Islander

TITO’S WEEKLY METAL RECS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 022023
 

Our friend Tito Vespasiani from Everlasting Spew Records (and other metal endeavors) is back with another weekly playlist of recommended heavy songs. This second one, like the first one last week, includes 20 tracks, with commentary about a few of them below. The full stream is at the end, and on Spotify here.

Defleshed – Grind Over Matter

Defleshed is BACK!

“Who?” Some fans out there could say. Oh come on, DEFLESHED! Under the Blade! One of the best thrashy death bands ever, grindy at times (like in this album) and one of the most aggressive and crushing bands as always. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PA VESH EN — “CATACOMBS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Nov 012023
 

In the late spring of this year the Belarusian raw black metal band Pa Vesh En released its fourth album Martyrs. Ever-prolific, Pa Vesh En is already returning with a fifth album, this newest one named Catacombs, and it’s being released today by Inferna Profundus Records.

What Pa Vesh En does from album to album is never entirely predictable, but one can predict that whatever variations might be introduced, the results will still be frightening, and so it is with Catacombs. Continue reading »

FOREVER PLAYING CATCH UP (2023 EDITION) PART 2

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 012023
 

(Our old friend and former NCS writer Austin Weber is returning to our page today with the second part of a multi-part series of reviews that we plan to run day after day until completed. You’ll find Part 1 here.)

Despite the incredible volume of music covered here at NCS, there remains a plethora of noteworthy releases yet to be shared in this space. Chalk it up to how much damn good stuff deserves the limelight and doesn’t get it because we all know this site already covers more than most as is.

As I’ve done in the past, join me for another multi-part feature that touches on music I strongly believe you should listen to—or at the very least, stuff worth checking out at a minimum. You be the judge. Onwards! Continue reading »

CRYSTAL COFFIN: “THE CURSE OF IMMORTALITY”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Nov 012023
 

(Didrik Mešiček wrote the following review of the third album by the Vancouver-based trio Crystal Coffin, which was just released yesterday.)

In my continued search for black metal that’s not quite the typical ’90s second wave sound that we all love/hate (choose whichever applies to you) I’m often intrigued by qualifying words like melodic, symphonic, or folky before the name of the subgenre. This time it’s the Canadian Crystal Coffin that’s caught my attention, a band that supposedly falls into the melodic group, if Metal Archives are to be believed. Their new album, The Curse of Immortality, will be released independently on the 31st of October, two years after the band’s previous album, The Starway Eternal, and that’s what I’ll be talking about today.  Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): AEONIAN SORROW — “KATARA”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 312023
 

In the Pindus mountains of northern Greece there is a pass called Katara. We are told that according to the legend, “Katara got its name from a despot who around 1800 set out from Ioannina to go to Trikala city, but the bad weather in the area made it so difficult for him that he died on the way and he cursed the mountain”.

Many tragic stories have been written about this pass, and the Greek/Finnish doom-metal collective Aeonian Sorrow have now written their own, although their new album Katara, which will be released tomorrow, includes other stories as well — and it is dedicated to the memory of Georgia and Michail, beloved grandparents of the band’s singer Gogo Melone.

The lyric stories included in Katara do vary across the album’s seven substantial songs, all of them heart-felt, but they are stories of deep loss, despair, and anger — heart-breaking and harrowing, as well as heart-felt. Gogo has explained how they all came to be: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: GODTHRYMM

 Interviews  No Responses »
Oct 312023
 


photo by Frank Ralph

(In mid-August Profound Lore Records released Distortions, a new album by British doom metallers Godthrymm, and today we present Comrade Aleks‘ interview with two members of the band, Hamish Glencross and Shaun Taylor-Steels.)

The name Godthrymm is familiar to many, and doom fans couldn’t help but hear how this UK-based band fired off one after another top-notch EPs A Grand Reclamation (2018) and Dead in the Studio (2019), and then struck with an epic full-length manifesto, Reflections (2020).

Their traditional, epic-oriented doom metal has deep roots. The singing guitarist Hamish Glencross went through the universities of My Dying Bride and Vallenfyre. The drummer Shaun Taylor-Steels played not only with the Brides, but also with Anathema. And if we dig deeper, we can easily find that both of them studied the basics of doom back in the ’90s, as part of the ever-memorable Solstice team.

Hamish and Shaun, along with bassist Sasquatch Bob and Hamish‘s wife, Catherine, who this time sings and plays keyboards, returned this August with a new album, Distortions.

(This interview was conducted shortly before the release of the album and was first published in the Spanish metal-magazine This Is Metal.) Continue reading »

FOREVER PLAYING CATCH UP (2023 EDITION) PART 1

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 312023
 


Paroxysm Unit

(Our old friend and former NCS writer Austin Weber is returning to our page today with the first part of a multi-part series of reviews that we plan to run day after day until completed.)

Despite the incredible volume of music covered here at NCS, there remains a plethora of noteworthy releases yet to be shared in this space. Chalk it up to how much damn good stuff deserves the limelight and doesn’t get it because we all know this site already covers more than most as is.

As I’ve done in the past, join me for another multi-part feature that touches on music I strongly believe you should listen to—or at the very least, stuff worth checking out at a minimum. You be the judge. Onwards! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COLLAPSED MAINFRAME — “AGENDA 2030”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 302023
 

(Christopher Luedtke introduces our premiere of a track from a new concept album by Texas-based Collapsed Mainframe in advance of its release next month by Roman Numeral Records.)

Conceived in 2021, Collapsed Mainframe began with the mindset of pushing the boundaries of chaos and dissonance. Utilizing grind, death metal, and doom, the band forged its sound while steeping itself in a message of anti-government and concerns of technology, the topics of which paint the upcoming release Theatre of Tyranny.

The single we present today, “Agenda 2030”, begins with a thundering drum beat followed by a melodic, distorted guitar section; it goes on for a second before kicking up the speed and the harsh vocals hit. Collapsed Mainframe kick into a grindy section that’s jagged and tense. It persists in its aggression, then breaks up into a sludgy/noise-rock section. Things break up as the track goes on and dissolves. Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE: NIGHT HAG AND BURIAL — “UTTERANCES FROM BELOW”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 302023
 

All trve true metalheads have only one favorite holiday, and it’s not Valentine’s Day. It’s the one bearing down on us tomorrow night. Most of us already have our own personally curated playlists of heavy music for Halloween night, but we’ve got something for you today that should lead to a revision of your list.

What we’ve got is the full streaming premiere of Utterances From Below, a new album-length split by Virginia’s Night Hag and Italy’s Burial, which will be released on November 10th by Rotted Life Records. As the label proudly previews, it is indeed “a union of death, doom, and disgust”, one that “bridges the fertile gap between quotidian horrors and supernatural dread”. Continue reading »

DISTASTE: “DER ERTRAEGER UND DAS FLEISCH”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 302023
 

(In this review DGR revisits an old favorite, the German band Distaste and their new album, released a few weeks ago by FDA Records.)

We’ve had a long history with Austria’s Distaste, as we’ve watched them evolve their form of blast-happy grindcore, relentlessly focused on short songs and straightforward hammering, to a blackened death-inspired group with a light sludge flavoring, to the current incarnation of the band obsessed with fury, hellfire, and portmanteaus of their chosen language.

Previously, Distaste had done pretty well for themselves with albums like Of Abyss-Hearts And Falsity and Black Age Of Nihil but they really started to come into their own along about the time of the Rotten Cold/Distaste split and the Todt EP. Adopting a strong guitar-lead segment did the group well, adding another element to the otherwise whirlwind chaos and well-spoken language of grindcore circle-pit throwdowns, and Deibel was a strong culmination of that. Continue reading »

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