Islander

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PANZERCHRIST — “LAST OF A KIND”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Jul 272023
 

Some of you reading this already know the 30-year history of the Danish band Panzerchrist without being told, because you lived through it. Others may have heard the name but were still children when the band released their last album, 7th Offensive, a decade ago — and yes, a decade of silence has passed since their last release.

The full history is an extensive one, not merely because the band’s origins go back to 1993 and included seven albums before the silence fell, but also because the band’s members have changed significantly over that 30-year life, and the full list of participants is both very long and also star-studded.

It’s tempting to delve deeper into that history to set the stage for the evidence of the band’s resurrection — a new album named Last Of A Kind that will be released tomorrow by Emanzipation Productions — but despite the ground-breaking nature of the band’s earliest albums, most hardcore metalheads know that an enthusiastic reception for a new record must be earned, even by bands who have already made their place in the history books.

So, in the case of Last Of A Kind, have Panzerchrist earned it? Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: ASPHODELUS

 Interviews  1 Response »
Jul 272023
 

(Next month Hammerheart Records will release a new album by the Finnish death-doom metal band Asphodelus, and that impending event led Comrade Aleks to contact the band for the interview that we now present.)

It’s an interesting coincidence – the last interview I completed was the interview with Temple of Dread, whose new album Beyond the Acheron (which will be out on August 11th via Testimony Records) touches themes of Ancient Greek mythology. And the new album of Asphodelus, Sculpting from Time (out on August 25th through Hammerheart Records) deals with similar topics as well. But this is the only similarity between the bands, as Temple of Dread performs their own original death metal and Asphodelus are into very obscure death-doom with gothic flavours and the taste of the early ’90s.

So Asphodelus was born from Cemetery Fog, founded in 2012 in Finnish Hamina. Sculpting from Time is Asphodelus’ second full-length work, and naturally it’s the most mature material they have ever released. The main feature of these songs is a true sense of old school death-doom with an authentic vibe of “cloudy” Tiamat and a mix of a straight-in-your-face approach with atmospheric melodies.

Sculpting from Time sounds like a tape lost in 1993 and found nowadays, mastered, mixed anew, and served a bit raw. Here you’ll find out more about the band and their forthcoming release.

(Thanks to Marianne Aarts, Hammerheart Records, for organizing the interview.) Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ATONEMENT — “SADISTIC INVADERS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 262023
 

If we were health-and-safety regulators we’d require people to don flame-retardant suits and headgear fed by big oxygen tanks before listening to the album we’re about to premiere in full (it would also be a good idea to dig up whatever spells you can come by that are designed to ward off demons). But we’re not regulators of any kind, so just forget about self-protection and get ready to be torched by one of the most explosive and exhilarating albums you’re likely to hear all year.

The band is a Swedish trio from Stockholm named Atonement, and the album Sadistic Invaders is their full-length debut, which will be released in just a couple of days by Dying Victims Productions. When you hear it you wouldn’t guess that these three barbarians aren’t yet in their 20s, age-wise, and thus it’s even more mind-boggling to consider what they might do next to follow up a truly mind-boggling debut album.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s focus instead on what we have in front of us right now. The PR materials portray the band as “dead-ringers for juiced-up and jackhammering deathrash of a most mid-‘80s vintage,” which is true, but we’d venture to sum it up in a different way — as maniacal demon-thrash that blows open the gates of Hell. Continue reading »

GODTHRYMM : “DISTORTIONS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jul 262023
 

(We present Wil Cifer‘s review of Godthrymm‘s new album, which is set for release on August 18th by Profound Lore Records.)

Doom does not feel like summer music to me. The heat normally makes me want to listen to death metal. I am on the other side of the bridge from Tampa, the birthplace of classic death metal, so it’s not until the storms roll in over the bay that I am in the mood for the kind of doom this gloomy British band churns out.

Despite having ex-members of My Dying Bride and Anathema in the band they are not weighed down by trying to capture the Peaceville sound. They further separate themselves from a great deal of modern doom by chugging forward with melodic purpose rather than getting lost in the meandering around a droning sprawl of sound.

Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TELOCH VOVIN AND VISERION — “THE IRON AGE OF KALI YUGA”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 252023
 

On Friday of this week, the 28th of July, two New York based black metal bands whose music we’ve covered here before — Teloch Vovin and Viserion — will release a new split entitled The Iron Age of Kali Yuga, available on CD and digital formats from both bands and featuring artwork by Elena Vasilaki. On Friday night they’ll also participate in a listening party for the songs at Duff’s Brooklyn.

A pair of songs from the split, one from each band, have already surfaced, but what we bring you today is a full stream of the entire split — essentially one new EP from each group. They will serve as a fine introduction to these bands for people who haven’t encountered their music before, and for existing fans it provides a portrait of where their music has arrived in the current day (though it will undoubtedly continue to evolve).

As usual, we’ll share our own thoughts about the split as a preview of the listening experience, along with some insights from the bands themselves, and we’ll take them in alphabetical order. Continue reading »

BIZARRE PLAYLISTS TO PISS OFF YOUR NEIGHBORS – SUMMERTIME EDITION

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jul 252023
 

-Good morning, my neighbors!
-FUCK YOU!!!

(In March of this year Axel Stormbreaker brought us a two-part “Bizarre Playlist to Piss Off Your Neighbors“. as a way of welcoming Spring. Being seasonably adjusted, he now returns with a Summertime Edition.)

Oh my, oh my. Thank you very much. It’s true these past few months haven’t been good (life’s shit, currently), hence why you haven’t seen any proper reviewing work on my behalf. Not that I’m looking for pointless sympathy from strangers, it’s just that several bands have asked me to review their work. And I should have done something weeks ago, at a time I wouldn’t feel like I could put together a concrete sentence, even if that’d save my own life. And then guilt came along, spreading its bleak, bat-shaped wings all over my entire subconscious.

Or maybe I should just blame my enjoyment for promoting music, even if it’s just a dumb, occasional hobby. I even started this blog in a hopeless attempt to lift my spirits; mostly for publishing conceptual work that bears no relation to NCS, such as fictional tales, ’90s TV show reviews, Japanese jazz, and other bizarre concepts. Sadly, so far I only uploaded one fictional tale I wrote right after the initial outbreak of COVID’s pandemic, but I guess I’ll work on it further, sometime.

So. enough with my senseless mumbling. You’d better enjoy the following muzick, or else. I’ll only recommend six, six, six releases for now, ‘cos I’m a horrible person and words don’t seem to flow anyway.

Here we go. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COLONY DROP — “THE CLOCKWORK GRIP”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 242023
 

On their debut album Brace for Impact, the Seattle band Colony Drop have found a particular kind of sweet spot, which accounts for the glowing reactions that have already started pouring out from both so-called “music critics” like us and listeners looking for a hell of a good time.  They’ve whipped up a stylistic amalgam that’s wild in its diversity but doesn’t sound either artificially bolted together or chaotic, and they’ve chosen lyrical themes that could be summed up as… the revenge of the nerds.

That last point isn’t intended as a criticism, by the way, because even though most of the above-ground world thinks of metal as a hellish house of malignant horrors, you’d be hard-pressed to find a nerdier group of fans of any kind of music (including, to be clear, the perpetrators of this site).

As one example of the sweet spot Colony Drop have made for themselves, today we’re premiering the album’s fifth track out of 11, a song called “The Clockwork Grip” that’ll knock your teeth out and light a fire under your imagination. We’ll provide our own introduction to it, but let’s start with comments by CDrop lyricist/vocalist Joseph Schafer (an old friend of this site and the long-timers who toil here): Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OF DARKNESS — “DIES IRAE”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Jul 242023
 

Of Darkness is an unusual band in many respects. Its three members also play in such significantly better-known Spanish groups as Graveyard, Teitanblood, and Balmog, yet the earliest recordings from Of Darkness are at least as old as all of those. A glance at the Of Darkness discography suggests that although their recorded output has been scattered and unpredictable, something about it continues to exert a hold on their imaginations. Like an ember that grows so cold it might seem to have been extinguished, some new oxygen unexpectedly causes it to burn again.

