Islander

AN NCS PREMIERE: WOMBBATH — “THE SEVENTH SEAL”

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Nov 012021
 

What do you do if you have mastered a particular art form? Some artists would just happily continue doing what they had mastered, on the theory that success breeds more success and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Others might retire and rest on their laurels. But some might create new challenges for themselves by focusing their energies on how to make what they had mastered sound different and new. And that’s what the Swedish death metal band Wombbath have done on their new album, Agma.

It should go without saying by now that Wombbath have mastered the art form of old-school HM-2-powered Swedish-style death metal. They got an early start on their mastery in the mid-’90s, went away for about 20 years, and then resumed work with 2015’s Downfall Rising. Since then founding guitarist Håkan Stuvemark and a new group of very talented comrades have pumped out three more albums which collectively proved, in increasingly convincing ways, that they were on very sure footing.

But now we have Agma, which is brimming with new ideas, so many of them that it’s a double-album, encompassing 16 tracks and more than an hour and 12 minutes of music. We are revealing one of those today in advance of Agma‘s December 31st release by Transcending Obscurity Records, a late date that we hope won’t cause Agma to be overlooked on EOY lists, because it can certainly lay just claim to be included. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, OCTOBER 2021

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Nov 012021
 


Light of the Morning Star

 

(October has ended, Halloween has concluded, and so it’s time for Gonzo to spotlight four of his favorite releases from the month.)

We’re officially at that point in the year when I’m taking stock of my favorite music that’s been released, subtly preparing to create a monster best-of list by the time December rolls around.

The trouble with this is good heavy music is still being released with impunity, which complicates everything in ways that I welcome. October hasn’t made this any easier. My fellow NCS scribes have uncovered some seriously bowel-shaking heaviness in recent months, and I am more fulfilled for having paid attention.

And that brings us to right now. Because I’m about to get on a plane to Iceland in a few hours, this intro (and column) may be a little shorter than usual, but I am nothing if not verbose when it comes to describing music (and most everything else). Let’s bang this out while my liver still functions, shall we?

Let’s go. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (SAMHAIN EDITION): COSCRADH, DEATHNOISEFREQUENCY, CEMETERIUM, KHNVM

 SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Oct 312021
 


from a painting by George Cruikshank (1792–1878)

 

This year Halloween falls on a Sunday, and thus lines up nicely with our weekly effort to blacken the Sabbath. It also provides an occasion for a brief reminder about how Halloween came to be, though I’m sure many of you already know it. The following sketch is drawn from this article, which appeared in this morning’s Washington Post.

In a nutshell, the holiday traces its roots to a celebration called Samhain (pronounced “SOW-in”) that was observed by Irish Celts for thousands of years before the arrival of Christianity in the 6th century CE. Literally translated, it means “summer’s end,” and was thus a new year’s celebration. It was a time when they thought the veil between worlds was at its thinnest, and that all kinds of things could cross over on that night.

After Christian missionaries arrived in Ireland they eventually did what they did all over the world — they attempted to co-opt existing pagan traditions for their own purposes, to aid in converting the “heathens”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: BESNA, RHINE, RAT KING, CONAN, RED FANG, 40 WATT SUN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 302021
 

I know I sound like a broken record, but this past week was a crazy one on all fronts for me, and so I did a piss-poor job keeping up with new metal, largely neglecting the NCS in-box and failing to make the usual list of candidates for round-ups. I did make that list this morning, but it took a ton of time, and I didn’t have much room left to dig very deep into it.

However, I dug deep enough to feel some inspiration about what to include in this compilation. I chose music from two Seattle bands that I happened to see in early live performance by both of them at the same show more than four years ago. I picked two more songs that came with Halloween-themed videos, because of course Halloween is tomorrow. And I chose a curveball to throw at the end.

I had a difficult time figuring out what to use as the opening song for the collection, but eventually settled on the one you’re about to witness, in part because of the video’s setting.

BESNA (Slovakia)

I guess Besna couldn’t find a barren warehouse for their live video for “Fúga“, so they had to make do with the ramparts of an ancient castle called Strečno in northern Slovakia, perched atop a 103-metre-high calcite cliff (it was also the location of a World War II battle between the German army and the Czechoslovak resistance). Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KRVNA — “TIMELESS… AGELESS…”

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Oct 292021
 

The Australian black metal band KRVNA made its recorded debut just last month with a debut demo consisting of two substantial tracks. Under the title Long Forgotten Relic it was released by Seance Records. In its lyrical themes, and through the visions of imagination spawned by the music, it explored the vampire mythos from the ancient world to Biblical times, and the black forests and mountainous castle crypts of Balkan and Carpathian incarnations of the vampire.

Now, following closely on the heels of that very promising advent, Seance Records is readying the release of KRVNA’s debut album Sempinfernus. It too delves into vampyric mythology but in an even more expansive and far-reaching way. Moreover, KRVNA’s solo creator Krvna Vatra has disclosed more precisely the nature of his interest in the subject matter, and how it stands for themes that extend beyond tales of the undead: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GOLGOTHAN — “PARENT ORGANISM”

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Oct 292021
 

Most of us are familiar with Golgotha, the skull-shaped hill of execution in ancient Jerusalem where, according to the Gospels, Jesus was crucified (along with many others charged with crimes). But what, pray tell, is a Golgothan? The creature seems to have originated in Kevin Smith’s 1999 movie Dogma. According to the Metal-Archives listing for the Louisiana death metal band who took that same name for themselves:

“A Golgothan (also called a ‘shit demon’ or ‘excremental’) is a fictional creature composed of human excrement. The creature derives its name from the hill where Christ was crucified; the collective suffering of the souls sentenced to death by crucifixion on that hill gives birth to the demon’s existence. The Golgathan rises from the collected offal secreted by each prisoner’s loosened bowels upon the moment of death”.

In keeping with the genesis of their name, Golgothan (the band) are thematically attracted to gore and horror, and apparently the more outrageous, the better. They’ve released a handful of EPs and singles beginning in 2014, and at last will have a debut album named Leech coming out on February 4, 2022 through Lacerated Enemy Records, who recommends it for fans of Aborted, Cattle Decapitation, and Bloodbath.

February 4th is a long way off, but we’re presenting a first single from the album that makes it a date worth remembering. Continue reading »

WHITE STONES: “DANCING INTO OBLIVION”

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Oct 282021
 

(Multiple listens and two months after the album’s release by Nuclear Blast, DGR now attempts to describe why the latest full-length by the Spanish prog-death band White Stones remains so fascinating.)

There are a few albums a year that I’ll fully own up to listening to and writing about here because they fascinate me. You can pinpoint those write-ups because I’ll often preface them with that exact statement. They’re albums where by the end of a long listening session I’m still not 100% sure where I stand on them, or they provide an indescribable difficulty in discussing why they continue to stick around.

Last year one of those albums was the Spanish death metal group White Stones‘ release Kaurahy. The Martin Mendez (of Opeth bassist fame) project’s first release was an amorphous number, one whose combination of folklore and prog-death sensibilities was hard to grasp on to. The darkened atmospheres and little light provided often felt like trying to kill a moth while it danced in and out of your flashlight’s beam, or like thinking you finally had a hold on a spiky ball and could grasp it only to have it turn completely smooth and move just outside your field of view again. It was, for lack of a better term, fascinating.

Not all of that album worked and it could at times come off a little samey and would blur together, yet an album that many were expecting to be a sort of prog-death masterpiece, given its pedigree, turning out to be an oddly discordant beast that was more often ugly groove than it was fully death was a surprising turn.

You can definitely find value in consistency though, and one year later the group behind White Stones return to us again, this time with an album entitled Dancing Into Oblivion, and save for a couple of notable changes it is once again a fascinating album. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BURIAL — “INNER GATEWAYS TO THE SLUMBERING EQUILIBRIUM AT THE CENTER OF THE COSMOS”

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Oct 282021
 

It has been our hideous pleasure to premiere two tracks from the staggering and slaughtering debut album of the Italian death metal band Burial, and today we’re even more fiendishly pleased to bring you a stream of the full album, evocatively titled Inner Gateways To The Slumbering Equilibrium At The Center Of Cosmos and graced by the ghastly cover art of maestro Paolo Girardi.

Everlasting Spew Records, who will release the record on October 29th, recommends it for fans of Spectral Voice, Mortiferum, Krypts, and dISEMBOWELMENT. We recommend it for anyone who relishes expertly written and meticulously executed death metal which succeeds in creating a wide-ranging amalgam of unearthly terrors, ranging from assaults of mind-mauling, bone-splintering barbarity to episodes of crushing gloom and hypnotic supernatural trances steeped in woe. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: STAGWOUNDER — “DAS PHANTOM ZERRINNT”

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Oct 282021
 

 

Extreme metal need not draw its inspirations or lyrical themes from philosophy and literature to be worth our time. Of course it doesn’t — visions of pentagrams, skulls, haunted graveyards, and steaming viscera will do just fine, as long as the music hooks us. Still,  provocative thinking can sometimes add an extra dimension to the experience, apart from the role it may play in providing inspiration to the musicians, and learning something new can be a welcome bonus.

Which brings us to the German band Stagwounder‘s new album The Shrouded Muse of the World´s Lament. In the press materials it is introduced by this quotation:

“Thou, eager to ascend to the sun on waxen wings, consider: even in the bleak caves of the deep it is better to reside than in the boundless ether. Between heaven and hell the child of Gaea is born, soon willing to lie itself down among the photophobic creatures of the chthonic dark, soon fluttering upward to the splendorous heights whose reflections radiate around it like garments of light.“

That passage was written by the 19th century German philosopher Julius Bahnsen. It appears in Pessimistenbrevier, a work translated as “The Pessimist’s Breviary”. That work provides the foundation for Stagwounder‘s new album, along with Japanese author and cultural critic Mishima Yukio. How these thinkers influenced the album is an interesting tale, and we think one worth telling before we get to the music itself (and yes, we will get to the music in due course, because we’re premiering a song from The Shrouded Muse… today, in the lead-up to its release by Crawling Chaos on November 26th). Continue reading »

FRONTIERER: “OXIDIZED”

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Oct 282021
 

(The mainly Scottish extremists Frontierer released their new album on October 1st, and DGR reviews it here.)

You probably could’ve sensed this one coming like a killer in a slasher film hiding just outside the frame, given how we salivated at the opportunity to cover anything the group did in the lead up to this one’s release.

Frontierer have made a name for themselves over recent years. The Scotland and US union of musicians – most of whom also play in Sectioned, who released my top album of 2019 with Annihilated – have burrowed impressively deep into the tech and mathcore scene. Conjuring old ghosts that could see the band being genre-blood-brothers with a group like Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza (whose last two albums are just relentless) as well as hybridizing influences from Dillinger Escape Plan, the off-kilter rhythms of Car Bomb, and the big, earth-shaking grooves of a band like Meshuggah is a damned lofty way to find yourself described. Yet the sound that Frontierer have forged for themselves on releases like Unloved and their newest album Oxidized is likely going to see them being mentioned in the same breath as those other names often. Continue reading »

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