AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): QWÄLEN — “SYVÄ HILJOISUUS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Mar 062023
 

Almost exactly two years ago we had the pleasure of premiering Unohdan Sinut, the debut album of the Finnish band Qwälen. As is our habit, we spilled a lot of words introducing it, dropping references along the way to such bands as Young and in the Way and Dödsrit, but also the likes of Darkthrone, Nifelheim, Bathory, and Terveet Kädet. We identified “speed and fury” as perhaps the record’s main hallmarks, but also underscored the gripping harmonies created by the feverish dual-guitar leads:

“They not only vibrantly channel a range of dark and disturbing emotions, they also burrow into the listener’s head with relentless penetrating force, their relative clarity piercing through the raw and ravaging tones of what surrounds them.”

It’s fair to say that Unohdan Sinut was a damn tough act to follow, but these black metal punks were undaunted. They’ve made a second album, Syvä Hiljaisuus, that’s just as fury-filled and emotionally powerful as the debut. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NEKUS — “KATABASIS”

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Mar 032023
 

The Ancient Greek word katabasis referred to a journey into the underworld — the Hades of myth — but in time it has come to refer to travels into the realm of the dead in tales beyond the stories of Odysseus and Orpheus.

“Katabasis” is also the name of the song we’re premiering today from the debut album of the Italian/German band Nekus, and as song titles go, this one was a perfect choice — because the music is horrifying and hopeless, supernatural and suffocating.

It does seem to rudely usher us into an ugly, abominable place where only the dead may dwell, and suffering is endless. But as you’ll discover, the song is also a sonic cataclysm of immense destructive power. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FORCEFED HORSEHEAD — “THE BLACK SUN”

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Mar 022023
 

What is it about music which inflicts humongous levels of near-physical sonic punishment, coupled with moods of abject hopelessness or unchained rage, that generates an urgent kind of magnetism for metal listeners? Doom-drenched earth-shakers aren’t comforting, and at pitch-black levels of intensity they aren’t the kind of thing that leaves you humming a tune. So what is it?

We’re pondering these questions after repeatedly listening to the harrowing song we’re premiering today off a new album entitled Monoceros by the unforgettably named Norwegian band Forcefed Horsehead. Even for metalhead whose ears and minds have been roughed up by years of sonic abuse and thus become de-sensitized to crushers, “The Black Sun” is a special kind of ruination capable of leaving people slack-jawed. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PLAGUE BEARER — “SUMMONING APOCALYPTIC DEVASTATION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  4 Responses »
Mar 012023
 

The stylistic banner of Seattle’s Plague Bearer brands the band as Unholy Black Satanic War Metal. The striking cover art of their debut album is itself a devotional to demons, and the song titles also scream blasphemy at the top of their lungs. The band’s cloaked, hooded, and masked countenances on stage double-down on the ethos of Hell come to Earth. And of course the album’s title, Summoning Apocalyptic Devastation, is perhaps the most brazen foreshadowing of the ruin within.

Given all that, some people might already be expecting nothing more than the kind of malformed and potentially monotonous sonic abuse that’s the stock in trade of many units who sadistically attack listeners’ ears under the genre sign of Blackened Death Metal. But there you would be leaping to the wrong conclusion.

To be sure, Summoning Apocalyptic Devastation is an explosive and devastating experience, frequently poisonous, almost relentlessly bone-smashing, and as intrinsically evil as all the surface hallmarks would lead you to expect. But the songs also pack riveting riffs, mood-changing melodies more nuanced than you would guess, and the performance skill of veteran executioners.

And thus in those ways (and others) the album may surprise listeners (less of a surprise if you’ve heard any of the track premieres that have preceded the full stream we bring you today). Indeed, we think it’s likely that this is a record which will still be vividly remembered come list-making time at the end of this year. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DESOLATE REALM — “THROUGH THE DEPTHS”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  No Responses »
Feb 282023
 

The name of our site has never been a literal commandment, but it’s also fair to say that we tend to observe its mandate more often than we bend or break it. We need a good reason to do the bending and breaking — but we’ve got a very good reason today, thanks to the return of the Finnish duo Desolate Realm and their forthcoming second album Legions.

Formed by members of Decaying, Chalice, and Altar of Betelgeuze, this Helsinki band worship at the altar of traditional epic doom metal, but with a penchant for highly infectious riffs and the kind of potent grooves that kick-start hearts.

Not for naught does the advance press for the album proclaim that it combines “the epic grandeur of doom-metal acts like Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus with classic heavy-metal of Savatage and Metal Church and the mighty groove of Black Sabbath“. And we’ve got the proof in our premiere of Legion‘s second single, “Through the Depths“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VANISHMENT — “NO MORE TORTURE”

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Feb 282023
 

(On March 3rd Dead Sage Records will release No More Torture, the debut album from Seattle-based Vanishment, and today we’re delighted to premiere the album in its entirety, preceded by the following review written by Todd Manning.)

