Islander

AN NCS PREMIERE: CURSED TO OCCULT — “CULTLEADER”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 082023
 

Cursed To Occult is a German one-man band, the solo recording work of one Micha Eibisch, though it expands to a full band for live performances. Because it is a one-man project, the music is very much a reflection of its creator’s personal experiences, and those experiences are distressing — as you might guess from both the name of Cursed To Occult‘s debut album Mind Wreck, and the title of its forthcoming second album, Diary Of A Broken Man.

What we have for you today is the unnerving and exhilarating first video and single from that new album, in advance of its release by the Crawling Chaos label on September 1st. Entitled “Cultleader“, it’s a viscerally compelling amalgam of crust punk, black metal, sludge, and hardcore, all roped together to lash and pummel the senses with shattering intensity.

But before we get to that song and video, it’s worth sharing what Micha Eibisc has stated about where the music on the new album comes from: Continue reading »

TIDELESS: “EYE OF WATER”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 082023
 

(On September 15th Chaos Records will release the second album by the California band Tideless, and today we’ve got Wil Cifer‘s impressions of the music to share with you.)

2023 has so far become an impressive year for death metal .Many bands continue to sharpen the blade forged in Tampa, others make conscious attempts to wander their own path. California band Tideless set themselves further apart from the status quo with their sophomore release Eye of Water.

The aggression is dialed back as they lean in a post-rock direction with a cinematic sonic scope. At just under seven minutes the opening track is the shortest song on this album, as the songs seem to require extended track lengths to lay the groundwork for the breadth of the dynamics they are building toward. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GRAVERIPPER — “RESIST AGAINST THE LIGHT”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Aug 072023
 

At the end of every year for the last 13 years our site has rolled out a list of each year’s “Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs“. Barring some unforeseen calamity we will do it again at the end of 2023. We don’t start seriously thinking about which songs should make the list until the waning days of each year, but sometimes some of the choices become immediately obvious, and this is one of those times. There absolutely WILL be a song from GraveRipper on the 2023 edition of the list. The only thing up in the air is, which song?

The choice won’t be easy, because GraveRipper‘s forthcoming debut album Seasons Dreaming Death (set for release later this month by Wise Blood Records) is packed to the brim with highly infectious black-thrashing romps, the kind of exultant escapades that are loaded with hooks, bury them deep in a listener’s brain, and get hearts pounding and heads banging.

No, it won’t be an easy choice, but the song from the album we’re premiering today — “Resist Against the Light” — will certainly be a leading contender. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GOLGATA — “UR ELD OCH ASKA”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 072023
 

In mid-June of last year we had the opportunity to premiere a video for a song from Ur eld och aska (“out of fire and ashes”), the then-forthcoming third album by the Swedish melodic black metal band Golgata, which was subsequently co-released by Satanath Records and Ketzer Records.

As we wrote then, the album (as suggested by its title) “is a journey through fire and ash but it’s also a journey through time, inspired by the history and natural surroundings of the dark, forested region that gave birth to this duo. It has the capacity to scathe the senses in raw and unbridled fashion, but it’s equally powerful in its capacity to mesmerize and to transport listeners away from modernity and into a much older age, creating grim and haunting visions of yearning and sorrow.”

We now have an opportunity to revisit the album, and to introduce it to people who might have overlooked it, through our premiere of a lyric video for its title track. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: BLACK BIRCH, BLOOD ABSCISSION

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Aug 062023
 

I don’t feel great, thanks for asking. Within an hour after finishing yesterday’s roundup it became evident that I was coming down with a cold. (My spouse brought it home with her last week, so I don’t blame yesterday’s bands.) By dinnertime last night I felt like fresh shit, and didn’t sleep worth a shit either. I don’t think it’s much worse this morning but it’s not any better either. One of the few things that makes me look backward with fondness on covid is that I went two years without a cold. Staying away from human germ-carriers was a big silver lining.

I was tempted to just blow off this usual Sunday column and instead wallow in misery. Didn’t seem quite fair to share my thoroughly clogged and befogged headspace with innocent bands, or to interrupt their performances with ugly hacking and explosive blasts of sneezing, even though I was able to re-listen to the parts that were interrupted with rail-gun blasts of snot.

Well, but the world is not a fair place. It brings colds and music writers who don’t know when to shut up, and I thought forging ahead with this column might temporarily take my mind off my miseries. So it did.

BLACK BIRCH (Sweden)

Black Birch describe themselves as an “Atmospheric Black Metal duo from Southern Sweden” (the two of them are Gina Wiklund and Ulf Blomberg), with an ethos that is “Antifascist & vegan”. I see on their Bandcamp page that they’ve been releasing a sequence of seven singles since January of this year, and on September 1st they’re going to release a self-titled EP on vinyl and digital formats that includes two of those previous singles and two new songs. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: WARCRAB, KRONREST, JUST BEFORE DAWN, CVINGER, AFTERBIRTH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Aug 052023
 

Hey there, how’s your weekend shaping up? Is it shaping up like this, or like this? Either way, after you make your way through what I’ve picked for this Saturday’s roundup it may be re-shaped into something like this.

I decided to arrange the following new songs and videos in reverse alphabetical order by band name, mainly so I’d be able to start with…

WARCRAB (UK)

When I think of WarCrab‘s music I think of the kind of whumping sound that would be produced by a giant battering ram pounding against concrete pylons and ejecting the rebar out the other side. I also sometimes think of Bolt Thrower and Crowbar, and not just because Transcending Obscurity Records refers to those bands in the context of describing WarCrab‘s forthcoming album The Howling Silence.

