Islander

ANAAL NATHRAKH: “ENDARKENMENT”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Sep 212020
 

 

(Here’s Andy Synn‘s review of the new album from Anaal Nathrakh, which is set for release on October 2nd by Metal Blade.)

They say (whoever “they” are) that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

But when that dog has been outfighting, outfoxing, and outfucking the competition, cleanly and consistently, for pretty much the last twenty years, then why would you want to mess with success?

That’s the position that the two-headed rabid pit-bull named Anaal Nathrakh find themselves in right now, as while the band’s modus operandi may have evolved and mutated a fair bit since their Total Fucking Necro days, the underlying formula for their sound [grinding velocity x blackened venom + voracious hooks] remains practically unaltered.

The problem with this sort of approach, of course, is that at some point you’re going to run straight into the creative (and commercial) roadblock that is “the law of diminishing returns”, where just doing the same thing over and over again has less and less impact each time.

So, with the release of their eleventh album right around the corner, the big question now is… do Anaal Nathrakh have anything new to offer the world, or is it time to take them out back and put them out of their misery? Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INTO OBLIVION — “EAGLE OF THE SERPENT SUN”

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Sep 212020
 

 

Winds of Serpentine Ascension is the title of a new EP by the Toronto band Into Oblivion, and we’ll call it an EP because its tracklist is just three songs long — although they collectively amount to 35 minutes of music. The first two tracks, “Where Winds Wail and Gnaw” and “The Shattering Ascent” are longer than average, both of them falling between seven and eight minutes in length, but they lead up to a truly extravagant musical odyssey in “Eagle of the Serpent Sun“. That song, which we’re presenting today in advance of the EP’s September 29 release by Hessian Firm, is almost 20 minutes long.

The song is an odyssey in more than duration alone. As the band lead us through the richly varying movements of the song and its dramatic range of instrumentation and moods, it really does seem that we have embarked on a harrowing and heart-breaking journey, one that may only end in death for all concerned. And not only because of the EP’s cover art, it seems like the narrative of a warrior’s journey that crosses the sea and hostile lands. Continue reading »

CULT OF LILITH: “MARA”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 212020
 

 

(This is TheMadIsraeli’s review of the debut album by the Icelandic band Cult of Lilith, which was released on September 4 by Metal Blade Records.)

It’s rare any more that modern attempts at technical death metal impress.  A lot of the bands who are producing good stuff were around at least five years ago, if not longer.  So when a band come around who are complete newbies, absolute new blood, and they come out swinging with a debut that crushes the status quo of the hum-drum of bad Beneath The Massacre worship, I have to give credit where credit is due.

The thing about technical death metal that a lot of the zoomers (for lack of a better term) don’t get, is that it’s about demonstrating instrumental virtuosity while still maintaining compelling songwriting chops.  Suffocation has this, Necrophagist had this, Exocrine has this, you get the idea.  It’s hard to find technical death metal bands nowadays who write real songs with definitive elements of progression and logical structure and cohesion while also writing crazy complicated riffs or sections that push both technical skill and endurance.

That brings me to today’s subject, Icelandic upstarts Cult Of Lilith. Continue reading »

NIGHT CROWNED: “IMPIUS VIAM”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Sep 212020
 

 

(Here’s DGR’s review of the new album by the Swedish band Night Crowned, which is out now via Noble Demon Records.)

Night Crowned‘s debut album Impius Viam came out in the tail end of February and it has felt like a musical mental roadblock on this end ever since. We were lucky in being able to cover the band’s premieres at this site and even got their drummer to sit down and talk with us for a bit, yet when the full album came out we never fully sat down to dedicate words to it. Yet it’s been in constant rotation here, an ugly sort of beast clawing at the back of the skull.

The group’s hybridizing of a collective of extreme metal genres — with a heavy ratio of melodic black metal dominating the recipe — seems to have spread like an infection, and in between the spinning of newer releases this year, there’s always that haunting voice in the back of the head with its incessant whisper “what if you gave that Night Crowned disc another listen?” Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (MISCELLANY EDITION): IN VACUO, MOROKH, CONSTANT NAUSEA, AKANTHA, NĀV

 MISCELLANY, SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Sep 202020
 

 

I mentioned in the first Part of today’s column that I overcame the usual brain-freeze brought about by the overwhelming volume of interesting new music by separating the attractions into advance tracks and complete new releases. Today’s earlier post was devoted to advance tracks, and I mentioned that I had an idea for how to handle the new complete releases.

In the early days of NCS I began a recurring series called MISCELLANY, which got up to 78 installments before it died away from neglect. The self-imposed rule for that series was that I would pick bands I’d never heard before and listen to one (or maybe two) songs from something new they’d released, record my immediate impressions, and then leave it to readers to decide whether to explore further. That strategy allowed me to sample from albums and EPs that I didn’t have time to review in full, without knowing in advance how the music would strike me (or you).

And that’s almost the same strategy I’ve used in this post — almost, because some of what you’ll find below came to me via recommendations from people I trust. So it’s not quite the shot-in-the-dark of the old MISCELLANY series.

IN VACUO

To begin I picked “Pavlína Kováříkov“, the lead-off track from this Hungarian band’s just-released third album, Urbain Noir — and man, I love it. The guitar leads have a kind of yowling but spooky and sorcerous sound, and the way in which In Vacuo introduce and then twist the central melody is ingenious. The song as a whole proves to be a twisting (and twisted) experience – heavy and battering, deep and drilling, moody and murmuring, jolting and groaning, thrilling in its maniacally glittering tremolo’d vibrations and blood-curdling in the hostility of its varying vocals. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: KYRIOS, HORNCROWNED, GUIGNOL NOIR, DEVOURER, ODIOSIOR

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Sep 202020
 

 

When I began to think about what to include in this week’s column I had the usual brain-freeze brought about by the immense volume of choices. This week I decided to deal with that by herding all the singles and advance tracks from forthcoming albums into one stockade, and filling another one with full-lengths that have already recently been released.

From the first herd I picked the tracks included below. I have an idea about how to deal with the riot in the second group, all viciously clamoring for attention, but I won’t say what that is in case I’m not able to follow through. Onward!

KYRIOS

I would like to create a sub-genre called Queasy Black Metal, reserved for music that roils your guts like food that’s gone bad, and messes with your mind like a demonically conceived hallucinogen. I would put this first song under that heading. Its squirming dissonance, freakish angularity, and unstable rhythms are intestinally upsetting and mentally disorienting. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: DØDSFERD, AUBE GRISE, ARKHERON THODOL, OVTRENOIR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Sep 192020
 

 

When I woke up this morning I thought there was no way I would be doing something as seemingly inconsequential as listening to music and writing about it. The awful confluence of events in the country this year — the rampant disease, the hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths, the economic collapse, the vivid reminders that systemic racism still thrives, the burning of immense swaths of Western forest and the immersion of millions in a miasma of toxic smoke — just got worse again because of a single death, one that will give a mentally defective tyrant and his sycophantic enablers the chance to finish the job of tearing the country apart. Can we not get even one tiny fucking break from 2020?

And then I thought, we do get tiny fucking breaks every day. Every good new song is a break, maybe tiny in the grander scheme of things, but if 2020 has taught us anything it’s that hopes for bigger breaks are likely to be dashed without mercy.

So, I listened to some new songs, just a few, but enough to get a bit of a break. Maybe I picked them because they express (and perhaps reinforce) my current dark mood of rage mixed with despair, but I guess that’s often what musical catharsis is all about. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DYATLOVE — “DIE!KILL!PIG!”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Sep 182020
 

 

“I feel my throat tightening. It’s not the coronavirus or smoke. It’s rage—rage radiating up from my belly and my heart. We’re trapped inside because of the pandemic and because of the fires, but ultimately we are most confined by the inequality, selfishness, and greed that created this moment. Even in the wide-open West, we’re still stuck in the United States of America.” — Emma Maris, The Atlantic, Sept. 10, 2020

Unlike Emma Maris (and me), Dyatlove aren’t stuck in the United States. But they’re from the West, albeit the Canadian West (Vancouver BC, to be precise), and like Emma Maris (and me) they’ve probably been breathing what used to be forests in Washington and Oregon during the last week (and counting). They also sound plenty pissed-off, about some of the same things.

The band’s music isn’t the kind of extreme metal we usually cover at this site, but I’d say they’re “adjacent” — and there’s an explosive emotional fury in the song and video we’re presenting today that’s so cathartic (and so demolishing) that it’s more than welcome here. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC FRIDAY: TOMORROW’S RAIN, DARKENED, WAYFARER, CARCASS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 182020
 

 

(Here’s another Friday round-up of new music compiled by Seattle-based NCS contributor Gonzo.)

I, for one, am looking forward to cooler weather.

Not only will cooler temperatures bring about an overdue ending of the wildfires currently making life miserable for the Northwest, but also an ideal environment for listening to your audial brutality of choice.

And while it’s certainly kvlt as fuck to stand in the middle of a Norwegian forest in corpse paint and spiky gauntlets while cranking up the lo-fi black metal, it’s by no means required. Some of this week’s new releases may inspire it, though. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HEADS FOR THE DEAD — “AT THE DEAD OF NIGHT”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Sep 182020
 

 

Roughly two years after the release of their Serpent’s Curse debut album, Heads For the Dead have risen from whatever moldering, lightless tomb where they’ve been hibernating, and they’re hungry… for your flesh. Or at least they certainly sound famished for the delights of crunching bones, rendered entrails, and gushing ichor based on the new song we’re about to present.

That debut album was a massive-sounding exposition of Swedish death metal with an attraction to the tropes of old-school horror, and an addictive work of mauling terror it was, as exemplified by our dropping of one of its tracks into our list of Most Infectious Extreme Metal songs that year. Based on this new song — “At the Dead of Night“, which we’re presenting through a lyric video — they’ve lost none of their ability to crush, rend, and frighten in the intervening time.

But before we get to it, that image at the top of this post isn’t the cover of their forthcoming sophomore album Into the Red — this is: Continue reading »

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