Islander, Author at NO CLEAN SINGING

Islander

AN NCS PREMIERE: MARE COGNITUM — “PULSES IN EXTRACONSCIOUS LUCIDITY”

Aug 112015

Last year I, Voidhanger Records released Phobos Monolith, the third album by the one-man California project known as Mare Cognitum, and now that very tasteful label has decided to reissue the band’s second album, An Extraconscious Lucidity, in remastered form and with cover art and layout by Max Loeffler. Originally released only as a digital download and as a limited CD-r, the album includes six tracks of atmospheric black metal — and we are now premiering the closing one, “Pulses in Extraconscious Lucidity”.

The song is absolutely electric — I can’t think of a better word for it. Even when the song slows in the final third of its significant length, it’s a gripping piece of music. Continue reading »

MATRON THORN: “THE RITUAL NARCOTIC”

Album Reviews 9 Responses »

Aug 112015

Most albums, including many that each of us would count among our personal favorites, are simply collections of individual songs. Each song may be a blast to hear, and they may stay in your head for years, but hearing all of them together doesn’t amount to much more than multiplying the time spent enjoying something you like.

Other albums, however, are greater than the sum of their parts. The individual songs may stand up well in isolation; you may get something important out of listening to specific tracks even when you’ve just stuck them on a playlist. But when you listen to all of them together, from the beginning of the album to the end, they have an emotional impact that exceeds the effect of any of them standing alone, and the reasons go deeper than simply the extended amount of time you’ve spent listening to a band you enjoy. Matron Thorn’s The Ritual Narcotic is definitely one of those albums.

The Ritual Narcotic is the first album to appear under the name Matron Thorn, but it isn’t Thorn’s first solo (or near-solo) work. He has produced more than two dozen releases under a variety of other project names, including Benighted In Sodom, (and FYI, Thorn has just begun uploading all of the Benighted In Sodom releases to Bandcamp). But perhaps his best-known work has been as the composer and sole instrumentalist of the remarkable Ævangelist. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HERCYN — “OF RUIN”

Premieres 5 Responses »

Aug 112015

Following a debut demo in 2013 (Magda), an acoustic version of the demo in 2014, and a 2014 split release with Brooklyn’s Thera Roya (All This Suffering Is Not Enough), New Jersey’s Hercyn have completed work on their debut album. Entitled Dust and Ages, it’s set for release on September 11, and today we bring you the premiere of its first advance track, “Of Ruin“.

It’s a long song, topping 11 minutes, and it holds attention from start to finish, running the gamut from lilting folk-influenced acoustic melody to cascades of layered guitars, rippling bass notes, thundering percussion, and knife-edged vocal abrasion. The eye-opening performance of the rhythm section alone grabs you by the neck and never loosens its grip, while the slashing riffs and striking lead guitar melodies prove equally galvanizing. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: GAROTTING DEEP / FŌR — “VOID ASCETICISM”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 2 Responses »

Aug 112015

(Andy Synn wrote this review of the new split by Garotting Deep (Canada) and FŌR (Sweden).)

So I recently stumbled upon Garotting Deep, a band whose name is a reference to the poisonous, polluted swamp-lands that play a pivotal role in Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

Colour me intrigued.

Even more interestingly, the band’s newest release is a split with Swedish grim lords FŌR, a band that Islander has actually drawn the site’s attention to several times before (HERE).

So colour me doubly intrigued… as long as that colour is a suitably fuliginous shade of Black. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: OMNIUM GATHERUM, AMORPHIS, GHOST

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 14 Responses »

Aug 112015

In preparing these round-ups of new songs I usually try to include music from more obscure underground bands in addition to names most of us would recognize. But I didn’t have much time yesterday to wade through the interhole in search of new things, and by chance two of the new songs I heard come from some of the bigger names; the third one has been out for a month, but there’s a reason I’m including it now. And by chance, catchy melody is the common theme for these songs (which is a big reason these three bands are so well-known).

OMNIUM GATHERUM

It’s been over two years since Finland’s Omnium Gatherum released their last album, Beyond. On August 9 they began a North America tour headlined by fellow Finnish melodeath stalwarts Insomnium — who are mounting the tour without growler/bassist Niilo Sevanen, replacing him for this tour with Mike Bear (Artisan, ex-Prototype) from the U.S. And to coincide with the tour, Omnium Gatherum and Insomnium are releasing a 7″ vinyl split, featuring artwork by Olli-Pekka Lappalainen. Continue reading »

HEAVY MENTAL TOUR 2015: BINARY CODE, GYRE, DEAD EMPIRES, TORRENTIAL DOWNPOUR

Metal News 3 Responses »

Aug 102015

Two East Coast bands we’ve been following since early days — Binary Code and Gyre — are about to embark on a short tour, joined by two other powerful bands, Dead Empires and Torrential Downpour, and we’re happy to sponsor the tour and help spread the word about it. And if you’re unfamiliar with the music that will be on display, we’ll help introduce you to some of that as well.

