Islander

WARFORGED: “THE GROVE | SUNDIAL”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 032022
 

(This is another typically extensive review from DGR, and this time the subject of his attention is a new album by Warforged, which is out now on The Artisan Era.)

The launch of Chicago-based Warforged‘s first EP Essence Of The Land was promising. In the weird melange that is the progressive tech/death/prog/seventeen-other-subgenres world that Warforged exists in, that 2014 release felt like it was a few steps ahead of the game: a forecast of where many participants in that particular subsection of the prefix-core genre would be aiming in the future.

In the long run they were correct, because the following five or six years saw a huge explosion in ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ style writing where bands were willing to try anything in order to break out of the endless breakdowns and guitar noodling mold. Warforged just happened to beat everyone to the punch by a few years.

They were so on the forefront of that movement that other than the “Two Demons” single in 2015 it would be almost five years between the EP and the group’s first full-length – the incredibly indulgent hour and twelve minute monster that was 2019’s I: Voice, wherein not a single song would come in under the six-minute mark and about a third of them leapt well over the nine-minute hurdle. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): ARALLU, MORD’A’STIGMATA, LIGHTLORN, HEIDEN, VIKVANIR, SECOND TO SUN, UNFYROS

 Exceptions to the Rule, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Oct 032022
 


Arallu

As I forecast in Part 1 of this column yesterday, Part 2 takes us off in some unusual directions. Much of the time black metal is still in the mix, but in most of the songs featured here it’s more of a jumping-off point to other wide-ranging experiences than it is the rigid core of the music — or it’s not present at all, except perhaps as a sinister spirit that hovers on the edges.

This excursion will be welcomed by some of you, and some of the songs will probably disgruntle others. But there’s only one way to find out, and that’s to expose yourself to the music. I hope you’ll do that with all the tracks here, all of which are from forthcoming albums or EPs.

ARALLU (Israel)

This long-running Israeli band, whose roots are in the late ’90s, will be releasing a new album (their 8th one overall) in November. With the imposing title of Death Covenant, it follows up the excellent En Olam from three years ago. I’ve already written here about one of the new album’s advance tracks, “Desert Shadows Will Rise“, and now we have another one. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): NOCTEM, LUCIFERICON, NOCTURNIS, SIRRUSH, PYRA, SHEOL BLANC

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Oct 022022
 


Noctem

I failed to get one of these columns done last Sunday, so I decided to go big today. I was able to spend hours yesterday listening, making choices, and beginning to write. From the windows, it looked like a beautiful day outside my home, but that’s as close as I got to it.

I made 13 choices, and 6 of them are in Part 1. Thirteen selections of music seems like too much to lay on anyone in a single day, particularly a weekend day, so I’m saving Part 2 for tomorrow. But I’ll give you a quick explanation about how I divided the choices:

Until you get to the last song, Part 1 is basically an inferno; the music in Part 2 goes off in a number of unusual directions that probably won’t please the trve and kvlt among you, but may intrigue others. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: IMHA TARIKAT, KAMPFAR, MULCIBER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 012022
 


Imha Tarikat

Last night the Seattle Mariners beat the Texas Rangers with a walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth inning, clinching a place in the Major League Baseball playoffs and ending what most of us long-suffering Mariners fans simply referred to as The Drought, i.e., the longest span of years (21 of them) that any team in any U.S. professional sport has had to endure in between playoff appearances.

Along with a few million other Mariners fans in this part of the country, I celebrated the historic event. I might have par-tayed a bit too much. That’s a conclusion one might draw from the fact that I slept for 11 hours, as if in a coma. Well, I had a rough week at my fucking day job too, which produced steam that needed to be blown off last night. But even after dragging my ass out of bed late in the morning I still spent a lot of time continuing to wallow in the glory of that Mariners win, taking in videos, photos, and lots of articles.

But the NCS Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (a specific syndrome now recognized by the American Psychiatric Association) is still a thing, and so I couldn’t bear to leave a complete blank spot on the site this Saturday. Had to daub that spot with at least a few splatters of musical paint. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: IMPUGNER — “OSTRACIZED VITALITY

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Sep 302022
 

Last December an obscure death metal band from Oslo named Impugner independently released their debut demo Advent of the Wretched in a tiny run of tapes. But Impugner won’t remain unnoticed, because that tape found its way to Sentient Ruin Laboratories and Caligari Records, who pounced on it. They will jointly be reissuing it on November 4th, and with respected labels like that giving Advent of the Wretched a big push, Impugner are about to find a much bigger audience.

It’s no wonder these labels were seduced. Impugner have invested themselves in an early phase of death metal’s evolution, when bands like Autopsy, Death, Pungent Stench, Nihilist, and Darkthrone (circa Soulside Journey) were shaking up the underground, but while that kind of old-school devotion is at the core of what Impugner have achieved on Advent of the Wretched, there’s more going on here than slavish worship of early heroes — as you’ll discover from our premiere of the song “Ostracized Vitality” today. Continue reading »

VEILBURNER: A REVIEW OF “VLBRNR” AND THE PREMIERE OF “REPULSED BY THE LIGHT”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Sep 302022
 

(Today we premiere a song off the new album by Veilburner, which is set for release on December 2nd by Transcending Obscurity Records, and to accompany it we present a fascinating in-depth review by Rob Tamplin.)

At this moment in time it’s difficult to think of a more on-the-nose band name. If Pennsylvania’s Mephisto Deleterio and Chrisom Infernium intended to toy with controversy when they conceived Veilburner, they could never have predicted world events taking place on the eve of the release of their sixth album. Born into a world where burqas are banned in 16 states, while protesters in Iran have been arrested and killed for burning their hijabs, both sides, fighting for the choice to either wear or not wear an item of clothing.

On this almost-eponymously-titled mission statement, Veilburner tell us none of us has any choice at all.

Across the album’s runtime, Infernium fires off a volley of hexes, ipse dixits, questions, and demands, all pointing to the inconvenient truth that humans’ warlike nature (“lathe a shiv from broken rib”) has consigned us all to a grisly end.

The band restrict the album’s lyrical matter to the realm of Old Testament apocrypha. I’m sure there’s a lot more going on with the lyrics than I can identify – Google searches of ‘the womb of Gehenna [and] the valleys of Sheol’ reveal these to be abodes of the dead in Jewish and Christian eschatology, i.e., ‘the doctrine of last things’! Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): AMAUROT — “…TO TREAD THE ANCIENT WATERS”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 292022
 

In the broad domain of Doom its musical denizens often dwell in subterranean caverns, moldering crypts, or dingy weed-steeped squats. But others, like Amaurot, make their home in ancient gothic halls, elaborately embellished and richly furnished, even if still swathed in darkness and with catacombs beneath that lead to perilous caves where beasts growl their laments.

To lead you on a grand tour of their haunted dwelling, this Sweden and Germany-based group have recorded a debut album named …To Tread the Ancient Waters, which will be released tomorrow by Obelisk Polaris Productions. They welcome you to their bleak but fascinating abode with these words: Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DAIUS — “JĂLIRE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 292022
 

Many members of the Romanian band Daius will be best known to listeners as current or former members of the widely beloved Clouds (and a dozen other groups), but the music of Daius takes them in other directions, which could be crudely summed up as a fashioning of atmospheric/pagan black metal. Those directions were first revealed in the debut album of Daius, named Ascuns, which was released in February of last year. Consisting of five substantial tracks, three of which were 10 minutes or longer in length, it deserved much more attention than it received.

Hopefully, the word about Daius will spread further, and their new single that we’re premiering today through a lyric video should help do that, especially because it foreshadows the creation of another Daius album in the coming months. The name of this song is “Jălire“, and the band describe its conception in these words: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MORBIFIC — “SUICIDE SANCTUM”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 292022
 

Contemplate the artwork of Chase Slaker that introduces people to the second album by Morbific. Take in the wretched, lifeless vision of skeletons strewn about and piled high in chilling monoliths. Consider also the album’s name — Squirm Beyond the Mortal Realm — and song titles such as “Meal From An Open Skull”, “Initiation Into Oblivion”, “Malignant Germination”, or the track we’re premiering today, “Suicide Sanctum“.

All of that foretells death (metal) and the presence of the supernatural.

These signposts are also very accurate. Morbific‘s brand of death metal is undeniably raw and foul, well-calculated to channel sensations of disease, putrefaction, and madness while giving your bones a brutal beating — and creating an atmosphere of supernatural horror while they do all that.

That would be enough for most fans of rotten-to-the-core death metal, but it turns out that Morbific are ridiculously good at making their creations head-moving and “catchy” as well as hideous. Continue reading »

WOLFHEART: “KING OF THE NORTH”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 292022
 

(We present DGR‘s extensive review of the latest album by Finland’s Wolfheart, out now on Napalm Records.)

Right before Tuomas Saukkonen launched Wolfheart way back in 2013 as his only musical endeavor he had his musical tendrils spread pretty wide across a collective of projects. Over time he had become quite prolific, and each of those projects started to blur together save for one defining trait of each that was often the one identifiable thing that still made it that separate project.

Wolfheart‘s launch felt like an acknowledgement of that, coming soon after the release of the then-final Before The Dawn album Rise Of The Phoenix – and what a wild world that’s become with the recent release of the song “Downhearted” on that end – which in a lot of ways felt like a proto-blueprint for what Wolfheart would eventually become.

Even though Wolfheart began under auspices of being bitter cold and doomier flavored melodeath – which has been the core of many of Tuomas‘ projects – it didn’t take long before the high-energy blastbeat drumming and energetic aggression of the band became its trademarks; Wolfheart morphed into a band that was more often than not bathed in fire. The group’s final release with Spinefarm Records, Tyhjyys in 2017, contained two songs named “World On Fire” and “Call Of The Winter” for instance, if you’re hunting for the sort of dynamic that has come to define this group. Continue reading »

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