Islander

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: DEPHOSPHORUS, KAUNIS KUOLEMATON, KRAKEN DUUMVIRATE, L’HOMME ABSURDE, MOS GENERATOR, ONSEGÉN ENSEMBLE, ORDINANCE, QONIAK, THANATOPSIS, THOKKIAN VORTEX, THROANE, VOX MORTIS, YOVEL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Sep 122020
 

 

Greetings, ladies and germs. As promised in yesterday’s round-up, I have MANY more selections of new music for your listening pleasure. Does this mean that I’m now caught up in showing you what I’ve discovered? Oh, hell no! I will have more in tomorrow’s SHADES OF BLACK column (and still won’t be caught up).

To speed things along I’m just throwing you the music streams and my usual impulsive commentary, sans artwork. Later today I’ll fill in the art, a few more details about the releases, and the usual ordering and FB links. The following tracks are presented in alphabetical order by band name (with Greece coincidentally represented at the beginning and the end), and I’ll tell you that the music is all over the map stylistically.

DEPHOSPHORUS (Greece)

This first song is such a heavyweight neck-wrecker at the beginning, although filaments of ravishing melody rapidly spiral out from beneath its bone-breaking rhythm. However, the song also explodes in breathtaking fashion — a storm of battering drums, blizzard-like guitars, and truly wild, howling vocal ferocity. The track is tremendously thrilling in all of its course-changes, which include sweeping, fire-bright sonic panoramas; the sludgy heft of the low end is a thrill all its own. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC FRIDAY: KATLA, DARK TRANQUILLITY, UNIFORM, MESSIAH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Sep 112020
 


Katla

 

(Our friend Gonzo returns with anoher Friday selection of new music, this time actually posted by our editor on Friday!)

 Doing these columns over the past few weeks has made me intensely aware of my perception of time. Some weeks feel like days, some days feel like weeks. Nothing makes sense anymore. We’re all living in a Black Mirror episode that’s been left on repeat after being force-fed enough LSD to turn ourselves into spiritual mediums for an alternate dimension where capitalist houseplants have enslaved humanity.

Fortunately, there’s new music to distract us from our inevitable fate at the hands of some power-worshipping azalea. And where would we be without it? I don’t want to imagine that dark alternate reality.

Sticking to the darkness of the current reality seems sinister enough.

The good news? If dark and sinister is your musical preference, I can’t recommend this week’s new releases enthusiastically enough. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HANGING FORTRESS — “BURNED ALIVE”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Sep 112020
 

 

“Hardcore-infused Death Metal seems to be what all the kids are into these days… Made popular by the likes of Nails followed by Gatecreeper, both borrowing heavily from Swede legends Entombed, bands are finally beginning to branch out, shying away from the blatant Stockholm worship for a more American influence (whether for better or worse). While many seem to fall in the pit of mediocrity, some do it convincingly enough to catch my attention.”

Add that’s how the proprietor of Redefining Darkness Records begins his introduction to Hanging Fortress, a band from the benighted confines of Toledo, Ohio. The Cleveland-based label will release the band’s debut album Darkness Devours on November 6th, and to help launch pre-orders for it today we’re bringing you a savage album track named “Burned Alive“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SKYLESS AEONS — “DIMENSIONAL ENTRAPMENT”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Sep 112020
 

 

We’re told that the origins of Skyless Aeons can be traced to “an errant bus ride” in London (Ontario, not England) around 2014 during which drummer Martin Burchill and guitarist Nicholas Luck met up for the first time. It will probably be a while before close encounters on a bus plant the seeds for bands again, but in those less infectious times this one did. And from that meeting, Skyless Aeons grew into a fleshed-out entity following the joinder of vocalist Nathan Ferreira and bassist Steve Oliva.

Those four released a debut EP named The Era of Famine in 2016, but it’s fair to say that the band were still searching for their identity then, using death metal as the backbone of their sound. However, their debut album Drain the Sun, which will be out on October 2nd, is a more distinctive and arresting reflection of the band’s interests. The care devoted through two years of songwriting shows, and the results are both intriguing and very impressive — as you’ll see when you listen to our premiere of an album track called “Dimensional Entrapment“. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: DARK TRANQUILLITY, OMEGAVORTEX, SEPTAGE, WATASHI DAKE, VALDUR, HOLY DEATH, NOVARUPTA, DEAD SHAPE FIGURE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 112020
 

 

Earlier today one of our writers, purporting to speak for all of us, asserted that we at NCS are not perfect. I disagree. I, for one, am perfectly aware of my inability to keep up with the release of new music.

Last night I did manage to plow through the last two days of e-mails in our bulging in-box and checked a few other valued sources. From that effort I added roughly two-dozen new songs to check out, on top of a similar number I had identified the last time I went exploring just a couple of days ago.

