Islander

A SWARM OF THE SUN: “THE WOODS”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  4 Responses »
Jan 022019
 

 

(Here’s Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the Swedish group A Swarm of the Sun, which will be released by Version Studio Recodings on January 11th.)

After debating with myself for a while I’ve decided that the best way to kick off my 2019 at NCS is by… covering some minimalist, melancholy, and mostly instrumental Post-Rock where the vocals, sparingly used yet sublime, are delivered in a plaintive, cleanly-sung croon.

Who, me, contrarian?

In all seriousness though, A Swarm of the Sun’s previous album, The Rifts, was easily one of the richest, most rewarding musical experiences of 2015, so much so that I was compelled to include it in my Critical Top Ten of the year alongside other such impressive entries from bands like Sulphur Aeon, Bell Witch, and Alkaloid.

Hence you can probably imagine just how eagerly (and impatiently) I’ve been waiting for the band to produce this follow-up, which is scheduled to hit the streets (and the internet) next Friday. Continue reading »

NORTHWEST TERROR FEST 2019 — FULL LINE-UP ANNOUNCED (TICKETS ON SALE NOW)

 Metal News  No Responses »
Jan 022019
 

 

For the third year in a row, NCS is proud to be involved in the planning and presentation of Northwest Terror Fest, which will take place in Seattle, Washington, on May 30 – June 1, 2019, with a special pre-fest show on May 29th. Yesterday NWTF announced the complete festival line-up and launched on-line ticket sales (following an offering of discounted early-bird passes last fall that sold out fast).

As in the festival’s first two years, the 2019 event will be spread across three venues. Each night performances will rotate back and forth between the main stage at Neumos and the cozier confines of Barboza, which adjoins Neumos. Soon after one band finishes at one venue, the next band will start at the other, so that there are no overlaps or conflicts, and it will be possible for ticket-holders to see every band on the line-up. And then, following the performances at those venues, there will be additional performances at the Highline bar to extend the fun past midnight.

The three main nights of the 2019 edition of the festival will be headlined by Cirith Ungol, Wolfbrigade, and Pig Destroyer at Neumos, and by Dawn Ray’d, Iskra, and Khôrada at Barboza. The “after parties” at Highline over the three nights will include shows by Bongzilla, Indian, Bongripper, and more. In addition, the pre-fest show on May 29th at Highline will feature a “quiet” set by Thou, an acoustic performance by Austin Lunn of Panopticon, and a solo synth set by Slasher Dave of Acid Witch. Continue reading »

ANDKRISTNI 2018

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Jan 022019
 

 

(On the 21st of December, the Andkristni 2018 festival took place at the Gaukurinn venue in Reykjavik, Iceland, and our Norwegian friend eiterorm made the trip west for it. He was kind enough to share with us the following report, photos, and music streams.)

A few weeks back I saw an online poster for Andkristni 2018, and took notice of the eminent lineup for this one-day festival, with several bands I had never seen live before. A little later, the event came up in a conversation with a friend, and we were both curious about what it would be like to see these bands live. It was then that I thought: “Hey, I have a day of vacation left. I should go to Reykjavík.” And just like that, the decision was made.

Now, I’ve never written a show report before, and I rarely ever read them myself, because they simply don’t interest me. When I mentioned to Islander that I was going to attend Andkristni 2018, however, he asked me if I wanted to write a report for the blog, preferably with some photos from the night. I declined the idea of doing a publishable report, but offered to make a personal summary for him instead. Then several other friends made similar requests, and now look what happened – I ended up writing a full report anyway. (Unfortunately, the photos in the report are mediocre at best, but I didn’t want to experience the concerts through my phone screen and therefore spent little time taking photos.) Continue reading »

PHLEBOTOMIZED: “DEFORMATION OF HUMANITY”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jan 022019
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new comeback album by the Dutch symphonic death/doom band Phlebotomized (who were the subject of an interview at our site last August), which is set for release on January 7th by Hammerheart Records.)

There is a good argument to be made that Phlebotomized are singlehandedly responsible for the genre we know as symphonic death metal.  It’s hard to imagine that bands like Fleshgod Apocalypse, Septicflesh (especially Septicflesh, the stylistic parallels are there), and the like would have turned out the way they did without Immense Intense Suspense, in my mind one of the greatest albums that has ever been created in the history of metal. I enjoyed the band’s sophomore album prior to their original split-up, Skycontact, with its odd left turn to a sort of psychedelic funeral doom style, but Immense Intense Suspense is what the band is most known for, for good reason.

Deformation Of Humanity is a comeback album, arriving more than 20 years after Skycontact, that’s very distinctly in the tradition of what Immense Intense Suspense established — death metal punctuated with synths and strings that runs the gamut from melodic death metal to traditional death metal, grindcore, and funeral doom, all mixed together into a cauldron of all-consuming void magik in sonic form. Continue reading »

DGR’S QUEST TO TURN 2018 INTO A COFFEE TABLE BOOK – ISSUE TWO: 40-31

 LISTMANIA 2018  2 Responses »
Jan 012019
 

 

(Here’s the second installment of DGR’s 5-part year-end effort to sink our site beneath an avalanche of words and a deluge of music.)

This segment has some interesting patterns in it. The grindcore power hour makes its appearance here, as I’m a sucker for a whole lot of high-speed songwriting over blasting drums, and there’s still some spill-over from the veterans who remained fairly consistent (which you’ll note, defined a lot of part one). As we reach the bottom of the list you’ll start to see some new faces, stunning debuts and incredible full-lengths, and from here the list only gets more and more wild.

As of this writing I’m not sure how to describe the next few segments, but you’ll note that the albums tend to get a little bit more heartfelt, vicious, and a whole lot more passionate as we get further and further into this list. If anything I’d say the immediate thing I’m noting is that the high-twenties of this affair fully sell me out as having had a giant tech-death party. But right now, let us enjoy this current batch of madness as we bounce around from the worlds of grind, to high speed death metal, to a pleasant prog-death and sludge metal break, only to finally close things out with a tremendous crushing of skulls. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON THE LAST DAY OF THE YEAR: JUBAL, OBED MARSH, DEPARTURE CHANDELIER, CVLT OV THE SVN, SVRM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Dec 312018
 

 

Man, have I got a red-hot New Year’s Eve planned with my wife. Bring in some kind of dangerous take-out food. Watch some re-runs of Law and Order. Maybe have an egg nog with a shot of whiskey (but only one because I don’t need the calories and I’m cutting back on the booze). Asleep by 10:30 at the latest. I’m so fucking excited that I’m hyperventilating.

You think I’m joking, but I’m really not (except about the hyperventilating). After more than a few decades of severe misbehavior, the idea of a quiet night and a New Year’s Day without a cataclysmic hangover has become very appealing. No more day-after’s wondering “is that blood on my shirt mine?”, “whose room is this?”, and “where did I leave my pants?”

These days I tend to get a lot of my thrills from heavy music, and I spent this morning catching up on some new sounds, some of which I’m recommending to you in this round-up. This actually started as what might have been a second SHADES OF BLACK installment yesterday, but I decided to throw in a few other styles of music and finish it up for today.

JUBAL

I was quite impressed by the first demo (Archaic Discipline) released by the hooded Dutch duo Jubal through Clandestine Faith earlier this year, and said so here: “There is foreboding, catastrophe, and grandeur in the sensations of these savage, dramatic songs, along with a panoply of killer riffs and the kind of vocals that summon visions of demons coming for your throat.” I was thus excited to learn that Jubal have a new release headed our way in 2019. Continue reading »

DGR’S QUEST TO TURN 2018 INTO A COFFEE TABLE BOOK – ISSUE ONE: 50-41

 LISTMANIA 2018  5 Responses »
Dec 312018
 

 

(DGR is actually turning NCS into a coffee table book, but slowly, one day at a time, from now through Friday.)

About halfway through the year I actually thought I was going to make it through the year-end with a solid Top 30 list and nothing more. For a good chunk of the year, 2018 seemed to move in fits and starts — there would be large batches of album releases and then a couple of quiet weeks, then another small collection, and so on. A lot of the more consistent older guard were on something of an “off year” too, so at first I wasn’t expecting to see a large cast of repeats from two years ago making themselves known. I’ve gotten used to a two-to-three year album cycle, so I half-expected stuff to start pointing towards a real loaded front-half of 2019.

But alas, instead the back-half of 2018 turned out to a be a flood. Not just in bands that I’ve consistently enjoyed either, but a whole bunch of new faces that have either been hammering it out over the years and put out some genuine surprises, or people with some absolutely stunning first-time exposures on my end. Not only that, but who would’ve expected an actually pretty solid -core resurgence, with a lot of groups that had thought to hang it up deciding 2018 would be a good year to resurface and put out some stunningly good releases (at least in some cases).

As a result, 2018 proved to be an absolutely massive year. In some ways I think people’s year-end lists are reflecting just how vibrant the year was for our specific subsection of the musical sphere. While people lament that rock ‘n’ roll is dying or has become lame, heavy metal seems perfectly content to just be the constantly angry and forever roiling collective of music — as if it has found a sort of equilibrium in comparison to the mainstream world outside. Which is how you wind up with stupid shit like this, where I once again have FIFTY (warning ahead of time: if you think this introduction is getting verbose, do I have a surprise for you) albums to talk about in wrapping up this tire fire of a year. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2018: TO THE TEETH’S “LIST OF LISTS”

 LISTMANIA 2018  5 Responses »
Dec 312018
 

 

To the Teeth is the name of a Facebook-based metal blog that began life in May of 2016. The proprietor, Dutch writer Peter van der Ploeg, regularly posts about new extreme metal songs and full releases, and as the year goes along he adds selected music to a growing Spotify playlist. He also has a Reddit thread in which he often goes into greater depth about what appears more briefly at To the Teeth on FB.

Peter has posted his own personal 2018 Top 50 list, which you can see HERE, but he again compiled a “List of Lists”, as he has done in past years. To do that he began by assembling a population of 87 international year-end lists, which included a lot of “big platform” mainstream publications as well as lists from scurrilous metal-only outlets such as our own; those 87 also included separate staff lists from some sites (such as our own). This year, these were the lists he included in the aggregation process: Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: A LATE-YEAR ROUND-UP OF NEW RELEASES

 SHADES OF BLACK  8 Responses »
Dec 302018
 

 

Here we are, nearing the end of that strange seven-day period that begins with the Christmas holiday and ends with New Year’s Day, when many of us have more lazy free time than usual but also experience something like sensory overload from an onslaught of family, friends, food, drink, commercialized excess everywhere you turn, and the looming dread of a new year beginning with a return to jobs and no more holiday reprieves on the visible horizon. It can be both a joyous time of year and a depressing one, more of the former than the latter if you’re lucky, but with both conditions defined with greater intensity than the plodding progression of a normal week.

Even as odd and disorienting as this annual occurrence usually is, the one we’re in the midst of now has struck me as even more bewildering, even comically so, from my perspective as an obsessive fan of extreme music with a compulsion to share recommendations. On that front at least, things are supposed to slow down, with fewer albums being released (given the likelihood they’ll be overlooked against the background froth of so many other holiday diversions) and something of a pause in the promotional activity around albums slated for release in the new year, including the debut of new songs. And while that has in fact happened to a degree, it’s been a smaller degree than usual, especially in the genres of music that are the focus of this column. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2018: A YEAR-END LIST FROM BRENDAN SLOAN (CONVULSING)

 LISTMANIA 2018  5 Responses »
Dec 282018
 

 

(For the second year in a row we asked Australian musician Brendan Sloan, the man behind Convulsing (whose new album Grievous has made a fair share of year-end lists itself), if he would allow us to share his YE list of music. As was true last year, this is the most musically diverse list we’ve published — the selections aren’t all metal, but they are all very interesting.)

 

I’ve been counting these down on Instagram, so some of the review text is pulled directly from there, but I’ve tried to modify it to fit this format.

Here’s my weird Advent Calendar of important 2018 releases. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries