Islander

SEEN AND HEARD: AUTOPSY, STRIGOI, NORDJEVEL, DAEVA, HAGETISSE, REJOICE! THE LIGHT HAS COME

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Aug 182022
 

The last 24 hours brought forth a deluge of new songs and videos, from names both prominent and obscure. It completely messed up my plan to use today’s column as a way of continuing to catch up with new stuff that emerged over the last week. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to that, but everything in the following collection is hot off the presses.

AUTOPSY (U.S.)

Prepare for a heaving and stomping death/doom horror of massive proportions that screams, roars, and leaves pain and madness in its wake… and also convulses in outbursts of mindless marauding savagery, all of it accompanied by a suitably chilling video. So deep into their career, Autopsy still know how to make even long-lived metalheads sit up and take notice. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HEGEMONE — “INFERENCE”

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Aug 182022
 

When we had the opportunity to premiere We Disappear, the second album by Poland’s Hegemone (released in 2018), we introduced it this way:

“If you’re looking for titanically heavy music, the kind that will loosen your teeth and vibrate your spinal fluid, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking for music that glimmers and shimmers like the northern lights, you’ve also come to the right place. If you want the sounds of tension and pain, lead-weighted gloom and feverish desperation, mechanized warfare and sunrise grandeur, you’ll find that here as well — plus a steady dose of what makes people compulsively bob their heads…. The music surges and subsides, seems to crack the earth and heat the blood to a feverish boil, and spirits the listener away to heights of of perilous and panoramic wonder.”

We Disappear made our veteran writer Andy Synn‘s list of 2018’s “Great Albums”, and one of the tracks also appeared on our list of the year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. No wonder, then, that we got very excited to learn that Hegemone would be releasing another album this year. The name of the new one is Voyance, and it’s coming our way on September 15th via Brucia Records.

Thankfully, we again get a chance to help introduce Hegemone‘s music, through today’s premiere of a stunning new song named “Inference“. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: HELÉH

 Interviews  1 Response »
Aug 182022
 

(Our friend Comrade Aleks has an undisguised and widely-known devotion to Doom Metal, and when he discovered this Argentinian band doing it absolutely right, he reached out for an interview which we now present to you.)

Honestly, I don’t know a lot about the Argentinian music scene, and when I discovered Heléh’s debut self-titled album, I was intrigued. The trio from Cordoba provides solid traditional doom metal in the absolutely true old-school vein. They sound really grim and almost epic, so I was literally charmed with their low tunes.

It saddens me always when a good band with high potential has poor exposure, and there’s not much information circulating about Heléh. So we’ve done this interview with Gonzalo Civita (vocals) in order to reveal some facts about the band. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLACK LAVA, RIPPED TO SHREDS, THULSA DOOM, STORMRULER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Aug 172022
 

We had another rare day today when there were no premieres on the calendars. Because I write almost all of those, this gave me some extra time to use in compiling another roundup of new songs and videos. But then my fucking day job unexpectedly reared its head like a hungry serpent, and greedily consumed almost all that extra time. So, this roundup wil be short, but hopefully you’ll find it sweet.

BLACK LAVA (Australia)

I always get a thrill when I see a new cover painting by Paolo Girardi. One of these days I’ll then discover that some album adorned by his artwork turns out not to be worth recommending. Maybe that has already happened at some point in the past, but if so I’ve forgotten it. It didn’t happen today.

What I saw today, and what you now see, is Paolo‘s cover painting for a debut album named Soul Furnace by Melbourne-based Black Lava. Lots of molten vulcanism in that verbiage, and the just-released title track provides some justification. Continue reading »

SOILWORK: “ÖVERGIVENHETEN”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 172022
 

(We present DGR‘s considered review of Övergivenheten, the new Soilwork album that’s coming out this Friday, August 19th, via Nuclear Blast.)

Look, an hour and five minutes (plus) is a very long time for an album. Not to put too fine a point on it here, but it’s a very long time for a Soilwork album as well. If you’ve been following the numbers game recently you’ll have noticed that Amon Amarth‘s The Great Heathen Army is not the only 12th album released by a long-running band this year, as Soilwork are also joining that prestigious club with their newest album Övergivenheten.

There’s a lot to be said for Soilwork‘s longevity, as a revolving door of cast members have kept the band lively over the years. Even through up and down periods in the group’s popularity, they’ve always found a way to morph themselves just enough to stay relevant within the modern-day scheme of metal. They have had “eras” as a result, which is a wild thing to say about a band who have always been so built around massive singles in recent years. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: CRUZ

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Aug 172022
 

(We’ve already written enthusiastically about the first music disclosed from a forthcoming second album by the Spanish death/thrash band Cruz, and so it was a very welcome gift to receive Comrade Aleks‘ following interview of the band, via its drummer Xavi.)

Cruz was formed in Barcelona in about 2013. It took some time before these guys made a decision to perform thrashy death metal glorifying the holocaust of ecstasy and freedom in the name of Cosmic Chaos and Lovecraftian Horrors. And even though their first album Culto Abismal (2016) was recorded relatively fast, it took six years to finish the sophomore work Confines de la Cordura, which will see the light in September 2022 according to Nuclear Winter Records’ schedule.

And while we wait until the stars align let’s take a glimpse into the world of Cruz together with the band’s drummer Xavi. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DIABOLOGY — “BLACKBLOOD”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Aug 162022
 

With a band name that refers to the study, theory, and doctrine of devils, we would expect nothing less than devilish music from them, and Los Angeles-based Diabology deliver that in spades on their forthcoming sophomore album Father of Serpents.

With thrash as their backbone, Diabology flesh out their new album by drawing on a mix of other genre ingredients — not in some scatter-shot, “we can’t figure out what we want to be” kind of way, but with the kind of focus and self-assurance one might not expect from a relatively young group. The songs are electric and vividly dynamic, but cohesive — and of course fiendish. We have a prime example in the piratical track we’re bringing you today — “Blackblood“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ALTARS ABLAZE — “FOR THE LIFELESS LOVE OF A CRUCIFIED CORPSE”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Aug 162022
 

The Czech band Altars Ablaze began as the brainchild of Tomas Halama (of Heaving Earth) after his departure from Brutally Deceased. He approached other established musicians in the Czech extreme metal scene, and they coalesced behind a musical vision that sought a place between blasphemous death metal and militant black metal, with a desire to push that conception to the extreme but simultaneously to introduce the unexpected.

The bitter fruits of this vision are to be found in the band’s debut album Life Desecration, which is set for release on September 16th by the Czech label Lavadome Productions. Up to now two singles from the album have been released, and today we add a third one with our premiere of the song that opens the album, “For the Lifeless Love of a Crucified Corpse“. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: APHONIC THRENODY, TYRANNOSATAN, AMMANAS

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Aug 152022
 

This is a rare weekday when we have no music premieres on the calendar, and thus I had some uncommitted time to use in sifting through the murky metal flood in search of other shiny nuggets. Coincidentally, it leads to the fifth day in a row when I’ve been able to pull together a round-up of new sights and sounds, creating our own flood. May you keep your nostrils above the tide.

For moi, part of the fun of these exercises is not just the process of making selections but the arranging of them. What comes first, what comes next, how to end? It’s as close as I’ll ever come to being a DJ. I wouldn’t be a very good one in any event, because the idea of enabling people to flow fairly smoothly from one thing to the next in a similar sonicsphere is usually uninteresting to me. Sometimes it’s more fun to create whiplash through abrupt shifts and jarring juxtapositions.

APHONIC THRENODY (International)

Aphonic Threnody never indulge any temptation for half-measures. The immense power of their funeral doom has proven to be unyielding, and so has the volume of the output. This year marks the third in a row to witness a new Aphonic Threnody album, following on the heels of The All Consuming Void and The Great Hatred. Moreover, those two were hour-long records and the one we’ll receive this year — The Loneliest Walk — is a double-album that’s almost 2 1/2 hours long. Continue reading »

BLACK MAGNET: “BODY PROPHECY”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 152022
 

(We had a torrent of reviews from DGR last week, and we have another one to kick-start this new week. The subject is the second LP from Midwestern US industrial metal outfit Black Magnet, which was released by 20 Buck Spin at the end of July.)

It seems only fitting, given the Author & Punisher and Lament Cityscape reviews that have floated across the site (one of which was the fault of yours truly), that at one point or another we were going to find our way to the doorstep of the industrial project Black Magnet.

The group’s recent album Body Prophecy was released at the tail end of July via 20 Buck Spin and is one of those releases where if you were curious in any sense what sort of music they made, you just had to see that the closing track was a remix by Godflesh‘s Justin Broadrick.

Black Magnet have been around for a few years now, though they are still a newer project, and Body Prophecy represents only the second full-length for the band. Arriving two years after their album Hallucination Scene, Body Prophecy tries hard to refine the band’s sound while also indulging in some hefty hero worship. It’s hard not to draw comparisons throughout the album as Black Magnet leans hard into the electronics-driven side of its sound, augmenting its guitar and hammering drums for something that could draw a wall of comparisons to groups like Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and yes, the aforementioned Godflesh. Continue reading »

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