Islander

WAXING LYRICAL: MISERY INDEX

 WAXING LYRICAL  2 Responses »
Feb 022019
 


photo by Heidi Strengell

 

(In this week’s edition of Waxing Lyrical, Andy Synn posed his usual questions about lyrics to Jason Netherton of Misery Index, whose new album Rituals of Power will be released on March 8 by Season of Mist.)

Is it selfish of me to admit that, as much as I hope everyone is enjoying the series so far, one of the primary reasons for coming up with the concept of “Waxing Lyrical” was so that I’d get the chance to speak to, and learn more about, some of my favourite vocalists/lyricists?

Well, selfish or not, it’s the truth, and today’s edition is a particularly special one, as it features one half of one of my favourite vocal tag-teams, Jason Netherton of the mighty Misery Index. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 19): SVALBARD AND VISCERA///

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  4 Responses »
Feb 012019
 

 

The two songs I’ve added to this list today consist of one that I discovered very late in the year after neglecting the album for many months, and another that’s been stuck in my head since we premiered it in October.

As usual, I’ll be taking a break from the rollout of this list this weekend while I continue trying  to figure out what will come next. Decisions, decisions, and they’re not getting much easier even though 19 installments are now behind me.

SVALBARD

I confess that I didn’t pay close attention to this UK band’s latest album until near the end of the year. Even after reading Andy Synn‘s review of It’s Hard To Have Hope last April, which spoke of the album’s  “unbridled passion and unwavering integrity” and insisted that “Svalbard deserve all the support and attention they can muster going forwards”, I didn’t listen. I meant to, but it must have been one of those especially harried weeks around the NCS compound, and as time passed, so too the album passed me by. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ÚIR — “ÓENACH TAILTEN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Feb 012019
 

 

Roughly two years after the appearance of their debut recording, Tein-Éigin, the Edinburgh-based atmospheric black metal band Úir are returning with a new EP named Óenach Tailten. It will be released by Pest Productions on February 18th, and today we present a full stream of its three shattering tracks.

“Shattering” is not an exaggeration. There is so much tension, torment, and pain in the music, and it comes through with such authentic passion and unwavering intensity, that it puts any sense of well-being a listener might have in dire peril. Yet paradoxically, there is an almost dreamlike quality to the music as well, a conjuration of haunting loss that crosses a dark border between flesh-and-blood and some intangible realm where ancient spirits still loom in twilight shadows. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE LUMBERJACK FEEDBACK — “THERAPY”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Feb 012019
 

 

Two drummers, a pair of guitarists, a bass player, and no human voice at all. That’s the line-up of The Lumberjack Feedback, a group from the north of France whose motto is “Loud and Low”. Mere Mortals is the name of their new album, which follows by three years their impressive full-length debut, Blackened Visions, and what we have for you today is the crusher that opens the new record, a song named “Therapy“.

Deadlight Entertainment, which will release the album on April 26th, describes the music as “a hypnotizing, mesmerizing soundtrack to the apocalypse”, a “deep droning bass and primitive twin percussions as a roaring low-end thunder, ridden by dark melodies crafted by a pair of guitarists like silver surfers riding a tsunami” — “a weak beauty topping a tornado of devastating primal elements”.

I usually prefer to come up with my own linguistic formulations (and I will here, too), but I thought those were some nice turns of phrase, and they have the added advantage of being accurate. Continue reading »

ASTRONOID: “ASTRONOID”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 012019
 

(Here’s Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by Boston-based Astronoid, which is being released today by Blood Music.)

It’s a pretty widely-held (and widely-accepted) opinion that those gaudy golden idols of the film world, aka The Academy Awards, aren’t necessarily won on merit… or, at least, they aren’t necessarily won on the merits of whatever film or performance they’re being given out for.

No, a lot of the time the ultimate winner of Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor/Actress, etc, often receives the award not because of the quality of the work for which they’ve been nominated, but because they’ve built up enough cultural cache with their prior work(s), or been overlooked enough times, that they’re deemed to “deserve” it.

And, as I’m sure some of you are aware, the same thing happens in the music world too, particularly when the larger sites and magazines feel like they might have missed out or been a little behind the curve when (dis)covering an unexpected underground sensation, such that they tend to majorly over-compensate with their subsequent coverage in an attempt to reassure their readers just how “with it” they are.

Which brings us to the new, self-titled, album from Astronoid. Continue reading »

2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 18): MORGENGRAU, ABYSSUS, SUPREME CARNAGE, FERVENT HATE

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  1 Response »
Jan 312019
 

 

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a habit of jamming four songs together in these installments of the list (tomorrow, there will only be two more). But I was convinced that putting these four tracks together was exactly the right thing to do. Apart from being infectious (duh), they’re all lethal forms of death metal savagery, with spectacular soloing, excitingly malignant vocals, head-cracking rhythms, and killer riffs discharged through a certain kind of chainsawing guitar tone that many of us lap up with glee.

