AN NCS DEMO PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BEZDECH — “TAM, GDZIE GNIJEMY POD POMNIKAMI”

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May 162023
 

Almost two years ago we encountered Duhkha, the debut EP by the Polish band Bezdech, summarily describing it as “a hair-raising and head-spinning alchemy of avant-garde black and death metal”, and then adding these words:

This Polish duo paint their disturbing but often electrifying sonic portraits with colors of mind-abrading dissonance, thoroughly unpredictable fretwork maneuvers, and rapidly veering tempos. But the music is just as likely to become cloaked in shrouds of haunting gloom or to dip into streams of soul-shaking misery as it is to spin like a centrifuge of technically impressive lunacy and riotous savagery. And holy shit, the vocals are stunningly rabid and possessed.

Since then Bezdech have expanded their line-up from a two-man studio project to a full four-man band, and have managed to get a few live gigs under their belts. They’ve also been working on new music for a debut album, but have decided to give the world a glimpse of what they’ve been working on via a demo named Tam, gdzie gnijemy pod pomnikami that we’re gratefully premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THE END OF SIX THOUSAND YEARS — SELF-TITLED

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May 152023
 

Today we have another tale of slumber and revival. In this case it’s the Italian band The End of Six Thousand Years. Their inception occurred nearly 20 years ago, and by 2012 they had released two albums, in addition to some shorter releases. But then a long silence befell them, interrupted only by a single (“Angelus Errare“) that emerged in 2020.

Well, they weren’t actually sleeping, more a case of “life getting in the way”. Yet the desire didn’t die, and although line-up changes have occurred, the band is now returning with a new EP that will be released by Hypershape Records on May 18th. As a sign of the rebirth, and it’s fair to say a reinvention, the new EP is self-titled. It includes four tracks, concluding with a cover of “The Man Who Loves to Hurt Himself” by Today Is The Day, and we’ve got all four of them for your listening pleasure today. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WOODEN VEINS — “GANYMEDE”

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May 122023
 

The Chilean melodic doom metal band Wooden Veins, whose members are now mostly based in European countries, made an auspicious full-length debut with their well-received 2021 album In Finitude. There, the band crafted beautifully produced music that pulled from deep wells of sorrow and gained strength from the deep, rich singing voice of frontman Javier Cerda.

Now Wooden Veins are returning with a follow-up album named Imploding Waves, which will be released on June 23rd by Ardua Music. Beginning last year the band started disclosing singles from the new album. So far, three songs have surfaced with videos, and today we present a fourth one — “Ganymede“.

Collectively, these songs demonstrate that Imploding Waves expands on the songwriting evident on In Finitude, adding progressive and gothic elements and overall providing a more elaborate, more dynamic, and ultimately more memorable experience. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VILE RITUAL — “LIVING HELL”

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May 122023
 

Even if you missed out on Vile Ritual‘s self-titled debut demo from 2019 or the Tongues of the Exanimate compilation of Vile Ritual‘s music that Sentient Ruin Laboratories released early last year, the linguistic embellishments accompanying the band’s forthcoming debut album would clue you in to the terrors of this project’s music.

Sentient Ruin, which will also release this first full-length (on June 16th), refers to it as a “psychedelic bestial death metal plague” emerging from “the bowels of hades”. Or try these vivid words on for size:

On the forty-minute, eight-track death-riddled hallucinatory tesseract, Vile Ritual unites the animalistic violence of bands like Archgoat and Von with the technical and compositional unpredictability of progressive and atmospheric-leaning death metal bands like The Chasm, Timeghoul, Incantation, Infester and Demilich to unleash a mind-devouring hallucination of mutated dark and occult death metal carnage.

In a way not dissimilar to what we’ve seen done by bands like Antediluvian, Howls of Ebb, or Chaos Echoes, Vile Ritual‘s aim with Caverns of Occultic Hatred is that of prying the listener’s mind open with violence, expanding it to dissolve the consciousness and using alchemical, ritualistic and esoteric orchestrations to create a trance-like state that renders the listener trapped and disoriented into a sonic delusion, to then bludgeon them mercilessly with the carnage of the primeval and barbaric blackened death metal that shapes the other half of its darkened, gruesome soul.

Or maybe just ponder for another moment the new album’s name: Caverns of Occultic Hatred. Or just stare for a minute at the cover art. Better yet, listen to the first single we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: RANĂ — “LÄUTERN”

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May 112023
 

In the last month of 2021 the German band Rană made their recording debut with an EP named Armament co-released by Vita Detestabilis Records and Fiadh Productions. Nearly a half-hour long (you could call it an album without a lot of argument), that four-song release delivered both a musical and an emotional wrecking ball. Using corrosive riffs, ringing leads, bone-bruising percussion, and scalding howls, Rană veered from moods of ruinous, doom-drenched hopelessness and furious belligerence to sensations of agonizing despair, heartbreaking melancholy, and defiant resilience.

To do that Rană mainly harnessed elements of black metal, crust-punk, and hints of post-metal in strikingly dynamic fashion, but also stepped well outside those influences with the hauntingly beautiful reverence of the song “Pyres” in its clean-sung opening phase (before it becomes a conflagration), and the lonely, grief-stricken instrumental prelude of “Im Joch” (before the onrushing storm of rebellion at the gates).

The band also made very clear that melodies which would stir the soul, often in sweeping fashion, were just as important in their songwriting as crushing power and the ignition of adrenaline-fueled wildfires.

