Islander

DEATH METAL REVIEW ROUND-UP: IN ASYMMETRY, MVLTIFISSION, CATHEXIS

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 122021
 

 

(In this article DGR combines shorter than usual reviews of three records released during the first half of the year — by In Assymetry (international), Mvltifission (China), and Cathexis (U.S.).)

It’s not too often that I’ll try my hand at the “Short but Sweet” style of reviewing, but my travels around the world of heavy metal have proven quite fruitful, so much so that it would be criminal to have some of these releases locked away while I wait for the brain to fully congeal some sort of deep-dive review on them.

Also, in some cases albums can be exactly what is presented on the cover. You know what you’re in for staring at the cover art, and from there it’s just a choice of how far you want to be punched into the side of a cliff. In this case, there’s a near ceaseless brutality flavoring the international travels, starting with a massive union of multiple countries before landing in China for an unexpected visit, and then finally arriving somewhat closer to home with one hell of a tongue twister in the opening line.

Will this be a new norm? Probably not, but there’s an excellent chance here to dispense with the intellectual bullshit – briefly – and just enjoy the death of every instrument present here, because every band within this review collection absolutely destroy on that front. Continue reading »

AT THE GATES: “THE NIGHTMARE OF BEING”

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Jul 122021
 

 

(We present TheMadIsraeli‘s review of the seventh studio album by At the Gates, released earlier this month by Century Media.)

Watching how your favorite musical artists deal with the inevitability of getting older, slower, and weaker is one of the more fascinating aspects of this media consumption thing we all do. That’s especially true of metal, which is a genre that’s often predicated on physical ability. It’s all technicality and endurance, coupled with demands on the performers to be emotionally resonant, to still maintain that human element that makes music touch our souls and make life just that little bit better.

It’s commonplace for a lot of long-running bands to slow down, dial back the technical aspects of their music a bit and try to compensate for their age in other ways. Sometime they try to make their songwriting better, and to try less mechanically demanding ideas. Sure, here and there they can still write a barnburner that’s on a crash course with a brick wall at two hundred miles per hour, but it’s tough to play a whole album of that anymore. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: MÜTTERLEIN, 0-NUN, ELLES VĀRTI, CRUCIFIXION BELL, WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM, WORMWITCH, NYTT LAND

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Jul 112021
 

 

Hate to say it, but this week’s column is in some respects going to be linguistically abbreviated, if not musically. The day job has been a bear this weekend, and on top of that I’m getting together via Zoom in a couple hours with Andy Synn and DGR to record “voice breaks” for our next session as Gimme Metal DJs on July 30 (at noon PDT, 3:00pm EDT, 9:00pm CET). I’m not confident in my ability to ad lib about the music we’ve picked, so I need to make some notes to myself, e.g., “don’t fuck this up!” We’ve picked a lot of good stuff for our two-hour show, so I hope you’ll tune in.

Anyway, my writing eventually peters out today (you’ll see what I’ve done to short-cut things as you move through this collection), but that’s not a sign of lack of enthusiasm or appreciation for the music itself. I do believe it’s all still worth your time.

MÜTTERLEIN (France)

About three weeks ago in one of these columns I highlighted the release of a giant 24-track sampler by Les Acteurs de L’Ombre Productions. At that time I picked out tracks from three French black metal bands to feature, because they were all from forthcoming albums. I also mentioned that the sampler included tracks from a new split by Limbes (formerly known as Blurr Thrower) and Mütterlein — though I hadn’t yet listened to them. Now I have, and I want to draw special attention to Mütterlein’s track here, in part because it creates such great anticipation for a new Mütterlein album headed our way via Debemur Morti Productions. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: GROZA, APATHY NOIR, EYES OF PERDITION, THUMOS, KAAMOS WARRIORS, KASCK

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 102021
 


Groza

It was one of those weeks when my day job jackhammered me into submission. I fell far behind even in saving links to new songs and videos I might want to check out, and the hundreds of emails we receive every day went mostly un-read. And man, what a week to fall behind in. As people used to say 5 or 10 years ago, there was a metric shit-ton of new releases and song or video premieres.

I did obsessively spend a chunk of time this morning just making lists of links, and felt overwhelmed at the end of that exercise. If I had total control over my life I’d spend most of the rest of the day plowing through all those links and compiling round-ups, or at least one gigantic one. But my day-job project isn’t finished, and I’ve got to turn back to it, even on a fucking weekend. So I’ve just dipped my toe in the ocean, and this is what dripped off of it.

GROZA (Germany)

To begin, I chose a video for “Elegance of Irony“, a song off a new album named The Redemptive End by these Bavarian black metallers. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: AGELESS OBLIVION

 WAXING LYRICAL  No Responses »
Jul 102021
 

Ageless Oblivion - photo by Adam Pegg

(Andy Synn brings us another episode in his series about lyrics in Metal, and today the responses come from Stephen Jones, vocalist and lyricist of the UK Death Metal band Ageless Oblivion, whose latest album is out now via Apocalyptic Witchcraft Recordings)

Anyone who knows me… hell, anyone who’s been reading NCS for any significant amount of time… will be able to tell you how much I love the work of Progressive/Post-Death Metal maestros Ageless Oblivion.

In particular, I’ve gone on record, multiple times, about how highly I rate their second album, Penthos, whose signature blend of mechanical precision, organic biorhythms, and claustrophobic atmosphere is a big part of what makes it, in my opinion at least, one of the best (and most underrated) albums of the last decade.

So it shouldn’t really surprise anyone, especially in light of the rave review I gave their recent “comeback” album, Suspended Between Earth and Sky, that I was eager to bring the band onboard for an edition of Waxing Lyrical, if only to satisfy my own curiosity about what it is that influences, informs, and drives this particular aspect of their sound.

Thankfully they were extremely amenable to my overtures, and sent forth their vocalist Stephen Jones (who has performed on all three of the band’s albums thus far) to offer up some insight on the group’s past, present and future, as seen through the prism of their lyrics.

So, without further ado… Continue reading »

PESTILENCE: “EXITIVM”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jul 092021
 

 

(This is TheMadIsraeli’s review of the new ninth album by Pestilence, which is out now on Agonia Records.)

Patrick Mameli is a musician in the extreme metal music space I’m often conflicted about.

One one hand, I think he is an absolute genius. What he’s created with Pestilence and continues to do under the Pestilence banner never has been replicated convincingly, and probably cannot be replicated.  He has an unparalled command and mastery, both as a guitarist and as a songwriter of dissonance and chaos.  Pestilence is one of the few bands out there (and the only band that does it the way they do it) who completely shun away from conventional melody while using a jazz bent to create a twisted brand of death metal that I can only say sounds like what it feels like to experience real and severe mental illness and terror.  There is a pathos to Pestilence that is undeniable. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: RISE TO THE SKY — “END MY NIGHT”

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Jul 092021
 

 

Rise to the Sky is the vehicle for the music of its sole creator, Chilean multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Sergio González Catalán. Though the project’s earliest releases emerged only in 2019, it has already assembled an extensive discography devoted primarily to atmospheric death/doom metal. The newest album, Per Aspera Ad Astra, is set for release on September 3rd by the Russian label GS Productions, and it’s the second full-length by Rise to the Sky that will see release this year.

But the tragic inspiration for the album is one that should be explained before we reveal the album’s second advance track today: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DISKORD — “DIRIGISTE RADIO HIT”

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Jul 092021
 

 

Transcending Obscurity Records has already revealed enough music from the mind-boggling new album by the Norwegian death metal band Diskord that perhaps most fans of adventurous metallic extremity are already well aware of what a wild and exhilarating trip it is. Yet perhaps we’ll still catch a few new ears today with our premiere of another astonishing track off the record — the name of which is Degenerations — in advance of its August 3rd release.

Diskord’s intricate and unpredictable music is capable of rapidly twisting and turning your mind so that it resembles a Rubik’s Cube prior to the beginnings of the puzzle’s solution. Everything within your head may feel lined up in the right order when you begin, but then Diskord spins it in reverse, creating a jumble of brilliant colors. In the case of the song we’re presenting today, “Dirigiste Radio Hit“, the music creates overarching moods of madness and ferocity, but how it does this is a source of considerable fascination and continuous thrills. Continue reading »

DIRTY BLACK SUMMER PT. II

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jul 082021
 

 

(A couple months ago we published (here) a “dirty black summer” playlist compiled and written by Neill Jameson (Krieg, Poison Blood), and now we’re happy that he’s followed that with a second installment of recommendations for your summer listening, presented below.)

Normally for me summer means a change of listening habits to old Swedish death metal, Danzig I-IV, and early Queens of the Stone Age, but this year’s been a little different; seasonal listening hasn’t really come into play for me in the way that it has in years past. I understand there’s a bit of a stigma attached to the idea of seasonal listening anyway but that’s the sort of shit boring people with boring existences have to come up with to shit on people with richer emotional lives. Anyway, if you’ve got a moment here’s another list of things I’m listening to.

You’ll see a batch of Death Kvlt Productions releases in nearly any list I put together these days, which I understand can be a little frustrating if you’re into owning physical releases since the label tends to sell out within minutes only to be flipped to kids who won’t actually listen to the fucking records but post pictures of them incessantly on their social media feeds, almost like a roadmap to letting people know they’re assholes without actually getting to know them, saving everyone a lot of time. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEVOID OF THOUGHT — “SIDEREAL NECROSIS”

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Jul 082021
 

 

After releasing a pair of demos and a trio of splits, the time has at last arrived for the Italian death metal band Devoid of Thought to present a debut album — and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that it will give this band the kind of rapt attention that the music so richly deserves.

The fact that it’s being jointly released by such connoisseurs of metallic extremity as Everlasting Spew Records and Caligari Records is a dependable sign of the album’s quality, and the mind-blowing songs on Outer World Graves bear out their good judgment.

And speaking of seizing attention, the album’s cover art by View From the Coffin is guaranteed to do that — as will the track we’re premiering today in the lead-up to the release of Outer World Graves on August 27th. Continue reading »

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