Islander

Sep 062020
 

 

The “aggressive” sound of black metal — the blazing tremolo runs, the blasting drums, the shrieking and rasping vocals, the often abrasive levels of distortion — is one of the genre’s hallmarks. But black metal doesn’t always sound angry. Even when the aggressive sound is present and accounted for, the music can also seem dolorous, haunting, hysterical, or mystical (among other sensations). Today’s collection includes many of those other emotional touch-points — as well as fury.

NUBIVAGANT (Italy)

To begin, I’ve chosen two songs from Roaring Eye, the debut album by a one-person Italian project named Nubivagant. The album will draw attention because that one person is both Thorns and Omega, the drummer of Blut Aus Nord, Chaos Invocation, Enepsigos, Darvaza, Fides Inversa, and many other groups). Here, he performs all instruments, and he sings in a tenor voice. That’s right, these songs are exceptions to our rule, but well-earned ones because Omega really can sing. Continue reading »

Sep 052020
 

 

For me, this past work-week was much like the one before (and the one before that, and the one before that), i.e., I had to devote so much time to the fucking day job that I couldn’t keep up with the usual flood of new metal, much less pull together any new-music round-ups. This morning I spent some time trying to catch up, at least a little, and from that exercise I picked the following nine new songs and videos.

I arranged things in a particular way — beginning with something that’s rousing, then going down into sadness (verging on despair) with a block of songs that happen to include clean singing, then beginning to pull out of that mood with reminders that not not everything is horrible (and with music that’s more extreme), and then concluding with something that ought to perk you up again.

GAVRANOVI (Serbia)

Six months ago my Serbian friend Miloš pointed me to “Pjevanija prva” (“Cry of Yore”), the fantastic first song released by the Serbian band Gavranovi (a word that means “ravens”). I still know very little about the band, though now I know a bit more than I did then.

Gavranovi’s frontman is Nefas, who was the vocalist for the great black metal band The Stone for almost 20 years. A second member, Janković, who seems to be the principal instrumentalist, plays the gusle, a traditional horsehair-string instrument that dates back to the 9th century. And there are three more members, all of whom also perform vocals — Matković (who’s also credited as a guitarist), Sokolović, and Rančić. Continue reading »

Sep 042020
 

 

When we speak of an album as “ambitious”, we might mean different things — perhaps as little as a band simply trying to do something they’ve never attempted before, or perhaps as momentous as when a group reaches toward high levels of songwriting extravagance and performance intensity that, if successful, could leave listeners shaken or spellbound, or mentally and emotionally altered, to a degree that more commonplace achievements don’t achieve. On their new album Cosmogenie, Dysylumn’s ambitions are of the latter kind, but don’t stop there.

The album is also a massive work, extending in length to an hour and a half. And conceptually it spans three separate-yet-unified chapters, each one with its own cover art, with subjects that include (to quote from press materials for the album) “the creation of everything from nothing, in the immensity of emptiness; the formation of the primordial chaos, forming little by little the concretization of the elements; and these same elements that disperse in an infinite space until their extinction.” And thus the three chapters in the album are respectively named Apparition, Dispersion, and Extinction.

Of course, ambitions are merely goals. The loftier the ambitions, the greater the difficulty in achieving them and the higher the risk of failure. In the case of music, the test of success is in the listening. What we have for you today is a part of that test for Dysylumn, a premiere of the second Part of Cosmogenie’s second chapter, “Dispersion“, in advance of the album’s release on October 9th by Signal Rex. Continue reading »

Sep 042020
 

 

(This is Andy Synn‘s review of an expanded EP by the Detroit band Jesus Wept, released by Redefining Darkness Records on August 21st.)

Let’s make one thing clear. Apartheid Redux is, as you might have guessed from its name, not a totally new release, even though this is the first time it’s being featured here.

As a matter of fact four of these six tracks (glossing over, for now, the fun but disposable WASP cover which appears on some editions) were first heard on Jesus Wept’s appropriately crush-tastic and catchy-as-hell debut EP, Crushing Apartheid.

But, thanks to Redefining Darkness Records, who recently decided they’d be the ones to pluck the group from relative obscurity, the music from that record, along with two additional (and similarly killer) tracks is finally getting a much-needed and well-deserved wider release. Continue reading »

Sep 042020
 

 

(Andy Synn introduces our premiere of a new cover song by the German band Phantom Winter.)

This site’s history with German sludgemongers Phantom Winter goes back a number of years now.

