Islander

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MICHAEL H. ANDERSEN (THORIUM)

 Interviews  1 Response »
Oct 112024
 

(Following up on his review and premiere of a well-received new album by the Danish death metal band Thorium last month, our contributor Zoltar has conducted an in-depth interview with the band’s mainman Michael H. Andersen, which we present below.)

There are several kind of super-groups. These days, anything is possible, thanks to technology. You can be a nobody yet still grab a bunch of veterans who don’t even need to live in the same country, let alone the same continent, and convince them to record their parts on their own before assembling everything on your own, putting a nice attention-catching tag on your album ‘featuring members of blab la bla’ et voilà!

Thorium have never played that game though. Yes, when they first seemingly came out of nowhere, storming the gates in the spring of 2000 with their debut Ocean Of Blasphemy, the line-up felt pretty impressive, with Iniquity’s Jesper Frost Jensen, Withering Surface’s Allan Tvedebrink and Michael H. Andersen, and Taetre’s Jonas Lindblood. Yet while most were expecting this one quite good love-letter to classic death metal to be a one-off, Thorium have proven to be a far more long-term affair with five more albums, including the-just released The Bastard.

And while through the years the line-up has seen various people come and go, ultimately it is Andersen, who initiated the whole project in the first place, who still takes the final decision. Eager to keep the wheel turning, he vowed to try out an unusual method to give birth to The Bastard, first premiered on this very website on September 18th, and agreed to give us the details about the present and the future of Thorium. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MIRACLE BLOOD — “HELLO HELL”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 102024
 

Fair warning: the song and video we’re about to present includes singing. The music also includes head-butting punch, bone-grinding heft, and explosive screaming. The song, after all, is called “Hello Hell“. And it turns out the singing is one of the strong points of the music instead of something you have to grit your teeth (the ones the song doesn’t bust out) and endure.

“Hello Hell” is the title song to the forthcoming second album from Boston-based “dissonant noise-punks” Miracle Blood, following up their 2022 debut LP Melter. As the band rightly say, they decided to get a lot meaner, heavier, and noisier on the new album, and the title song proves the point. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: POSSESSIVE — “INSTIGATION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 102024
 

Res Ipsa Loquitur: the Latin phrase which means “The thing speaks for itself.” The Idaho band Possessive (a collaboration among members of bands such as Hummingbird of Death, Tempestarii, and Lunar Temple) chose that phrase as the name of their new album because they wanted their genre-splicing musical havoc to speak for itself.

In light of that, it’s tempting to simply provide you the stream of the album track we’re premiering today, without comment. But we want to speak for the song, and Possessive have also provided some comments about what they’ve done, fleshing out the significance of the album’s name, and we want to share that too. So let’s begin there: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: INTAGLIO

 Interviews  No Responses »
Oct 102024
 

(Today we present Comrade Aleks‘ interview of Evgeny Semenov, founder and principal of the Russian funeral doom band Intaglio (whose latest album we premiered and reviewed here) and a founder and owner of Solitude Productions. The interview focuses on both of those subjects, and more.)

Intaglio is one of very first funeral doom bands founded in Russia. They and Comatose Vigil released debut albums in 2005, and only Вой / Voy could challenge their birthright, but its demo recorded in 1991 wasn’t officially published until 2012.

Although Intaglio’s self-titled first album was almost unnoticed in the world underground, it was also one of the releases by Solitude Productions, the Russian doom-oriented label which has gained its reputation with years of fair and selfless work in the name of Doom. By accident, Evgeny Semenov, one of Intaglio’s founders, who performs guitars, bass, and programming, also is one of Solitude’s owners.

As everything about funeral doom is damn slow, here we are to discuss with Evgeny the band’s latest album II, released in 2021. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CREST OF DARKNESS, SLECHTVALK, DOEDSMAGHIRD, [4672], BULLHEAD, GRUZJA

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 092024
 

(written by Islander)

I found enough time enough to pull together another mid-week roundup of new songs and videos. I picked all of these on Monday and started scribbling about them then, hoping to post this collection sooner than today. In the meantime, a lot of other new things have caught my attention, but those will have to wait ’til Saturday.

The first two of the songs and videos below are heart-pounders and neck-wreckers of different kinds, and then the music begins to twist and turn in increasingly bizarre directions. By sheer coincidence, none of the bands is from the U.S. By design, I again threw a curveball at you with the final selection. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CURSED CEMETERY — “YANJA”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 092024
 

(written by Islander)

The song you’re about to hear from the Romanian band Cursed Cemetery is a mysterious and often deeply disturbing trek of nearly 11 minutes. At times it creates chilling spells, at others it shakes the ground and fractures the rafters. It builds searing crescendos of pain and soundscapes of vast catastrophe. From start to finish, even when viscerally muscular in its power, it sounds thoroughly unearthly, like a nightmare, or a guided tour through terrors of an underworld (or a ravaged inner world) made real.

The song, named “Yanja“, is one of four long tracks on the band’s new album Magma Transmigration, which will be released by the Dusktone label later this month. It’s accompanied by a video whose harrowing and hallucinatory imagery suits the music extremely well, enhancing the riveting but disturbing impacts of the audio experience. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BIRKENTAL — “SUPERBIA”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 082024
 

(written by Islander)

The German black metal band Birkental started as a one-man project by bass player Raug after a band break-up during the covid pandemic around the end of 2021. He wanted to create a project to experiment with bass-only black metal.

The drummer Zlam joined the project after about a year of its existence, and from then on Birkental has been a two-man project with Raug writing the songs, playing bass, and performing vocals and Zlam playing drums and keyboard. After about another year, they finished a debut album named Peccatum Mortiferum, which will be released on December 13th by Void Wanderer Productions.

Today we’re premiering the first advance track from the album, an intriguing song named “Superbia” that furiously assaults with visceral power but also proves to be both gloom-ridden and eerily otherworldly. Continue reading »

DEADFORM: “ENTRENCHED IN HELL”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 082024
 

(Here’s Wil Cifer‘s enthusiastic review of the debut album by Oakland-based Deadform, which is set for release by the Tankcrimes label on October 25th.)

Entrenched in Hell is the first full-length from this Oakland-based trio. If you are a fan of crust punk, this should be considered the upper crust of the genre.

Dino Sommese from Dystopia is playing drums and sharing vocal duties with Brian Clouse from Stormcrow. Clouse is playing bass in this project, with Judd Hawk (ex-Laudanum) laying down the guitars.

Hawk cranks out a vicious guitar tone, and phrases his riffs in a manner that gives you everything one might want from the grim world-ending metal. The production is raw, but feels like you are in their practice space having your eardrums ruptured. It certainly highlights the things I love about this sub-genre as it carries a stormy fury but grooves into the dark apocalyptic mood of the songs. The disdain projected into these songs makes for the perfect soundtrack to the world around us, with lyrics shattering the false hopes we try to fool ourselves with. Continue reading »

NORTHWEST TERROR FEST 2025!

 Metal News  7 Responses »
Oct 072024
 


Poster art by Jacqui Alberts; layout by Emily McCafferty

Once again we are very proud and very excited to help present Northwest Terror Fest in its next edition on May 8-10, 2025 in Seattle, Washington. Today NWTF revealed the first group of bands scheduled to play at next year’s fest (with more to be announced), along with more info.

Here’s that first group of bands — 22 of them — and it’s a tremendous lineup, including headliners Agalloch, Demolition Hammer, and Gorguts: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: AVERNUS

 Interviews  1 Response »
Oct 072024
 


Photography by Gene Ambo

(In mid-September we had the privilege of premiering Grievances, the comeback album of the Chicago doom band Avernus, a few days before its release by M-Theory Audio. And now our Comrade Aleks presents an extensive interview he also conducted in September with Avernus members Rick McCoy and James Genenz.)

Avernus from Chicago is considered one of the first bands to consciously mix influences of gothic rock and death-doom, as they did it in the early ’90s. Working on a series of demos and singles helped them digest this experience and come to the most effective expression of these ideas in the full-length release …of the Fallen (1997), which fans still remember with warmth.

Seventeen years have passed since then. The band managed to break up, re-form, and gradually record the second album Grievances. The line-up of Avernus has undergone minimal changes since 1993, and the latest “newcomer” is guitarist James Genenz (also Jungle Rot), who joined the guys in 1998. Other men are Rick Yifrach (drums), Rick McCoy (vocals, guitars, keyboards), and Erik Kikke (guitars).

An old horse does not spoil the furrow, as we say here, and in Grievances Avernus do not copy themselves, essentially moving along the path of melodic and atmospheric death-doom. It is curious, but in general the material is close to the fresh album of other luminaries of the scene – Officium Triste rather than to …of the Fallen. The similarity lies in the general tendency towards magnificent guitar melodies (there are three guitarists in Avernus), towards concentrated-in-power riffs, and in Rick McCoy‘s thunderous growl. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries