Islander

AN NCS PREMIERE: ASHEN HORDE — “PARITY LOST”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 082019
 

 

The last time we featured the music of Ashen Horde in these pages was almost exactly two years ago when we premiered the band’s two-track EP, The Alchemist, which was intended to pave the way to the band’s third album. Now, that album has been completed, with the title of Fallen Cathedrals — and today we’re hosting another Ashen Horde premiere, a breathtaking track off that new record named “Parity Lost“.

For those who might be encountering Ashen Horde for the first time, it began as the solo project of Los Angeles-based musician Trevor Portz. Working alone, he released a handful of EPs and two albums since 2013. Beginning with The Alchemist, he joined forces with vocalist Stevie Boiser, known for his work with such tech-death heavyweights as Vale of Pnath, Inferi, and Equipoise, and both are in harness again for Fallen Cathedrals. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OBSCURING VEIL — “DO YOU WANT TO SEE THE KNIFE I USED?”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Mar 082019
 

 

Consider these names, and try to imagine what might happen if they joined forces in a musical enterprise devoted to channeling their own creative madness and simultaneously assaulting the sanity of their listeners:

Matron Thorn (Ævangelist, Præternatura, Benighted In Sodom, Devil Worshipper, ex-Bethlehem)
H.V. Lyngdal (Wormlust, Guðveiki, Martröð)
Mories (Gnaw Their Tongues, Cloak Of Altering, De Magia Veterum, Aderlating)
Jarle Byberg (Urgehal, ex-Craft, ex-Shining)
Kabukimono

This isn’t an idle thought exercise. These individuals have in fact collaborated under the name Obscuring Veil, and their first album, Fleshvoid To Naught, will be released on March 22nd by I, Voidhanger Records. We are fiendishly pleased to present a stream of a track that asks the question “Do You Want To See The Knife I Used?“ Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CHALICE OF SUFFERING — “LOST ETERNALLY”

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Mar 072019
 

 

Much like the vistas of fog-shrouded trees and snow-cloaked mountains you’ll see in the video we’re presenting for the title track to the new Chalice of Suffering album, the music is itself cold, bleak, and yet wondrous, even in the near-abyssal depths of its loneliness and despair. Like those same visions, “Lost Eternally” is hypnotic and haunting, yet possessed of a craggy, mountainous weight, and its emotional resonance of misery is also staggering.

The seven-track album that shares the song’s name will be released by Transcending Obscurity Records on April 19th, and it makes for a supremely powerful follow-up to this Minnesota funeral doom band’s 2016 debut album, For You I Die. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: EARTH, HELEVORN, QUALLUS, INTER ARMA, THE MODERN AGE SLAVERY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Mar 072019
 

 

Last night, as I made my way through a batch of new songs that I noticed yesterday (almost all of which actually surfaced just yesterday), a pattern began forming in my mind, a bit disjointed at first, but then everything fell together as I began rearranging the pieces (one of the pieces that fell into place came my way via NCS contributor Grant Skelton, who also furnished some words to accompany it). The result is what you now have before you.

In an effort to present this musical pattern in a way that has the pieces falling into place for you as you go along, and because I’m short on time, I changed the usual format of this round-up. You’ll see what I mean (but if you like the usual format, don’t worry, the change isn’t permanent). Continue reading »

VENOM PRISON: “SAMSARA”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Mar 062019
 

 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Venom Prison, which will be released on March 15th by Prosthetic Records.)

So this weekend just gone I had the pleasure of seeing Bryan Adams playing to a packed out arena full of people, performing tracks from across his fourteen(!)-album back catalogue with all the verve and vitality of a man who has built his career, and his life, around a simple love of music.

On the surface, of course, the former’s uplifting pop-rock anthems have very little in common with the hideously abrasive assault of Venom Prison, whose second album is arguably an even more aggressive, no-holds-barred barrage of Death Metal fury than their first, but I find it interesting all the same to see how the basic building blocks of both artists’ music – guitars, bass, drums, vocals – are basically the same, yet the execution and end result are so strikingly different.

One thing that the two do have in common, however, is that their music undeniably comes straight from the heart (pun intended)… although in the case of Samsara it does so in a much more bloody and brutal way than anything which the (in)famous groover from Vancouver has ever released! Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DOOMBRINGER — “WALPURGIS FIRES”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  6 Responses »
Mar 062019
 

 

Everything about Doombringer’s new album Walpurgis Fires is sorcerous. One imagines hooded warlocks reciting conjurations over a smoking cauldron, transmuting a host of musical ingredients into a strange new potion that’s both intoxicating and poisonous. A metal musicologist would have a fine old time attempting to reverse-engineer what they’ve done and trying to document the formula, and we’ll do a bit of that here because their concoction is so unusually inventive.

But such a dissection would only go so far in explaining why the album is such a heady (and unnerving) experience; there is no good substitute for simply listening to it — which we’re giving you the opportunity to do today in advance of the album’s release tomorrow (March 7th) by Nuclear War Now! Productions. Continue reading »

MORO MORO LAND: SMIRENIE

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Mar 062019
 

 

(This is DGR’s very enthusiastic review of the new EP by the Russian band Moro Moro Land, which was released on February 20.)

I enjoyed the hell out of the Russian group Moro Moro Land‘s 2015 EP Through. The combination of dark atmospherics, the smoke-tinged reverb-haze that seemed to surround the band, and the metallic-hardcore with which the band built that EP really struck a chord with me. To this day, Through remains a constant listen. While the “Something In The Way” cover plays it relatively straight, it also does a fantastic job of demonstrating the filter through which Moro Moro Land put their music. If you’re familiar with the original then you’ll hear how the songs prior to it were formed and then “painted ugly”, just to add a fine layer of dinge to an already heavy experience.

Which is why learning through our very own web site about the group’s followup Smirenie, four years after its predecessor, put me in two very distinct moods. I felt like an utter dipshit for learning through our own news about a band I had gotten used to regularly checking up on myself, and I was also incredibly excited — because if the Moro Moro Land crew could inch anywhere close to Through again, then the Smirenie EP was going to be something that would be very easy to recommend.

At a little over twenty minutes in length, if the question is whether you should give Moro Moro Land‘s new EP a shot, then the answer is relatively simple: Absolutely yes. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): WHYTHRE — “STILLBORN WORLD”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Mar 052019
 

 

If your ass has been dragging, beaten down and disgusted by the daily grind, strapped for sleep, short on cash, and your reservoirs of hope running low as well, we’ve got a sure-fire antidote for most of those ails. Granted, it won’t put any cash in your pocket (though it won’t demand any from you either), but it will make you feel a whole hell of a lot better. And if you’ve got a bellyful of rage you’d like to get out of your system, what you’re about to hear will provide some catharsis for that, too.

What we’ve got for you is a premiere stream of Stillborn World, the explosive new EP by Whythre, which is being released today as a name-your-price download on Bandcamp. It really will make everything better, at least as long as you’re listening to it. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: EYE OF SOLITUDE, AKROTHEISM, INCANDESCENCE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 052019
 

 

I’m kind of scrambling due to interferences from my damned day job, but I didn’t want too much time to pass before sharing with you a few items of interest — the first of which is an exclusive piece of very exciting news.

EYE OF SOLITUDE

Those of you who’ve been following the site for a while will probably be aware that we’re big fans of Eye of Solitude and their fearsome brand of funereal death/doom. We’ve been writing about these Romanian/British doom lords for well over six years now, and have featured articles on their work a number of times (such as here, here, here, and here), as well as one of Andy Synn’s Waxing Lyrical interviews of the band’s main man Daniel Neagoe (here).

Eye of Solitude’s most recent album, 2018’s Slaves of Solitude, presented (in Andy Synn’s words) “some of the best music we’ve heard from the band since their career-defining Canto III“, and was definitely one of the year’s doom metal high points, successfully achieving “that rare feat of providing a listening experience which is both utterly devastating yet eminently re-listenable.”

And now we are delighted to report that this year Eye of Solitude will be returning with another album named Godless, and to reveal the album’s cover art (above). Continue reading »

WRETCHED FATE: “FLESHLETTING”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Mar 052019
 

 

(Here’s Todd Manning‘s review of the debut album by Sweden’s Wretched Fate, released on February 22nd by Redefining Darkness Records.)

When Old School Death Metal made its initial comeback, there was a welcome focus on the kind of Punked-up, hyperprimitive violence as best exemplified by Autopsy and their ilk. This particular approach is certainly fruitful and, for many, will never grow old, but it’s great to see other acts dive into other Death Metal discographies and come up with material that, while not technical the way the term is used today, is certainly more accomplished than the aforementioned OSDM acts.

One such band bringing their particular brand of pain is Swedish killing unit Wretched Fate on their album Fleshletting, which just came out on Redefining Darkness. At first glance, this album reeks of their Swedish heritage in the best possible ways. Furious d-beats, check. HM-2 distortion, check. Graveyard stench, check. But there’s more to this concoction than just rehashing old Dismember and Entombed records. Continue reading »

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