SEEN AND HEARD ON A SUNDAY: CONSTRUCT OF LETHE, ROTTENDAWN, SULPHUROUS, EZKATON

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 292018
 

 

This being a Sunday, you might have been expecting a SHADES OF BLACK post — and there will be one later today — but I wanted to recommend some other new discoveries first. The music in this collection is more genre-scattered than the format of SOB would allow, but I have included an excellent new black metal track at the end, sort of as a segue from this post to the next one.

By the way, I decided not to include the new tracks that appeared last week from At the Gates, Marduk, Skeletonwitch, and The Agony Scene, despite the urgings of some of my NCS comrades, mainly because I wanted to go more under-the-radar (and also because I had mixed feelings about a couple of those tracks). But if you missed them, the hyperlinks will take you right there.

CONSTRUCT OF LETHE

I would have listened to the new Construct of Lethe song eventually, even without seeing the headline for Toilet Ov Hell’s premiere, because I have very good memories of their 2016 EP, The Grand Machination, for which we ourselves premiered two songs. But I got to the new song faster after seeing this headline, though I did allow enough time to enjoy the entire ToV article first: “CONSTRUCT OF LETHE BRING RIFFS SO THICC THEY’LL CLOT YER DICK“. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: AMORPHIS, YOB, GRAVE SUPERIOR, ZARRAZA, INTERNAL SUFFERING (AND MORE)

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 252018
 


photo credit: Lars Johnson

 

For this mid-week round-up I was again up to my eye-brows in worthy new music to choose from. I decided to do something a little different from usual, combining the formats of these SEEN AND HEARD collections and the occasional OVERFLOWING STREAMS columns. In other words, I’ll begin with some new songs and videos that I’ve introduced with my own descriptive verbiage (beginning with a couple of “exceptions to the rule”), and then followed that with a few more music streams that will somehow have to represent themselves through sound alone, difficult as that may be to imagine. (I also intend to present a rare week-day edition of SHADES OF BLACK later today or tomorrow in order to foist some more recent music on you.)

By the way, did you see that on July 6 Nuclear Blast will be releasing the first new Immortal album (Northern Chaos Gods) since All Shall Fall? It’s just Demonaz and Horgh, of course, but with Peter Tägtgren as session bassist. Even without Abbath in the line-up, I’m kind of excited.

AMORPHIS

I was also kind of excited about the prospect of a new Amorphis album when I first learned of it. That band has been the source of many joyous moments for yours truly in the past, and they put on a hell of an exciting show the only time I’ve seen them live (at Maryland Deathfest). Of course they and I have evolved to the point where their music isn’t as “extreme” as most of what I listen to these days, but when they’re on their game, even in these later days they still produce a thrill. Continue reading »

DOOM AND DEATH: ZEIT, …UNDER A FULL MOON, SHAMBLES, BURIAL STONE, BISMUTH, LEGION OF ANDROMEDA

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Apr 192018
 

 

I’ve been meaning to do this for about a week, and finally found time. I came across all of the following music in the course of surveying new releases for a SEEN AND HEARD round-up here at our putrid site, and thought it would make sense to package them together for extra catastrophe.

The music ranges from catastrophic funeral doom to catastrophic death metal with a heavy doom component, to something doom-centric but less easily describable at the end. I arranged the music in a way that would provide a bit of back-and-forth flow, so your blood doesn’t completely congeal and your heart doesn’t completely slow to a stopping point.

While I was writing this I thought about Andy Synn telling me that he’d come across a metal forum in which NCS was criticized by one or more idiots people for concentrating on “mainstream” metal. Yeah, right. Mainstream this right up your bungholes:

ZEIT

I’ve written frequently about this German band, who’s usual stock-in-trade is an amalgam of sludge and black metal (and some other ingredients). But for their latest EP, null., they decided to give the funeral-doom treatment to two of their previously released songs, and I’ll be damned, it turns out they’re just as strong in this other genre as they are in their main line. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 4): ABSTRACTER, OPERATION NEPTUNE SPEAR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 172018
 

 

And with this I bring to a close today’s four-part round-up of new and newly discovered music. Unlike the pairings in the first three installments of this column, there’s not much that ties these two together, other than my own liking for them.

ABSTRACTER

I liked the hell out of this Oakland band’s last album, 2015’s Wound Empire, so much so that their new one, Cinereous Incarnate, has been high on my eagerly-anticipated list. I had been holding off writing anything about it until there was a full song that I could share (which is supposed to become available sometime next week), but what the hell. I might as well make sure this is on your radar, because it has the earmarks of something stupendous — and at least I have a video album trailer created by Chariot of Black Moth if you haven’t caught it yet. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 3): OXYGEN DESTROYER, BESTIAL SIGHT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 172018
 

 

I’m continuing today’s four-part round-up of new and newly underground sounds with two more selections — two bands widely separated in geographic terms but both very adept at putting a megawatt charge straight into your spine.

