OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 1): KATATONIA, WOLFHEART, KRALLICE, OLD MAN GLOOM, MÉSALLIANCE

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Mar 212020
 

 

After I finished today’s first post I spent almost two hours just going back through e-mails we’ve received over the last three days pushing new music upon us, and recent messages from some friends with their own recommendations, and then creating a list of links to everything that looked interesting. Some of these were new songs or videos and some were complete new releases.

When I counted up the number of links in that list, I found that there were 80 of them. Eighty of them, from just three days of new releases! I’m sure the Bandcamp thing on Friday (where they didn’t take their cut of sales) spurred a lot of this output, but even considering that it’s still insane.

Needless to say, I’m going to be resorting to the OVERFLOWING STREAMS format, in which I pare my own verbiage back to the bone (though I did include artwork this time). Also perhaps needless to say, I’ve barely made a dent in listening to those 80 items. But I’d like to get going with what I’ve found so far that I think is worth recommending, so here’s some of it now, and more will come in the next few days. (By the way, a ton of that new stuff was black metal, so I’ll have my hands full trying to figure out what to put in tomorrow’s SHADES OF BLACK column).

KATATONIA

Who would not want a new Katatonia album in these dark, isolated times? The timing is indeed fortuitous, because a new Katatonia full-length will be released by Peaceville on April 24th. The title is also fortuitous: City Burials. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: ABYSMAL DAWN, CENTINEX, COGNITIVE, COOLING TOWER, DEATH COURIER, DEVIN TOWNSEND, EVOKER, GRAVEIR, HELLHOOKAH, KRATER, LAMB OF GOD, LAUDARE, MALICYST, WHITE STONES

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Mar 182020
 


Abysmal Dawn

 

Here we are again. with so many new songs and videos that I want to recommend that I’m resorting to what I did last weekend — compiling lots of sights and sounds (which are all over the map in genre terms), accompanied by only very brief comments of my own. I also added one news item that excited me, though there’s no music to be heard yet.

I should add that I hope you are all well, and that you’re doing your damnedest to physically stay away from other people to the greatest extent possible.

ABYSMAL DAWN (U.S.)

We begin with a jackhammering, shivering, and slithering piece of death metal menace, complete with thoroughly beastly vocals and twisted melodic accents and grooves that both prove to be ridiculously catchy. I could swear they actually used a heavy-caliber machibe gun instead of drums for parts of this, and that they tortured a poltergeist for the solos. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BENIGHTED, GREEN CARNATION, KHÔRA, GOLDEN BLOOD, EMBODIMENT

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 102020
 

 

Hurrying as usual, but managed to have enough time to do some listening over the last 24 hours and to pick out five tracks from forthcoming records to recommend on this Tuesday. Hopefully you’ll agree with me that variety is the spice of life, because there’s quite a bit of that in what follows. Enjoy the spices.

BENIGHTED

I thought the best way to begin today’s collection was with a really disgusting music video about a malformed child taking revenge on his truly awful family (or at least vividly imagining it). Don’t bother watching at work, but hey, in the days of the coronavirus who’s at work? Continue reading »

MY DYING BRIDE: “THE GHOST OF ORION”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  1 Response »
Mar 032020
 

 

(DGR prepared this review of the new 13th album by My Dying Bride, which will be released on March 6th by Nuclear Blast.)

 

Releasing “Your Broken Shore” in advance of My Dying Bride‘s newest album The Ghost Of Orion may be one of the shrewdest moves in music history. The “holy shit, they’re onto something with this release” comes early on during The Ghost Of Orion — during the first growled chorus of “Your Broken Shore”. While the shifting dynamic from gothic melodrama to the oppressive heaviness that My Dying Bride conjure during that section of the song may be an easy thing to sketch out musically, denying just how hard that section hits is an exercise in futility.

It’s indisputable just how heavy that moment is, and it grabs you as a listener and basically holds you in place for the rest of the song — making a near-eight-minute journey fly by as the My Dying Bride crew really hammer home why they’ve had a career as long as they’ve had and how they’ve maintained the miserable engine that has kept them going.

It’s also something of a revelation, in that “Your Broken Shore” is so strong a song that you almost wouldn’t believe you’ve got another fifty-or-so minutes of music to dive into after it. You could even say that My Dying Bride started The Ghost Of Orion with a show-stopper — if the band hadn’t left other weapons laying around in The Ghost Of Orion‘s track list. Continue reading »

DEMONS & WIZARDS: “III”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  2 Responses »
Feb 282020
 

 

(This is Wil Cifer‘s review of the new album by Demons & Wizards, which unites the talents of Jon Schaffer (Iced Earth) and Hansi Kürsch (Blind Guardian) and was released by Century Media on February 21st.)

Fifteen years later and this project has returned.

Before we get into the meat of the metal here it should be said that I am pretty picky when it comes to power metal. This might surprise some since I grew up listening to the bands that influenced power metal. Even when Helloween came out with Keeper of the Seven Keys pt 2, I was still on board. The only problem was the bands who took inspiration from that album were too happy for me. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): WHITE NIGHTS, ФИЛАНТРОПЪ, NYRST

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Feb 202020
 

 

Did you enjoy the musical chocolates in Part 1 of today’s round-up? I hope you did, and Ii hope you’ll like what’s next, which continues following the theme of diversity that was evident in the first installment.

WHITE NIGHTS

One look at the cover art (above) for White Nights‘ debut EP, Into the Lap of the Ancient Mother, gave me an inkling that it wasn’t going to be the kind of music I usually expect from Iron Bonehead Productions — and it isn’t. Actually, there are two different covers, one for the CD edition and one for the vinyl edition. Here’s the other one: Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PYRE OF DESCENT — “PEAKS OF ETERNAL LIGHT”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  2 Responses »
Feb 172020
 

 

Crystalline notes echo across incorporeal spheres, soulful arpeggios ring out and reverberate, back-beats rock from the kit as a vibrant bass punches the pulse, the melody soars like an anthem, dour vocals present a gothic haunting gloom and turn to scarred howls, and spiraling guitar solos scintillate the senses. “Fyre” is a compulsive rocker, irresistible in its rhythms, but in its ethereal, chiming melodies it seems like a musical spell woven with threads made of light.

“Fyre” is the first song presented on the debut EP of the Berlin-based band, Pyre of Descent, and it makes for an enthralling introduction to Peaks Of Eternal Light, which will be released on February 24th by the Italian label Terror From Hell Records. But as compelling as that song is, the remaining three tracks are equally seductive, and equally aimed at transcendental goals — as you shall discover through our stream of the entire EP today.

Not for naught does TFH Records describe it as “31 minutes of enigmatic grace paired with sorrowful tension”, and not for naught do Pyre of Descent introduce their creations in these words: Continue reading »

A VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE: PERCHTA, HELFRÓ, ULVER, PHOBOS MONOLITH, ISHVARA, VMTHANAACHTH

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Feb 142020
 

 

On Valentine’s Day 2011 (here) I provided a 600-word history of the holiday going back to the Roman celebration of Lupercalia, interspersed with efforts to explain why Valentine’s Day is metal. Re-reading it this morning, I nearly passed out from the tedium.

On Valentine’s Day 2012 (here) I posted an NCS “lonely hearts” column in which I answered a variety of e-mails from women offering to video-chat with me (soapy and fresh out of the shower), people trying to sell me products that would give me “robust bone-ons”, others who wanted to have my children (I proposed to send ampules of love juice and suggested names for the kiddos), and a few broken-hearted people looking for help (I told them to just go ahead and kill themselves). The Comments were funnier than what I wrote. I’m more grown-up than that now (yeah, right).

As far as I can tell, I haven’t made an effort since then to organize any kind of holiday-related theme for the music I’ve posted on Valentine’s Day, though I’ve usually make some kind of (usually snarky) comment about the day, typically related to how commercialized the holiday is. In case you were wondering, this year the National Retail Federation reports that those celebrating Valentine’s Day in the U.S. plan to spend a record average of $196.31, up 21 percent over last year’s previous record of $161.96, and that total spending is expected to total $27.4 billion, up 32 percent from last year’s record of $20.7 billion.

Isn’t that heart-warming? Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: ENSLAVEMENT / GARGANJUA / GODTHRYMM

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  No Responses »
Feb 142020
 

 

(Here’s another one of Andy Synn‘s tripartite review columns devoted to recent releases by bands from the Emerald Isles.)

I’m sure I had some sort of cool, edgy, non sequitur of an intro in mind when I first started thinking about this column… but burn my eyes if I can remember what it was.

So let’s just get right down to it, shall we?

Here are three fine-fettered examples of “the Best of British” that I think you’ll all enjoy, two of which are actually only just being released today! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HAISSEM — “BLACK TIDE DOMINION”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  3 Responses »
Feb 102020
 

 

Haissem is a melodic black metal band started by Ukrainian musician and vocalist Andrey Tollock in Donetsk in 2014. With him working as the sole performer, Haissem released albums in 2016 (Maze of Perverted Fantasies), 2018 (Panacea for a Cursed Race), and 2019 (Demonotone), as well as a pair of EPs in 2017 and 2019. Over the course of those releases, Haissem’s creativity has expanded from a stylistic affinity for melodic black metal rooted in the ’90s into music of greater variety and more diverse stylistic influence.

Haissem’s newest output is an album named Kuhaghan Tyyn (which means “The Evil Spirit”) that will be released by the band’s new label Satanath Records on March 22nd. As compared to previous records, this one includes a greater use of synthesizers (though they are still subtle) as well as guest performers on specific tracks, including female vocalist Alyona Malytsa, harpist D. Vander, and cellist Alexandra Zima — the latter of whom makes an appearance on the song we’re premiering today , “Black Tide Dominion“. Continue reading »

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