Islander

AN NCS INTERVIEW: BRETWALDAS OF HEATHEN DOOM

 Interviews  No Responses »
Jul 032023
 

(Metal-Archives’ stitching together of “heavy metal, doom, black metal, and crust” is a pretty good signifier that the music of the British band Bretwaldas of Heathen Doom isn’t easy to pigeon-hole (and those multiple labels still don’t go far enough), but it’s a hell of a lot of heavy, sinister, head-bobbing fun. With their new album fairly fresh out, Comrade Aleks decided to reach out, and landed a very engaging discussion with band bassist/vocalist Wartooth.)

The duet of Dagfari Wartooth (bass, vocals) and Sceot Acwealde (aka Arcwielder) (drums, guitars, vocals) keep on playing their pagan hymns for 22 years now. Started in 2001, Bretwaldas of Heathen Doom performs an angry and vivid mix of doom, heavy and crusty pagan metal, and their fourth album Summoning the Gatekeepers was released on the 1st of May (Beltane, you know?).

You may still buy  the rest of the CDs small run, ordering it right from the band’s own label Old Man’s Mettle. And here, in this interview with Wartooth, you’ll learn why this album is worthy of your money. And I truly hope you’ll enjoy this authentic album as I did, for the will of the gods is a great power. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: KRIEG, DEATHMOOR, PORTA NIGRA, ZIGOTA

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  5 Responses »
Jul 022023
 

Here we are again, ready to blacken the Sabbath with some new things you might not have heard, the kind of things that would ruin most people’s days but I hope will turn yours into warming bonfires. Well, maybe not warming, more like incinerating, but still welcome I hope. What’s ahead is a new stand-alone single, a couple of tracks from a forthcoming album, and two just-released full-lengths.

KRIEG (U.S.)

Neill Jameson has made a name for himself as a music writer, often wise-cracking, irreverently cynical, and creatively foul-mouthed but with a finely-honed and widely respected taste that makes lots of people pay attention to his recommendations of underground gems. We’ve benefited from that here ourselves, usually through his year-end lists for our site but also at other times when he’s been moved to send something our way.

But before he made a name for himself in those ways, he and his band Krieg made a name for themselves in the annals of U.S. black metal. Krieg‘s musical output, beginning with their debut album in 1998 (recently reissued by The Devil’s Elixirs Records), ran in a hot, year-after-year torrent through 2018, mostly splits and EPs but with 7 more albums also scattered along the way. Then there was a four-year pause before 2022 brought forth a split with Crucifixion Bell, which demonstrated in electrifying fashion that although Time may have aged Krieg‘s members, it definitely hasn’t dulled their knives or moderated their musical savagery.

And now we’ve got a new Krieg single named “Bone Whip,” which is captured on one of those flexi-discs in the new issue of Decibel magazine (the one with Mizmor on the cover, available for purchase here). As disclosed at Decibel’s site, the song was recorded during the sessions for Krieg‘s next album (the name of which is Ruiner), but won’t be included on that album. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: INCANTATION, KATAKLYSM, OSSUARY, CRUCIBLE OF HATE, GHOST HOLLOW

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jul 012023
 


Incantation

When I started this blog 13 years, 7 months, and 10 days ago (but who’s counting?) I had very few ambitions. One of them was to continue posting about metal straight through the weekends for as long as this NCS lark might last, no days off.

Back in those days of the internet’s infancy, blogs devoted to metal were few in number (none of them were fancy enough to call themselves “web sites”), and I thought being the only such place with something new on the weekends would attract a few more visitors. But my main motivation was to tangibly demonstrate that NCS wasn’t a business, and writing for NCS wasn’t a job, and never would it be. Because if it were a job you’d get the weekends off, right?

13 years, 7 months, and 10 days later, I’m still not pausing NCS on the weekends. In all that time we’ve had some weekend days where nothing new went up, but not many. Maybe a dozen days, certainly not more than two dozen. Illness, injury, and apocalyptic hangovers have taken their tolls, but not nearly as often as you might think. However, weekends like this one pose a special challenge. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEAD AND DRIPPING — “MOLECULAR DEGRADATION UPON WARPED ONYX STOVES”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Jun 302023
 

Since 2016 the one-person New Jersey band Dead and Dripping has lurked in a far subterranean corner of the sonic torture chamber known as “brutal death metal”. Over the course of a pair of demos and a pair of albums, its music has proven to be far more bamboozling than the typical pile-driving thuggery and bullet-spitting mayhem for which the genre is best known. The music has been unusually intricate and technically impressive, though it would be wrong to try to slot it into the “technical death metal” framework, and it has trended in increasingly macabre directions.

All of those qualities stand out in Dead and Dripping‘s new album Blackened Cerebral Rifts, and indeed this new one is even more surreal and schizophrenic than what has come before, even more technically complex, and yet somehow also ruthlessly bludgeoning and gruesome. For those reasons (and others), the vividly colorful and strikingly bizarre cover art by Jason Wayne Barnett is an excellent companion for the music. Not for naught does Transcending Obscurity Records recommend it for fans of Wormed, Demilich, and Defeated Sanity, as well as Suffocation, Mortal Decay, and Wicked Innocence.

Three songs from the album have already premiered, and if you’ve heard those you have a very good idea of what you’ll be getting yourselves into when Transcending Obscurity releases the album on August 11th. But especially if you haven’t heard any of those, and even if you have, the song we’re premiering today is well worth your time. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SQUELCH CHAMBER — “THE STEEPLE IS FALLING”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 302023
 

 

On July 12th the Czech label Owlripper Recordings will release Eater of Self, a new album by Pennsylvania-based Squelch Chamber. In describing it, the label invites you to consider the idea of a sonic blender:

For the forthcoming album, mangle together in a blender reminiscences of the untamed ferocity of Primitive Man, The Body, Ken Mode, Therapy? on their first 2 EPs, Abandon (Sweden), Skinny Puppy, then add dashes of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, Full Of Hell and Fear Of God all on 16rpm, but with added liquids, doom and noise. That’s the Squelch Chamber cocktail as I hear it, so I hope this gets you suitably intrigued for the monolithic album that is to follow…

Well, that got us intrigued, and the album track we’re premiering today followed intrigue with deep-seated disturbances, made even more disturbing by the video that accompanies it. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GROTESQUERIES — “VILE CREMATORY”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 292023
 

In their current promo photo the members of Grotesqueries look serious, quiet, maybe a bit withdrawn — but that’s what the neighbors always say about the serial killers who lived down the block after the awful truth comes out. Grotesqueries probably didn’t actually kill anyone in the making of their debut album Vile Crematory, but it sure as hell sounds like they did, and in the most horrible ways you can imagine.

As they did on their debut EP Haunted Mausoleum from last year, this Boston-based quintet devote themselves on the new album to a particular kind of death metal, the kind where almost nothing is clean and almost everything is vile. The kind where the guitars are tuned to sound like manifestations of flesh-eating disease, the vocals are possessed by monstrous horrors, the grooves are calculated to inflict bone-smashing trauma, and the moods are malign, maniacal, and miserable.

But as you’ll also discover for yourselves through our premiere of the album today, on the eve of its release by Caligari Records, Grotesqueries are also very adept at getting the blood of listeners racing, as well as causing it to congeal. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: DEATH OF GIANTS

 Interviews  1 Response »
Jun 292023
 


Photo by Viviane Eriksen

(Over more than 10 years (yes, it’s been that long!) Comrade Aleks has brought us a great many excellent interviews, but the one that follows is among the very best. It’s a discussion with Morten Søbyskogen, the man behind Death of Giants, whose remarkable debut album was released this past May.)

There’s a tragedy behind the epic and gorgeous Death of Giants debut album Ventesorg. This project of multi-instrumentalist Morten Søbyskogen, who managed to perform one of most remarkable gothic death-doom albums of 2023, is a tribute to his wife Sandra, who passed away from brain cancer in 2018. Morten‘s grief took the form of six grandiose tracks filled with real pain and sincere regret. Ventesorg absorbed all of this sadness and frustration and transformed it into something new and touching.

The album was recorded with participant guest musicians, and moreover Morten performed a few gigs with the session lineup, so there are signs pointing toward Death of Giants becomes something bigger and more global. We talked with Morten, and this honest and long conversation is here before you now, along with a recently premiered video near the end of the band’s live cover performance of  “Horror” by W.A.S.P. at the Oslo release show for Ventersorg. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MACHINATIONS OF FATE — “A SPLIT SECOND OF DIVINITY”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Jun 282023
 

Kentucky-based Machinations of Fate made their recording debut almost a dozen years ago with their album-length demo Tyrannous Skies. Significant time passed before the band made another release — a self-titled debut album released by Redefining Darkness Records in 2020 that was a re-mixed and re-mastered version of the tracks from the demo that also included re-recorded drum tracks, courtesy of Ash Thomas (Faithxtractor & Shed the Skin). Although the songs weren’t new, they received a very positive reception, which fueled the band’s work on a follow-up album.

That second album, Celestial Prophecies, is now finished and set for release by the same Redefining Darkness Records on July 28th. The label describes it as “first and foremost, fueled by melody, while the rhythms remain aggressive and cutting”, bringing to mind at different times the classic works of Hypocrisy, Dissection, Immortal or Dimmu Borgir, the kind of thing that “will appeal to those metal fans who have been diehards for decades”.

To help pave the way to this eagerly anticipated follow-up album, today we’re bringing you its second single, a song called “A Split Second of Divinity“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: RANNOCH — “THREADS”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Jun 282023
 

Few metal bands have so captivated our attention from their beginning to the present day as the UK prog-death powerhouse Rannoch. They started strong and became even stronger; witnessing the evolution of their ambitions and their skills has been thrilling, and in both respects they reached a high-water mark in the extraordinary achievements of their last album, 2020’s Reflections Upon Darkness.

For precisely those reasons, however, there’s been some frustration among us here that Rannoch still haven’t gotten all the acclaim and attention they deserve. They run rings around bands vastly better-known than they are, but thankfully those injustices don’t seem to have sapped Rannoch’s desire. Instead, they have only driven themselves harder, and their forthcoming third album Conflagrations is abundant proof of that. It is indeed a creative conflagration, and one we hope will propel their name to the scale of attention their talents warrant.

This new album is set for release on July 21st by Willowtip Records, and it’s our privilege now to premiere its second single “Threads“, presented through an attention-riveting video. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: CRYPTIC BROOD

 Interviews  No Responses »
Jun 282023
 

(In the following interview Comrade Aleks caught up with drummer/vocalist Steffen Brandes from the German metal band Cryptic Brood, and covered a lot of the ground that has passed by since their last discussion 3+ years ago, plus taking a look into the Brood‘s future.)

Steffen Brandes performs drums and vocals in the German death metal (with a bit of doom edge) band Cryptic Brood. We did an interview with him in January 2020, and that was fun. And three years later, during January 2023, I found that I somehow skipped Cryptic Brood’s newest release, the Caustic Fetid Vomit EP produced by Lycanthropic Chants in September 2022. That’s just a two-song-long recording, but there’s always something to talk about with the deep underground dwellers.

Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries