AN NCS PREMIERE: DESEKRYPTOR — “FESTERING ULCERATION”

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Jun 132023
 

Following up on a sequence of four short releases that surfaced over the last six years, the Indiana death metal band Desekryptor have at last recorded a debut album. Aptly entitled Vortex Oblivion, it’s now set for release by Blood Harvest Records on July 14th.

The record is indeed a lethal death metal vortex, both ghastly and gutting — merciless in its bone-smashing force, terrorizing in the violence of its convulsions, disturbing in its moods of monstrous malignancy and abject agony — and yet freakishly elaborate and dynamic in its mauling permutations. It’s the kind of music that not only rewards repeat listening but demands it, to fully appreciate all the twists and turns in the cavalcade of horrors it presents.

In other words, there is ingenuity and intrigue to be found within these hideous cataclysms, and an impressive talent for melding both old school influences and newer-school adventurousness, executed with equally impressive technical skill, which even the density of all the subterranean mangling and mauling doesn’t completely obscure.

We’ve got two prime examples of these qualities in “Festering Ulceration“, the album track we’re premiering today, and “Abysmal Resurrection“, the album’s first single that we’re also sharing. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OUR DYING WORLD — “THE EGREGIOUS SINS OF HUMANITY”

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Jun 122023
 

The last time we visited the works of the Los Angeles band Our Dying World a year ago, the occasion was our premiere of a video for the song “Veil of the Reaper“ off their then-forthcoming second album Hymns Of Blinding Darkness. We introduced it with these words:

We’ll make you a solemn promise: Whatever condition you happen to be in now (unless you’re in a coma), the song and video we’re about to present will make you feel orders of magnitude more alive, accelerating your heart-rate, igniting your fast-twitch muscles, and spinning your head like a glorious top. And for those of you who want your music to attack like a pack of rabid dogs, it fills that need, too.

Today we get a chance to revisit the band’s work through our premiere of a new single named “The Egregious Sins Of Humanity” — and it’s another ravishing spectacle. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE PIT — “AEONS OF HATE”

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Jun 122023
 

Hailing from Queretaro, Mexico, The Pit will celebrate two decades of existence next year. Like other bands with such a long career, life has gotten in the way, and their recording output hasn’t been prolific. Until this year, their discography consisted of only a debut split in 2006 and a debut album (Disrupted Human Symmetry) in 2008. But now, 15 years later, Personal Records will soon be discharging The Pit‘s aptly named second album, Of Madness and Evil Whispers.

As one might expect, the line-up has changed in the interim, although original guitarist Antonio Nolasco, original bassist Octavio Olachea, and original vocalist Guillermo Galván are all still in harness together on the new album, joined by new drummer Mauricio Villalón and new second guitarist Angel Villegas.

Also not entirely surprising, The Pit have moved their music in different directions as compared to what you can hear on their first full-length, and the results are — in a word — electrifying. Where The Pit now thrive is in the unleashing of high-speed, high-power death metal fueled by ruthless ferocity, but also embedded with equally ruthless hooks that get stuck in the head, and simultaneously channel an array of dark and demented moods — which is to say that they are damned effective songwriters.

We’ve got two great examples of the sinister yet hurricane-strength power of the new album in two songs we want to share today, including one we’re premiering. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DISIMPERIUM — “BLADE OBFUSCATION”

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Jun 082023
 

We almost never copy/paste what labels and PR agents write about the music they’re promoting. Not because they’re never right, but because we prefer to reach our own conclusions and express it in our own words, even when we’re enthusiastic enough about what we hear to host premieres. But sometimes, the word-smithing we receive is so glorious that it’s hard to resist. In the case of Sentient Ruin‘s come-on for the forthcoming debut album of Portland’s Disimperium, it’s gloriously horrifying:

As the debut 2021 7″ “Malefic Obliteration” had already hinted at, human ears will fall prey yet again to an entity whose quest for total sensorial destruction has now reached implausible and horrific extremes, far beyond the confines of sanity which had already been obliterated on the inaugural release. In its nine tracks and thirty two minutes of pure concentrated terror, “Grand Insurgence Upon Despotic Altars” discharges an inescapable payload of death that impacts the listener with the force and speed of an apocalyptic shockwave escaping the fireball of a nuclear warhead.

And there’s more where that came from, such as this: “Where bands like Diocletian, Impetuous Ritual, Tetragrammacide, Knelt Rote and Damaar had already tested and established the limits of human resistance against abstract ideas of omnipotent negativity and horizonless sonic bedlam, Disimperium explore these outer limits even further, venturing out and establishing a new era into which there is no more measure to the very definition of musical insanity sought and achieved for the sole sake of aggression”.

That’s all vividly evocative enough that you’ve probably already got a good idea of what you’re about to experience in the album track we’re premiering today, but we’ve got to justify our own existence, don’t we? So here goes…. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GUHTS — “WHITE NOISE”

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Jun 082023
 

White noise is a term that technically refers to a sonic sensation which equally includes all frequencies across a spectrum of audible sound, a meaningless commotion of static that can be used to drown out other sounds, which is why white noise generators are sometimes used as sleep aids. Sometimes it’s compared to the emissions of an old radio whose dial hasn’t yet found a station.

The New York avant-garde post-metal band Guhts had their reasons for naming their new single “White Noise“, but it’s not because the music sounds like some meaningless background drone, and it most definitely is not soporific. Far from it, as you’re about to learn for yourselves.

