AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PRONOSTIC — “BARE AND WRETCHED”

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Mar 302023
 

The darkest clouds of the covid pandemic didn’t have many silver linings, but one of them is that the lockdowns gave musicians a chance to bring to fruition ideas that had been long-gestating. The Montreal-based technical/progressive melodic death metal band Pronostic is a prime example of that. The dead times allowed them to complete their second album, Chaotic Upheaval, which is set for release on May 12th. It follows their formidable full-length debut (An Atomic Decision) by a long eight years.

It’s fair to say that with this new album Pronostic pulled out all the stops. New participants have come on board, including Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s piano and orchestration maestro Francesco Ferrini; world-renowned drummer Samuel Santiago, known for his time in First Fragment, Gorod, Black Crown Initiate, and more; and fretless bassist extraordinaire Xavier Sperdouklis, whose resume includes work with Killitorous and Ignominy. Moreover, the new album includes a host of impressive guest appearances (which we’ll identify later in this feature). And they got Cryptopsy‘s Christian Donaldson to produce and record it along with the band’s Charles “Butcher” Pilotte.

And none of that is intended to take away from the songwriting and performance skills of continuing members Pilotte (Low Vocals / Guitar) and Alex Lauzon (High Vocals / Guitar).

What all these talents have accomplished on the new album has already been previewed by the release of a single called “L’impureté Globale” (accompanied by an ambitious post-apocalyptic music video), and today we’ve got a further preview in our premiere via a lyric video of the album track “Bare and Wretched“. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NECRONOMICON EX MORTIS (SELF-TITLED)

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Mar 302023
 

What you’re about to experience is likely to be the most electrifying 18 minutes of your day, unless you lose control of your car, the brakes fail, and you’re surging toward a concrete pylon at Formula One speed.

Those 18 minutes of full-throttle, mind-boggling music are wrapped within the self-titled debut EP by the Chicago quintet Necronomicon Ex Mortis, which will be released tomorrow (March 31st). Their brand of death metal is so fast, so technically head-spinning, and so devilishly inventive that it allows no room for any calm contemplation. All you can do is hang on for dear life and enjoy the flame-throwing madhouse thrills while they last — and then yield to the impulse to throw yourself back in right away. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PUSTILENCE — “ASPIRANTS OF INTEMPERANCE”

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Mar 292023
 

We’re going to leap right into the music we’re now presenting, and then backfill with some details about who’s responsible for it and the album that includes it.

The song is “Aspirants of Intemperance“, and it is indeed a belligerently intemperate death metal outburst. With little more than a noxious grunt to announce it, the song quickly begins bludgeoning listeners and broiling their brains with squealing, siren-like strings and viciously roiling riffage. The raw madness in the seething and swarming fretwork channels rabid savagery as the rhythm section rapidly jackhammer syour spine and horrific gutturals vent their vitriol.

And there’s more violent lunacy to come, including a freaked-out guitar solo, gut-plundering bass-lines, crazed screams, bursts of jittery and jolting fretwork, weird channel-shifting yowling tones, constant shifts in rhythmic patterns and tempos, and even more macabre vocal howling and roaring. It’s all bizarre and bamboozling, not just gruesome and barbaric but also intricate and elaborate. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SOLNEGRE — “VESSEL PART I: THE NIGHT WITHIN”

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Mar 292023
 

We are premiering a powerful song in this feature, but we’re also doing much more than that. We’re introducing you to a new band (this is the first of their recorded music to be revealed); we’re presenting the new single’s cover art for the first time; and we’re sharing insights into what inspired the music, and news about what will be coming next.

The band is SOLNEGRE, from the Balearic Islands near the eastern coast of Spain. The band is new, but the members are not newcomers to heavy music. Indeed, the two founders have been bandmates since 1995 and members of the Doom Metal sextet Helevorn. They chose to part ways with that band but quickly re-united in this new project, later joined by two other performers, who also has extensive experience in underground metal.

They have taken their musical inspiration from the old school greats of Doom/Death metal from the ’90s, referring to such bands as My Dying Bride and and early Anathema and Opeth, and more recent comparative references might include the likes of Shape of Despair, Ahab, and Doom Vs.

SOLNEGRE have inked a deal with the Armenian label Funere for the release of their debut album this fall (which includes guest appearances), but in the meantime they will be releasing their first single on April 7th, a song named “Vessel Part I: The Night Within”, and that’s what we’re premiering today through a visualizer video. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEMONSTEALER — “THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE”

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Mar 282023
 

Sahil Makhija (aka “The Demonstealer“) began a long road to recognition in the global metal community roughly 25 years ago. At least in terms of recordings, the road began with Sahil’s band Demonic Resurrection, whose debut album Demonstealer saw release in November 2000. Four more Demonic Resurrection albums followed, along with opportunities to perform outside their native India, and for a time it’s fair to say that DR was India’s best-known and most-celebrated extreme metal band.

Along the way, Sahil activated other vehicles for his musical output, including Reptilian Death and his solo project Demonstealer, and he gained further recognition through hosting the online cooking show “Headbanger’s Kitchen“, which gave him a chance to rub shoulders with members of metal bands scattered far and wide across the globe. And that’s not to mention his founding of a recording studio, a record label, a PR agency, and a consultancy service.

