Islander

Nov 222023
 

(Not long ago the former Belarusian band Woe Unto Me, now relocated to Poland, finished a  tour of Europe in support of their exceptional 2023 album released by M-Theory Audio. At a break in the tour Comrade Aleks conducted an extensive interview of the band’s co-founder Artyom Serdyuk, and at last we present that today.)

Woe Unto Me (Grodno, Belarus) crossed the borders of funeral doom metal some time ago, but we label them now as a funeral band almost by inertia. Both the EP Spiral-Shaped Hopewreck that we discussed two years ago here with one of the band’s founders Artyom Serdyuk (guitars, vocals, keyboards) and the new, third album Along the Meandering Ordeals, Reshape the Pivot of Harmony carry us further to the territories of the progressive genre with the deep atmospheric feeling.

The band just returned from a mini-tour and now the guys prepare to start another one, so I’ve tried to catch up with Artyom again and to talk about the new album and the situation around the band. Continue reading »

Nov 212023
 

The odds are high that once you’ve seen the painting above by Paloma Pájaro that adorns the cover of TodoMal‘s new album The Greater Good, you won’t forget it. The odds are also high that it may perplex you. The choosing of the art was obviously unconventional, but then again, so is the music.

The Greater Good is the second full-length by the TodoMal duo of Christopher B. Wildman and Javier Fernández, following the release of Ultracrepidarian in 2021. As they conceive it, the new album follows dark paths, “where doubts about what is right or wrong, what we do in this world to earn redemption, or why we have a nefarious tendency to destroy what we love are depicted against a smoldering forest”. “The journey continues,” as they say, “despite the obstacles”.

And so we have a Spanish band whose name means something like “all is evil” or “all is wrong” ambitiously seeking “The Greater Good”. They put a lot of thought and work into making it a continuation from their first album that would both expand their ambitions and manifest them more precisely, and today you’ll be able to hear every minute of what they achieved in advance of its release on November 24th by Ardua Music. Continue reading »

Nov 212023
 


painting by the great Zdzisław Beksiński

On November 21, 2009, I made the first post at this blog. On the 21st day of every November since then (except one year when I forgot to do it until a few days later) I’ve made a post celebrating our birthday. And here I am doing it again, because we’ve survived another year.

In these annual posts I usually explain how I had no ambitions or expectations when I started the blog, nor any training or experience as a music writer, and that the sum total of my motivation was to create an enjoyable diversion for myself from the grind of daily life, and to indulge my burgeoning interest in heavy music. And there, I just did it again, albeit in fewer words than in many other years.

In these annual observances I also tend to reminisce about how many things about NCS have changed from the early days, and about how surprising it is to me that we’re still here. Some of you remember the early days, because you were here with us then and haven’t left. Others who have begun checking in here more recently might yawn if I indulged in that kind of nostalgia, so let’s just skip that, as I have the last couple of years, and get right into expressions of gratitude and the annual tradition of mind-numbing statistics (though they’re less mind-numbing this year).. Continue reading »

Nov 202023
 

Canada is home to a great many metal bands, and over 60 of them participated in the contest to determine which one would represent the country at Wacken Metal Battle in Germany during the famed Open Air festival last August. The chosen band was Strigampire from Trois-Rivières in Quebec.

It was good timing for the band, because they’re following that appearance next month with a new album named All To Dominate, their first release of new music in five years (and again with their strigoi mascot Stan on the cover). One single from the album has already been released, and today we bring you an official video for another one — “Sold Our Soul“. Continue reading »

Nov 202023
 

Stuperous,” in case you were wondering, is a word found in the dictionary. It means “stunned or confused and slow to react (as from blows or exhaustion)”. Synonyms include dazed, foggy, groggy, and lethargic.

A strange choice for a metal band name, you might think, especially a band whose music stands as an antonym for “stuporous”. Momentarily, you’ll see why we think that.

As for the band itself, it’s the brainchild of Floris Velthuis, whose name you might recognize as the main person behind the unorthodox black metal band Meslamtaea. In Stuperous he’s joined by trumpeter Izzy Op de Beeck, who’s also part of Meslamtaea, and singer Devi Hisgen, who we’re told works in psychiatry, a useful specialty in the context of the trio’s debut album Asylum’s Lament, given that the lyrics are about mental disorders and depression, based on true events in a psychiatric facility.

That album is now set for release on January 25th by Void Wanderer Productions and War Productions, and what we have for you today is the premiere of the album track “Decorating the Willow Tree“. Continue reading »

Nov 192023
 

I hurt all over, thanks for asking. The result of a week spent trying to exercise muscles that turned into limp noodles after months of sedentary living. If I could get all the lactic acid out of my body it would probably fill a barrel.

Well, maybe hurting all over wasn’t the worst thing as a basis for picking the music in this Sunday column today. It led to selections that will make you hurt in different ways too.

IHSAHN (Norway)

The hurting begins with “Pilgrimage To Oblivion“, a new song from Ihsahn that surfaced three days ago in two different versions. The main version combines orchestral bombast and terrorizing screams, frenzied strings and plundering percussion, to create a thoroughly harrowing experience in keeping with the song’s title and the video’s tale of personal ruin. Continue reading »

Nov 182023
 

LOTS of new metal to get to today, so this sentence is all the introduction I’ll provide.

SAVAGE LANDS (Int’l)

A charity project whose goal is to help preserve the forests of Costa Rica and the creatures that live there. Founded by drummer Dirk Verbeuren and musician-turned-activist Sylvain Demercastel (a current resident of Costa Rica). First song is about howler monkeys and features appearances by guitarist Andres Kisser (Sepultura) and vocalist John Tardy (Obituary). OK, I’ll bite. Continue reading »

Nov 172023
 

(DGR finally caught up with reviewing the new album by Stortregn, and one reason you can guess at is that it’s probably going to appear again on his NCS year-end list. That’s our bet at least.)

You probably noticed this before I did, but a glance at the calendar in this clusterfuck of a year showed that it had suddenly because November. Traditionally – and there are a few traditions that even us heretics in this corner of the interweb observe – November is something of a ‘panic month’, wherein not only do you have your new releases, but you also have people – like our own Austin Weber recently – who are desperately trying to play catch-up with albums that have come out throughout the year.

This writer does the same of course and with similar purpose, because there are albums that for one reason or another didn’t get covered or ones that we’ve discovered while burying our nose in the tree roots and sniffing around the dirt, or the more personal one: to introduce people to an album now so that when it starts popping up within people’s year-end collections they won’t suddenly be taken aback by a release that has had fuck-all coverage on a site now praising it as one of the best of the year.

It’s a compulsion to complete a narrative arc, and I have that sense that Stortregn‘s Finitude may actually dark-horse its way into a few people’s year-end collectives. A bigger part of that story may be how it will likely find a place somewhere in the year-end celebration we throw around here, because Finitude is a very fine distillation of the tech-death genre as a whole, and the one that these Swiss madmen have created here is one that will surprise people – even when you can recognize many of its component parts. Continue reading »

Nov 172023
 

You can tell from the name Dusk that this Wisconsin band got their start a very long time ago. Especially in the doomier sectors of the metal-verse, a name like that would have been seized early. Of course, as Metal-Archives shows us, 10 other bands from around the world also seized it, but none earlier than this group from Green Bay.

Metal-Archives also documents for us that many of the other early Dusk‘s no longer exist, some of them barely surviving past their first releases. And so it seemed with the Wisconsin band: They released a self-titled EP in 1994 and a debut album (…Majestic Thou in Ruin) in 1995, and then nothing new for 10 years after.

The silence was broken by a 2005 split with Aphotic (another Green Bay band), and then another long silence descended until the band re-formed in 2015 and the Dark Symphonies label then released Dusk‘s 2018 EP, Withdraw.

Twenty-eight years is a damned long time between albums, but at last we have a new one on the way from Dusk, a second full-length named Dissolve Into Ash that will be collaboratively released on December 8th by Dark Symphonies/The Crypt Vinyl and Dread Records, and as a sign of what Dusk has now accomplished we’re premiering an official video for the new album’s opening song, “Beacon Obscured“. Continue reading »

Nov 172023
 

At almost exactly this same time last year we had the pleasure of premiering a song from the first album by a captivating German melancholic black metal band named Stilleklang. That album, Tränen der Vergangenheit Part 1, was (as its title portrayed) the first part of a two-part work. And now the second and concluding part is ready for release and it’s again our pleasure to host a song premiere.

The songs on Tränen der Vergangenheit Part 2 date from the same period as the first album, both in terms of the compositions as well as the recording and mastering. On both albums Stilleklang‘s sole member Fabian Veith was joined by two guest musicians — Markus Röll (Gernotshagen, Herbstlethargie) on drums and M. on violin.

Last year we described Stilleklang‘s music as “a multi-faceted fashioning of black metal that’s elegant and poignant as well as harsh and livid” — both somber and tormented, spellbinding and wondrous. Those words come to mind again in listening to the long song from the latest album that we’re presenting today — “Sehnsucht lauert“. Continue reading »