Islander

BLOODSHOT DAWN: “DEMONS”

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Oct 132014
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the eagerly awaited second album by Bloodshot Dawn.)

I’ve been anticipating this ever since their debut came out. Bloodshot Dawn’s debut self-titled SAVED melodic death metal for me. It seemed that the only thing you could turn to for truly good melodic death metal was the doom-flavored Daylight Dies/In Mourning stuff. That stuff is excellent, and is one of my favorite musical developments in metal, but there hasn’t really been a champion for fast, aggressive, and riffy melodic death metal to prove it’s not an irrelevant copy-cat circle jerk. Bloodshot Dawn is now that champion.

Of course, I was apprehensive about whether Demons would be able to live up to its predecessor. The self-titled is so well-written and the perfect 50/50 split between melodic death metal and straight death metal that the balance the band established seemed like it would be a very delicate thing to maintain. With their second album, I have to say I think this is my first legit album of the year candidate, and it’s looking likely that it will be my album of the year in a few months time. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: ENRICO SCHETTINO (HIDEOUS DIVINITY)

 Interviews  4 Responses »
Oct 132014
 

 

(Our interviewer KevinP, a notoriously hard man to please, somehow convinced Enricho Schettino, guitarist for Italy’s Hideous Divinity, to speak with him. This is what followed.)

K:  The band was formed in 2007 when you left Hour of Penance and moved to Norway.  What caused you to move and would you have stayed in Hour of Penance if you hadn’t moved?

E:  I thought I was gonna drop death metal as soon as I’d start a new life in a foreign country… god I was wrong. About my moving reasons… a Norwegian friend of mine once told me that people move there either for love or to escape from a war conflict.  In my case it was the first one. Have no clue about how things would have been in the band if I stayed, I just remember that at the time for me it was really difficult to stand the company of many Hour of Penance members.

 

K:  Then you rejoined in 2009 for a short period of time?

E:  Yes. Got the proposal to re-join and I was extremely happy to play live again with them. I was not involved at all in their new album’s songwriting process but I thought it was fair.  I took it all extremely easy. Then we played in an Italian festival, apparently the sound was messy and I took all the blame. Asked if there was any problem, but everyone said “No no we’re fine 100%”… One week later, just before a fest in Switzerland, I got the call — with no face-to-face explanation to this date — saying, “We’re better off as 4 piece”. These are the facts, just want to stick to them, or at least I wanna try. Continue reading »

DECKARD CAIN’S MALADIES OF THE EAR!

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

(Our friend and fellow blogger deckard cain re-joins us with a fresh set of musical recommendations.)

Greetings!

While Diablo constantly devises plans, doomed to fail of course, to conquer the world and the rest of the world lets out a collective sigh, I sit here thinking. Thinking about penning down yet another scroll on the most infectious maladies of the ear, and lo, here we are!

“Stay awhile and listen.”

1.  DESERTED FEAR

OSDM with an extremely glossy finish, courtesy of Dan Swanö.

I’ve written about these guys from Germany before; in fact it was on my best of 2012 list here on NCS. What probably separates them from the old guard is their knack for using grooves that are more reminiscent of modern metal. One could say that they’ve got one foot each in the past and the present. This German trio’s got a new LP out titled Kingdom of Worms via FDA Rekotz. Stream their first single below. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLASPHERIAN, CLOUDKICKER, DISSVARTH, EASTFRISIAN TERROR, FEN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

After a two-week hiatus from listening to new songs, watching new videos, and preparing these round-ups, I’m easing back into the gig. I didn’t finish as many reviews during the hiatus as I had hoped, and so I still won’t prepare these round-ups as frequently as before, until I make more headway on some reviews I desperately want to finish. With luck, Leperkahn will continue to pitch in as he did during my break. Speaking of which, how about a big round of applause for Leperkahn?

The good new metal continues to come in a flood: The following offerings are all new things I saw and heard just over the last 24 hours. The bands are presented in alphabetical order. The music is all over the map, both stylistically and geographically.

BLASPHERIAN

Iron Bonehead Productions has announced plans to release a new 7″ EP by Houston’s Blaspherian by the end of November. Its name is Upon the Throne… Of Eternal Blasphemous Death. The last time I wrote about Blaspherian (here) was more than three years ago, just before the release of their debut album. The fantastic cover art for the album had caught my eye, and the art for this new EP is certainly eye-catching, too. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 6

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, Reviews  2 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

 

(In this 6th installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory forays through the underground. Previous installments are linked at the end of this post.)

DUNGORTHEB

Let’s start off this installment with the technical death metal band Dungortheb, a French group from the world of Lord Of The Rings that I’ve been a fan of for years. Somehow, in spite of being a massive fan of their first two albums, Intended To… and Waiting For Silence, I failed to realize they had a new record out until recently, when I was checking out the roster for Great Dane Records on Metal-Archives. Seeing their name on the roster inevitably led me to click on the Dungortheb page on M-A where I saw the new album. Luckily I was not too far behind, as this latest release, Extracting Souls, just dropped on August 30th of this year.