Now Rană are  following Armament with their 40-minute album Richtfeuer, which will see release on June 16th via Breath Sun Bone Blood. Armament left expectations high. Richtfeuer abundantly fulfills them. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GATEWAY — “SACRIFICIAL BLOOD OATH IN THE TEMPLE OF K’ZADU”

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May 112023
 

In glancing at our extensive previous commentary going back to 2015 on the music of Gateway, the most commonly occurring words have been variants on “titanic”, “obliterating”, “pestilential”, “skull-cleaving”, “abysmal”, “mauling”, “blood-congealing”, and “ghastly”. The phrase “appalling and abominable” popped up as well. There was also this pungent passage from our review of the band’s 2018 EP Boundless Torture, which still rings true:

Within the more heartless and slaughtering corners of the extreme metal underground there has been a decades-long competition to reach the deepest, coldest caverns of devastation and despair, and to weaponize the horrors found within the crushing pressures of those abyssal chasms. The Belgian one-man death/doom band Gateway has been one of the more dedicated and successful combatants in that race to the bottom.

But hey, as nightmarish as Gateway‘s music has been, it still gets its massive meat-hooks in the head. We even named the 12 1/2 minute title track from Gateway‘s 2021 EP Flesh Reborn to our list of that year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. It does take a special kind of talent to scare the shit out of listeners yet leave them compelled to continue listening again and again.

And now we have new Gateway nightmares to indulge, thanks to the album Galgendood that Transcending Obscurity Records will release on July 5th. The label promises “a catastrophe of biblical proportions”. We would expect nothing less. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THORN — “HYPOGEAN CRYPT”

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May 102023
 

Let’s begin with a slice of history: Phoenix-based Thorn (the solo wrecking machine of Brennen Westermeyer) made its advent in 2020 with an EP entitled The Encompassing Nothing, which (in our words) revealed itself “as a musical monstrosity dedicated to the creation of cavernous, ominous, and dreadful death metal”. Thorn followed that auspicious debut by joining forces with Toronto’s Fumes for a fearsome split release in January 2021. We hosted the premiere of songs from that split, summing up Thorn’s contributions as “an amalgam of crushing brutality, freakish mayhem, and eerie supernatural frightfulness”.

After that we helped spread the word about Thorn‘s 2021 debut album Crawling Worship by premiering the song “Drowned Serpents”, which we described as “a jolting, neck-bending experience” shrouded in “an atmosphere of horror”.

Thorn followed that with another split and then another album, named Yawning Depths, and we touched on that one too, describing its advance track “Cavernous Shrines“ as “a ravishing combination of sensations”: “It will bludgeon you senseless, but also creates an atmosphere of otherworldly mystery and poisonous fascination. It’s discordant and grinding, cruel and even hideous, but mercurial and mesmerizing”.

Since then Thorn has continued to write its own history at a rapid clip, releasing two splits last year and now preparing to present yet another album, its first one on the Transcending Obscurity label. This one bears the portentous title Evergloom, and today we’ve got a sign of what it holds in store via our premiere of the song “Hypogean Crypt“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VORTEX — “THE WALLS”

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May 102023
 

When the Canadian collective Vortex begin work on a new album their songwriting approach differs from that of most extreme metal bands. They begin with a story, crafting chapters in a narrative that then become the basis for the songs. The music takes shape based on the feeling of the tale, and because of that the musical ingredients shift with the story. In the case of Vortex and their newest album The Future Remains In Oblivion, those ingredients draw upon death metal and black metal, with helpings of orchestration, and are both scathing and richly melodic.

Like the band’s last two albums, The Asylum (2016) and Lighthouse (2018), their new one is thus a concept record, a continuous lyrical and musical narrative. Today we present one of those musical chapters in advance of the album’s release on June 9th. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GRIDFAILURE / INTERSTITIA — “POPULATION COMPLIANCE ATTAINED THROUGH THE DISSEMINATION OF A PSYCHOTROPIC AGENT”

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May 092023
 

Once upon a time, before sound came to movies, pianists and organists (or phonograph recordings) would perform soundtracks for audiences in darkened venues, calculated to capture the changing moods of the silent footage or (as written here) simply to distract the viewers from the early unnaturalness of the larger-than-life two-dimensional medium and “absorb the shock” of it.

Those days are long gone of course, though (to quote the same source) “music eventually became so indispensable a part of the film experience that not even the advent of mechanically produced sound could silence it.” Witness the fact that almost no movies over the last century have been presented without a synchronized recorded soundtrack.

What you’re about to witness in this premiere is something like a throwback to the time of silent movies, even if it is a step forward into a dystopian future — though silent-movie audiences would have been horrified to see and hear this short film. The imagery is reality turned inside-out, and the music provides no real comfort, no “shock absorbers” despite its viscerally compulsive movements, but instead an ultimate reinforcement of fear. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ETHEREAL VOID — “THE VOICELESS”

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May 092023
 

Aggressive music (for want of a better term) seems to rush forward, not just because time is moving forward as the music plays out but because the music itself seems violently to surge at the listener. In the case of extreme metal there’s a reason why we say (ad nauseum) that a band has “assaulted” us or has been “unleashed”. It’s because the music sounds like we’re the target of an attack.

In the case of Ethereal Void song we’re premiering today, the attack is particularly vicious, and it sounds like they have an imminent deadline for finishing us off — no time to waste, no chance for escape. And yet the music also moves… sideways… as if diverting us from the danger, or even seducing us into its embrace. Continue reading »

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