The tour details are listed in the flyer at the top of this post, and repeated here: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: ACID KING

Interviews 4 Responses »

Aug 102015

(Comrade Aleks returns to our site with an interview of Lori S. of Acid King.)

Acid King (San Francisco, California) are one of the most inspiring and influential bands on the American psychedelic doom scene. They’ve rocked since 1993 and it seems that they’ve found a source of really great doom tunes somewhere in the Klamath Mountains! Acid King have released their new LP Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere on Svart Records after nearly a decade of silence, and I have to admit that it’s one of the best records of 2015 for me. I was lucky enough to have this brief discussion with Lori herself, eternal mastermind of this hypnotic band.

******

Hi Lori! Thanks for finding the time for this interview. The road from Acid King’s previous record III to Middle of Nowhere, Center of Everywhere took almost 10 years. What kind of obstacles did you meet on your way?

Life! Marriage, Divorce, Layoffs, being together for over 20 years, are just a few! We also started to tour Europe on a regular basis and spent more time doing that than trying to write a record. Continue reading »

A LOATHING REQUIEM: “ACOLYTES ETERNAL”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Aug 102015

(DGR reviews the new album by Nashville’s A Loathing Requiem.)

You may recognize the name A Loathing Requiem, as we have written about this project before. In early July we actually featured a small write-up about it in one of our “Seen and Heard”, posts alongside Orkhan and some others, and now we’re going to check back in with it because July 31st actually saw the release of the band’s second album, Acolytes Eternal.

Acolytes Eternal, the new album from A Loathing Requiem — the one-man solo tech-death project headed by perpetually angry-looking musician Malcolm Pugh — comes at an interesting time. 2015, like the years before it, seems to be adding to the ever-expanding blast-front that is the tech-death explosion, and a lot of bands are clearly giving it their all — these releases are coming hard and fast. It makes them somewhat difficult to distinguish, and you have to dig that much harder to get past the massive walls that each band erects in terms of sound and song structure.

It’s an increasingly hard field to break into, but A Loathing Requiem has some interesting advantages up its sleeve. One is that this project has been around for a while; Acolytes Eternal marks the second full-length release from this project — serving as a follow-up to 2010’s Psalms Of Misanthropy, and another advantage lies in the musician behind the project himself. Continue reading »

SOILWORK: “THE RIDE MAJESTIC”

Album Reviews 15 Responses »

Aug 102015

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Sweden’s Soilwork.)

At one point if you’d asserted that, fifteen years into their career, Swedish shred-masters Soilwork would be undergoing a creative and commercial renaissance I’m pretty sure you’d have been laughed out of whatever building you were in. Or thrown out.

Though the twin-peaks of A Predator’s Portrait and Natural Born Chaos initially positioned the band as a force to be reckoned with, the relative disappointment (creatively, if not necessarily commercially) of Figure Number Five (an album I, personally, absolutely love), Stabbing The Drama, and Sworn to a Great Divide definitely had a lot of people wondering if the band had started on the long, slow slide into mass-marketable mediocrity.

Somehow, surprisingly, 2010’s The Panic Broadcast bucked this trend with gusto, with the returning Peter Wichers clearly bringing a renewed sense of vigour and vitality to the songwriting process, and the decision (consciously or otherwise) to allow uber-drummer extraordinaire Dirk Verbeuren to finally cut-loose paying massive dividends.

This all led to the unexpected and unpredictable success of 2013’s The Living Infinite – a massive double-album undertaking which somehow sustained an impressive 85-90% hit rate across its twenty-song track-listing, re-establishing the band as contenders while simultaneously raising the bar.

And there’s the rub. Because, try as I might, I can’t help but feel like The Ride Majestic falls a little short of the mark the band have set themselves. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LUX FERRE, GOAT TORMENT, MEFISTO, BORGNE, JOTNARR

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET 5 Responses »

Aug 092015

Off and on over the last couple of days I browsed the web and links we received via e-mail, hunting for new music that I thought would be worth recommending. I’ve collected some of those here. The songs display different styles, though they are all connected to the traditions of black metal — and I think they are all very good.

LUX FERRE

Lux Ferre are a Portuguese band who somehow eluded my attention until this weekend, despite the fact that they’ve released two full-lengths and have a third one coming out this fall. The new album is entitled Excaecatio Lux Veritatis.

Lux Ferre obviously don’t crank out their albums in a hurry — this new one comes six years after the band’s last record, Atrae Materiae Monumentum, and that one followed their debut album (Antichristian War Propaganda) by five years. Though I can’t comment on the band’s previous releases, the first advance track that has appeared from the new album is tremendous. Continue reading »

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