But that’s just a start to what’s unusual. In addition, we’re told that the band never rehearse, and rather just improvise in the studio while recording. They composed, recorded, arranged, and mixed their new album Missa Tridentia in three days, which may make you wonder why eight years have elapsed since their last album, which in turn followed their first demos by a decade or more.

And then there’s the album credits, which recount that all three members contributed “orchestral arrangements”.

We might mention that their last album was also their first one — and that it was a tribute to the modern classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki, the author of such works as “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” and an opera named The Devils of Loudun, as well as many sacred works — though the members of Of Darkness are themselves said to hold “extreme nihilistic beliefs”.

And to these facts we’ll add one more significant observation: Although it’s not out of place to consider their new album under the headings of “funeral doom” and “orchestral metal”, it’s far from a conventional example of either genre. Continue reading »

MENTAL CRUELTY: “ZWEILICHT”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 242023
 

(In the following review DGR takes a very deep dive into the new album by the German band Mental Cruelty, which was released near the end of June by Century Media Records.)

The deathcore genre is one that has absorbed so much over the years in the nuclear arms race for ‘heavy’ that we’ve gone beyond being able to track down any particular list of influences or context being provided. We’re layers upon layers deep at this point, and much as it was opined in our writeup for Worm Shepherd‘s latest, it seems like the genre has folded in on itself enough times that at this point it’s just short of a few tempering baths and a sharpening stone that it could be morphed into a sharp blade.

Lately, groups have made use of these insanely multi-talented vocalists, adding their own multitude of vocals on top of it, so that the attack comes from multiple directions, embraced backing symphonics, and cranked the tempo up to near-lightspeed at all times. It has become a genre of ‘a lot’, and a lot is thrown at you any time you’re listening to such a group. Many, it seems, have warmed to the idea of getting by on sheer bombast alone. However, some impressive groups within that sphere have managed to make use of the ever-increasing multitude of weapons offered to them, and Germany’s Mental Cruelty are one such group.

Germany is already pretty skilled at making brutal death and slam music, so it wasn’t too shocking that Mental Cruelty‘s earlier works were born out of and were fully within that vein, but the group made a massive leap in that symphonics-backed brutal-death direction on their 2021 album A Hill To Die Upon. Of course, not long after the group would lose a vocalist as sexual assault allegations came to light post-signing to Century Media, because that seemingly inevitable sword that hovers above all -core group’s heads came collecting. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: NIDARE, COLLIER D’OMBRE, GRIFT, ATGEIR, VOIDMÏLKER

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jul 232023
 


Nidare

Why would any sane person wake up at 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, which is what I did today? Was it too hot to sleep in our un-air-conditioned bedroom? Not at all — it was a delicious 55°F (12.7°C) outside (eat your hearts out all you hell-dwellers in the rest of the sun-broiled world). It may have been that I limited my Saturday-night intoxicants to one ice-cold martini. Possibly I was subconsciously anxious because I had made no start on the writing of this column yesterday.

I don’t recommend this kind of behavior. I see no evidence that the early bird gets the worm. Instead, it turns the brain wormy… or at least very foggy. I went in search of music to function as a pesticide (the more forever chemicals, the better) and a bitter wind to blow away the fog. Here’s what I found:

NIDARE (Germany)

Late last year we premiered a song from Von Wegen, the then-forthcoming debut album by this German post-black metal band, and it pulled me headlong all the way into that album. It’s a very good thing, then, that we haven’t had to wait long for a follow-up, which hit the streets on July 12th in the form of a stunning EP named Naehe und Flackern (via Through Love Records). Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries