Islander

WHITE STONES: “KUARAHY”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 022020
 

 

(This is the fourth installment in a seven-album review orgy by our man DGR, who is attempting to free his mind for year-end season by clearing away a backlog of write-ups for albums he has enjoyed in 2020. We’ve been running these on consecutive days — except we missed Friday — and today’s subject is a debut album released last spring via Nuclear Blast by the Spanish band White Stones.)

The March 13, 2020 album Kuarahy by the band White Stones is such a fascinating release for a number of reasons. This far out from its release, it’s been interesting to see how things have played out for the group’s debut release via Nuclear Blast. On the homefront, we covered the music videos in the lead-up to the debut of this project led by Martin Mendez (of Opeth bassist fame), but upon full release it kind of full off the site’s radar. We’ll rectify that here.

This is a record I’ve listened to a multitude of times since its release, and by the end of multiple listening sections and a seven-month writing delay it remains stubbornly ‘interesting’, in part because what keeps grabbing me seems to nebulous. Every time I think I have a hold on it, it wriggles away and moves just slightly out of vision again. It’s a bizarre creature that seems to exist permanently ‘elsewhere’, even though  at first glance it never seems to garner much more than ‘that’s some prog-death music alright’. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: DODENKROCHT, SHAGOR, NÉVOA, TYHJÄ, DØDSFERD, TE RUKI

 SHADES OF BLACK  19 Responses »
Nov 012020
 

 

This worked out okay. I woke up at 7:00 thinking I’d be late finishing SHADES OF BLACK again, and then realized after my first cup of coffee that I’d forgotten to set the clocks back. Suddenly, I had an extra hour. Fortunately, I also made all of today’s selections yesterday and had even added all the artwork, links, and a few notes. It just remained to create some complete sentences, not enough of them to qualify as careful reviews, but hopefully enough to tantalize you.

Tantalizing is the strategy of the day, because this week’s collection includes three complete albums and a three-track demo, in addition to two singles, and although they all merit the kind of thoughtful and thorough reviews that most other NCS writers manage, it’s beyond what I have time to do, even with an extra hour. So, please become tantalized.

DODENKROCHT

I’m beginning with one of the singles, a lyric video released two days ago for the title track to The Dying All. That’s the fourth album by the Dutch band Dodenkrocht, coming out on November 27th via the Swiss label Auric Records. Continue reading »

HALLOWEEN HELL: BENIGHTED, MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY, VEGAS., PUPIL SLICER, SICK N’ BEAUTIFUL, DESASTER, DECAYED, HELGAMITE, GROMADAH, PANYCHIDA, TRANSILVANIA, NOIRE ANTIDOTE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Oct 312020
 


Benighted – photo by Anthony Dubois

 

While slugging coffee this morning I got my daily text-message alert from the county health department reminding me that the safest way to celebrate Halloween is to stay inside my home. As if I needed that fucking reminder, on top of all the other miserable reminders that this Samhain will be like no other in our lifetimes.

I can’t even count the predictable absence of trick-or-treaters as a silver lining to this cloud, because they never came around our place even before the pandemic made that a potentially self-destructive choice. The screaming of the loris horde and the carefully-placed pools of guts might have had something to do with that.

So, most of us will have to celebrate the most metal day of the year stuck inside playing with ourselves our pets and trying to forget that global infections are now setting new records, that the U.S. set its own new record yesterday with more than 99,000 new cases (!), and that Sean Connery died. What a fucking year it’s been, and still two months of fresh hell to go before it ends.

But we can still listen to the devil’s music tonight, and here at NCS we need to do our part to enliven that experience and help you forget. So here’s an extravagantly-sized playlist of mostly brand new songs and videos that I assembled this morning.

BENIGHTED (France)

If you haven’t had enough breeeeee in your diet, we’ll fix that right away. Also included in the food groups within this first dish are cyclotron-speed drumming, incendiary riffage, back-breaking grooves, splendid blaring chords, carnivorous roaring, and a generally rabid approach to life. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 126): DYSYLUMN

 Album Reviews, THE SYNN REPORT  No Responses »
Oct 302020
 

 

(In this Synn Report for the month of October 2020, Andy Synn assembles reviews of all the albums released by the French band Dysylumn, the most recent of which appeared earlier this month via Signal Rex.)

