Islander

LISTS OF LISTS

 LISTMANIA 2017  5 Responses »
Jan 012018
 

 

Happy New Year to everyone!

Our 2017 LISTMANIA series isn’t finished yet, even though the year now is. And really, there’s no reason to think that it should be finished. There’s a decent argument to be made that before you decide which releases were the best ones in a given year, the year should be allowed to end first.

We have seven more year-end lists in hand and ready for publication, and three more that should arrive this week, including two eagerly awaited ones from Austin Lunn (Panopticon) and Semjaza (Thy Darkened Shade). Even if we post two per day beginning tomorrow, LISTMANIA will continue on into the second week of the year. And at some point soon I’ll begin rolling out the Most Infectious Song list.

But today I’ve decided to highlight some Lists of Lists that have appeared recently. These represent the efforts of some hard-working people to aggregate a wide range of Best of 2017 lists, including one master list that’s based on the selections of our own readers. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): VARNAK, KARMACIPHER, PANPHAGE, KHORAJA, ANTIGONE’S FATE

 SHADES OF BLACK  5 Responses »
Dec 312017
 

 

As you can see, I have ambitions… ambitions for a SHADES OF BLACK post that carries over, one that’s both the last SHADES OF BLACK of the old year and the first of the new year. Of course, those ambitions depend on my being able to write Part 2 tomorrow and your ability to read it. Since my New Year’s Eve will probably consist of a quiet evening at home with Ms. Islander and a bottle of champagne, I’ll probably be able to give a decent account of myself come the dawn. I wish I could be more hopeful about you. If you wake up in a pool of your own urine with the taste of vomit in your mouth, please don’t send photos.

I’ve divided my selections this week as follows: In Part 1 I’ve included a few recent EPs and advance tracks from forthcoming albums.  In Part 2 I’ve collected some complete 2017 albums that I’d like to call attention to, not all of which are brand new.

JANUARY 1 UPDATE:  That prediction about New Year’s Eve being a placid, well-behaved time for yours truly turned out to be load of horseshit. The extent of my suffering today is of epic proportions. Part 2 will be delayed until January 2.

VARNAK

I’m indebted to my friend Miloš for recommending this first two-song EP. Entitled Вопль о Земле, it was released via Bandcamp by the Russian black metal band Varnak on December 28th (the cover art is at the top of this post). I processed the Russian lyrics through Google Translate, and although the results are a bit garbled, I found them fascinating — just as I did the music. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: RUDRA — “ANCIENT FOURTH”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Dec 312017
 

 

At roughly this same time one year ago the ground-breaking Singaporean band Rudra released their eighth album, Enemy of Duality, through by Transcending Obscurity-Asia. In advance of its release we had the pleasure of premiering two songs — “Abating the Firebrand” and then “Ancient Fourth”. And now, on this final day of 2017, in which Rudra have celebrated 25 years as a band, we bring you a reminder of that wonderful album as we join other sites around the world in premiering a music video for “Ancient Fourth“, the song that close the record.

Discerning and adventurous listeners will be familiar with Rudra, but even in a career that dates back to 1992, they remain to be discovered by more people. They claim for themselves the genre term “Vedic metal”, which is a form of blackened death metal in which the band (who are themselves of Indian lineage) have often incorporated elements of music rooted in Hindu traditions (including the use of Indian classical instruments), with lyrics often drawn from Vedic Sanskrit literature and philosophy. Continue reading »

TWO FINAL 2017 RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THEMADISRAELI: TONGUES AND ATHENIC

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Dec 312017
 

 

(Here we are, on the last day of the year. But before it disappears into the history books, TheMadIsraeli has a couple more 2017 releases to recommend.)

 

I decided before we let 2017 end, I’d get one more in. This is another case of released way too late in the year for it to matter for many people. I’m telling you, December releases for albums fucking suck.

TONGUES

I, Voidhanger is low key one of my favorite labels around. They’ve always been good at acquiring some of the absolute best in the realm of avant garde and progressive, especially in the black metal realm. When the music isn’t either of those things, it’s full of so much venom and grit it’s hard to say no regardless.

Tongues are a Danish black metal band, a minority genre to my knowledge considering Denmark’s typical pedigree for metal. They play a very dissonant haphazard style that still manages to contain quite a bit of melody, with some slight death metal and doom metal riffing touches put in play to enhance the rather dismal horrific atmosphere of their sound. Their debut record Hrellia is quite impressive. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 92): DROTTNAR

 THE SYNN REPORT  5 Responses »
Dec 302017
 

 

(In the final Synn Report of 2017, Andy assesses the discography as it exists to date of the distinctive Norwegian band Drottnar — whose Facebook page is here.)

 

Recommended for fans of: Mayhem, Dødheimsgard, Krallice

For the final edition of The Synn Report in 2017 I found myself torn between a number of possibilities, ranging from bruising, technically-adept Death Metal, to high-energy, thrash-infused Melodeath, to grim and gritty Black/Death riffosity.

In the end however I made the choice to go with the Technical/Avant-Garde Black Metal menace of Norway’s Drottnar (although don’t worry, the other bands referenced obliquely above will all be getting their own features very soon).

Calling their sound “Bunker Metal”, the Fredrikstad quintet have always been one of the more unusual and hard-to-pin-down members of the Norwegian scene, with a sound that largely defies easy definition and clean categorization, and an image that pulls more from Soviet-style militarism than the pseudo-fascist iconography employed by many of their brethren.

However I’m hopeful that this column will serve as a great introduction to a band who I think are one of the most overlooked, and underrated, acts to ever come out of the great frozen North. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: B’S TOP 17 OF 17 (FROM BRENDAN SLOAN OF CONVULSING)

 LISTMANIA 2017  24 Responses »
Dec 292017
 

 

Editor’s Intro

If you haven’t yet discovered the music of Australia’s Convulsing, you should carve out some time and allow it to carve you up. 2016’s Errata (reviewed here) was amazing; Convulsing‘s side of this year’s split with Siberian Hell Sounds (reviewed here) even more so.

I’ve benefited not only from Convulsing‘s music, but also from the musical recommendations of Convulsing‘s lone gunman Brendan Sloan (also a member of Dumbsaint), whom I follow on Facebook. And so this year I invited him to share with us (and you) his year-end list of favorite releases. He has chosen a Top 17 (plus a list of EPs, splits, and Honorable Mentions), and they aren’t all metal, but they are all interesting. He went further and hand-picked individual songs from each release as examples, and I’ve embedded streams of them within his list. So settle in for some good reading and some good listening.

 

The last few years I’ve been the most clever person of all time and listed a “top 14 of 14, 15 of 15, 16 of 16”, but this year is genuinely the only one where I’ve struggled to actually pare it down. 2017 has been a monster year for music, and here are the reasons why. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: THE GRAND TOME OF ALBUMS THAT DGR ENJOYED IN 2017 (Part 3)

 LISTMANIA 2017  11 Responses »
Dec 292017
 

 

(This is the third and final part of DGR’s massive year-end list feature. Part 1 (here) included Honorable Mentions and albums ranked 30-21; Part 2 (here) counted down albums 20-11. And today we present DGR’s Top 10, plus a few other assorted year-end honors.)

 

There are few things that I enjoy each year more than the yearly list roundup here at NCS – including taking the time to write out my own personal favorites. This is a post that I spend a large part of the year dreading, knowing that my penchant for massive verbiage in the face of all things common sense will turn around and bite me in the ass and the stress implied therein of the constant re-reading and editing that goes into the joy of crushing one’s website editor under the sheer weight of text. Were the yearly list allowed to be a book, I would deeply enjoy witnessing the ever increasing size of the roll of toilet paper mine would have to be printed on throughout the year. Maybe one year I’ll actually be able to spring for two-ply and at least have some effect. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NÒTT — “WHITE. COLD. DEATH.”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Dec 282017
 

 

Those of you who’ve been visiting us for years are quite familiar with our continuing admiration of the Minnesota band Amiensus, whose releases we’ve followed closely and written about frequently ever since the appearance of their debut album Restoration in 2013. And so we were intrigued when we learned that Amiensus frontman (and Fail to Decay bassist) James Benson had started a separate solo project named Nòtt as a vehicle for creating music that combines bleak and progressive elements of black metal.

We can now reveal that Nòtt’s debut album is nearing completion and is projected for release in January of the new year, and we can go further than that — because today we’re premiering the first single from the album, a song called “White. Cold. Death.“, which is now available for free download at Bandcamp. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: BLASHPEMOUS FOUNDATIONS (A YEAR-END ROUNDUP BY THEMADISRAELI)

 LISTMANIA 2017  13 Responses »
Dec 282017
 

 

(We present here the lists of 2017 releases that proved to be the favorites of NCS writer TheMadIsraeli.)

2017 was a fucking great year for metal of all kinds, but most particularly the extreme kinds. Keeping it short and sweet again this year, I’ve decided to call this list Blasphemous Foundations. I picked a Top 6 of thrash, black, and death metal, the central pillars of extreme metal (heuhueheue 666 get it!?) followed by a miscellaneous Top 10 of stuff either not in those categories or was its own thing to the extent I didn’t think it fit into them. This will probably be my year-end list format going forward, although there will be differing amounts of exposition and me generally being an overly verbose fuckhead.

But first, some hot takes, and not-so-hot takes I’d like to offer: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MYSTAGOS — “DROWNING IN THE SEA OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Dec 282017
 

 

Roughly three months we premiered a remarkable debut album named Ho Anthropos Tes Anomias by the Spanish band Mystagos, which was subsequently released by Clandestine Faith. In an accompanying review, I wrote about the way in which spiritual inspiration and distinctive musical talent had come together in an unusually successful way: “The music itself has an otherworldly and occult resonance, channeling the exploration of dark mysteries, the exaltation of sinister forces, and the delirium of madness”.

Given the rare appeal of that album, we were excited to learn that Mystagos has prepared a new collection of songs, an EP entitled Pvrvsha, which is projected for release on February 1, 2018, by BlackSeed Productions., with great cover art by Opposition Artworks. It includes three black metal songs and four dark ambient songs, and today we have the good fortune to bring you the premiere of one of the black metal tracks: “Drowning In the Sea of Unconsciousness“. Continue reading »

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