Not coincidentally, I wrote about all of them when they first appeared, and even premiered three of them, so this gives me plenty of chances to quote myself, which is always a real pleasure.

MORGENGRAU

Nick Keller created the album art for the new second full-length by the Austin-based death metal band Morgengrau — and he did his usual spectacular job. Only part of his creation is shown above. More is visible here: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SAMMAS’ EQUINOX — “PILGRIMAGE / BOAHJENÁSTI”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Jan 312019
 

 

On February 1st — tomorrow — Signal Rex will release a compilation of the two demo tapes previously released by the Finnish black metal project Sammas’ Equinox. This new edition, which combines the names of the demos — Pilgrimage / Boahjenásti — includes remastered sound courtesy of Moonsorrow’s Henri Sorvali, and has been captured on CD and vinyl LP formats, with artwork and layout by Álex Tedín at Heresie Graphics.

Today we’ve got a full stream of the compilation, beginning with the four tracks from Pilgrimage (2016) and concluding with the three from Boahjenásti (2017). If you’ve not previously encountered these creations, prepare for an unusual and arresting combination of haunting, horrifying, and hallucinatory atmosphere, primal physical thrust, and affecting strands of melody, with the excursions overlaid by a voice that’s nasty as hell. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AORATOS — “THRESHER”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Jan 312019
 

 

In my humble opinion, no other domain of deeply underground music channels the madness of spiritual devotion, the intensity of unconstrained zealotry, the casting off of self-advancing calculation, as well as black metal. And few other genres so powerfully capture our most deep-seated terrors or so vividly give form to unseen spirits.

Many bands try to channel manifestations of stellar burning chaos through the fashioning of simulacrums — creating reasonable facsimiles of the real thing, but straining too hard to manufacture the explosion of blood and mind that’s the hallmark of authentic blinding fervor and fear. Needless to say, finding music that combines such genuine blast-furnace intensity with mindfulness about details — which channels extravagant emotional inspiration and reaches with straining sinews for the divine, yet reflects a demanding meticulousness about nuances of sound — is a rarity.

But here we have that rarity, in God Without Name, the first album by Aoratos. The emotional effect of the music is astonishing, though at the same time that effect is no surprise at all given the people whose talents are behind the name Aoratos, which means unseen. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 105): SAOR

 Album Reviews, THE SYNN REPORT  1 Response »
Jan 312019
 

 

(The January 2019 edition of THE SYNN REPORT is devoted to the releases of the Scottish band Saor, and includes Andy Synn‘s review of Saor’s newest album, Forgotten Paths, which will be released on February 15th by Avantgarde Music.)

Recommended for fans of: Panopticon, Alcest, Dawn Ray’d

There’s been a lot of discussion recently – much of it intriguing, much of it ignorant – about what Black Metal “should” or “shouldn’t” be.

And while the whole issue, and all its many facets and factors, is far too complex for me to address here, the various conversations and arguments I’ve had with people – some like-minded, some less so – have helped crystallise in my mind that the most important thing any Black Metal artist needs… is passion.

Case in point, Saor (the solo project of one Andy Marshall) is absolutely brimming with passion and primal vitality, and each of the band’s albums (the fourth of which will be released within the next few weeks) marries energy and emotion, atmosphere and artistry, in a way that clearly comes right from the heart. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 17): BORN TO MURDER THE WORLD AND ANAAL NATHRAKH

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  3 Responses »
Jan 302019
 

 

I may have made a mistake with this 17th installment of my expanding list of infectious songs — not in the choice of the two tracks, because I do find them damned infectious, but in the decisions to pair them in a single place instead of dispersing them among different Parts of the list. Because, as you’ll see, they seem like fraternal twins — closely related though not monozygotic (there, maybe some of you just discovered a new word). The two tracks do share a parent (Mick Kenney), which may have something to do with the sonic kinship.

By the way, we’re now 42 tracks into this list, and based on past experience we’re more than halfway through. I will continue doing this through the impending end of this month and at least a couple weeks into February. If you’re one of those ornery types who thinks the list is already excessive, that’s tough, because I don’t care and you can’t stop me. If you want to check out the preceding 40 songs, they’re collected here.

BORN TO MURDER THE WORLD

My pal DGR was a big backer of this band (and I do mean BIG) from the moment when he first heard of its existence (“a band made just for me”). Born To Murder The World was started by Shane Embury (Napalm Death, Brujeria, etc.) and the afore-mentioned Mick Kenney (Anaal Nathrakh/Mistress), joined by vocalist Duncan Wilkins (Fukpig, Mistress), and their debut output, The Infinite Mirror Of Millennial Narcissism (ouch!) was released last August. Continue reading »

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