subgenre: the ridiculousness of the ultra-low guttural or pig-squeal vocals, the pinging snare drums and rough mixes in general, the gratuitously violent and sometimes misogynistic art and lyrics. Nuklearth had basically none of these, but still married brutality with tech-death precision into something not quite like anything else I had heard. From there I branched out, starting with the rest of the Cytotoxin discography, then to adjacent bands like Katalepsy, Benighted, Unfathomable Ruination, and Analepsy. I still avoid most of the genre, but my horizons have broadened anyway. Continue reading »

ANCIENT DEATH: “EGO DISSOLUTION”

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Apr 222025
 

(Our Norway-based writer Chile has provided the following enthusiastic review of the debut album from Ancient Death, recently released by Profound Lore Records.)

Sometimes I feel that new bands have it hard. Other times I feel something else. Anyway, new bands. With what is now more than a half a century of metal history behind us, one would think that the burden of classics weighing down and the manic following of fans trying to prove that nothing great came out after Altars of Madness or Leprosy, would somehow discourage anyone from playing death metal. Well, think again.

These days, with all the technological possibilities permeating the music industry, the one real problem bands can encounter is finding their one, trve identity in the scene flooded with copycats. It seems like all the great, memorable band names have been taken by the ancestors, so new bands have to resort to various imaginative combinations on that perennial quest.

Enter Ancient Death. Hailing from Massachusetts with a name symbolic of the genre it plays, the band was formed in 2019 (or 2021, depending where you look) and already has a great EP and a split with Germany’s Putridarium under their belt. It’s only natural that the next step taken is a full-length album. Released on April 18th on Profound Lore Records, Ego Dissolution is the band’s debut and a wonderful show of intent and talent. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): COGAS — “AMONG THE DEAD: HOW TO BECOME A GHOST”

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Apr 212025
 

(written by Islander)

We prize extreme metal because it captures and conveys emotional intensity in more powerful ways than most other musical genres do. However, the emotional intensity of the music and vocals aren’t always reflected in lyrics. Often written after the music, the lyrics may be entirely unconnected to the experiences and moods that inspired the music; worse still, they may also be mundane, cliched, and entirely forgettable.

That kind of criticism won’t be applied to the new sophomore album by Cogas. It is rooted, both musically and lyrically, in the frustration, pain, and anger spawned by conditions in their homeland of Sardinia, the second largest island in the Mediterranean and a place of remarkable, varied beauty and rich, fascinating history, but also (based on our own reading) a place apparently plagued by high youth unemployment, enormous outflows of young people seeking to escape such conditions, and both mental and physical health problems among those who’ve remained.

Cogas themselves, who have been based in London for some time, have explained what inspired their new album Among the Dead: How to Become a Ghost: Continue reading »

DAWN OF OUROBOROS: “BIOLUMINESCENCE”

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Apr 212025
 

(Below we present DGR‘s review of the new album by Dawn of Ouroboros, which was released last month by Prosthetic Records.)

Oakland’s Dawn Of Ouroboros have been a vexing band since their founding, part of a class of black metal collectives for whom the genre is one more arrow in the quiver than something to be wholly defined by. They’re part of a grouping for whom the multi-faceted, multi-genre approach has led to something less conventional than straightforward songwriting and more avant-garde with the addition of many a post-black metal and shoegaze element into their overall approach.

Being frank, there’s even been a sense within the band’s music that they’re still searching for how to jam all the pieces together, and so a journey into their discography can be a journey through just as many generally beautiful and transcendent moments as there are times when the band are still learning how to juxtapose such oppositional elements together within the same particular song.

As a result, they’ve been difficult to pin down on each album – like a creature stubbornly moving just to the side every time you’re about to finally set the specimen in place for display. They’ve been a musical cat that doesn’t want to be picked up, somehow turning to liquid and falling through your arms every time.

There is no singular approach to a band like Dawn Of Ouroboros, and so a single- dimensional approach falls to pieces within a song or two. Very few musical narratives fit the band as a result, but the one that has been steady is that as they’ve gotten deeper into their career, they’ve gotten distinctly better. Each album shows a stronger understanding of just how to take these musical parts and jam them together without it sounding like you’ve broken out a brad-nailer for that particular purpose. Their newest album Bioluminescence is the strongest example of that yet. Continue reading »

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