Retro-thrash can be a dicey affair. Too many bands opt to play an oversimplified version of the genre and forget the nuance and complexity exhibited by many groups as they developed. However, this isn’t the case on No More Torture, the debut full-length from Seattle’s Vanishment.

While No More Torture is the group’s debut, these guys are no rookies. Containing current members of Trial, Himsa, Heiress, and Lair of the Minotaur, their collective experience shines through in both instrumental chops and songwriting acumen. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: IDLE RUIN — “SHACKLED FOR ADORNMENT”

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Feb 272023
 

Just last month Bitter Loss Records released the debut album of the Australian band Idle Ruin (from Brisbane). Entitled The Fell Tyrant, it unleashed nine tracks of mainly full-throttle thrashing death, hurling the listener into one exhilarating escapade after another, propelled by bone-splintering drumwork, iron-shod bass lines, wild-eyed guitar work, and larynx-lacerating vocal extremity.

Idle Ruin packed each song with head-spinning twists and turns as well as spine-slugging and skull-smacking grooves, channeling mayhem, madness, and a general air of marauding savagery. The album’s explosive energy was (and is) potent enough to power massive turbines, but the band also picked their moments to downshift their racing speed, darken the mood, make room for surprising instrumental maneuvers, and plow up the pavement with bursts of jolting (and highly headbangable) brutishness.

And although there’s an abundance of guitar soloing through the album, the “personalities” of those solos change repeatedly, sometimes exotic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes despairing, and sometimes downright berserk.

The album’s opening track, “Shackled for Adornment“, sets the stage for this mind-bender of a record in electrifying fashion, and that’s the song which is the subject of the video we’re premiering today. It was filmed at the The Fell Tyrant album launch show at The Bearded Lady venue in Brisbane on January 21st of this year. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AYYUR — “A CHANT FOR THE DEAFS”

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Feb 272023
 

Extreme metal finds fertile soil in nearly every corner of the globe, though the soil is undeniably less hospitable in some places than others. It is, for example, more difficult for such musicians to become noticed (and possibly more difficult even to indulge their creative interests) in a country like Tunisia, a land where many ancient cultures intersect in the northern-most geography of Africa. But there, Ayyur was born 16 years ago, and has managed to survive and, against all odds, even to thrive.

After Ayyur‘s inception, Metal Archives shows us that the project quickly released an EP, a pair of splits, and a demo in its early years, but then fell silent for nearly a decade. Beginning in 2018 Ayyur has returned, releasing three EPs with only two-year gaps between them (including last year’s Hidden Room Sessions I), and now the band has at last completed a debut album named Prevail, a title which seems to stand for what the band itself has managed to do.

We’re told by the labels which will release it that through this new album of blackened doom metal “the artist observes the desolating reality which surrounds them, finding a personal path and the answers to their own questions”. It is thus also described as “an intimate album, strongly introspective and ruthless at the same time, with lyrics sharp and pungent like blades”. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: KRULLUR — “DEAD LIVE!”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Feb 242023
 

The world is obviously a very big place. Most of us will only glimpse relatively tiny corners of it in a lifetime’s worth of travels. Similarly, there are vast numbers of far-flung metal bands most of us will never get to see on stage, no matter how addicted we are to their music, and studio records just don’t often come close to capturing the explosiveness of some bands’ live performances.

Houston, Texas-based Krullur is undoubtedly one of those bands a lot of people overseas, or even in the U.S., will never get to see as they destroy venues with their crazed and crushing amalgams of thrash, death metal, punk, and grindcore. But what we’ve got for you today is the next best thing, the premiere stream of a record called Dead Live! that does an astonishingly effective job of bringing listeners right into the head-exploding blast zone. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HVRT – VERGISSMEINNICHT / NEZABUDKA

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Feb 242023
 

(Andy Synn presents a new track whose subject matter is painfully relevant on this particular day)

Did you know that today it’s been exactly one year since Russia invaded Ukraine?

If you didn’t… well, I wouldn’t necessarily blame you. It certainly doesn’t feel like the war has been going on that long, even though it somehow also feels like it’s been going on forever.

Let’s face it, the human brain has difficulty processing events like this, especially over long periods of time, and that goes double when we’re not being directly affected (and I won’t even pretend to understand what those actually in the war zone must be going through).

It’s an all too human response, and one which makes it all too easy to grow numb and jaded, to simply accept this as “the new normal” and forget what fuelled our anger and our abhorrence in the first place.

But the song/video we’re premiering today asks us, implores us, not to forget. Not to blind our eyes or cover our ears, but to heed the cries of the dead and the disappeared and to remember those who have been lost… because sometimes that’s all we can do.

Continue reading »

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