Islander

FUNERAL MIST: “DEIFORM”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Dec 172021
 

Funeral Mist‘s last album, Hekatomb, dropped in June 2018 without any preview. I rushed to listen to it, and rushed a review into print, more to urge it upon listeners than to give it a carefully considered assessment, especially an assessment that would compare it to the band’s preceding albums.

Well, today NoEvDia released a new Funeral Mist album named Deiform, and I’m basically doing the same thing.

This time I actually received an advance copy, but it wasn’t very much in advance of today’s release and it came at a time when I couldn’t drop everything else (much as I wanted to) and really become immersed in what Arioch had created this time around.

So once again, although I’m providing my immediate impressions of the album, I’m mainly urging people to listen to it, especially year-end list-makers who haven’t finished their lists, because Deiform has the capacity to up-end the process. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SIREN’S RAIN — “KEEPERS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 162021
 

The folk metal band Siren’s Rain hail from Tacoma, Washington, just down the highway from our site’s home base. Their debut full-length, Rise Forth, was released earlier this fall, and it delves into themes of abandonment, betrayal, hope, despair, and resilience, while joining together elements of heavyweight metallic extremity and such folk instrumentation as mandolin, harp, and the nyckelharpa.

What we have for you today is the premiere of an official music video for a song off Rise Forth called “Keepers“. The video features the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. As vocalist Rena Hellzinger tells us, “We wanted to do a ‘metal band in the woods’ video, as this song is about protecting the environment”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FESTERDECAY — “ABORTICIDE”

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Dec 162021
 

 

If you haven’t yet discovered the wickedness of FesterDecay, they formed in Fukuoka, Kyushu, Japan in 2015 with the aim of reviving goregrind the way Carcass did it with their 1988 full-length debut, Reek of Putrefaction.

FesterDecay have already released two demos and a split with the band Crash Syndrom, and now they’re releasing a new single named Aborticide. To get an idea of what’s coming, the band say their intent was “to make your eyeballs rot while you are eaten by maggots and body fluids drain from every hole of your body while you get ready for something bigger and tastier!”

“To make this single even more delicious,” they say, “we also added some infested entrails, a delicate touch of juicy pus and a live version of the track ‘Maggot Bath’! Blueearghhhh!”

Okay, are you ready to become befouled? Because we’re now presenting the song “Aborticide” in all its disgusting glory. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SYMBOLICAL — “EPIPHANY & REVIVAL”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 162021
 

 

The death metal mystics in Symbolical have embarked on a new musical campaign, the purpose of which is to draw you into the darkness that ancients believed was “the home of all that is not yet in form but holds the energy of the creative source”. These Polish musicians proclaim that “Symbolical is our darkness, filled with fat, gloomy, remorseless, simple, and morbid sounds which create and destroy sorrow, depression and grief.”

The new campaign consists of a three-part series of EPs, the first of which — Igne — will be released on December 25, with the next two coming in 2022. Each EP includes a trio of tracks, each of which will be presented through a video. Two of the tracks included within Igne have already premiered through videos, and today we present the third one, “Epiphany & Revival“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: MYRDØD — “THE MOURNING HOLLOW”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 152021
 

 

(Todd Manning provides the following introduction to our premiere of the new album by Myrdød, whose release is imminent.)

Emerging from the rural nether-swamps of Pennsylvania, the duo known as Myrdød are set to release their full-length The Mourning Hollow on December 17th courtesy of Wise Blood Records. Originally formed by the mysterious Søppelskaler, the project released several singles before enlisting collaborator Fractal Creature.

While many bands claim both death and black metal influences, Myrdød truly blend the two genres and not in a fanboy sense. The Mourning Hollow reeks of pure death mysticism.  Søppelskaler states the following: Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BENEATH THE SOD — “BENEATH THE SOD”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 152021
 

 

“Beneath the Sod scrape back the top soil to lay bare all that is repulsive and feculent beneath. Narcotic and eldritch, Beneath the Sod erodes the listener with a writhing tapestry of industrial doom, grinding noise and hallucinatory horror. Punishing and bewildering, with each release Beneath the Sod sinks deeper into their unique and singularly maddening mire”.