Recommended for fans of: Schammasch, Sinmara, Blut Aus Nord

I know, I know, this is the third time in a row where The Synn Report has zeroed in on a band playing some form of Black Metal. And, I promise, next month’s edition will break the pattern. But I honestly couldn’t let October pass by without taking the opportunity to completely immerse myself in the pitch-black back-catalogue of French duo Dysylumn, whose latest album was released earlier this month.

If it helps matters, the band’s earliest works erred much more towards the Blackened Death Metal side of things  albeit with a heavy, borderline hypnotic, atmospheric presence on top of all that, so this edition of The Synn Report is still set to be strikingly different to the ones which preceded it.

But what I’m really looking forward to here is an opportunity to chart the band’s evolution from their imposing Black/Death early output through to their more atmosphere-intense, poisonously “progressive” Black Metal of their more recent work, as it’s only be understanding where they came from that we can truly appreciate what they’ve become. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ATOMIC WITCH — “DEATH, SEX, AND SATAN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Oct 302020
 

 

When we last checked in with Atomic Witch at our putrid site, about 14 months ago, the occasion was a premiere of the title track from their first EP, Void Curse. It caused us to conclude that the long-time disciples of the Cleveland metal and hardcore scene who formed Atomic Witch picked a damned good band name. As we wrote then, that EP “couples the wild radioactive energy of a runaway nuclear meltdown with the weird and witchy feeling of a supernatural orgy”. Together, those four tracks were supercharged with furious, pulse-pounding energy, head-spinning instrumental changes, and unhinged vocal intensity. The genre-bending music created a maniacal atmosphere, whole-heartedly indulging in a musical blood-spraying riot from beginning to end.

Now, 14 months later, the band’s label Seeing Red Records is on the verge of releasing a new Atomic Witch EP, entitled Death, Sex, and Satan. They picked Halloween as the release date (tomorrow!), for reasons that will become obvious when you find out what they’ve done — and yes, you can find out right away, because we’re premiering a full stream of the whole thing. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NIBIRU — “ALKAEST” (AN EXCERPT)

 Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 302020
 

 

The music of the Italian trio Nibiru is nearly unclassifiable. You can find references to their impetuous and esoteric creations as Ritual Psychedelic Sludge or Blackened Sludge & Drone. The press materials for their new album Panspermia state that “the influences of Neurosis, Black Sabbath or MZ.412 have always been pretty clear”, but those materials also report that “in terms of an atmosphere, Nibiru relate themselves to the post-punk/darkwave scenes of the early ’80s (Fields Of The Nephilim, Virgin Prunes, early Christian Death, Joy Division) and to the pioneers of Depressive Black Metal, as well as bands such as Xasthur or Shining.”

Those are all useful clues, but they also underscore the point above — that the music is extremely difficult to capture through genre labels and other typical reference points. Their non-musical inspirations, which range from occultists and esotericists such as Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Austin Osman Spare and Julius Evola, to “psychiatric essays, a deep inner illness and a peculiar cult for the actor Klaus Kinski”, also provide clues, but they too are a bit bewildering.

Even the premiere we’re presenting today in advance of the new album’s November 13 release by Argonauta Records, doesn’t function as a summing up — not even close — but it does provide a tantalizing glimpse. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PNEUMA HAGION — “ANTICOSMIC INCANTATIONS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 292020
 

 

For those not in the know, the death metal band Pneuma Hagion is one of the many projects of the prolific Texas-based vocalist/multi-instrumentalist known here as R., whose other bands include Intestinal Disgorge, The Howling Void, Endless Disease, and Excantation. Under the guise of Pneuma Hagion he has released a handful of demos, splits, and an EP since 2015, and on December 1st will at last release a debut album through Nuclear War Now! Productions. Its name is Voidgazer.

The album’s title reflects not only some of the music’s themes but also its creator’s grim and gloomy perspectives on existence. As he explained in a recent in-depth interview (here), at its core the album is about alienation, and through various symbolic expressions it grapples with the idea that humans are beings of spirit imprisoned in fleshly vessels in an earthly domain that too often make human existence feel pointless. “The world of flesh and matter is ruled by a cruel, tyrannical Demiurge, and we feel this universe to be cruel and evil because we are, at our core, alien to this place. We are from a place that is not a place, and is everything that this place is not.”

This perspective, it turns out, is mirrored in R.‘s own personal turmoils. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HERETIC RITUAL — “BLACK PERVERTED ABOMINATION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 292020
 

 

Like just about every other metal genre descriptor that’s been in common usage for more than about ten years, “blackened death metal” (or “black/death”) no longer provides a specific compass point to guide listeners. At one time it was closely associated (at least in this writer’s mind) with “war metal”, but the term clearly encompasses an increasingly wide range of stylistic approaches, with greater and lesser degrees of melody and significant variations in the extent to which bands employ ingredients from the even the more expansive realms of black metal and death metal.

But the Mexican band Heretic Ritual are still pretty firmly positioned in the war metal sector of the blackened death metal soundscape. Yet they execute their assaults of iron-fisted genocidal savagery in a way that, while undeniably raw and vicious, doesn’t wallow in near-formless murky abrasion and relentless hammering, and the music is definitely not monotonous (let’s be honest, it’s not hard to think of many bands who are guilty of all those failings).

We will prove this to you through today’s exclusive premiere of “Black Perverted Abomination“, a song from this slaughtering trio’s new album War-Desecration-Genocide / Passages of Infinite Hatred, which is set for release on November 10th by Death In Pieces Records and Goatthrone Records. Continue reading »

BASIC TORTURE PROCEDURE: “DOMINATION THROUGH TORTURE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 292020
 

 

(Vonlughlio has unearthed a blast of buzzsaw d-beat goregrind and gives it a hearty recommendation in this review.)

One of the best things for me is discovering music out of the blue, either by a recommendation from a friend, scrolling on the internet, Bandcamp, or seeing a FB post. That’s what happened in the case of Basic Torture Procedure, a goregrind act formed this year whose three members are spread across Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

They independently released  their debut album Domination Through Torture on May 17th, but of course yours truly only discovered them like a month ago and went on their Bandcamp to purchase the tape version (the only available physical format). This for me is one of the best music discoveries of 2020. I am somewhat picky in the goregrind department and their music captured me right away. Continue reading »

DEMONICAL: “WORLD DOMINATION”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 292020
 

 

(This is the third installment in a seven-album review orgy by our man DGR, who is attempting to free his mind for year-end season by clearing away a backlog of write-ups for albums he has enjoyed in 2020. Today’s subject is the newest album by the long-running Swedish death metal band Demonical, which was released on October 23rd by Agonia Records.)

Even though Demonical have been around for six albums and a swath of material in between, it’s been interesting to watch how the band have wound up unintentionally re-contextualized alongside bassist Martin Schulman‘s other works, like Centinex. The two groups share common DNA through Demonical’s initial founding around a core of former Centinex crew and the timing of their releases being so close to each other. It makes it seem as if the two are playing off of each other.

Whereas Centinex is rooted firmly in a classic Swede-death sound and all the rock-striking-boulder thump that is contained therein, Demonical are the other side of that death metal coin, a more modern-sounding project that sidles up perfectly alongside the distorted chainsaw riff and blasting drums of today. Both groups have also maintained very fluid lineups, with both gaining new vocalists in place of October Tide‘s multi-talented – and at one point very prolific – Alexander Högbom. Demonical have been a little more steady in comparison to Centinex’s full refresh, but the additions of Christofer Säterdal on vocals and returning drummer Ronnie Bergerstäl in the time between Chaos Manifesto and the group’s newest album World Domination has certainly kept things interesting. Continue reading »

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