SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: CONAN, GREY AURA, SEPULCHRAL CURSE, NITE, DEATH OBVIOUS, ABRAXAS HORN (AND MORE)

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Jan 252025
 

(written by Islander)

In the early part of this month, as the old year moved into the new, the volume of new album announcements and new songs subsided. For people like those of us at NCS, things got kind of slow and comfortable.

Well, of course that turned out to be comparable to a “negative storm surge,” a phenomenon in which waves recede before a typhoon strikes, the water being pulled away from the coast by the storm’s low pressure system before the ocean comes rushing back when the typhoon strikes in full force.

Which is what is now happening in the music we pay attention to. Everything is in full force, and I’m drowning in new music. I know it gets repetitive and possibly mind-numbing when I share the count, but I’ve got more than 60 open tabs on my computer, each one linked to a song that came out just this past week which I was curious to check out in planning today’s column, on top of a lot more from last week.

Obviously, I didn’t listen to all of them. Obviously, I wouldn’t have liked all of them if I had. I liked the ones below that I did get to. How did I get to them within that great mass of tabs? I admit I gravitated to bands I’ve liked in the past — though I did take a few shots in the dark that also paid off. And I decided to add some music at the end without commentary (due to vanishing time).

P.S. In the early evening I’m going to an annual party in Seattle across the water from my home. I’m sure that if I make it back home, it won’t be until close to 2 am. I’m also sure I won’t make any effort to wake up before noon on Sunday, and will be woozy when I do. So, don’t expect a SHADES OF BLACK column this weekend (I won’t have enough time to pull it together before leaving home this afternoon). Continue reading »

CHRONICLING CORRODED CRENELATIONS OF RESONANCE – LONGFORM MUSINGS ON KOKESHI, MESARTHIM, IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT, LYCOPOLIS

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jan 202025
 

(As the title of this post signifies, our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri shares some thoughts about new music by kokeshi, Mesarthim, Imperial Triumphant, and Lycopolis, but in this month of beginnings and transitions he also shares a great many other abundantly-linked thoughts before getting there, many of them concerning “theft and intertextuality within music.”)

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” – ultimate guitar user quote… originally by H.P. Lovecraft

It was 210 days left in my 40th year when I started writing this. One of my exes recently said the reason I’ll remain single for life is because I refuse to grow up, probably also why my articles read like they were written by a teenager on crack. 210 is a Harshad number. Harshad originates from the Sanskrit harṣa (joy) + da (give), meaning joy-giver. I for one rejoice in the bliss of discovering new music gushing in from my headphones.

2024 was the year of the dragon, a word which finds its origin in the Greek drakōn or ‘serpent’. 2025 will be the year of the snake, from 蛇 or Shé in traditional Chinese, or Hebi in Japanese Kanji which refers to “the winding thing.” This bodes well for what is to come for the dragon sharing so much of its hoard with us in music. And their etymologies being so linked one could only imagine 2025 to be as prodigious in output. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: IN THE WOODS…, BONG-RA, DESSIDERIUM, NOMADIC RITUALS, AGHARATH, BRAT

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Jan 182025
 

(written by Islander)

I’m going to a memorial service today for a friend who died of brain cancer. First time I’ve been in a church since the last church funeral I attended, which was pre-covid. During covid I attended two memorial services via zoom, one for my best friend, the other for my most important mentor, both of them killed by the same disease that then kept their friends and family from remembering them in a shared physical space.

The arc of life being what it is, the longer you survive, the more chances you’ll have to show up for those who succumbed before you have. I really don’t want to go to today’s service, or any of them. Who does? But at some point in the distant past I learned from what other people did when I lost family members I loved: I learned the importance to the survivors of showing up, of being present, even if you don’t utter a word. Most of the words you might utter would sound so clichéd anyway that they’d risk coming off as phony even if they aren’t.

I make this dreary report only to explain why I’m late in posting this Saturday roundup and why it’s shorter than I wish it were. My head has been clouded by sorrow and dread since waking up, remembering the last times I sat with my friend when he could no longer speak and now daunted by the prospect of what’s coming later today. All that slowed me way down, though the music I did manage to investigate blew away those clouds, even if only temporarily, and even if sometimes they replaced them with other clouds. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: CHAOS!

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jan 112025
 

(written by Islander)

Normally I use the “Seen and Heard” title for Saturday roundups of recommended new songs and videos. When the number of picks swells to gargantuan proportions I use “Overflowing Streams,” because the number of streams in the column is overflowing. Get it?

I’ve got a baker’s dozen of bands in today’s collection, too many names to try to cram into the post title. I used the exclamatory word “Chaos!” in place of all the names because I got on a roll with the kind of high-energy, high-intensity, sometimes batshit-crazy, music I was hearing. With just a couple of exceptions, I filtered out everything that wasn’t Chaos!, leaving them for another day.

Stylistically, the Chaos! comes in different packages. Though the opening segment is pretty heavy on tech-death, I arranged the choices so they begin to change. You’ll see. You’ll also see that there’s no black metal in this collection (or at least nothing I’d call black metal or its variants), but I’ve got tomorrow to focus on that. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SABHANKRA, ANDE, HOLY DEATH, MEGATON COMMUNION, CRACKWHÖRE, GASH FAITH, THE FALL OF MOTHER EARTH, ЧЕРНОПЛОДЬ

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Jan 042025
 

 

We’ve reached the end of a long holiday period and that left me feeling glum last night, morose over the realization that the rat race will resume on Monday. I felt much better after going through a big batch of songs I wanted to consider for this Saturday roundup.

Apart from enjoying the music, I’m enjoying the idea of how wobbly these eight selections will leave people who make it through all of them; there are many twists and turns along the way.

I arranged the choices in four two-band blocks. This doesn’t mean the selections in each part sound alike, but I did perceive some connections, except in the final two. Those two are together at the end only because I didn’t want to leave them out. 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 »

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 »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: OBSCURE SPHINX, THIS GIFT IS A CURSE, SH-BO-OO-OM, BANK MYNA, MISANTHROPÆ

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Dec 212024
 


Obscure Sphinx

(written by Islander)

It seems like the end of the year is coming up in a big rush. It’s now four days before Christmas and the start of Hanukkah and 10 days before New Year’s Eve, a block of time when many people do something different from what they normally do (like taking time off from work), and other people feel grumpier about what they normally do because they’re still having to do it (like working).

We’re still here of course, and not even feeling grumpy about it. For a bunch of reasons I won’t bore you with, it’s the fanatically commercialized “holiday season” that makes me feel grumpy, and it’s continuing to pound away on this blog that helps get me through it.

Part of what we’re pounding on, of course, is year-end LISTMANIA. Even on a Saturday I nailed another list to the door. Next week we’ll have lists from at least four more of our writers, plus a bag of odds and ends from Neill Jameson.

But for now, just more new music — quite a lot of it actually. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: AN EVENING WITH KNIVES, ARKAIST, HAVUKRUUNU, NOVARUPTA, SADIST, GOJIRA, THY CATAFALQUE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Dec 142024
 

(written by Islander)

If you’ve been visiting us recently it’s obvious that we’ve dived into year-end LISTMANIA. Andy Synn just finished his week-long series, which always starts us off, and we’ve re-posted a few lists from sites much bigger than our own. But if that was the dive, we’re about to sink way deeper into lists, like someone who offended a crime lord and are now being pulled into a watery abyss with concrete blocks chained to our thrashing body.

To preview what’s coming, next week we’ll roll out DGR‘s week-long Top 50 list, a three-part list series from Neill Jameson, and a couple of year-end lists from other NCS writers, with a lot more to come in the weeks after that. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: ABDUCTION, ANCIENT TOME, FANE, MONASTR, MONTE PENUMBRA, PHRENELITH, RELICS OF HUMANITY, VIOLET COLD

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Dec 072024
 


Abduction – photo by Jack Armstrong

(written by Islander)

Bandcamp Friday would have been a better time for this roundup, but I couldn’t get it done in time. Yesterday was the last one of those for 2024, and it’s not clear if Bandcamp will keep it going next year. They announced the 2024 schedule on March 11th of this year, so it’s really too early to say. Obviously, a big horde of us hope Bandcamp continues the tradition.

Well, near misses only count in horseshoes and hand grenades, so my near miss with this roundup probably doesn’t count. Still, even with Friday gone, picking up the releases collected below won’t cost you anything more, even though less of the purchase money will go to the labels and artists.

Once again I resorted to arranging the music in alphabetical order by band name. To the extent there’s any musical through-line here, anything that explains why I picked these songs instead of the many others I considered, it might be that they all made me… uncomfortable… in different ways. And it turns out that the arrangement will throw you back and forth, tempo-wise. Continue reading »

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