Feb 182023
 

Today I woke up late and moved lazily. For most of my life, and probably yours, that’s the way Saturday mornings always were. Except in my case I had the lunatic idea when I started this blog in the fall of 2009 that I’d post something about music I liked even on Saturday and Sunday, and every holiday.

I thought of that as a way of underscoring that NCS would never be a business, and would consider none of us here as “workers”, because people working “jobs” almost always get weekends off. I think I also believed we might get more visitors due to the lack of competition on the weekends from the somewhat more-established metal sites that were beginning to dot the internet landscape.

And I probably thought the lifespan of NCS would be about a year, so how tough would it be to listen and write on the weekends for a year? Who knew it would go on like it has? I sure as shit didn’t.

In the last 13+ years I’ve failed to make some weekend posts, after a long stretch of never failing, though the number of failure days is still small. So now when I wake up late and move lazily it doesn’t take long before I start to feel like I’d better get my shit in gear, even if the lateness of the morning hour means I’m not able to make the Saturday roundup as extensive as I’d like (which is true today). But… no failure today at least…. Continue reading »

Feb 172023
 

Yet another big week for new metal. I have many things I want to recommend, but not enough time today to throw them all your way. So I’ll make a start now, with a sandwich made of some big names at top and bottom and stunning Theophonos in the middle, and continue on Saturday.

CATTLE DECAPITATION (U.S.)

It’s kind of amazing that Cattle Decap have now been around long enough to release a tenth studio album, which is what will happen on May 12th when Metal Blade ushers Terrasite into a waiting world.

We have a linguistic preview of what’s coming, thanks to this statement by guitarist Josh Elmore: Continue reading »

Feb 042023
 


Chat Pile – photo by Juliette Boulay

For this Saturday’s roundup I decided to limit myself to single new songs and videos released in just the last few days. The first is in support of a 2022 album, and the rest are advance tracks from records due for release in March or April. I feel pretty confident in saying that I’ll have more to recommend through a Shades of Black column tomorrow, though I haven’t yet decided what to put in it.

CHAT PILE (U.S.)

Chat Pile probably don’t need more help getting noticed. Last year’s God’s Country popped up on most of the year-end lists assembled by notable mags and sites that get lots of eyeballs on them. But the band’s new video for the song “Tropical Beaches, Inc.” doesn’t have half a million views yet, so that needs some help. Continue reading »

Jan 312023
 


photo by Rex Mananquil

And now for something completely different… a mysterious and spellbinding video… a song of many facets and multiple meanings… and a big musical departure from our site’s usual extremist fare….

The subject is a new video for “Dream Flood“, a song from an album named Future Mirror that’s the first new release in nearly a decade by a band whose name tends to stick in the head — Oakland’s The Atomic Bomb Audition. There’s a significant back story about this group and their eclectic compositions, which have drawn inspiration not only from the geography of Northern California but also a collage of musical influences ranging from cinematic music to prog rock, heavy metal, and new wave.

And we’ll get to some of that back story, but we ought to focus first on what you’re about to see and hear in today’s video premiere. Continue reading »

Jan 282023
 


Astriferous

I’m taking a break from NCS this weekend, so there won’t be a big roundup of recommended new songs and videos today or a SHADES OF BLACK column tomorrow. I’m involved in a big party that’s going to happen tonight, and there are things I need to do to help make it happen. I also know from past experience that I won’t get back to the NCS island HQ until sometime early Sunday morning, and I won’t get back stone-cold sober either.

On top of that I hope to spend a little time trying to figure out which songs to include in the final two days of our Most Infectious Song list next week. (If you don’t know what that is, you can find everything I’ve chosen so far via this link). I’m hoping to figure out some way of doing that without losing my fucking mind, because I’ve still got dozens of songs I’d like to include.

Of course I recoil at the idea of posting anything at NCS without including music, and so although the main point of this post is to keep people from wondering whether a big blank space for this weekend isn’t the result of some personal catastrophe, here’s some music: Continue reading »

Jan 262023
 


Enslaved

Yesterday I promised that today I would post a Part 2 of a mid-week roundup of new songs and videos, even though I hadn’t yet made the choices, much less written it. I hate to break promises, but I’m rapidly running out of time before I have to do some paying work. And my dirty laundry isn’t going to wash itself, nor are our cats going to clean their own litter box. So, although you’ll find lots of good new metal below, you won’t find artwork or as many words as I normally like to dish out.

ENSLAVED (Norway)

Forest Dweller“: Prepare for big gloom-ridden stomps and exotic Eastern melody, soft strumming and somber and soulful singing, elements of mystery and mesmerization, and plenty of brazen racing and ravaging. Gorgeous video, I assume shot in Iceland.

From the album Heimdal, due out March 3rd on Nuclear Blast. Continue reading »

Jan 202023
 


Disillusion

You see what I did today? I guess it’s not very subtle.

Believe me, it’s not easy to pick the songs for this list, because so many are deserving. When things jump out like these did as I was frantically scrolling up and down through my alphabetized list of candidates, it’s very easy to give in to impulse rather than yield to insanity.

Mind you, these songs were on the list of candidates for a reason, and they jumped out not only because of the bands’ names appearing in fairly close proximity to each other and with phonetic syllabic kinship. I remembered the songs and mentally exclaimed THERE! THAT’S IT! PART 15 IS DONE!

DISILLUSION (Germany)

Three years ago I picked a song from Disllusion’s comeback album The Liberation for the 2019 edition of this list. Three years later Disillusion returned with another album, Ayam, and here we are again. Continue reading »

Jan 192023
 

What we’re about to lead you into is a kind of music that’s somewhat rare for our site. It includes occasional elements of black metal, but is even more slanted toward doom and depressive rock. It includes gritty and high-flown singing as well as lycanthropic snarls. It rarely races and is often simple, but is also capable of becoming elaborate. It has the capacity to mesmerize in different and often unsettling ways, and joy and hope are dim at best and only fleeting.

The subject is Your Star Will Collapse, the debut album of a Hungarian solo project named Sír, which follows a first EP named Cosmic Grave released in 2020. We’re told this about the band’s name and conception: “Sír has equivocal meaning. The most obvious one is grave, but also means crying. Together they represent grief, loss of a loved one, it is a deep emotional state. It has nothing to do with the undead or other fantasy themes, it’s all about living people and their struggles.” Continue reading »

Jan 122023
 


The Otolith

I don’t need to say this to longer-term readers, but somehow we still pick up new ones, so for their benefit: Despite the name of our site, which has always been somewhat tongue-in-cheek rather than absolutely literal, we do write about metal that includes singing rather than exclusively growling, gagging, and shrieking. Mind you, the exceptions must be earned.

In light of the foregoing, it should not be a huge shock that this Most Infectious Song list includes songs with singing. I’ve added three of them today, and not only with singing but all of them with women singing. I found all three songs to be highly memorable, and the kind that I’ve enjoyed revisiting.

And for those of you who (like me) don’t have a high tolerance for singing in heavy music, the singing is not only very good here, it’s also paired up with more extreme voices in two of the songs. Continue reading »

Dec 292022
 

What do you do when you enthusiastically agree to premiere a video, then forget to mark the appointed day on the calendar, and then fail to make the premiere when the day arrives? Well, if you’re me you make abject apologies to the band and host the video the day after it has become public, and you still call it a “premiere” even if technically it isn’t.

In the case of Laudare’s video for their live performance of a new song named “Her Enchanted Hair Was the First Gold“, my fuck-up is especially embarrassing because of how excited I was after watching and listening to the video for the first time. The song is such a fascinating variation on our usual musical fare around here, but rest assured, there is a valid reason why Laudare call their music “violent poetry”.

Well, let’s talk about the poetry first, in both of the forms it takes. Continue reading »