A laughable thing to do, of course, given there’s no way I could make my way through all of that in time to write anything for today. So I threw mental darts at the list, with some hits and some misses. The following eight new songs were among the hits. I’ll pick some more for your listening pleasure on Saturday.

DARK TRANQUILLITY (Sweden)

In “Phantom Days” Dark Tranquillity launched the run-up to their new album Moment with a sure-fire crowd-pleaser — nothing terribly different, but capable of stimulating the pleasure centers of fans. I confess that I felt stimulated, though not to the point of tumescence. Will I remember it? That’s a different question. Continue reading »

THINGS WE MISSED: AVERNAL / BAERUS / DEADWOOD TREE / DUMAL / ETHICIST / SWAMP LANTERN

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Sep 112020
 


Avernal

 

(Andy Synn wrote the following six brief reviews, and of course speaks solely for himself in the first sentence despite the breadth of the claim.)

I have a confession to make, on behalf of all of us here at NCS… we’re not perfect.

I know, I know, this admission has probably come as a serious shock to some of you, but it’s true. Sometimes, despite our general all-round awesomeness, we miss things.

But the silver lining to that, of course, is that it gives us a chance to play catch-up now and then and to bring you not one, not two, but six different bands/albums which you might otherwise have missed out on too! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ABYSSAL ASCENDANT — “WOMBS OF TORMENT”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Sep 102020
 

 

Almost exactly one month ago we had the ghoulish pleasure of premiering a track from the forthcoming second album by the French death metal band Abyssal Ascendant. Entitled Chronicles of the Doomed Worlds – Part. II : Deacons of Abhorrence, it will be released by Dolorem Records on October 9th, accompanied by the striking artistic handiwork of Daniele Lupidi.

As on their debut album, Abyssal Ascendant have again drawn their inspirations from the Lovecraftian mythos of The Ancient Ones and the ’90s death metal of such greats as Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, Immolation, and Obituary. Appropriate to their subject matter, the band demonstrate a sure-handed talent for creating sensations of supernatural horror, mindless fear, and slaughtering savagery. And as further proof of that, today we’re following our first premiere with a second one — this one named “Wombs of Torment“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: THE MYOPIA CONDITION — “SEPARATION FROM CLASSIFICATION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 102020
 

 

Hailing from the Red Deer, Alberta, The Myopia Condition came together under a hybrid of heavy influences that ranged from the cathartic spirit of metalcore to the divergent grooves of Meshuggah and Lamb of God. They opened enough eyes to be selected for the finals of the Canadian Wacken Metal Battle in 2018 and festival appearances that included Armstrong Metalfest and Loud As Hell. And now the band are preparing for the October 16 release of their debut album Event Horizon.

Today we’re presenting a lyric video for the album’s first single, “Separation From Classification“, and it too is a hybrid, though not entirely what you might expect from the influences listed above. Continue reading »

EXIST: “EGOIISTA”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 102020
 

 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli provides a detailed review of the new album by Baltimore-based Exist, which was released on August 28th by Prosthetic Records.)

You ever hear a band that has remarkably talented musicians, some definite top-tier songwriting chops, and unique sound elements to distinguish them, but you felt like they themselves were their own worst enemy in achieving the pinnacle of what they could do?

That was Exist for me.

Exist’s last full-length So True, So Bound was a good album, but I found this band extremely difficult to talk about or even quantify and I found that record, while good, to be inconsistent.  This mainly came down to Exist getting stuck in a rut, in too much of a focus on atmospherics and passive sorts of grooves.  These guys really want to be Cynic 3.0 in the worst way, and that’s not meant to be a knock in any way shape or form.  Except unlike Cynic, they don’t forget their death metal roots, which leads to a progressive experience that kind of mixes the best aspects of newer Cynic combined with the primal emotion and intensity of albums like Focus, Death’s latter-era work, or even Atheist’s commitment to discernable nonsense. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TOXAEMIA — “TOXAEMIA”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 092020
 

 

What causes a cult Swedish death metal band to come back to life after almost 30 years of silence? Not fame and fortune, at least not in the case of Toxaemia. Their roots go back to 1989, and their early demos and other recordings in 1990 and 1991 can legitimately be considered part of the pioneering sound of early Swedish death metal, but they’re not a household name in 2020. Rather than trying to cash in on a name, it’s a much better guess that this revival was spawned by one thing and one thing only: passion for the music.

Sure, you might guess that nostalgia had something to do with it, but when you hear the music they’ve now made on a debut album that gestated this long, what you feel is fire and fury. The name of that album is Where Paths Divide, and it’s set for release by Emanzipation Productions on November 20th. One single from that album (“Pestilence”) has already been released, and today we’re premiering a second one that shares the band’s name. Continue reading »

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