Islander

SORGELIG — “DEVOTED TO NOTHINGNESS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Apr 292019
 

 

Last fall we had the opportunity to premiere a song from Devoted To Nothingness, the new EP by the Greek black metal band Sorgelig. The EP was eventually released in January, digitally and in a limited cassette tape edition. I had intended to write more about the EP following our premiere, and now (finally), I will. The delay is not all bad, because we’re now only days away from the release of a 12″ vinyl edition of Devoted To Nothingness by Iron Bonehead Productions (it’s due on May 3rd).

Sørgelig, who share three members with another band we’ve written about before (Isolert), released their first EP in 2017 (Forever Lost) and then an excellent debut album (Apostate) in the spring of last year. This new EP (which includes 8 tracks) represents a few changes. Continue reading »

VANUM / VARAHA / VIELIKAN / VIMUR

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Apr 292019
 

 

(This is a quartet of reviews written by Andy Synn, gathering together impressions and streams for four excellent new albums by bands who happen to share a first letter.)

Did you know they’re planning on doing a full-length movie version of Sesame Street?

I didn’t until recently, but I guess it just goes to show that anything which the studios believe can be turned into a movie will be turned into one eventually.

Still, as long as they avoid the temptation to make it a “dark and gritty reboot” I suppose it can’t be that bad, right?

Anyway, this has very little to do with the bands I’m writing about here today, other than to act as a cheeky little segue into me saying that today’s article is brought to you by the letter V and the number 4. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEAD TONGUE — “PREJUDICE ON THE SYMBIOSIS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 292019
 

 

Dead Tongue hail from Padua, Italy, and have embraced the likes of Autopsy, old Carcass, Abscess, and Necrophagia as their musical brethren. Their second album, Disgorge Through the Eyes, was released last fall and provided a livid, 16-track manifestation of diseased old school death metal done right. The album has been available digitally since its release but is now being made available on CD, and to celebrate the occasion Dead Tongue have produced a video that we’re happily introducing today.

I bought the album last fall after hearing only one track, the beautifully named “Ethics of the Jugular“, which buried its hooks in my brain from the first listen and proved to be so addictive that it took me a while to get past it and into the rest of the album. But I eventually discovered that my impulsive purchase decision was a smart move, because the rest of the album is also killer, and pulls from a rich range of influences, which are not limited to gruesome old death metal.

Another track on the album (among many) that proved immediately addictive once i got to it is the one we’re featuring in this new video, “Prejudice On the Symbiosis“. Continue reading »

TURIN HORSE: “PROHODNA”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 292019
 

 

I learned of this just-released new album by the German band Turin Horse from Rennie (starkweather), who never steers me wrong. In genre terms, the music is a hybrid, and a rich mix of dark ingredients it is, pulling from sludge, doom, black metal, and post-metal, with vocals that are also varied.

A dark and desperate atmosphere shrouds the album, but within this harrowing cosmos of sound the band use a changing palette of bleak and fiery colors to maintain a tight grip on the listener’s attention. They anchor the songs with a titanically heavy low end (the bass is mountainous), capable of figuratively pounding your body into fragments when the band put their mind to it, and grinding the remnants into even smaller fragments. And as if the sheer physical brutishness of the music weren’t devastating enough, they create melodies of dismal and desolating power. Continue reading »

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING…

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 282019
 

 

… why there is no SHADES OF BLACK column on this Sunday, it’s because I’ve been spending the weekend with a bunch of old friends in Houston, Texas, helping one of them celebrate her 50th birthday.

I’ve had a great time at what has turned into a multi-day non-stop party, except for this morning, when I’ve been incapacitated by all the partying, even after 10 hours of sleep. But there’s been no blog time at all, and almost no time for listening to metal either. And to be brutally honest, the thought of listening to brutal music in my current condition isn’t appealing. Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL 2019: DAY 4

 Concert Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 262019
 

 

(In what has become an annual tradition, our man from the UK, Andy Synn, attended Inferno Festival on April 18 – 21, 2019, in Oslo. We have been posting his reports on the event this week, day by day, accompanied by a few of his photos, and this is the final installment.)

