AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SCÁTH NA DÉITHE — “VIRULENT PROVIDENCE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Feb 022023
 

Track lengths on albums and EPs can vary significantly, but the most common seem to be in the 4-5-minute range. Even when some song lengths creep up into the 10-minute range, most releases still include enough individual tracks that interested listeners can do some “sampling”, i.e., listening to a song or two in order to decide whether to take the plunge into the entire record.

Scáth Na Déithe‘s new album Virulent Providence does not allow this. It includes only two tracks, each of them in the vicinity of 20 minutes long, and those two are also conceptually connected, so even listening to just one of them diminishes the impact of the album as a whole.

Obviously, this is a risky approach, especially in an age filled to overflowing with distractions, where minds constantly flit from thing to thing and patience is in short supply. The demands for immediate gratification and tendencies toward quick impulsive decisions can make the prospect of investing 20 minutes in a single composition, or two of them that demand that much time, a daunting one. The desire for sampling won’t go away either, and so there’s also the risk that people might just spend a few minutes listening to the start of one of these two long tracks, and make a snap decision based on that alone.

But we’re here to tell you that Virulent Providence is well worth all the attention it demands, because the album is a remarkable one. It’s also difficult to fathom how it could have been broken up into shorter pieces without severely sacrificing what makes it so remarkable. It’s simply one of those albums that, to be fully appreciated, requires immersion in the whole saga. Fortunately, it turns out that becoming immersed in it isn’t difficult at all, and as long as there isn’t some external event that forces you to stop, you probably won’t have any sense of a clock ticking and time passing. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CARMA — “MONUMENTO”

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Feb 012023
 

This article makes the third time we’ve paid attention to Ossadas, the forthcoming second album by the Portuguese band Carma. The first occasion was a commentary on the album’s first single, “Memória“. The second was an unusual review of the album written by Axel Stormbreaker, which integrated the music with the viewing of a movie about Edgar Allan Poe named The Pale Blue Eye. And now we present another single from the album named “Monumento“.

The album is an emotional powerhouse, one that deeply immerses the listener in its concept, which was inspired by the Conchada Cemetery located in Coimbra, Portugal. As described by the Monumental Rex label that will be releasing it next month, Ossadas is an exploration of “various cemeterial aspects, such as the architecture, the burials and the atmosphere, and the related feelings – fatalism, futility, loss, mourning, longing, among others.”

The titles of the record’s nine tracks are the most common words that appear on tombs and tombstones throughout the cemetery, and even the lyrics (in Portuguese) contain certain verses engraved on the cemetery’s tombstones. But it’s the music, which integrates funeral doom, black metal, and ambient, that most deeply involves the listener in the ever-present daunting realm of death and all the feelings that it brings. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: THE ATOMIC BOMB AUDITION — “DREAM FLOOD”

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Jan 312023
 


photo by Rex Mananquil

And now for something completely different… a mysterious and spellbinding video… a song of many facets and multiple meanings… and a big musical departure from our site’s usual extremist fare….

The subject is a new video for “Dream Flood“, a song from an album named Future Mirror that’s the first new release in nearly a decade by a band whose name tends to stick in the head — Oakland’s The Atomic Bomb Audition. There’s a significant back story about this group and their eclectic compositions, which have drawn inspiration not only from the geography of Northern California but also a collage of musical influences ranging from cinematic music to prog rock, heavy metal, and new wave.

And we’ll get to some of that back story, but we ought to focus first on what you’re about to see and hear in today’s video premiere. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FESTERDECAY — “SCUM’S KARMA”

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Jan 312023
 

Short sharp shocks in life come in a multitude of forms, most of them unpleasant. A pink slip delivered by e-mail. An eviction notice nailed to the door. A semi-truck T-boning your helpless car. A sudden severe headache that turns out to be a tumor.

With “Scum’s Karma” the Japanese gore-grind revivalists FesterDecay deliver their own short sharp shock, and it’s as ruinous as those examples above, but it’s also the kind of macabre mangling music that will bring fiendish smiles to savage faces. You’ll soon see for yourselves…. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DREAM UPON TOMBS — “THE CALL”

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Jan 262023
 

The Australian melodic black/death metal band Dream Upon Tombs has been dreaming in tombs over the course of a 20-year slumber. After the release of a demo (Black Tales of Sorrow And Damnation) in 1997, nothing further was to be heard until another demo (Marble Night In Ecstasy) surfaced in 2020. And now, at last, a debut album named Palaces of Dust is on the horizon.

Founding member and guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist Jak Shadows found reasons to begin anew, joined on the album by David (guitar, keys, strings, bass) and Jarrad Taylor (drums). He explains the album’s animating inspiration in these words:

“When mortality has been laid to rest, the streams of existence become a blood ocean unto a distant shore – a land beyond this time, un-chartable; sought by many and ruled by none…”

To help introduce the album, today we’re presenting an official lyric video for a song named “The Call” in advance of the record’s March 3rd release by Sleeping Church Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ABADDON INCARNATE — “VERITAS”

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Jan 262023
 

Last August Transcending Obscurity Records detonated a new album by the Irish band Abaddon Incarnate, and we sat back and happily watched the shrapnel fly, cutting through everyone who didn’t have the good sense to duck and cover. Our reviewer DGR found the brutality, rage, and vitriol channeled by the band’s formulation of death/grind to be a welcome catharsis. He spilled many words about The Wretched Sermon, including these:

Ten of the thirteen songs on The Wretched Sermon don’t even cross the three-minute mark and many of them are an excuse for drummer Olan Parkinson to just blast things into oblivion while a high-low vocal attack hits with about as much percussiveness as their drummer does. The highlights on that front come early, as both “Veritas” and “Gateways” make for a good one-two boxing combo in the opening minutes of this album after the band race through the initial death metal gurglings of “Rising Of The Lights” – whose opening riff sounds like something straight out of the world of Centinex before Abaddon Incarnate lean hard into “tear heads off’” mode.

We quote that passage because “Veritas” is the song that’s the focus of a video we’re premiering today. It’s a good reminder of what a hell-raising album this is, and a good introduction to people who might not have crossed paths with it last year. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEAD WILL WALK — “A NEW DAY OF DAWNING”

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Jan 252023
 

The Dutch band Dead Will Walk pack six songs into their new EP A New Day of Dawning, and you’ll get to hear every one of them today in advance of the record’s January 27th release. Horror and ferocity await you in this music, with its roots sunk deep into the fetid earth of death metal from decades past, but delivered with the killing efficiency of modern mechanized armaments and the kind of songwriting chops that make the songs highly addictive. We share these thoughts from the band:

Our goal for this release was to write songs that underline our roots for the old school underground scene. Here we have tried to convey the same feeling as from the glory days of death metal. Thoughtful songs that remain listenable and always have a small twitch. We don’t take ourselves too seriously and we wanted to record an EP that wouldn’t look out of place in a record collection from the late eighties or early nineties.

The humility in that comment is admirable, and so the task is left to us to explain just how damned good A New Day of Dawning really is and why it definitely should not be overlooked in the vast seas of old school death metal that now surround us. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MONDOCANE — “ULTIMA”

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Jan 242023
 

The Swedish solo black metal project Mondocane has been on a heated creative run since the pandemic began (perhaps spawned by the lockdown), starting with a self-titled debut EP in 2021 and continuing through a pair of albums, one that same year (Dvala) and another last year (Gloria, briefly reviewed here), and then a split release last year as well (also reviewed here, along with a premiere).

But despite such a fast and ferocious start, Mondocane isn’t slowing down for a nice nap. There’s already another record named Ultima that will be released sometime in the first part of this new year. We don’t yet have a lot of details about it, but we do have the title track, and it makes us even more grateful that Mondocane have kept the creative fires burning. It’s also further proof that Mondocane’s stylistic influences are more expansive than conventional Scandinavian black metal, and the music is all the better for that. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ALLFATHER — “TAKE THEIR EYES”

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Jan 232023
 

We’ve been avidly following UK-based Allfather since their first EP release in 2015, sort of like a dog madly chasing after a semi-truck and hoping not to get run over. As our own Andy Synn wrote in the context of reviewing their last album, 2018’s And All Will Be Desolation, their music has been “heavy and heartfelt,” the kind of experiences “where you can practically feel every ounce of blood and sweat and tears” that go into their creation.

And let’s underscore heavy, because their Sludge-injected, Hardcore-inflected, proto-Death Metal sound has been potent and punishing. Getting run over and flattened by the music has always been a serious risk.

In the years since that last album, and especially during the last two years, the world seems to have rapidly been descending into a burning cesspool. With an active moral and political conscience, Allfather could not help but react to that in the music they’ve made. They wrote and recorded a new album named A Violent Truth across these last two years of “global pandemics, increasing oppression, and the slow creep of contemporary fascism”, and (to quote further from their label’s preview) “the album captures and distills the pent-up fear, anger, and exhaustion of living in desperate and seemingly hopeless times”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: 71TONMAN — “WAR”

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Jan 232023
 

Let’s not beat around the bush: You’re bulbous skull is about to get flattened into a pancake shape and you’ll lose even more height through spinal fracturing and compression, not to mention the simultaneous searing of mind and soul.

Of course, lucky you, we’re only speaking figuratively. But those are the kinds of sensations imagined by a mind’s eye when listening to the song we’re presenting today from the forthcoming third album by the remorseless Polish sludge/doom behemoths in 71TonMan.

Aptly named Of End Times, the new record envisions apocalypse, with each of its four long tracks named for the Four Horsemen in the Book of Revelations. These songs do authentically sound like harbingers of utter doom and devastation, and the one we have for you today is “War“. Continue reading »

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