People who’ve heard Guhts‘ 2021 EP Blood Feather or their summer 2022 single “Burn My Body” won’t be surprised by that observation. Both of those releases were the kind of sonic and emotional powerhouses whose impact could be likened to meteor craters on Saturnian moons (not our moon, because it’s too familiar, and the music of this band tends to be startling). Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): I, DESTROYER — “COLD, DEAD HANDS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 072023
 

The story of New England-based I, Destroyer is an unusual one, perhaps best summed up as a tale of indomitable perseverance in the shadows of the underground. As we write this, the band are on the eve of their 20th anniversary, and yet (with a new lineup in place) are only now about to release their first official EP as a label release.

Those two decades did see the production of four I, Destroyer demos, but they were self-released and usually passed along by hand to friends, fans, and other bands. Moreover, although those four demos collectively included 21 songs, they totaled only about 38 minutes of music. The new EP — Cold, Dead Hands — is nearly 25 minutes all by itself, spread across 6 tracks. If you do the math, you’ll figure out that these songs on average are longer than anything the band have done before.

These songs are also dynamic and expertly executed assaults. And make no mistake, they are indeed vicious assaults, relentlessly pulse-pounding attacks of black thrash and speed metal, but with enough changes in momentum and mood (and plenty of technically eye-popping performances) to keep listeners perched on the edge of their seats. It’s raw and nasty, fetid as well as ferocious, both feral and freaked-out — a wild ride from beginning to end.

And so, it’s with fiendish pleasure that we present a full stream of Cold, Dead Hands today in advance of its June 9th co-release by Eternal Death and Born for Burning. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CLARET ASH — “CASCADENCE OF THE TWILIGHT” (AND AN INTERVIEW)

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Jun 072023
 

In 2019 very few (if any) people foresaw all the global upheavals that the immediately following years would produce — a global pandemic, the damage caused by rapidly accelerating climate change, and a ravaging war in Europe, among other catastrophes. The Australian band Claret Ash didn’t foresee them either, at least not in all of those specifics, but what happened did depressingly dovetail with an imaginative narrative they had already begun, and informed where it would then unfold in a tale of societal collapse.

In December of last year, almost five years after the release of their last album The Great Adjudication: Fragment Two, the band began a new musical sequence called WORLDTORN. As explained by the band in an exclusive interview you’ll find at the end of this feature, it “picks up from where the last album, The Great Adjudication, finished by focusing on events after the collapse of society and the eradication of humanity”.

Clarest Ash launched WORLDTORN in December with the single “GATEWAYS” (reviewed by us here). Thematically, it described a world in turmoil, reeling from an “anthropocentric holocaust” during which nature had mutated and become the supreme force and humans were forced into hiding.

And now Claret Ash will be following that initial chapter of their continuing narrative with a second installment, a new EP named WORLDTORN: Anemoia that’s set for release on CD and digital formats by Hypnotic Dirge Records on August 11, 2023. In addition to the afore-mentioned interview, it’s our pleasure today to premiere the EP’s electrifying opening song, “Cascadence of the Twilight“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VOIDHAVEN — “LITHIC”

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Jun 062023
 

Today we premiere a full stream of Lithic, the debut album by Hamburg-based Voidhaven, arriving five years and many hardships after their self-titled debut EP. It provides a masterful union of stylistic ingredients from different corners of the vast realm of Doom, sectors where death/doom, funeral doom, and trad doom reign in their haunted, ice-cold castles. Both instrumentally elaborate and vocally multi-faceted, the album is completely captivating.

Perhaps this won’t come as a surprise after you learn that the band’s line-up is composed of veterans, and includes members of such bands as Ophis, Fvneral Fvkk, and Remembrance. Yet as noted above, the writing and completion of the album didn’t come easy, but the time enabled care and attention to detail. And that’s probably a good place to begin, with the band’s own extensive statement of how the album came to exist and what they sought to achieve: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): AODON — “PORTRAITS”

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Jun 052023
 

We’re approaching the halfway mark on 2023’s calendar, but we’ll venture the bold speculation that even by year-end you’ll have a hard time finding an album more overwhelmingly powerful in its sound and mood than Portraits, the forthcoming third album by the French atmospheric black metal band Aodon that’s set for release by Willowtip Records on June 9th. Over and over again, it takes the breath away with the monumental scale and visceral intensity of its music.

The themes of the songs are dark, and unmistakably the music is too, even in its suddenly softer phases, which provide haunting (and occasionally even hopeful) reprieves from the album’s turbulent and towering intensity. It is, to forewarn you, a harrowing series of portrayals, but so immense and immersive that it chains the senses in place, caught and consumed by the calamities and the contrasts. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ORGAN DEALER — “PANORAMIC” AND “SOLITUDE IS DEATH”

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Jun 052023
 

Mondays tend to be morbid days for many of us. Maybe our asses are dragging from a weekend drowned in excesses of various kinds and not enough sleep. Maybe we’re staring at the face of an ugly job, knowing that there’s five days of them standing in a nasty gauntlet ahead of us. Motivation might be in short supply, and over-stuffed pessimism riding you like a sway-backed mule.

But don’t lose hope, there’s an antidote for this Monday: an opportunity to stick your head into a sonic blast furnace that will at least temporarily incinerate your woes (and your clothing and flesh). And even if you’re actually looking forward to the start of a new work week, what you’re about to hear will give it the kind of kick-start otherwise available only from a syringe of adrenaline plunged into your carotid artery.

To fulfill that promise we have the premiere of not one but two tracks from The Weight of Being, a new album by the explosive New Jersey grindcore band Organ Dealer, which will be fully detonated by Everlasting Spew Records on July 28th. Continue reading »

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