The road to recognition hasn’t been easy. It still isn’t. As Sahil explained in a recent interview with our man Comrade Aleks, he has experienced a fair share of moments when he wanted to give up, not because of a lack of desire to continue creating music but because of all the shit constantly shoveled up by “the business side” of releasing music and performing. And then there’s the fact that metal music is still an alien art form in India — “culturally strange and also sonically not appealing” to the vast majority of the population. “Metal music, unlike in the west, is music that people of a certain privileged and economic background listen to. It’s not the music of the common man.”

Nevertheless, Sahil forges ahead, with music still the mainstay of his life as he approaches his 41st birthday. And more than ever, disturbing conditions in his native land (and around the world) became the subject matter of his songwriting as he returned to his Demonstealer project. Reflecting that subject matter, the name of the new Demonstealer album which we’re presenting today is The Propaganda Machine, which is now set for release on March 31st by Black Lion Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THØRN — “INFERNO”

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Mar 272023
 

For those of our visitors new to the band Thørn, they’re a Milanese group formed by members of the Italian hardcore DIY scene. And hardcore/crust-punk does provide a key ingredient to their music, but that’s only one of many, which also include black metal, grindcore, and more besides. Not for naught do they cite the diverse influences of such bands as The Secret, Trap Them, Baptists, Cursed, and Oathbreaker.

They released their first EP (self-titled) through Indelirium Records in 2018, and followed that with a split with the Estonian crust-punk band Ognemot. Now, they’re ready to hit the streets again with a debut album fittingly named Inferno, which will see a limited tape release on March 30th through the collaboration of Vita Detestabilis Records and Fiadh Productions — and today we present the album’s full stream. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ERNTE — “CUTTING THE STARS FROM THE SKY”

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Mar 232023
 

A bit more than a year after the release of their debut album Geist und Hexerei, and the release of a 7” EP in September 2022, the Hellvetic black metal duo Ernte are returning with a new album named Albsegen, and it confirms this band’s talents as formidable spellcasters. As forecast by Vendetta Records, which will release the record on April 7th, it “captures real world hate and frustration while calling back to a distant past with an invoking of old energies and spirits”.

This Swiss duo — V. Noir (guitars, bass, drums) and Witch N. (vocals, bass, violin) — have hit upon a formulation of black metal that’s atmospheric and immersive, creating nightside experiences of mysticism and old magic, but they also simultaneously give their songs visceral punch and mind-scarring intensity. Their music can be disorienting, depressive, unsettling, and even deranged, but it’s still very easy to fall prey to the music’s unearthly sorcery.

One song-and-video has already emerged into our consciousness, and today we present a second one, which give us a chance to see the performers doing their thing. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ASYSTOLE — “BLANKETED IN FLIES”

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Mar 222023
 

The ever-interesting musical palette (and palate) of I, Voidhanger Records will become even more distinctively varied on April 7th when the label releases Siren To Blight, the debut album from the NY/NJ avant-garde death metal band Asystole.

The band features the talents of guitarist extraordinaire Pat Hawkins (Thaetas, Aberrated, Needlepusher, Kyrios) and bass virtuoso Kyle Linderman, as well as drummer James Applegate (Windfaerer, Replicant) and vocalist John Dunn IV (Abominism, Dark Waters End).

With a line-up like that, and knowing that they’ve drawn upon the disparate influences of such bands as Gorguts, Virus, Krallice, Cryptopsy, and Anata, you might venture a guess that the album is going to have its fair share of technical razzle-dazzle and a kind of head-spinning adventurousness in the song-writing, and that would be a good guess. But some other things you might not guess, and you’ll see what we mean when you listen to “Blanketed In Flies“, the album’s opening track that we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HELLCRASH — “DEMONIC ASSASSINATION”

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Mar 222023
 

When we premiered the second single from the new Hellcrash album in early February we introduced it this way: “It’s time for a rude ‘n’ crude celebration of filth, fury, and fun! Plus sickness, sleaze, and slaughter!”

It seemed like a fitting prelude to the hell-raising experience of Demonic Assassination, which is now racing toward a lavish March 24 release by Dying Victims Productions, but we also  observed, for those who might not have encountered the band’s debut album Krvcifix Invertör, that Hellcrash “follow in the cloven-hooved footsteps of such groups as Bulldozer, Slayer, and Venom, whipping up a gnashing and pulse-pounding convulsion of blackened thrash and speed metal”.

And we also pointed out that while all those ingredients revealed in the debut album still make up the high-octane fuel for the new album, Demonic Assassination provides even more variety and an even tighter execution. Today you’ll see what we meant for yourselves, because we’ve got the full album stream for you today. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VISION DEPRIVED — “SELF ELEVATING, DEEP INSIDE THE VOID”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 212023
 

In a search for analogies it’s tempting to compare Milan-based Vision Deprived‘s new album to a musical roller-coaster ride. It’s packed with twists and turns, ups and downs; it gets the adrenaline flowing; it frequently pops our eyes wide open; and it’s scary. But it’s not the kind of trip that’s likely to leave riders laughing it off when it’s time to dismount, and the twists are… twisted… in ways that can become unsettling because they’re so unhinged. You can hear and feel the rails under a roller-coaster car, but what would happen if that sense of being attached were to vanish?

Self Elevating, Deep Inside The Void is the album’s name, and even the title suggests leaving the rails and any other tangible boundaries, which is pretty much what happens as you make your way through the record. What you might not expect from the title is that the music is usually firestorm-fast and decimating, as well as completely dazzling in its madhouse instrumental escapades through a dystopian hellscape. Continue reading »

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