Not only is it a continuation of their heavily lead-focused, melodically entrenched, often mid-paced death metal style, but it’s quite an evolution as well. Extracting Souls sees an influx of Death– and Coroner-style thrash influences seep into their sound, giving their latest a Gory Blister-type headbangable take on technical death metal. Continue reading »

DOOM AND DEATH RITUALS: FAMISHGOD, STORMVOLD, NANGILIMA

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Oct 112014
 

So here’s how this collection of songs came together:

I saw a Facebook post yesterday about a new band named Famishgod. It’s the creation of some people who know what they’re doing. I listened to their first single on Soundcloud. If you don’t stop after you listen to a song on Soundcloud, it moves you right into another one… and then another one… and I went with it. And voilà!

FAMISHGOD

Dave Rotten has loaned his inhuman voice to many projects, his best-known one being the long-running death battalion Avulsed. What I saw on Facebook yesterday was an announcement that he has now partnered with a Spanish musician named Funedëim (Svipdagr, Morkulv) to create a new entity under the brand of FamishGod. With Funedëim on guitars and bass, FamishGod have recorded an album entitled Devourers of Light divided into seven tracks, each of which lyrically forms a chapter in a a conceptual story, with cover art and additional artwork created by Tommi Grönqvist from Finland’s Desecresy.

Along with this announcement came the premiere of the album’s title track and first chapter, “Devourers of Light”. Rotten’s vocals are monstrously deep and horrific, the kind to which words like “cavernous” and “abyssal” really don’t do justice. And the radioactive riffs and massive bass hammers are monsters in their own right, spreading a thick miasma of putrefying doom that moves from funereal dirge to methodically skull-clobbering assault, with a malignant lead guitar melody eventually uncoiling in its midst like a serpent. Great intro to the song as well. Continue reading »

RICHES FROM LONDON AWAIT!

 IQ Subtraction  13 Responses »
Oct 112014
 

 

Hope springs eternal!

It’s been ages since I’ve been the recipient of a philanthropic e-mail offer from Africa, promising stupefying sums of cash, bags of gold dust, bars of bullion, and other forms of riches, in return for just a bit of personal information. No matter how many times I responded in good faith, none of those motherfuckers ever made good. And then they just stopped e-mailing me altogether.

I had pretty much given up, and stopped thinking about all the things I would do with the money, like paying Fleshgod Apocalypse to come live on my island and play for me whenever I want; construct the Grolsch beer fountain; re-open the wormhole vortex; hire personal groomers for the loris horde; and start paying money to get some decent writers for the site.

And then… and then I got an e-mail a couple days ago from a gentleman in London with a very enticing proposition. And I wrote him back, in-line with his message to me, as follows (I’m soooo excited!): Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: STARKILL — “VIRUS OF THE MIND”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Oct 102014
 

Eighteen months after the release of their debut album Fires of Life, Chicago’s Starkill have come roaring back with their second album Virus of the Mind, scheduled for release next week by Century Media, and today we’re giving you a chance to hear it from start to finish.

Speaking of starts, the fast-paced orchestral introduction to the album’s first song, “Be Dead or Die”, is about as blood-pumping a start to an album as you’re likely to hear this year. And the adrenaline rush doesn’t let up. Whether the band are ripping like razors or vaulting into the stratosphere with soaring choruses, they keep the energy in the red zone. Continue reading »

CREPUSCLE: “DRACONIAN WINTER”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 102014
 

 

(DGR reviews the 2014 debut album by Crepuscle from Redwood City, California.)

There are styles of heavy metal that I think, through no lack of trying on America’s part, are always going to be distinctly European. Folk metal and its various offshoots, alongside the hybrid genres of pagan melo-death (I’m still not sure that means anything but have seen numerous tours under that banner) and the sort of symphonic battle hymns that the combinations of the aforementioned genres, are all styles of music that European bands, and particularly the usual Scandinavian suspects, seem to have on lock down.

There have been some valiant attempts in the U.S., of course, as firing a shotgun into a wall is bound to hit something, and there have been a ton of bands over the years who have been inspired by groups such as Wintersun, Ensiferum, the viking metal explosion (itself a thorny briar patch of bands not easily defined), and their folksier brethren — but those bands have usually suffered from one of two problems: an inability to find a crowd here in the States and therefore no staying power, or a tendency to display a light shade of mimicry.

It has usually been all too clear that the musicians in these bands were massive fans of their influences, but they were never able to get out of their shadow creatively, leaving them feeling like the B-team to a better product that sadly, rarely seems to tour over here. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: MANES — “BE ALL END ALL”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  4 Responses »
Oct 102014
 

 

Prepare yourselves for a big departure from our normal fare as we present a full-album stream of Be All End All, the new release by Norway’s Manes.

You would be hard-pressed to find a band who have led as many diverse musical lives at Manes. At the time of the band’s genesis in about 1992, and through the release of their 1999 debut album Under Ein Blodraud Maane, they were a black metal band. And then there was a hiatus — until the second album Vilosophe was released in 2003. It sounded nothing like what the band had been creating prior to the break, and it defied categorization. More releases followed, including a third album (2007’s How the World Came To An End), and then another hiatus followed.

Now the band have, in effect, begun a third life with Be All End All, which will soon be released by Debemur Morti. This follows a two-song single named Vntrve released at the end of the summer (reviewed here), and it’s the first full-length from the band in seven years. Continue reading »

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