OXYGEN DESTROYER

I first encountered the music of Seattle’s Oxygen Destroyer early last fall, when their single “Vanquished by the Unrelenting Devastation of the Celestial Behemoth” sucked the air out of my lungs with the speed, ferocity, and obliterating power of its assault. As I reported then, they were at work on a debut album, and now it’s out, having been released on April 5th. Its title is Bestial Manifestations of Malevolence and Death, and it’s one hell of a rocket ride. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): SECTIONED, VOCES MAGICAE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Apr 172018
 

 

We shall now have a block of Scottish noise.

SECTIONED

Sectioned have been releasing singles from their new album Annihilated, each one with its own separate photographic cover portraying images of decay and abandonment. They’re up to three singles now, the most recent of which is “Release“.

The appearance of these songs has been sort of like landmines going off. You’re walking along, minding your own business, and the next thing you know pieces of you are rocketing in all directions, enveloped in obliterating sound. “Release” is a particularly explosive experience — electrifying drumwork; punishing riffs you can feel in your bones; crazed string flurries; maniacal vocals. It savagely ravages, brutally pounds, and sprays blood like a hellish firehose. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): VERBERIS, NOVAE MILITIAE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 172018
 

 

Let’s take a quick tour through the underground, shall we? Just to see what kind of carnage is happening down there right now, where the sun don’t shine and no one sleeps easy in their beds.

I collected music from 8 bands for this round-up. Normally I would have put all of it together in one humongous post. Today I decided to split it into four parts and scatter the parts around today in between the other things we’ve planned, which include a review and a bunch of premieres).

VERBERIS

If you have any kind of anxiety disorder, extreme fear of the unknown, clinical depression, or deep-seated paranoia, you probably shouldn’t listen to this first song. It’s such a brutally grim, tension-creating, tension-ratcheting, frightful experience that you’d better have your emotional moorings firmly in place before going into it. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CRAFT, OVATE, NICK VASALLO, JØTNARR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 112018
 

 

I’ve been away from home since last Friday morning, mainly working on the things I do when I’m not throwing music at your heads at NCS, but having some fun here and there. I shudder to think what havoc the loris horde have wrecked at the NCS compound while I’ve been gone. I’ll find out tonight; I’ll be leaving for the Philadelphia airport, bound for Seattle, as soon as I post this hurried collection.

The huge list of new songs I had created before leaving Seattle torments me; I’ve grown more tormented looking at what popped up in my e-mail and web-surfing last night and this morning. Just too damned much intriguing metal being vomited forth every day. This is a tiny fraction of what I found most recently.

CRAFT

White Noise and Black Metal is the name of the new album by the long-running Swedish black metal cult Craft, their first one in seven years. The release date, through Season of Mist, is June 22nd. Continue reading »

PANOPTICON RELEASES “THE SCARS OF MAN ON THE ONCE NAMELESS WILDERNESS (I AND II)”

 Metal News  4 Responses »
Apr 042018
 

 

We almost never just post stand-alone news announcements, but we’re making an exception here — and to cut to the chase, Panopticon has now released its eagerly awaited new album, The Scars of Man on the Once Nameless Wilderness (I and II).

Austin Lunn shared the album with a few select friends, but requested no reviews before the release of the album. And so you won’t see one in this post, but you will see one tomorrow, simply because the album inspires too many thoughts and reactions that might cause me some kind of internal damage if I don’t get them off my chest and out of my mind.

For now, I just want to share the stream and links to the places where the album can be downloaded and ordered in physical editions (my own vinyl order should be arriving any day). But first, here is a statement from Austin Lunn that appears on the Bandcamp page where it can be downloaded: Continue reading »

THE END IS NIGH

 Metal News  27 Responses »
Apr 012018
 


photo by Max Rossi (Reuters)

 

The Pope says there is no Hell. Or so reported 93-year-old journalist Eugenio Scalfari of the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on Thursday after a private conversation with Francis, both of whom have become friends with each other. “Souls are not punished,” the Pope was quoted as saying in the Repubblica piece. “Those who repent obtain God’s forgiveness and go among the ranks of those who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot be forgiven disappear. There is no hell — there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

The Vatican tried to walk this back, but some words can’t be unspoken, especially from such an authoritative source on Heaven and Hell. And for some of us in the metal community, the denial of eternal hellfire comes as a crushing blow. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries