Jul 142023
 

Here we are at another Friday, with yet another big pile of new metal staring us in the face and not nearly enough time to make much of a start in selecting recommendations before the sun gets high in the sky (or is replaced by the moon where you might live).

I’m reminded of the statement attributed to Laozi about how the journey of a thousand miles begins, a proverb that usually doesn’t motivate me at times like this, when a thousand-yard stare is all I can usually muster. But today I tried harder to take the proverb to heart, and actually made two steps. Unless like puts a bog in my path, more steps will follow tomorrow and Sunday.

WOE (U.S.)

My first selection is a new song from Legacies of Frailty, a new album by Woe and the first one since 2017’s Hope Attrition. Since then, it’s hard to deny that the human world around us has slid backward, more rapidly and in more disgusting ways than even the pessimists among us had contemplated, and the natural world has suffered for it as well.

These developments certainly weighed on the mind of Chris Grigg, who for the first time since 2007 made this Woe album by himself (albeit with additional drumming on three tracks by Lev Weinstein). The result is a concept album, described by Grigg in these words: Continue reading »

Jul 142023
 


Deadspace

Those of you who have been following us a long time know that for a long time we have been following the band Deadspace (as the many reviews collected here will demonstrate), as well as the Exitium Sui solo project of Deadspace front-person Chris Gebauer (those reviews collected here). There was a time when we thought Deadspace had been interred forever when Chris moved to Europe, but thankfully the reports of their demise proved to be premature:

In 2021 Deadspace released the single “Moksha“, and about one month ago Immortal Frost Productions announced that on September 22nd it will release the band’s seventh album, Unveiling the Palest Truth. But even before then Deadspace will release another record, and it’s our pleasure to announce that today, as well as to provide a reminder about the first single that surfaced from the new album about a week ago and to spread the word about a couple of upcoming live shows. Continue reading »

Jul 082023
 

I don’t work regular hours for my “day job” (in quotes because it can require night hours too, because it’s irregular). The upside is that it usually gives me time for NCS in the early part of the day when I do most of what I do around here. The downside is that it sometimes inserts itself unexpectedly, like on a Saturday morning of all fucking times, which is what happened to me today, never mind that it’s also my birthday (please hold your applause).

So, getting a late start on this roundup means it’s not as fulsome as it should be. I was able to manage more than two songs (which was the sum total of what yesterday’s roundup provided), but not many more. But they’re good ones!

CRYPTOPSY (Canada)

Cryptopsy are one of those bands that I think all of the steady contributors to our site have enjoyed for a long time (at least I can speak for myself, DGR, and Mr. Synn). So the news of a new Cryptopsy album and song popped up in our secret discussions very quickly. So that’s where we’ll start… with the video for that new song, “In Abeyance” (especially because it gives us a chance to show off some more of Paolo Girardi‘s artwork at the top of the page). Continue reading »

Jul 072023
 

My stack of links to new songs and videos is so high it would fall over and crash if they were dominoes. Here are just two, by good friends, that I’ve enjoyed which came out during the week that’s about to end. Barring unforeseen disasters, I’ll pick many more to share tomorrow and the next day.

PANOPTICON (U.S.)

Austin Lunn encouraged Panopticon fans to send messages to the county commissioners with permitting authority over Wyoming’s Fire in the Mountains festival by promising to release a new song if 100 or more such messages were sent. That goal was more than met, and so true to his word, Austin released “Cedar Skeletons“, which will appear on Panopticon‘s new album The Rime of Memory. As Austin has explained, the song includes some very talented guest performers:

“It features guest vocals by my friend Victor Sanchez and a choir comprised of many of my collaborators (Andrea from Exulansis, William from Dalla Nebia, and Andy, whom yall know as the bass player from our live band.) Patrick Urban (Dämmerfarben) wrote and performed Cello, Charlie Anderson returned to collaborate on this album on fiddle, and we had a great time recording and arranging together.”

Continue reading »

Jul 012023
 


Incantation

When I started this blog 13 years, 7 months, and 10 days ago (but who’s counting?) I had very few ambitions. One of them was to continue posting about metal straight through the weekends for as long as this NCS lark might last, no days off.

Back in those days of the internet’s infancy, blogs devoted to metal were few in number (none of them were fancy enough to call themselves “web sites”), and I thought being the only such place with something new on the weekends would attract a few more visitors. But my main motivation was to tangibly demonstrate that NCS wasn’t a business, and writing for NCS wasn’t a job, and never would it be. Because if it were a job you’d get the weekends off, right?

13 years, 7 months, and 10 days later, I’m still not pausing NCS on the weekends. In all that time we’ve had some weekend days where nothing new went up, but not many. Maybe a dozen days, certainly not more than two dozen. Illness, injury, and apocalyptic hangovers have taken their tolls, but not nearly as often as you might think. However, weekends like this one pose a special challenge. Continue reading »

Jun 272023
 

As you can see, I found just enough time after finishing today’s two premieres to jump quickly into the non-stop churn of new songs and videos and grab just a few of them to hurl your way.

COLONY DROP (U.S.)

Full disclosure: Colony Drop‘s frontperson Joseph Schafer is a very good friend, and at one time a writer for NCS who long ago helped propel us into a higher orbit before going on to become editor at Invisible Oranges, a writer at other high-profile publications such as Decibel, and a leading co-conspirator of ours in the production of Seattle’s Northwest Terror Fest.

Now with that out of the way, here’s why I’d be recommending Colony Drop‘s genre-bending new song “Colony Drop (Brace For Impact)” even if the vocalist had been hooded and anonymous: because it’s one hell of a rocket ride. Continue reading »

Jun 242023
 


False Gods

Excess is best?” Well, sometimes it is. In fact, given how much music NCS throws at people every day, one might even say that should be this site’s sub-header (remember when we used to change the sub-headers every week?). But today the latest edition of Rennie Resmini‘s starkweather SubStack, which landed in our in-box overnight and which asked that question in its title, made me think, “No! Not this morning!

I already had some ideas for this round-up, and then saw Rennie‘s recommendations and bookmarked a dozen of them that I hadn’t been aware of — too many to explore in full, unless I was willing to delay this collection for many more hours, which I’d be anxious about doing. I did investigate a few of them, and you’ll see two of those below, followed by a few I’d previously found in other ways.

Hope you find something to brighten, or ruin, your weekend, even including the astonishing curveball I’ve thrown you at the end. More selections of a blackened variety coming tomorrow…. Continue reading »

Jun 232023
 

Once again I’m beginning what I hope will be a three-stage march backward through some of the better metal I came across over the past week, most of it brand new and some of it only newly discovered. Stage One is today, with the next two stages planned for the weekend. (None of the stages will include the bludgeoning and blistering new Cannibal Corpse song, but only because you probably already know about that one).

ALKALOID (Germany)

The last time I included Alkaloid in one of these round-ups we had news and cover art to share, but no music from their forthcoming third album Numen. Now we do. You might assume from the song’s title — “Clusterfuck” — that Alkaloid are going to throw your head into an instrumental blender set to liquefy, but if so you might be surprised.

I read this in a press release before listening to the song: “‘Clusterfuck‘ might have a clean and catchy chorus, but even the fiery, finger-tapped solo that squiggles loose around the four-minute mark is crushed like an ant between colliding moons”.

I also read the following comment from the band (now a quartet consisting of Morean (vocals, guitars, concepts), Hannes Grossmann (drums), Christian Münzner (guitars), and Linus Klausenitzer (bass)), which reveals that the song’s title has perhaps more to do with its subject matter than its sounds: Continue reading »

Jun 212023
 

I started working on this roundup of new music on Juneteenth, the U.S. holiday that was observed two days ago. Couldn’t finish it in time, due to a little celebration of the day that I was involved in. (Even my white-as-chalk family in central Texas celebrated it when I was growing up there eons ago, mainly for the excuse to feast on soul food, not so much to commemorate the final surrender of the Confederate army, and it has stayed with me even here in Washington State where it became an official holiday only last year). I couldn’t finish the roundup yesterday either, but finally, success.

Still buried in new music and with my brain knotted trying to figure out what to do, I decided to cut this Gordian knot by focusing on just a few recent releases from bands in the Pacific Northwest near where I live now. Although they’re all from the same region, however, you’re in for a real musical roller-coaster ride.

UNDULATION

First up is An Unhealthy Interest in Suffering, a head-spinning debut EP released by the Seattle band Undulation about 10 days ago. Here’s how the band themselves describe their music:

“Behind an oozing velvet curtain stand Undulation, Le Gran Guignol of Cascadia. Through the dappled sunlight of broken rose windows, their ritual begins like a writhing, pulsating wyrm thirsty for innocent blood. Painting a horrid beauty like gallows in a field of flowers, their cacophony blooms into a blurred, surreal vision of melodic blackened death metal. Undulation cometh.”

Continue reading »

Jun 172023
 

The plan as of yesterday was three round-ups in a row, and now I’m two-thirds of the way to success. The way things are looking now, I feel good about the odds of finishing a third one in tomorrow’s Shades of Black collection. Don’t place any bets, however, because there’s a party in my future tonight and possibly a hangover in my future tomorrow morning, but at least there’s no sign of my fucking day job bringing out the whip.

ALKALOID (Germany)

As a rule, news doesn’t get published here unless there’s music to go along with it. But like the rule in our site’s title, we do make occasional exceptions. This is one of those times.

Yes, I’m sorry we don’t yet have any new music from Alkaloid to share, just that album art you’ve been staring at up there — but hell, that’s worth an exception isn’t it? Continue reading »