But in the case of the first two singles from the new album, those aren’t the first impressions that come to mind. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A BANDCAMP FRIDAY: CHOROSIA, NOTTURNO, BODY VOID

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Aug 042023
 

Bandcamp Friday’s are ideal days for roundups such as this one, because people can immediately act on what they like in a way that yields more money to labels and bands from that platform.

Unfortunately, the random chaos of the cosmos often seems to conspire against me on these days (forget about the fact that conspiracies aren’t random), and it has happened again today, thanks to a huge distraction from my fucking day job.

I’ve managed to pick a few — a very few — recommendations in the small slice of time available to me. I’ll have more tomorrow, perhaps enticing enough to go on your wish list for the next time Bandcamp lets more money slip through their sticky fingers.

CHOROSIA (Austria)

I’m leading off with a just-released video for a song by Chorosia from their new 35-minute EP, and I’ve made that choice for two reasons: First, it lets me put Orion Landau‘s stunning artwork for the EP at the top of our page. Second, the song is an out-of-the-ordinary blend of sludge, doom, and progressive metal that proves to be thoroughly captivating. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: THE BLACK HARVEST

 Interviews  No Responses »
Aug 042023
 

(On this Bandcamp Friday we lead off with a new interview by Comrade Aleks of David Briones, founder of the Chilean death/doom band The Black Harvest, whose newest album (an excellent one) was just released this past March by Australis Records.)

David Briones started his career in Chilean underground with the death metal band Son in Curse. He has performed vocals and guitars there since 2002. He does the same in the death/crust band Rotten Hate and – what’s more important – he runs the death-doom band The Black Harvest.

Technically started in 2004, the band was almost inactive until 2014 when the first demos managed to appear. The band signed a deal with local label Australis Records, and as result the label released two albums – the self-titled debut (2017) and the fresh sophomore work Mortuary Dogma (2023). The new material absorbed all the best from the UK Three legacy, and Paradise Lost’s fans will dig “The Succubi Delight”, a track which represents the band as an official video.

Let’s support this killer band and pay some attention to David’s story of The Black Harvest and things related to the Chilean underground. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SAMHAIN — “THE COURIER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Aug 032023
 

Our subject today is The Courier, Emanzipation Production‘s forthcoming deluxe vinyl reissue of demo tapes first released by the Danish band Samhain in the mid-’80s, now remastered by Tue Madsen. The advertising for this special album-length release (and the extensive liner notes accompanying it) refer to is as “a piece of metal history“. It further includes these quotes:

“Samhain helped us kickstart our career because they believed in metal! Forever thankful and I‘m happy to see their music being re-released. Hail Samhain!” Mille Petrozza, Kreator

“This is the kind of riffs bands like Obituary have made a career out of touring with for 30 years. Samhain played those riffs way earlier. And Obituary fucking rules!” Tue Madsen, producer, Antfarm Studio

“Way better musicianship and production than on the first Hellhammer demos. You guys were already way ahead of them. This shit is heavy as shit. In a primitive, good way!” Monte Conner, metal industry legend

All of this is entirely appropriate, but let’s be real: There are vast numbers of metal fans out there, old as well as young, who will greet this kind of prose with a shrug. There’s a musty smell to history, and a question about why people who aren’t history buffs, collectors, or folks trying to re-live a vital time in their own past, should pay attention to music created by teenagers 40 years ago, given that we’re already drowning on a daily basis in non-stop typhoons of music that’s brand new.

For people like that, we say: Forget about everything you’ve just read above. Pretend that Samhain is a brand new band who is just now releasing The Courier for the first time, and listen to what they’ve done. It will make you forget about history right damned fast. Continue reading »

HARBOURED: “HARBOURED”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 032023
 

(DGR fervently hopes that ‘better late than never’ holds true here, because the Harboured album he’s now reviewing below has been out in the world since mid-March via the Lost Future label.)

Though we’ve tried to prevent it from happening, it seems that as the years have gone on we’ve grown accustomed to pulling back the veil on the well-intentioned chaos that runs this site. Bare with us then, as we’re about to do it again in regard to the March release of Colorado’s Harboured.

You’ll recall that Labor Day weekend was host to Northwest Terror Fest up in Seattle, and we’ve intertwined ourselves with it more and more each year. As a result, the site tends to go quiet as three of us get wrapped up in working on and attending said show, especially since travelling with a laptop is a veritable pain in the ass and as a result yours truly does not fly with one anymore. Which means that I’m restricted to my phone for writing, which for lack of better terms ‘is not happening’.

Like previous years I tried to build up a massive review document I could chip away at and then backload into the site before leaving, so that there would always be ‘something’, even for days when we were all away from the internet as a whole. 2023 provided the fantastic opportunity of having a tiny release-window lull then, which allowed for a massive amount of musical catch up, and those of you who saw the site around that time likely saw the results of twelve or thirteen different writeups – some of which were still rolling out by the time yours truly had returned home.

Colorado’s Harboured were part of that initial review document, and up until the literal moment that I walked out the door to drive to the airport, were ones that I was wracking my brain around getting something said. I had listened to their self-titled release so much that it felt wrong not to get it out there for other people to experience before I left — but that didn’t happen.

Now months later, ham-handed as it may seem, we’re going to try to rectify that wrong. Continue reading »

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