In fact we’ve been fans of the band ever since their debut back in 2015, and just last year I selected their stunning second album, Sundown Pleasures as one of the best records of the entire decade.

So when the band got in touch to ask me to help them premiere their impressively ugly and abrasive take on Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” – all in service of a good cause – I couldn’t say no! Continue reading »

Sep 032020
 

 

The cover of the new album by Coexistence, as rendered by the enormously talented Adam Burke, is a wondrous sight to behold, a collage of beautiful colors and strange sights — of jutting spikes of stone, of a giant moon and winking stars, of aquamarine water cascading into what seems to be an entirely different dimension or sector of the cosmos…. And this is one of those pleasing cases in which the attractions of a painted album cover suit the music enshrined in the record.

That record, Collateral Dimension, is the debut album by this Italian band, who already opened lots of eyes through their 2018 EP, Contact With the Entity (reviewed here). And as good as that EP was, it is no exaggeration to say that the album is a great leap forward. Transcending Obscurity Records, which will release the album on October 23rd, calls it “a marvel”, and that’s no exaggeration either. It presents a tremendously multi-faceted hybrid of technical and progressive death metal that’s capable of entrancing and bewildering the listener while coming for your throat at the same time. We have a great example of this in the song we’re presenting today, “Symbiosis of Creation“. Continue reading »

Sep 032020
 


Necrot (photo by Chris Johnston)

 

(Andy Synn wrote the three following reviews of recently released albums by bands who have in common… well… a letter of the alphabet.)

Oh my stars and garters, there is a lot of music out there at the moment isn’t there?

I know this feels like a familiar refrain (and it is), but it bears repeating. There’s simply too much music, and too much Metal, being released, week after week, to stay on top of it all.

Still, we try our best to cover what we can, and today I’d like to direct your attention to three recently released albums from Nansis (Switzerland), Necrot (USA), and Núll (Iceland). Continue reading »

Sep 032020
 

 

(We present Comrade Aleks‘ extensive interview of Chris Naughton from the UK band Atavist, whose new album III: Absolution was released in June by Candlelight Records.)

Sometimes they come back… Manchester-based Atavist was put on hold twelve years ago and almost by accident I learned that the band had reunited in almost its original line-up: Chris Naughton (guitars), Toby Bradshaw (vocals), Shane Ryan (bass) and Callum Cox (drums) who joined Atavist in 2006, soon after the recording of their debut self-titled album. They didn’t waste the time that elapsed in that long break between their 2008 split Infernal Procession… And Then Everything Dies and their new full-length work, III: Absolution but were instead playing in different extreme metal bands and honing their skills.

Released by Candlelight Records earlier this summer, III: Absolution represents Atavist at their peak, with the band bringing deep, devastating, and uncompromised doom-death battle in its slower and minimalistic form. They pay attention to arrangements and very rare decorative elements like cello or some samples, but overall it’s cold and bleak (in the good sense of the words) doom-death. We got in contact with Chris Naughton to learn more about Atavist’s return. Continue reading »

Sep 032020
 

 

(Here’s Vonlughlio’s review of the latest album, released this past spring by Amputated Vein Records, by the Italian slamming brutal death metal band Gangrenectomy.)

The Italian metal scene is responsible for giving us great bands such as Devangelic, PutridityVulvectomy, Hour of Penance, Blasphemer, and Hideous Divinity, just to name a few (that I love).  And this time around I would like to take the opportunity to speak about one more, an underground project named Gangrenectomy that I recently discovered this year.

I  have to say that at first I was a little bit hesitant to check them out since their music is BDM that leans toward the slam side, and there are a lot of bands in that vein that just don’t do anything for me. Regardless, I decided to go with an open mind and checked out their second album, Cannibalistic Criteria of the Mantis, which was released early this year via Amputated Vein Records. Continue reading »

Sep 022020
 

 

On September 4th Hessian Firm will release a split record that includes the music of two San Antonio-based projects, Goatcraft and Plutonian Shore, both of whom have created outstanding releases that we’ve paid attention to before at this site. For this new split, each project has recorded three tracks, and today we’re presenting one by Goatcraft — along with a review of the split as a whole.

As the solo vehicle of musician Lonegoat, Goatcraft has specialized in the creation of dark neoclassical and ambient music that he has named “Necroclassical”. For this new split he created three pieces devoted to the depiction of Mars, drawing inspiration in part from Beherit’s electronic era (in particular Electric Doom Synthesis), and it’s the third of those in the running order — “Phobos” — that we’re premiering today. Continue reading »