Those are the accurately evocative words with which Cursed Monk Records introduces a new self-titled EP by this utterly diabolical Irish band, an EP set for release on December 17th that we’re presenting today in the full bloom of its terrors. We have more detailed commentary of our own, of course, but at least one more way of attempting to sum up the experience might be this:

It is deeply unsettling, even to the point of inducing queasiness in the listener, and brings forward the stuff of nightmares as old as humanity, and yet manages to become bewitching, to transfix attention, maybe in part because it is so fiendishly effective in crushing the soul and unhinging the mind. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEPLETED URANIUM — “BETA PARTICLES”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 142021
 

 

When does insanity begin to make sense? When you yourself begin to feel like you’re losing your mental moorings? When the whole fucking world seems to be going insane around you? Or when you realize there’s an appealing method to the madness you witness? Or some combination of all of the above?

These ruminations were spawned by listening to Origins, the new record by the brawlers and mad scientists in the Canadian band Depleted Uranium, which is set for release on January 28th of the coming new year. The music (which could be thought of as a blending of powerviolence and math metal) genuinely sounds insane — furiously so — and yet something about the experience makes sense. Not just because it sounds like people throwing away mental shackles and conventions, but also because the music simultaneously gets its hooks in your head. There’s a sense of order and precision of execution in it, at the same time as it seems completely disruptive of order. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): KADAVEREICH — “RADIANCE OF DOOM”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Dec 142021
 

 

On December 18th Godz Ov War Productions will release Radiance of Doom, the debut EP of the Russian blackened death metal band Kadavereich. Apart from a reference that the line-up includes members of Grond, Act Of God, and Gwarloth, Godz Ov War gave us no hints about the nature of the music the band had created when it asked that we host the EP’s full streaming premiere today. And thus the feeling of shock and awe that we experienced when listening to it was all the more stupefying.

In a nutshell, the sonic power of the EP is immense, and its impact is utterly devastating (but equally electrifying). It chokes the senses, blots out the ability to think of anything else, and becomes an all-consuming, bone-smashing, mind-mauling experience in remorseless destruction, abject terror, and paralyzing agony. If you’re looking for a transfixing visceral experience and don’t mind being subjected to ruthless audio ruination, you’ve come to the right place. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: IMMOLATION, ABYSMAL DAWN, AUTHOR & PUNISHER, WHITE VOID, LUNAR TOMBFIELDS, TYHJÄ, HELLFROST AND FIRE, EXIMPERITUS, SILENT LEGES INTER ARMA, VERMISST, THORN, KRALLICE, GERYON

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Dec 132021
 

 

I guess you noticed that we didn’t post anything new at the site on Saturday or Sunday. In 12+ years of our existence that has happened only a couple of other times. I went to holiday events on Friday and Saturday nights, got trashed at both of them, and spent the days after in a state of crippling mental and physical disability. So that’s the explanation in a nutshell.

There’s obviously a lot of catching up to do in the race for staying on top of new songs and videos, which explains why I’ve resorted to this OVERFLOWING STREAMS format. I made a conscious effort to include a fair share of black metal since I failed to post a SHADES OF BLACK column yesterday. Speaking of which, if you haven’t noticed I’ll mention the good news that a new Funeral Mist album is set for release on December 17th HERE (it appears that it will be released in its entirety that day, without any advance song streams).

IMMOLATION (U.S.)

I thought about alphabetizing this collection, as I usually do, but I have to begin with Immolation. Last week one of the best death metal bands of all time divulged a video for the first single from a new album, and it’s a breathtaker — explosive, blazing, bludgeoning, exotic, and crazed. Here’s a band who seem immune to the deleterious effects of aging. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOATBLOOD — “BLOODDAWN / ANNIHILATION OF THIS WORLD”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 132021
 

 

I’ve spilled many words about Goatblood over the years in a seemingly endless quest to describe just how maliciously ruinous yet gripping their music is. I have another opportunity today, because we’re premiering a new two-part album named Blooddawn​/​Annihilation Of This World.

Hatred, disgust, and violence have always seemed to be the dominating inspirations for this malefic duo’s bestial black/death metal ministrations, the more willfully offensive the better. The music’s not ostentatious or pretentious — quite the opposite, which is part of its primeval appeal. All those ingredients are again present and accounted for in this new album, but the two halves of it nonetheless present slightly different takes on the band’s core malignancy of sound. Continue reading »

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