Islander

SHOW REVIEW: DEFEATED SANITY, PEASANT, EAT THE ELDERLY, AND THE FALLEN PROPHETS IN CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, JULY 5TH, 2024

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Jul 172024
 

(Our contributor Vizzah Harri lives and works in Vietnam but is a native of South Africa, and on a recent return there he caught a great show in Cape Town featuring the bands named above. He sent us the following lively report, adorned by photos courtesy of Laura McCullagh and Slam Dank Productions.)

June 2022, intermittent light beams get blasted from the Oort cloud. 2 lightyears from Earth. In June this year the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Sutherland receives a message from outer space. Weirdly enough, instead of the technosignatures and quantum communication techniques that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has prepared for, it was in morse code:

Lucien Rudaux – Sur les Autres Mondes (defiled by adding morse digitally)

It immediately got sent to the SAAO headquarters in the suburb of… Observatory, Cape Town. Once deciphered it baffled astronomers the world over: Continue reading »

WHITE STONES: “MEMORIA VIVA”

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Jul 162024
 

(In late June Reigning Phoenix Music released a new album by the Spanish band White Stones, and today we provide our writer DGR‘s interesting review of this new work.)

Much like an immortal Heinz condiment-themed musical group, we’re forever playing catch-up.

I could never claim nor want to pontificate about the inner workings of a group or their band dynamic. These sorts of things are private for a reason and more often than not maintained that way so that a group doesn’t just become the ‘such-and-such show’ with three other musicians hanging around. You could make some solid as a rock ballpark guesses with certain groups as to who is responsible for what, but the pontification is more intellectual exercise for fun than anything that could actually have an effect.

What I will say, though, is that every time I’ve listened to White Stones, it has been both reminder and revelation of just how important bassist Martín Méndez has been to Opeth‘s sound over the years. The projects are purposefully and determinedly different from one another – White Stones having been obtuse and strange since their launch with Kuarahy back in 2020 – but it’s hard not to recognize that dude’s bass playing and transpose it over the works he’s been involved in, only to realize how fiercely creative that other group’s rhythm section has always been, with White Stones bringing it to the forefront. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TAUR-IM-DUINATH — “MADRE NOTTE”

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Jul 162024
 

“Taur-Im-Duinath (Forest Between Rivers) was founded in 2015 by F., as a means to seek the rhythm, the pattern, the essence that lies within the turning of the seasons, the dance of the leaves in the wind, the growing of roots in the depths, to learn from the transitory yet ever changing nature permeating the Universe. And to transform this Vision into aural landscapes.”

That is the introduction to Taur-Im-Duinath provided by the Dusktone label, which will release this Italian black metal project’s third album Verso Casa (Homewards) on September 13th. It is the follow-up to a first demo named Randir (2016), a debut album on Dusktone named Del Flusso Eterno (2018), and the double-album The Burning Bridges in 2020, which was released by Cult of Parthenope and included both black metal and neofolk material.

On the new album F. has once again composed and performed all the music and the vocals. As a sign of the new accomplishments we’re today premiering a song from Verso Casa named “Madre Notte“. Continue reading »

ASCENSION FESTIVAL ICELAND MMXXIV: A REPORT WITH PHOTOS

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Jul 162024
 

At 3:15 a.m. on Sunday morning, July 7th, I walked back to my hotel in Mosfellbær, Iceland, from the Hlégarður community center where the 2024 edition of Ascension Festival had ended roughly an hour earlier. The photo above shows the sky I saw, a sunrise in a far northern latitude. It was a fitting vision for what I was feeling, a feeling of wonder.

I should have been exhausted at that point after four late nights of intense music, and I suppose my body actually was, but my head was still spinning from the closing set by Rebirth of Nefast and a very uplifting conversation with Rebirth‘s Stephen Lockhart, who was also the person responsible for organizing and presenting Ascension. But I’ll get to that at the end of this report.

As for what precedes that closing commentary, here’s what I’ve done: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OBŠAR — “VOROŽKY”

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Jul 152024
 

In the autumn of this year Void Wanderer Productions and War Productions will jointly release the third album by the melodic black metal band Obšar from Slovakia. The album’s name is Propastnyk, and it continues exploring the band’s inspirations from Ruthenian nature, culture, mythology, and demonology.

To help introduce the new album, what we have for you today is a stirring and beautifully multi-faceted song from Propastnyk named “Vorožky“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BLACK HILL COVE — “ETERNAL”

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Jul 152024
 

The first time we featured the music of Black Hill Cove at this site two years ago we described it as “bleak and furious”, “both emotionally and ‘physically’ bruising and battering”, with every ingredient seizing attention and collectively creating “a viscerally intense experience”.

At that time the music we focused on was from this Portuguese band’s powerful debut album Broken, an amalgam of hardcore, thrash, and sludge that was released by Raging Planet Records. Black Hill Cove and Raging Planet have followed up that album with a new one named Ex Tenebris Vita that they released in April of this year, and to help call attention to it we’re now premiering a video for a song off the album named “Eternal“. Continue reading »

DARKNESS EVERYWHERE: “TO CONQUER ETERNAL DAMNATION”

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Jul 152024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the debut album by Oakland CA-based Darkness Everywhere, which was released in May by Creator-Destructor Records. The fantastic cover art is by Adam Burke.)

It’s weird to think about how wildly melodeath-ascendant the past few years have been. It’s strange when you’re within the bubble of a nostalgia cycle and are fully aware of it, as opposed to recognizing it from the outside and approaching it more from the cultural anthropology side of things.

There are even projects dedicated to exploring different eras, which is not something you would normally ascribe to a style that saw such a glut of artists in the late ’90s and early ’00s that it almost accidentally codified into the blueprint that was then widely followed to the point of mundanity.

Yet there are projects dedicated to both the retro and modern aspects, and those who split the difference between the two. In the case of musician Ben Murray and his latest exploration of the style in Darkness Everywhere, it’s one made with a ton of influence from that late ’90s to early ’00s period in which melodeath became its own thing and the words for the genre were no longer existing as just an abbreviation of a way to describe a less sewage-obsessed form of death metal. Continue reading »

BLOG BREAK

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Jul 132024
 

Yesterday I took that photo up there from the window of a Cessna prop-plane that was flying me and a handful of other passengers from Seattle to Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. I made the trip to be at the Orcas wedding of a friend that will happen later today.

It’s just as beautiful here on the ground as it is from the air. There was a hell of a pre-wedding party last night on a shorefront. There’s a photo of the view from that location after the jump.

The point of this isn’t to cause jealousy among readers, but to explain why I haven’t pulled together a Saturday roundup of new music and videos, and probably won’t be compiling a Shades of Black column for tomorrow either. Continue reading »

NIGHTRAGE: “REMAINS OF A DEAD WORLD”

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Jul 122024
 

(NCS writer DGR dives deep into the newest album by the Nightrage melodic death metal band, which was released in late May by Despotz Records.)

If you’ll indulge us for a few, there were a lot of releases that came out towards the tail end of May/beginning of June. Right about the time when we were all just returning home from floating around at fests across the country, and now I’m playing the desperate game of catch-up to write about all the stuff I was listening to while traveling from place to place.

Nightrage‘s new album Remains Of A Dead World is a genuinely interesting beast. If you’ve been following the band for its multi-decade existence then you’ll likely know that one of the unfortunate constants within the group is an ever-changing vocalist position. In fact, it wasn’t until the run of vocalist Ronnie Nyman‘s recorded works between 2015 and 2022 that Nightrage had actually had someone in the vocalist slot for more than two albums. Save for founder Marios Iliopoulos, the whole of Nightrage‘s lineup has always been on the fluid side – it just always seemed like the vocalist spot was changing out more than most.

Remains Of A Dead World, otherwise, is interesting because it was recorded with what was probably the most stable lineup of Nightrage in some time (and since the band has seen the exit of drummer George “Dino” Stamoglou, replaced by journeyman drummer Fotis Benardo), except for the vocalist slot, now occupied by newcomer Konstantinos Togas after having spent some time in that role helping the band on the live front. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: NOCTURNUS AD

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Jul 122024
 


photo by Tim Hubbard

(Today we present an excellent interview by our Comrade Aleks of Mike Browning from the terrific Nocturnus AD, whose latest mind-bender of an album is out now on Profound Lore.)

Nocturnus AD is the brainchild of Mike Browning, who started his career in the early ’80s in Morbid Angel as drummer and vocalist, and continued it in bands like Nocturnus and Acheron, among others. Nocturnus AD serves not just as continuation of Mike’s past works, but strictly follows the ideas he put into Nocturnus’ albums back in the very early ’90s. Together with Belial Koblak (guitars), Demian Heftel (guitars), Josh Holdren (keyboards), and Kyle Sokol (bass) he explores the occult side of technical sci-fi death metal.

Nocturnus AD‘s new full-length Unicursal was released on May 17th by Profound Lore Records, and we were lucky to catch Mike and learn more about his new album. Continue reading »

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