 

The fourth and final day of Inferno Festival this year was a tale of woe and suffering… for me anyway… which began the previous evening.

By the time I got back to my hotel after Taake the night before I was already spiralling pretty hard. I had a raging fever, my legs were barely holding me up, and every single part of me felt simultaneously frozen and on fire and covered in sandpaper. For the next fourteen hours (trust me, I counted them) I was unable to sleep, unable to rest, and unable to do anything but sweat and shiver and curse my own existence.

Thankfully I eventually managed to drop off, as otherwise I think I might honestly have gone insane, although by this point it was early Sunday afternoon, which made it extremely unlikely I was going to see all the bands I wanted to. But I did manage to see some. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HELLISH GRAVE — “HELL NO LONGER WAITS”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Apr 262019
 

 

Writing about any song on Hellish Grave‘s new album, Hell No Longer Waits, inevitably involves spoilers, because they’re all so surprising. The music has a backbone of racing, riotous black thrash, packed to the gills with pulse-pounding riffs and head-hammering rhythms, but as good as this Brazilian band are at pulling out the stops and getting our adrenaline surging, they’re obviously not satisfied with that alone. They’ve obviously got other musical interests and influences, and in their songwriting they’ve given free reign to them, which makes this album stand out from the usual black thrashing barbarism of most of their peers.

Hell No Longer Waits will be released on May 31st by Helldprod. One song from the album, “Macabre Worship“, has already debuted. If you’ve heard it, you’ll already understand what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you’ll get your chance down below. And on top of that spectacular song we’re now adding another — the title track. If you want to be surprised (as well as invigorated, like stepping on a live power line), just go straight to the streams and enjoy them. If you don’t mind spoilers, read on. Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL 2019: DAY 3

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 252019
 

 

(In what has become an annual tradition, our man from the UK, Andy Synn, attended Inferno Festival on April 18 – 21, 2019, in Oslo. We are posting his reports on the event this week, day by day, accompanied by a few of his photos.)

 

What can I say about the third day of this year’s Inferno Festival?

Quite a lot, as it turns out, although, for various reasons, still not as much as I’d hoped. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HEATHE — “ON THE TOMBSTONES, THE SYMBOLS ENGRAVED”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Apr 252019
 

 

On May 30, 2019, Wolves and Vibrancy Records will release the debut album of Heathe, a project born in Aalborg, Denmark, with a core of a single individual and an ever-changing line-up. The album, entitled On the Tombstones, The Symbols Engraved, is colossally heavy and about as physically compelling in its massive rhythms as anything you could find. It’s also intensely disturbing and disorienting, capable of making mincemeat of your brain and clawing at your emotional well-being at the same time as it metaphorically pounds the hell out of your body.

The album is a single 38-minute track composed of different repeating sequences which flow into each other. You can pick out elements of doom, black metal, and noisy hypno-rock in this evolving hybrid of corporal punishment, emotional abrasion, and mental hallucination, but everything is united in a way that makes the music seem to have been borne this way in an instant, rather than cobbled together from disparate pieces. To be carried away by it, without losing interest, is a natural reaction despite how harrowing the music becomes, even though it takes a while to recover from the whole trip. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MURG — “STRÄVAN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Apr 252019
 

 

In 2015 the enigmatic black metal duo Murg, who come from the rural mining areas of Bergslagen, Sweden, began a conceptual trilogy with their remarkable debut album Varg och Björn (“Wolf and Bear:), which delivered memorable, atmospheric melodies within thorned membranes of ripping savagery. Roughly 18 months later they continued their narrative with Gudatall (“Godpine”), an album that might have been even better, encompassing music that was both incendiary and staggeringly downfallen. And tomorrow they will complete their terrible tale with the release of Strävan, which is the most overpowering of all the albums (in more ways than one).

Murg’s narrative concept, which has inspired the three albums, is profoundly bleak, summed up in these excerpts from the press materials provided by Nordvis Produktion, which will release the new album on April 26th: Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries