Islander

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HASTURIAN VIGIL — “UNVEILING THE BRAC’THAL”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Jan 312024
 

Possibly drawing upon a reference in the Ambrose Bierce short story “Haïta the Shepherd”, and/or stories in Robert Chambers‘ collection The Yellow Sign, H.P. Lovecraft added Hastur the Unspeakable to his pantheon of the Great Old Ones in his tale “The Whisperer in Darkness”.

Spawn of Yog-Sothoth, the half-brother of Cthulhu, and possibly the Magnum Innominandum, Hastur was a vast monstrosity of hideous power drawn from nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions. And that terrible thing seems to have been an inspiration for the Irish musical duo who chose for themselves the name Hasturian Vigil.

However, these two — multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Cxaathesz and drummer Shygthoth — were not content to set their music solely within Lovecraftian spheres. For their debut album Unveiling the Brac’thal they created a mythos of their own, Yith-Melle, inspired not only by Lovecraft but also by Machen, Lord Dunsany, and Yeats, all the better to “embrace their fascination for cosmic dread, deranged pantheons, and unspeakable curses”.

So says the materials accompanying the album which we have received from the publicist for Invictus Productions, which will release Unveiling the Brac’thal on February 2nd. We also have these prefatory words from Hasturian Vigil: Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: REPLICANT — “ORGASM OF BEREAVEMENT”

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Jan 302024
 

Insanity reigns supreme in the Replicant song you’re about to hear, like a mad god gone berserk. It has the impact of a live power line thrashing unsuspecting pedestrians in a deluge, while teleporting their brains into a whipping centrifuge. Minds will be boggled, bones will be broken, blood spray will paint the walls.

Now that we have your attention, let’s fill in a bit of the back-story. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SARCASTIC OBEDIENCE — “FADING FAITH”

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Jan 302024
 

It may have been the English writer Jonathan Swift (he of Gulliver’s Travels) who was the earliest source of the proverb that, as time passes, everything old is new again. Or it might have been Ovid. But whoever first coined the phrase was surely right.

The members of the Greek metal band Sarcastic Obedience aren’t that old, but they are new again. They look very young indeed in photos of them taken when they released their debut EP Internal Disturbance in 2013.

But now they’re more than a decade older, and they have their first record since that EP now on the horizon, a self-titled album that will be released on February 14th by Chaos and Hell Productions. New again, but man, for them that horizon must have seemed like it was receding farther away with every step they took toward it. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MORVIGOR — “MIDDEN IN DE WERELD”

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Jan 292024
 

By sheer coincidence, this marks the second premiere we’re hosting today from a band who are returning with a new recording seven years after their last one. This time the band is the Dutch quartet Morvigor, coming back from their hiatus with a new EP named De Spiegel that will be co-released on February 26th by Onism Productions and Vita Detestabilis.

We also hosted a premiere in the run-up to Morvigor‘s last album, 2017’s Tyrant. At that time, having overlooked the band’s full-length debut (2014’s A Tale of Suffering), we didn’t know what to expect. But when this same writer first heard that song we premiered, I wrote that “it felt like someone had stuck a live power line straight into my brain stem, by which I mean it is an absolutely electrifying surprise — one of the best new discoveries of this rapidly waning year”.

Having been stunned by Tyrant, this time it will be more difficult for me to come away surprised by Morvigor‘s multi-faceted, genre-bending sounds and their adventurous approach to song-writing. But that doesn’t make De Spiegel any less startling, as you’ll discover for yourselves when you listen to “Midden in de wereld“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HACAVITZ — “MUERTE PRIMERA”

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Jan 292024
 

A long seven years after their last album (Nex Nihil), the Mexican black metal band Hacavitz are returning, with a tremendously powerful new album named Muerte that’s now set for release on February 9th by Vomit Records.

Muerte is the sixth full-length overall from Hacavitz in a career that now spans 20 years. Their name is well-known to devotees of dark metal, and their absence has been felt, even with a couple of splits dropping during the album gap.

But this new album abundantly compensates for the band’s absence, and you’ll quickly learn why when you watch and listen to our premiere of a lyric video for the album’s first song, “Muerte Primera“. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: CAVE SERMON, SALQIU

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jan 272024
 

After three weeks away from home working my day job I’m finally back. It was a stressful and often bizarre experience, made worse by the absence of my spouse and cats, and worse still because I had no time to listen to music, much less write about it.

That may sound weird. There’s always time to listen to music, isn’t there? In my case, it just didn’t fit what I was doing, too much of a distraction instead of a companion. Especially when it comes to metal, my brain’s not wired to combine even less raucous variants of music with trying to concentrate hard on something else. So I was forced to take a very long hiatus, the longest one in the 14+ years I’ve spent in devotion to NCS.

Andy and DGR stepped up and kept the site from going dark, and a few other writers continued sending things in too. But we’ve still got a backlog of un-published material to bring to the surface, mainly a big slug of interviews from Comrade Aleks. Other backlogs will never be fixed. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DOOM BEACH AND CHOP7X

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Jan 262024
 

(We present Christopher Luedtke‘s introduction of our premiere of two songs from a forthcoming 12″ vinyl split set for release in February by Redscroll Records, one each by the bands Doom Beach and Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop.)

It is not just a good day because it is Friday and the weekend is so close some of us can already hear the siren call of free time choice paralysis, but today we also have not one but two song premieres. Today is a double dose of blown-out Connecticut rage from Doom Beach and Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop Chop (or Chop7x if you’re nasty) from their upcoming split to be released early next month on Redscroll Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEFECT DESIGNER — “GAUDY COLOURS FROM YOUR PLASTIC BAG”

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Jan 262024
 

This isn’t our site’s first encounter with Norway-based Defect Designer. The last time, in the context of premiering a track from their 2022 EP Neanderthal, we attempted to prepare people by explaining that the group “revel in severely discombobulating their listeners, and beating them almost senseless”.

Even Ian Miller‘s utterly bizarre cover art for that EP was only a hint of the sounds behind it, a “mutated and marauding amalgam of grindcore and death metal that’s as relentlessly head-spinning as it is viscerally obliterating”.

Now Defect Designer are returning, with a third full-length named Chitin that’s set for release on March 14th by Transcending Obscurity Records. What can you expect this time? In a nutshell, more madness, but mutated yet again. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DYSSEBEIA — “HATCH”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Jan 252024
 

Dyssebeia‘s debut album Garden of Stillborn Idols was released last November by Transcending Obscurity Records. Like a chameleon in a hot house of flowering plants, its musical colors constantly shifted, revealing flashing shades of prog metal, melodic death metal, and black metal, richly embellished with technically impressive twists and turns by all the performers, animated by wild vocal savagery, and loaded with bursts of battering-ram groove.

With a clean yet powerful production behind it, the album incorporated swaths of beguiling melody, head-spinning fretwork fireworks (including glorious guitar soloing), frequent changes in tempo and mood, and the kind of rhythmic punch that might leave a listener checking for bruises and hairline fractures.

Fluid and elegant one moment, jarring the next, and spectacularly racing the next, it was (and still is) a thoroughly exciting roller-coaster ride of adventurous extremity, capable of rocketing to exhilarating heights and plunging to breathtaking depths, while veering around head-whipping turns with both abandon and aplomb.

It still is an album very much worth your time if you haven’t taken the full ride. As a reminder of its marvels for those who might have overlooked them, today we present a video for one of the album’s prize tracks, “Hatch“. Continue reading »

SPECTRAL VOICE: “SPARAGMOS”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jan 252024
 

(We present the following review by Todd Manning of the sophomore album by Colorado-based Spectral Voice)

Spectral Voice is composed of three-quarters of the members of Blood Incantation and is equally as formidable a death metal unit.

But if Blood Incantation have their vision firmly fixed on the stars above, Spectral Voice lurks in the subterranean shadows.

If their 2017 debut Eroded Corridors of Unbeing didn’t place them at the pinnacle of the Death-Doom genre, their latest, Sparagmos, should do the trick.

Due out on February 9th courtesy of Dark Descent Records, it is certainly a shoo-in for year-end lists. Continue reading »

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