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AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEJECTER — “FIENDS”

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Jan 022025
 

On January 31st the Kansas City outfit Dejecter will build upon and expand what they’ve done on two previous EPs through the release of a new one named Oblation Husk, and today we’re helping to introduce it through our premiere of one of the four new songs. Its entirely fitting name is “Fiends.”

For those who haven’t yet discovered the band, it began in the summer of 2022 when Sean Rehmer (Mercurial) and Josh Caldwell (Godhammered, One Inch Punch) begun writing together at Storm Crow Studio just outside of Kansas City. Some months later, they sought out a vocalist to complete their vision and found what they sought in Silas Olson (Devourist).

They then put out those two EPs mentioned above, Human​(​v​)​oid in 2023 and Majesty Artificial last year. Those two led Metal Archives to brand Dejecter‘s music as “Death/Sludge Metal,” and you’ll detect both of those genre ingredients in the new EP, but other ingredients are now also apparent. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON NEW YEAR’S DAY: AVULSED, CRAWLING CHAOS, ARGWAAN, SERPENTS OF PAKHANGBA, AWRIZIS, STRESS TEMPLE, GROUND SWEAT, HUSMANSKOST, BYFROST

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jan 012025
 


Fireworks at the Seattle Space Needle last night (photo by Sigma Sreedharan / KOMO #SoNorthwest Photography)

(written by Islander)

Happy New Year to all of you! May the turn of the calendar page begin leading you to many good things over the coming year, even if it mainly leads you to still write “2024” in your date entries over the next few weeks.

Yesterday we finished the main part of our annual LISTMANIA series, and I posted a “wrap up” for it earlier today. All those lists verified what we already knew as the past year crawled by, i.e., that 2024 was another great interval for metal, even if it was a garbage fire in many other respects.

We have abundant reasons to expect that 2025 will also bring us abundant metallic goodness and greatness, and some of those reasons are already concretely apparent, witness the music I picked for this New Year’s Day roundup (though some of it also comes from the later days of December — and a couple songs are from 2010!). Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2024 WRAPUP

 LISTMANIA 2024  1 Response »
Jan 012025
 

(written by Islander)

We posted the last of our many year-end lists yesterday, on the last day of 2024. As in previous years, the volume was extensive. As usual, some of them were re-postings of lists that appeared at “big platform” web sites and print magazines, and others were prepared by our own stable of race-horse writers. And once again we had a large group of lists from other guests and old friends. Plus, we’ve again received valuable, extensive lists in reader comments on THIS POST (new lists can still be added there).

In this article I’m setting forth links to all of the 2024 year-end lists that we published, divided into categories and listed within each category in the order of their appearance. For people who are looking for the best metal that 2024 had to offer, these lists and our readers’ lists provide a tremendous resource, as they have in past years. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2024: A LIST OF LICORICE ALL SORTS / SPONGIFORM LONG FORMS – AN EDGING OF MUSIC EXPERIENCED AND AN (KIND OF) UNRANKED LIST OF 2

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Dec 312024
 

(It’s fitting that the last installment in our main LISTMANIA series comes from one of our newest contributors, who made his first NCS appearance in early February of this year. Of course, this being Vizzah Harri (born in South Africa, now living in Vietnam), this isn’t a conventional list, but more like an ongoing diary of the year, which isn’t musically limited to metal nor even limited to music, though it begins with reflections from the present.)

It’s been a year of bi-polarities and absurdism. The Onion bought Infowars and Vice started writing Onion articles. The level of fakery doesn’t even matter anymore because it seems like reality has itself been augmented into a surreal hellscape. It takes but one lie to fool one man or a thousand for a lifetime; it is immeasurable how hard it is to turn back that lie. Randi and his partner once tried to prove how easy it is to fool people, and they succeeded but proved unknowingly that people didn’t want to know the truth in the end, they wanted to remain suspended in fantasy. The cognitive dissonance was too tough to reconcile.

 In brighter news, there will be new music from our favorite caterpillars in öOoOoOoOoOo and the teaser they dropped way back on April 1st is alluring as fuck: Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2024: A YEAR-END LIST FROM JOHAN HULDTGREN (OBITUS)

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Dec 312024
 

(For the 14th year in a row, our friend Johan Huldtgren of the Swedish black metal band Obitus — whose 2017 album Slaves of the Vast Machine is still their latest release — has again allowed us to share with you a year-end Top 10 list.)

As I usually remark, lists like this are always somewhat arbitrary, it’s ten releases I picked, from the longer list of albums I liked, whittled down from albums I’ve heard released in 2024. If as to underscore that this year I made several lists, this being the NCS edition.

Some of the albums on this year’s list were released fairly late in the year, so there is a risk of recency bias, but that is simply something we’ll have to let time sort out. As at least a few of the releases below I’ve not seen on other lists published here, I hope you find something here you enjoy which you may otherwise have missed. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FELL OMEN — “DUNGEON METAL PUNKS BESIEGING DIGITAL CASTLES”

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Dec 302024
 

(written by Islander)

There are so many aspects of the Fell Omen song and video we’re about to premiere that are just… bonkers. But I hasten to add, they are bonkers in very good and highly entertaining ways. Let me count the ways:

There is the name of the song: “Dungeon Metal Punks Besieging Digital Castles“. There is the fact that Fell Omen‘s Greek mastermind Spider of Pnyx performs the song in a suit of medieval armor. There is this armored warrior’s use of a hurdy-gurdy to open the song, and the fact that it’s not even the most “out there” aspect of the music. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: METAPHOBIC — “SPECTRAL CIRCLE”

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Dec 302024
 

(written by Islander)

In this strange in-between period of days separating one holiday and another, between the final gasps of the Old Year and the first whimpers of the New One, we still have a few premieres to share with you. This one, in particular, will make it even easier to lose track of what day it is… and whatever else your confused minds might have been pondering.

The Atlanta death metal band Metaphobic weren’t playing games when they named their debut album Deranged Excruciations. They were being brutally forthright about the nature of the music they made, as you shall learn for yourselves when you listen to this first advance track from the album — “Spectral Circle” — a couple months before the album release by Everlasting Spew. Continue reading »

BEDSORE: “DREAMING THE STRIFE FOR LOVE”

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Dec 302024
 

(Our South Africa-born, Vietnam-resident, contributor Vizzah Harri wrote the following fascinating essay. It includes a distinctive review of Bedsore‘s new album, but also uses it as a springboard to other connections and reflections.)

“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” –Ursula K. Le Guin

“This means that every person brings themselves to every piece of art. It means we all experience a different piece of art. Each time we return to a story we are creating a different story. Rereading is good actually.” – saxifraga-x-urbium (from Tumblr)

If you didn’t know anything about this album prior to clicking on this article and did not want to go into it entirely blind, then I can attempt to sum it up for you sonically in 34 words: This band’s waking dream of an album is like Hail Spirit Noir alchemized with giallo; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; the most serene Italian chamber orchestra; and a few doses of the holy trinity of proggy-death in Skeptic, Cynic, and Atheist. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: BEEHIVE REVOLT, EDEN RAYZ

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Dec 292024
 

I had ideas ready for this weekly post today, and notes about the music I’d selected. When I was ready to begin writing this morning, my desktop computer shit the bed (basically, it wouldn’t start up and showed an error symbol).

I spent the next two hours following a variety of Apple instructions sourced from my laptop, none of which worked. Now I have to take the computer to the nearest Apple Store this afternoon, which is about a 90-minute commute from where I live. This is a much more miserable way to spend the day than I’d expected, but of course you and I can imagine worse ways.

In a state of extreme mental frustration and with much of the morning gone, I thought about abandoning this column for today, but as you can see, I didn’t. However, it doesn’t included all the selections I wanted to cover, or even all the words I wish I could have written about the ones below. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MEFITIS, CLOUDS, SIKARIO, LABYRINTHUS STELLARUM

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Dec 282024
 

(written by Islander)

This is a good time to take stock of where we are (“we” being NCS, not the squirming hive of humanity that continues spinning helplessly through the void). I thought we would have the final installment of our year-end lists from writers and other friends on Monday, but a late-breaking e-mail creates the possibility there will be one more after that. Whether we finish Monday or a bit later, there’s one more segment of LISTMANIA still to come, i.e., my own list of 2024’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. More on that in a minute.

Next week we’ll also have Andy‘s monthly Synn Report and five song premieres (at last count), plus at least a couple of interviews that have been patiently (or impatiently) waiting for an opening. After next week, most of which will still be a holiday for most people, things in metaldom will ramp back up into the usual churn of news announcements and new releases, and we’ll again have the usual weekly volume of premieres, reviews, and interviews from then until 2025 starts winding down. Continue reading »

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