Islander

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NEPHREN-KA — “L’ABOMINATION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 052021
 

 

It would seem like a paradox to most people (though not to many of the fiends who visit our site) that music which violently and ruthlessly assaults the senses can fuel a feeling of outlandish fun (as well as triggering a big discharge of adrenaline).

When riotous, high-speed brutalization is inflicted with no care for restraint or mercy, it can become terrifically exhilarating rather than repellant — at least when the experience is created by technically skilled executioners and diabolical songwriters. Even better when it becomes apparent that subtle structures and seductive accents exist within the explosive chaos, so that you feel the compulsion to have the experience again and again — and find even more to like about it with each renewal.

All of that is true in the case of “L’Abomination“, the song we’re premiering today from the forthcoming third album by Nephren-Ka, From Agony To Transcendence, which will be released by Dolorem Records on June 25th. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: FREDRIK SÖDERBERG (DAWN)

 Interviews  8 Responses »
May 052021
 

 

(We welcome NF, a new contributor to NCS. He has brought us the following interview of Fredrik Söderberg of the Swedish band DAWN, who should need no introduction, as well as lots of photos, some of which are being published for the first time.)

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Fredrik, thank you for taking the time to do this interview. It is an absolute pleasure to be having this conversation with you. Let’s go back to the very origin of DAWN. How, where, when, and why did DAWN come to be?


-Fredrik rehearsing-

Fredrik: Thanks for your support. It’s an honor to have this conversation with you today, I really appreciate it! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE FLIGHT OF SLEIPNIR — “SERVITUDE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 042021
 

 

Like a certain other band whose music was the subject of a premiere today, The Flight of Sleipnir is one we’ve been following for a long time as they’ve accumulated a substantial and increasingly impressive discography. In a feature more than six years ago devoted to their first four albums (created when the band was a duo, bound together by a clear and passionate love of heavy metal, heartfelt melody, and heroic Norse folklore), our Andy Synn characterized the music as a distinctive amalgam “whose earth-shaking, doomy power and sombre, progressive inclinations incorporate binding threads of folk-inflected melody and slithering strands of blackened fury”, while making room for “lengthy acoustic passages and folkish murmurations”.

In our review of the fifth album, V, Andy noted (here) that the songs were, on average, “longer and more intricate than on previous albums, with a greater sense of light and shade than ever before, their hidden depths and subtle secrets concealed beneath waves of gleaming melody and brilliant metallic clarity”. And their sixth album, 2017’s sublime Skadi, only enhanced the strength of the band’s reputation for crafting richly textured, dynamically nuanced, and stylistically diverse conglomerations of massive heaviness, acoustic serenity, and much, much more in between.

And thus we’ve been eagerly awaiting The Flight of Sleipnir’s seventh album, Eventide, which is now calendared for release by Eisenwald on May 28th. From that album, we’re proud to premiere its second advance track, “Servitude“, and to bring you a brief interview with guitarist/bassist Clayton Cushman. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WITHERED — “CASTING IN WAIT”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 042021
 

 

Withered‘s Verloren, which is now set for release in June by Season of Mist Underground Activists, is one of the albums we named earlier in the year as among our most anticipated 2021 releases. It follows 2016’s Grief Relic (reviewed here), which we hailed as one of the best albums of that year. And that frighteningly superb album in turn followed three previous full-lengths collectively reviewed here in a report that attempted to sum up their sound as “blending the raving savagery of Black Metal, with the wrenching heaviness of Death Metal, and the slime-drenched grooves of Sludge, each one bathed in a scalding miasma of acid-rain atmospherics and bleak, bitter misanthropy.”

In a nutshell, we are big fans.

But the eager anticipation we have felt for Verloren isn’t simply a function of how phenomenal Withered‘s track record has been over a career that’s now entering a third decade. It’s also a matter of intrigue, because Withered have most definitely followed the beat of their own contrarian drummer, and the beat changes, in thought-provoking and sometimes confounding ways, while the constantly genre-bending music nevertheless continues to hit home with tremendous visceral and emotional power. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): KOSMODEMONIC — “LIMINAL LIGHT”

 Premieres  1 Response »
May 032021
 

 

There may be only two succinct statements that it’s possible to make about Kosmodemonic‘s new album: The first is that it’s not possible to sum up the music succinctly. The second is that the music is really damned good!

The reason that attempting to capture what this New York group have achieved on Liminal Light is so tough is that the songs are so multi-faceted. Even if you knew nothing about the line-up, it quickly becomes evident in listening to the album that their inspirations are manifold and their tastes eclectic (even if they seem to share a pretty grim world-view). One prominent hint of that comes from the comment we received from James Rauh of Transylvanian Recordings, who will be releasing this new album on May 7th: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ASCÈTE — “LA LANTERNE DU MORT”

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May 032021
 

 

The French band Ascète have drawn their inspiration from Peirigòrd Nègre in the southwest of France, an area described as one that presents the grim face of a forgotten and forlorn countryside marked by ruined minor landmarks, where an aging populus of “small, poor people of the rural lands slowly die in the shadow of indifference of big cities’ administrations”. We are told that this miserable area is also home to a dark and strange folklore, which has provided lyrical inspiration to the band as well.

How has this French foursome translated these inspirations into sound? The answers are revealed in a debut album named Calamites & les Calamités, which is set for international digital release on May 28 (with physical editions on slightly different dates) by one of our favorite labels, Antiq Records. One hint of what the album holds for listeners has been provided through the release of a song called “Courroux du Lébérou“, and today we present another through our premiere of “La Lanterne du Mort“. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): THY DARKENED SHADE, AMESTIGON, INCONCESSUS LUX LUCIS, SHAARIMOTH, VAINA

 SHADES OF BLACK  5 Responses »
May 032021
 

 

Part 2 of this week’s Shades of Black isn’t as voluminous as Part 1 was. I had two objectives in making it: First, to give some early attention to a four-way split many of us have been eagerly awaiting for a very long time; and second, to follow through in recommending an album I had originally intended to include in Part 2 of last week’s column, but had to cut because I ran out of time.

SAMAELILITH: A CONJUNCTION OF THE FIREBORN

The long-awaited split is SamaeLilith: A Conjunction of the Fireborn, and it combines the prodigious talents of four groups we’ve been writing about with admiration for years: Thy Darkened Shade (Greece), Amestigon (Austria), Inconcessus Lux Lucis (UK), and Shaarimoth (Norway). It will be released on June 30th by W.T.C. Productions.

Each band contributed multiple tracks to the split, ranging from three to five, for a total of more than an hour and a half of music spread across 15 songs. Although I’ve been fortunate to recently receive the complete album, this isn’t something I want to rush into just in order to publish one of the first reviews. Just counting the minutes alone, there’s a lot to take in, and if past is prologue, one hurried listen to what these bands have done here won’t do their efforts justice either. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): ANAPILIN, PRÉSAGES, SXUPERION, ZGARD, TRHÄ, MORTIFERO, ZWEISPALT, VULTURE LORD, NUCLEAR REVENGE

 SHADES OF BLACK  7 Responses »
May 022021
 

 

Part 1 of today’s column is in the vein of the giant round-up I prepared yesterday — a lot of music and not a lot of words. Though the music is of course “in the vein” of black metal, or at least in spiritual/aesthetic kinship with it (according to my own perceptions), you won’t find any two bands here that sound like they were raised in the same litter.

Part 2, which may appear later today or may appear tomorrow (because I haven’t written it yet), is devoted to four songs from a forthcoming (and long-awaited) four-way split, and a frightening album I meant to include in this column last week before I ran out of time.

ANAPILIN (Lithuania)

Rennie (of starkweather) pointed me to the song and lyric video I’ve chosen to lead with. At that time, it was apparent that an album by these gas-masked Lithuanians was on the way, but neither of us could find a name for it or a release date.

Those mysteries were solved this morning when the album just dropped out of the sky, fully formed. But by the time I awakened and saw Rennie’s message about the full release, I didn’t have time enough to listen to it, so I’m sticking with the original plan of focusing just on the one song and video — but including the full stream as well. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: AT THE GATES, BEFORE THE DAWN, WOMBBATH, FRACTAL UNIVERSE, SEEMING EMPTINESS, IMPURE WILHELMINA, HESPER PAYNE, CULTES DES GHOULES, GRAVE MIASMA, VILDHJARTA, PERTURBATOR, MAGGOT CROWN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
May 012021
 

 

It’s been a long time since I resorted to this Overflowing Streams format for spreading the word about new music I’ve enjoyed, but last week seemed more even more insane than usual — just a ton of new tracks were revealed by old gods, new gods, and assorted minor demons. As bloated as the following collection may seem, it’s still far from complete — I’ll include a few more in tomorrow’s SHADES OF BLACK column.

Without further ado, here we go with lots of sights sounds and not many words, though I do encourage you to add your own in the Comments.

AT THE GATES

Speaking of old gods, I might have included the news about Darkthrone album No. 19 (Eternal Hails), but there’s no music yet, so I’ll wait. You can peep the cover art here. But among the old gods, At the Gates did give us a new song, and I had to lead with it. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CAGE OF CREATION — “I AM THE VOID II”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Apr 302021
 

 

This marks the fourth time in five years that we’ve written about the unorthodox, genre-splicing Russian band Cage of Creation. The first time, in 2017, was our review of a record named III, which completed a trilogy of EPs. The second, in 2018, was a discussion of another EP named I Am the Void, which was the commencement of yet another trilogy. And then last year we premiered and reviewed their most recent full-length, Into Nowhere II. The persistent theme of all these written reactions was one of continual fascination with the band’s unbridled experimentation — within the context of songs that were nevertheless so seductive that they were damned difficult to get out of our heads.

The occasion for today’s happy reunion with Cage of Creation is the premiere stream of a new EP entitled I Am the Void II, which will be released on May 16th by Devoted Art Propaganda on 12″ vinyl. As the title suggests, it’s the second part of the new trilogy that began with I Am the Void in 2018, a three-part work that thematically focuses on experiences related to psychoactive explorations. This new EP presents two original works and a cover of Bethlehem’s “Nexus“. Continue reading »

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