Islander

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: GLOSON — “THE RIFT”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Mar 172022
 

 

All of the old-timers here at NCS have their own musical tastes, which are probably best portrayed as a Venn diagram in which there are areas of intersection but also swaths of area that largely stand apart from each other. But the Swedish band Gloson are one of those bands in which we all overlap in our enthusiasm for the music. And thus it’s a genuine thrill for us now to present a full stream of their new album, The Rift, which is set for release this coming Friday by Indie Recordings.

For those who haven’t been paying attention, our own Andy Synn presented a review of the album just yesterday. He called it “by some margin the best Post-/Sludge Metal album I’ve heard so far this year — surpassing even Cult of Luna‘s fantastic new record”, an album that “has most certainly re-set the bar for 2022, and only time will tell if anything else can match it”.

He then proceeded to explain why, should you need any further persuasion to dive into the full stream today. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CULT BURIAL — “DISORDER”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 172022
 

It’s fair to say that we here at NCS have been following the UK band Cult Burial very closely. We’ve reviewed and recommended every one of their releases so far — their debut EP Sorrow in 2020, their self-titled debut album that same year, and their second EP Oblivion in 2021. It thus took no second thoughts nor any pause for us to leap at the chance to hear the band’s new single, “Disorder“, and we leaped equally fast at the chance to premiere it (as soon as we re-assembled our spine and picked our teeth up from the floor).

In a broad way, Cult Burial‘s music can be described as a changing amalgam of Black, Death, and Doom Metal, but while the band are capable of creating dark, dense, and oppressive soundscapes, this new song is a high-speed hurricane of obliteration. As the band have explained to us, “The aim was to create a nasty, aggressive, energetic piece of music that would leave the listener suffering under the weight of the song.” Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MRTVI — “LAKE OF MEMORIES”

 Interviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 172022
 

Music videos can be entertaining to watch when they are well-made, even when they don’t have any deep connection (or sometimes any connection at all) to the music they accompany. But in those rare instances when they do connect, each aspect of the art can enhance the other, the sights and sounds intertwining to create a more powerful and emotionally involving experience than if each were experienced separately. We have one of those rarities to share with you today.

The song is “Lake of Memories“, and it brings the listener to the culmination of a story that unfolds across the fifth concept album created by the Serbian experimental black metal project MRTVI (that genre description isn’t really adequate, but it would be equally inadequate to concoct some other short-hand descriptor). Entitled The ExiZentialist, the album is now set for release on June 14th by Life Is A Dream Records.

All of MRTVI‘s albums have been rooted in the experiences and thinking of their solo creator, Damjan Stefanović, but this new one is even more autobiographical, inspired by his own experience of being uprooted long ago from his homeland, transported for many years to another country (the UK, where he began MRTVI), and much more recently returning to the country of his birth. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FLUMMOX — “FLUMMOXING ACT I: GARBANZO’S LEAP”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 162022
 

 

We have two premieres at our site today. The first of them was a new song by the legendary Wisconsin death metal band Viogression. The contrast between that one and the one we’re presenting now could hardly be more stark. I suspect that will be pleasing to the band who’s the focus of this premiere, because their mission is… to flummox… to flummox conventions and expectations.

It’s been a while since we checked in with this Nashville band, and so it may be worth repeating something I wrote long ago:

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary tells us that no one is completely sure where the word flummox comes from, though its first known use was in Charles Dickens’ debut novel, The Pickwick Papers, published in 1837. It means “to confuse”, and among its synonyms are “baffle”, “perplex”, “bewilder”, “bemuse”, and “mystify”. And when you understand all that, it’s not confusing at all why this band chose Flummox as their name — because (as forecast above) flummoxing listeners seems to be their primary mission. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VIOGRESSION — “CIPHER”

 Premieres  4 Responses »
Mar 162022
 

 

Until recently I had never heard Viogression‘s 1991 debut album Expound and Exhort, which led to this Wisconsin band mounting a world tour with Death and Pestilence. Even today that album has a cult following who recognize it as a criminally underrated gem of the early death metal scene, one that draws comparisons to the likes of Death and Obituary, to Morbid Angel and Morbid Saint. And I’ll say now, based on personal experience, that it holds up very well 30 years later.

From all accounts, even that first album didn’t get the attention it deserved when it came out, largely due to negligent label backing. But what happened afterward was like a second hammer blow to the band’s legacy — including the premature release of an unfinished second album (Passage) the year after Expound and Exhort, and then a 9-year hiatus, finally broken by a 2014 EP.

The band continued to perform live, but only now, 30 years after their debut full-length, are Viogression releasing a third album. Its name is 3rd Stage Of Decay. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SÖNMA

 Interviews  No Responses »
Mar 162022
 

(These days when most of us think of Russia we have negative thoughts (to put it mildly) based on the vicious invasion of Ukraine. But the participants in this interview — our friend Comrade Aleks and Vlad Tatarsky from the Russian bands Sönma and Crust — have no love for what is being done by a dictator in the name of the Russian people. Their words and the music are still worth our time.)

Sönma is the drone/doom project of Roman Romanov (drums, vocals, effects) and Vlad Tatarsky (guitars, effects). You know them better as members of the death-doom/sludge band Crust, also from Veliky Novgorod.

We started this interview with Vlad in late January and things went slow, but everything changed after the 24th of February and we were in shock knowing nothing about what to do with this interview. Vlad asked me to find some right words for this forword, but I don’t have any right words now, just a feeling that Sönma’s albums Terra and Ether channel this sense of catastrophe precisely. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: MISERY INDEX, CLEARXCUT, AWAKENING SUN, NEMA, AKLASH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Mar 152022
 

 

Drowning in new music and regrettably short on time to listen and write about it, I’ve decided to just grab five of the new things I’ve recently seen and heard to share with you today.

MISERY INDEX (U.S.)

I don’t know what came first in the creation of this new Misery Index song, the words or the music, or whether they were conceived together, but both are enraged. The politically charged lyrics begin this way:

Ancient ways ensnared in the monetary grip
Sons and daughters slaved by the wage and the whip
Our way of life crushed, as our lives drown in work
Is this what we’re to think, that a human life is worth? Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: UNBENIGN — “THE UNTENANTED EPOCH”

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Mar 152022
 

 

The Dutch black metal band Unbenign is a relatively new formation but it includes seasoned musicians who have performed with such bands as Prostitute Disfigurement, Centurian, and Nox, and their line-up was rounded out by Michiel van der Plicht (Carach Angren, Pestilence, ex-God Dethroned), who played session drums on their debut album and also handled the recording, mixing, and mastering. That album is self-titled and is now set for co-release by Satanath Records and Asgard Hass Productions on April 16th.

Unbenign have proclaimed that both lyrically and musically they drew their inspiration from second-wave black metal from the early ’90s, with a mission to create ferocious, in-your-face assaults as a means of channeling their frustrations with modern-day society. Their music is indeed ferocious, but it’s a lot more than that as well, as you’ll discover by listening to the song from the album that we’re premiering today. Its name is “The Untenanted Epoch“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FATHER BEFOULED — “SALIVATING FAITHLESSNESS”

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Mar 152022
 

At the end of last month we premiered “Katabatic Deliverance“, a song off the forthcoming fifth album by the harrowing Georgia-based death metal band Father Befouled, and now it’s our diabolical pleasure to bring you another track off this jaw-dropping new record.

The name of the album is Crowned in Veneficum. In case your Latin is rusty, veneficum is connected to the word veneficus, which connotes both poison and sorcery. And this new song you’re about to hear, “Salivating Faithlessness“, is indeed a dose of poisonous aural sorcery. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SAATTUE

 Interviews  No Responses »
Mar 152022
 

(What we have here is Comrade Aleks‘ extensive interview with two members of the Finnish band Saatue, whose first release under that name came in 2004 and whose latest album (their fourth) was released last October.)

I got in touch with Tero Kalliomäki because of his involvement in Yearning, a Finnish melodic doom band which was active from 1994 until the premature death of its founder Juhani Palomäki in 2010. We spoke about Yearning as part of a short interviews’ series for Doom Metal Lexicanum II, but I kept in mind that Tero also performed guitars and keyboards in the authentic death-doom outfit Saattue since 2004. “Authentic death-doom”! They call it “Saattoo Metal” and the fourth album in this style, Vain Toinen Heistä, was released DIY in October 2021.

It’s strange to do interviews in times like this, but it makes sense and helps to keep at least an illusion of “normality”. The answers were provided by Tero Kalliomäki himself with some help from the band’s bass-player Samu Lahtinen. Continue reading »

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