Islander

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PARADOX RIFT — “THE SKY BENEATH”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 162024
 

On May 10th the Cleveland-based extreme metal band Paradox Rift will release a debut album named Ensnared. It features harrowing cover art by Remy Cooper (Headsplit Design), which captures key elements of the album’s themes. In the band’s words it depicts: “A figure or entity stuck/being torn between two dimensions; A demolecularizing body that has no complete form in one realm or the other. Existing in agony, never to be whole. Constantly being ripped apart and reanimated, Ensnared between two worlds.”

The band’s music pulls from different worlds too — different sub-genres of metal reflected in the influence of such bands as Between the Buried and Me, Gojira, Lamb of God, and Converge (among others). To share again the band’s own explanation:

Paradox Rift is a blend of multiple generations of metal coming together. With members in their early thirties, late thirties and even a fifty year old. We all listen to different generations, styles and subgenres of metal and we all bring something different to the Paradox Rift table.

What we have for you today is the premiere of a lyric video made by Scott Rudd Films and featuring artwork by Mark Erskine for a song from Ensnared named “The Sky Beneath“, and once more we’ll start with the band’s description of what the song is about: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SEREMENT — “FORGING THE DARKNESS”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Apr 162024
 

The blasphemous Athenian quartet Serement came to life in mid-2022, with three of its members moving onward from the death metal band Blessed by Perversion and the fourth having spent time in Chaos Heresy and Sickening Horror.

After independently releasing their 2022 EP Deviation From God, Serement made an unholy pact with Dolorem Records (France) and Iron, Blood and Death Corporation (Mexico) for the release of their debut album Abhorrent Invocations on May 17th of this year. The labels faithfully describe the music this way:

Their sound and style are heavily influenced by the most obscure and aggressive aspect of the Death Metal genre, with a Black Metal atmosphere that always casts a shadow over every track of the new record, combining fast blast beats with some groove rhythms and haunting melodies.

As a more concrete sign of what the album brings, today we’re premiering an album track called “Forging the Darkness“. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: HAUNTOLOGIST

 Interviews  No Responses »
Apr 162024
 


photo credit: Kuba Leszko

(No Solace released Hauntologist‘s long-gestating debut album in early January of this year, and it has made a memorable impression on a lot of listeners, including Comrade Aleks, who follows up the album with this interview of The Fall.)

How many times was Hauntologist mentioned here? And yet it’s not enough. The debut album of this Polish experimental black metal duo entitled Hollow saw the light of day in January, and you can’t ignore it. Not only because it’s a project of two of Mgła’s members – The Fall (vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards) and Darkside (drums). This nihilistic and dissonant yet experimental black metal projects precisely our urban misery; it lacks a traditional blackened aesthetic but it’s functional, striking, and highly atmospheric.

Hauntologist is the best example of modern days black metal with an artistic approach and an in-depth, personal message. It was good to learn a bit more about Hollow from The Fall himself first-hand. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TORTURERS’ LOBBY — “REPTILIAN HIDE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 152024
 

One look at the cover art for the debut album from Tampa-based Torturers’ Lobby tells you that the music is likely to be disturbing but unconventional. It’s not easy to decipher what we’re seeing. Though skeletal remains and a vulture’s head appear to be part of the scene, the ghastly greenish hues and running veins create a twisted image of an old desecration.

It turns out (thankfully) that the music is also disturbing and unconventional, even more so than the cover art, the result of a willfully free-wheeling hybridizing of influences that follows only its own twisted logic but (also thankfully) doesn’t come off as “different for the sake of being different,” cohesion be damned.

We should quickly add that the music’s intensity is often so overpowering and shattering that it might leave you bug-eyed and slack-jawed.

As evidence of these conclusions we have two songs from the album to spotlight today, one of which has previously surfaced and one of which we’re premiering today in advance of the album’s June 14th release by Caligari Records and Ixiol Productions. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VRYKOLAKAS — “BILATERAL VENOMOUS ASSAULT

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 152024
 

As you can see, today we’re premiering a song from a new album, Nocturnal Dominion of Death, by the veteran Singaporean death-dealers Vrykolakas. It’s the second song from the album to be revealed so far. Together, those two tracks bring to mind the boxing terminology for the “one-two punch”, the devastating combination of blows that leaves an opponent sprawled on the canvas.

So let’s take up the first punch first. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: HERESIARCH, MAREA, RITES OF REGRESS, MOISSON LIVIDE

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Apr 142024
 

Well, though I feared that partying last night might make today a wasteland for me, an incipient cold kept me away from the party. The only silver lining from missing that birthday party is that I had a clear enough head to pull together this column, which includes reviews and streams of two new albums and two new songs from full-lengths that are on the way — the theme of which is that “Variety is the spice of life!”

HERESIARCH (New Zealand)

Heresiarch‘s new album puts me in mind of a stunning mountain that seizes attention from far away, looming by itself like a daunting edifice above mundane surroundings, like a Rainier or a Fuji or a Kilimanjaro. Only as you get closer do the details begin to stand out too.

Edifice is indeed the new album’s name, and we’re drawn to it initially from far away, the distance being the seven years that separate us in time from their first album, Death Ordinance, which still looms in the memory. Unlike the mountains named above, however, this one is erupting, and through its vulcanism is re-configuring as the explosions occur, the earth shakes, and the lava flows. In that way, new details take shape in the harsh crags, to leave new memories. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: BOLESKINE HOUSE, CROCELL, GÖDEN, UDOLS, WEREWOLVES

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 132024
 

Following up yesterday’s roundup of recommended new songs and videos, here’s another — five more to help get your weekend off on the wrong foot.

BOLESKINE HOUSE (Italy)

The name of the debut album from Boleskine House is Miserabilist Blues. The ringing guitar harmony that opens the long song I’ve chosen to begin today’s collection is indeed miserable and blue, but “Black House Painters” transforms that feeling of aching loneliness by then processing the melody through a lens of frantic blackened riffing, tumultuous percussion, and abyssal roars. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BARBARIAN SWORDS, DARKTHRONE, LAIR OF THE MINOTAUR, SEAR BLISS, THOU

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Apr 122024
 

Another big week for new songs and videos from some very good bands. I wasn’t able to pull together a mid-week roundup, so we’ve got a lot to cover today and tomorrow. Without further ado, let’s begin.

BARBARIAN SWORDS (Spain)

We start today’s alphabetized collection with B, which stands of course for Barbarian, as in Barbarian Swords, and a song of “true nihiilistic black doom” off their new album Fetid. Continue reading »

SLAM CITY METAL FEST II 2024 MARCH 15-16

 Concert Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 122024
 

(Our Hanoi-based contributor Vizzah Harri prepared the following extensive report on the Slam City II Metal Fest, which took place last month over two days in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.)

SLAM CITY II METAL FEST 2024 officially featured 11 bands from three South East Asian countries. Sadly, Lilith from the Philippines were unable to make it this time due to what the author can confirm as exorbitant flight prices this year. My Chemical Bromance, a metallic-dubstep act stood in for the Siem Reap leg. It was set and executed to occur over two days in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. And again, this scribe can verify that it was a weekend that will go down in the history of Asian metal as what the underground is all about. Grit, grunge, punk-values, inclusion, and mighty riffage. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CONSTRUCT OF LETHE — EXCERPTS FROM “A KINDNESS DEALT IN VENOM”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 122024
 

The concept behind Construct of Lethe‘s new album A Kindness Dealt In Venom is challenging, and frankly, very disturbing. The music is also challenging, frequently so wildly unconventional that it could be branded “experimental death metal”, and in its extravagant twists and turns and instrumental spectacles, some disturbing and others exuberantly delirious, it creates a transfixing union with the concept.

The music is meant to be heard as one continuous song, 44 minutes in length, which follows the shattering conceptual narrative. However, it does include separate segments as it proceeds along its traumatic course, and we have two of those for you today — two that are among the most head-spinning episodes in the stunning pageant that the album creates. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries