SEEN AND HEAR ON A SATURDAY: AETHERIAN, AARA, KOLLAPSE, SOEN, 7.5 TONNES OF BEARD, SHEVILS

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jan 302021
 

 

I picked a half-dozen songs for today’s round-up, most of which I paid attention to based on friends’ recommendations. It was easy to do that because I was already a fan of every group included here. If you don’t immediately recognize all the names, I’ll forewarn you that there’s a lot of whiplash in this playlist, which is to say that the music diverges sharply from song to song. On the other hand, the variety increases the odds that you’ll find something to like.

AETHERIAN (Greece)

I was so excited to find out that Aetherian would be releasing a new song and video yesterday. For a band that only have one EP and one album to their credit since the release of their first single in 2014 we’ve written about them literally a dozen times, including reviews of that EP and album. They earned all that attention because their brand of melodic death metal is so very good. Their melodies (which tend to lean on the melancholy side of things) are beautifully crafted and moving; when they charge hard, they’ll give your pulse rate a swift kick in the ass; and they always seem to have a few surprises up their sleeves as well. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): OCEANA — “THE PATTERN”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  3 Responses »
Jan 262021
 

 

It has been a long time coming — a very long time — but on January 29th the Roman band Oceana will release their debut album The Pattern through Time To Kill Records. But it seems the time is right, even if the album is arriving 25 years after Oceana’s debut demo and EP, and the strength of the new album is such that fans of progressively inclined melodic death metal will be grateful the band did not die an early death.

Given the passage of so much time, all will be forgiven who are unfamiliar with the band. It was the brainchild of Massimiliano Pagliuso, who has been the guitarist for the Italian band Novembre throughout those same 25 years, and it was he who revived Oceana, bringing together original drummer Alessandro “Sancho” Marconcini and another old friend, Gianpaolo Caprino, as second guitarist.

How the rebirth happened, and the themes that inspired The Pattern, are subjects addressed by Massimiliano Pagliuso in an extensive statement that you will find below. What you will also find below is a full stream of the new album, preceded by a few reactions of our own. Continue reading »

OFF THE BEATEN PATHS: THY CATAFALQUE, JARI LINDHOLM, BLACK KIRIN, NILOTIKA CULTURAL ENSEMBLE, TE VAKA

 Exceptions to the Rule, Off Topic, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jan 252021
 

 

In a round-up yesterday I disclosed that I spent a lot of time on Saturday catching up with new music I was interested in hearing. I actually just scratched the surface, but still got submerged in a lot of metallic extremity. As palate cleansers, I sometimes gave my ears and my head a break by venturing into music I knew in advance wouldn’t be the usual bread and butter of NCS. From those off-the-beaten-path excursions I selected the following music to share with you.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no metal here at all, and a couple of the names will be well-known to NCS readers, but it’s still different. And you’ll also find that there is a lot of globe-hopping coming your way.

THY CATAFALQUE (Hungary)

I can always recognize the music of Thy Catafalque when I hear it, regardless of which vocalist happens to be accompanying Tamás Kátai. It may have something to do with his guitar tunings and his use of rhythms, but mainly it’s rooted in his crafting of melodies. I wish I could confidently assert that the melodies are connected to the folk traditions of his Hungarian homeland, but I’m just assuming that, because I’m not a student of Hungarian folk music. To my untrained ears, all I can say is that the sounds are exotic to me, and both earthy and haunting. But really, those two adjectives just skim the surface, because across the breadth of Thy Catafalque‘s extraordinary discography, there are many other sensations as well. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2020’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 9): CIRITH UNGOL, AETERNAM, ETERNAL CHAMPION

 Exceptions to the Rule, MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2020  1 Response »
Jan 162021
 

 

CLEAN SINGING ALERT!

This past week I missed two days in the rollout of this list, for reasons explained when I was able to resume it. I also mentioned that I might try to catch up this weekend, et voila!

As the alert warns you, or maybe entices you, all three of today’s selections involve singing, and thus run counter to the rule in our site’s title. But as regular NCS visitors know, that’s never been an iron-clad rule. We have always made exceptions where exceptions are well-earned, and they are in the case of these songs. Plus, I found these songs highly infectious, so much so that I could not in good conscience omit from this list. (And these won’t be the last partially or wholly clean-sung songs to make the list.)

CIRITH UNGOL

Reunions and come-backs are a whole lot more miss than hit, but holy shit, have Cirith Ungol been hitting it out of the park since they came back together after almost 20 years of inactivity. Along with some great live shows, their 2018 single “Witch’s Game” was a sign that the band still had it. And last year brought further proof with the release of Forever Black, their first studio album since 1991’s Paradise Lost. Continue reading »

UNSUNG HEROES OF 2020:  ECCLESIA / LETHIAN DREAMS / SHORES OF NULL

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  1 Response »
Dec 182020
 


Ecclesia

 

(Andy Synn follows yesterday’s installment of “Unsung Heroes” with another one, this time presenting reviews and streams of new albums by two French bands and one Italian group, all of which provide well-deserved exceptions to our “Rule” about singing.)

As I’ve tried to stress several times – not just this year, but every year – it is literally impossible for any “Best of…” list to be totally comprehensive and/or definitive.

There’s only so much listening time available, and so many, many albums released each year, that the most you can ever really hope for is a representative sample of the year’s “best” releases.

It’s in acknowledgement of this unfortunate, but incontrovertible, fact of life that I first started writing these “Unsung Heroes” articles in the hope of providing some well-deserved, albeit retroactive, coverage for a bunch of artists and albums which I/we didn’t get chance to cover in proper detail before now, and which you, our readers, may well have missed out on too.

Today’s article has a particularly doomy focus although, as you’re about to find out, each of the three bands featured here has a distinctly different take on the genre.

Of the three artists I’m about to (possibly) introduce you too, one of them is a very recent discovery that I didn’t stumble across until my week-long list-a-thon was almost finished, while the other two I was hoping to be able to write a paragraph or two (or five) about prior to “List Season” commencing, but just never found the time. Continue reading »

ETERNAL CHAMPION: “RAVENING IRON”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  1 Response »
Dec 042020
 

 

(NCS writer Gonzo turns in a glorious review of a pretty fuckin’ glorious album by Texas-based Eternal Champion, which was released in late November by No Remorse Records.)

I know, I know – we’re all busy making our best-of-2020 lists and doing our best to not lose our collective shit as a result of staying inside all day. But, before the year’s end, I wanted to squeeze another review in, and it’s one that we somehow missed mentioning up to this point.

Sharpen your fucking swords, kids, because if you haven’t heard the marauding onslaught of old-school metallic warfare that Eternal Champion cooked up on Ravening Iron, gather ‘round.

One of the things I love about metal is its unending propensity to not take itself too seriously. To quote a friend from long ago who’s also the vocalist for Orange County outfit Bleed the Sky, “what most people don’t understand about metal is that it’s basically goofy dudes drinking beer and making stupid faces a lot.”

“You know, he’s right,” I remember thinking to myself while sitting in his garage at 3 a.m. drunk off my face on the vile combination of Jager and Rockstar. Oh, to be 23 again.

Those words from my friend echoed in my head when I first saw the artwork for Ravening Iron and read a little about the band in a Decibel interview. I concluded that the band was probably a latter-day incarnation of Manowar. Probably a good listen for a nostalgic chuckle or two, but nothing I’d take seriously. The over-the-top artwork and the fact that vocalist Jason Tarpey forges his own swords (while inherently badass) told me that maybe this is a pet project that was more glam than hammer.

By the might of Thor, was I wrong. Continue reading »

PALLBEARER: “FORGOTTEN DAYS”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  1 Response »
Oct 232020
 

 

(This is Wil Cifer‘s review of the new album by Pallbearer, which is being released today by Nuclear Blast.)

“This is going to be our heaviest album yet” or “We just wanted to strip things down and get back to our roots” are stock answers for many metal bands when asked about their next records. So much so they have become tropes. Yet that is what has happened on Pallbearer’s fourth album, which is their first for Nuclear Blast.

The title track that opens the album is even more Sabbathy than anything from Sorrow and Extinction, which of the three previous albums has the most in common with this one. Some of this is due to the rawer production. The vocals are mixed to sit back more in the guitars, bringing out the heft of the guitars. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: GAVRANOVI, SÓLSTAFIR, CRIPPLED BLACK PHOENIX, ANCST, ANTUCO, MUN, THEVETAT, NOXIS, MACABRE

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Sep 052020
 

 

For me, this past work-week was much like the one before (and the one before that, and the one before that), i.e., I had to devote so much time to the fucking day job that I couldn’t keep up with the usual flood of new metal, much less pull together any new-music round-ups. This morning I spent some time trying to catch up, at least a little, and from that exercise I picked the following nine new songs and videos.

I arranged things in a particular way — beginning with something that’s rousing, then going down into sadness (verging on despair) with a block of songs that happen to include clean singing, then beginning to pull out of that mood with reminders that not not everything is horrible (and with music that’s more extreme), and then concluding with something that ought to perk you up again.

GAVRANOVI (Serbia)

Six months ago my Serbian friend Miloš pointed me to “Pjevanija prva” (“Cry of Yore”), the fantastic first song released by the Serbian band Gavranovi (a word that means “ravens”). I still know very little about the band, though now I know a bit more than I did then.

Gavranovi’s frontman is Nefas, who was the vocalist for the great black metal band The Stone for almost 20 years. A second member, Janković, who seems to be the principal instrumentalist, plays the gusle, a traditional horsehair-string instrument that dates back to the 9th century. And there are three more members, all of whom also perform vocals — Matković (who’s also credited as a guitarist), Sokolović, and Rančić. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC FRIDAY: FATES WARNING, HINAYANA, FIRES IN THE DISTANCE, IHSAHN

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Aug 292020
 


Fates Warning

 

(Because your humble NCS editor has done a shit job compiling new-music round-ups in recent weeks, our contributor Gonzo stepped up and offered to begin doing that himself on Fridays, and this is the first edition. It actually would have been posted yesterday, on Friday, except your humble editor fucked that up too.)

Suffice to say, it’s been a fucking weird year.

Weirder, perhaps, is the fact that so much new music keeps rolling out from all corners of the earth; weirder still is that most of it is quality material instead of half-assed live albums, comps, EPs, singles and cover albums.

Most of it.

(I’m looking at you, In Flames.)

Before I start spiraling into a tirade about my odious thoughts on the Clayman reboot, allow me to get right to it: Yesterday, August 28, marked another Friday in this endlessly bizarre, dystopian and occasionally terrifying timeline we all just call “2020,” and it marked another day of new metal coming to assault our eardrums.

This one’s a glorious mix of old and new, and some stuff I’ve been anxiously awaiting for a while. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CRIPPLED BLACK PHOENIX, OXALATE, REBAELLIUN, TENEBRA

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jul 292020
 

 

Happy hump-day. To help get you over the hump I compiled this short collection of new songs and videos from among others I checked out last night and this morning. Apart from the fact that I thoroughly enjoyed all of these, they give you a lot of variety. Surely you will enjoy at least one, if not all of them. If you don’t, we’re not offering refunds.

CRIPPLED BLACK PHOENIX

The opening drum pattern in this first song and video reminded me of Kate Bush‘s hit from the mid-’80s, “Running Up That Hill”. Even if I hadn’t already been a fan of Crippled Black Phoenix and curious to see what they’d be doing on their new album, that alone would have rooted me in place for the rest of this ride — and what a wonderful ride it is. Continue reading »

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