AN NCS PREMIERE: AUTUMNAL — “WHERE EAGLES FLY CLOUDY SKIES”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  3 Responses »
Dec 222022
 

We have a double dose of melancholia for you today — a deeply moving and thoroughly enthralling anthem of sorrow, and a moving epitaph for the band who made the song.

As you will soon understand, the song in question, “Where Eagles Fly Cloudy Skies“, could hardly be better named. Grey skies do loom above the music, but it soars in a way that puts a listener’s heart in their throat, and the memory of it lingers like a formidable spell.

The band who made the song, the Spanish group Autumnal, presented their first demo in 1998, followed by three more from 2000 through 2005 leading up to their debut album Grey Universe in 2006. Eight more years would pass before Autumnal released their second album, The End of the Third Day, and then seven more years of silence would follow that release, a silence only broken now by Autumnal‘s final expression — this song we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOLDEN BATS — “SCATTER YR DARKNESS”

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Dec 212022
 

Over the span of roughly 11 years Golden Bats has made 18 releases, but until today only one of those (2018’s Residual Dread) was a full-length album, all others taking the shape of demos, splits, and EPs. As of today there is a second album, Scatter Yr Darkness, and as we’ve done many times in the past we’re spreading the word of Golden Bats through a premiere, this time of the entire new full-length.

Some things have changed since the last album. For one thing, the band’s sole songwriter and performer Geordie Stafford moved from Australia to Italy just months before the outbreak of Covid, “a worse career move than most”, as he says. Among other things, it resulted in Golden Bats becoming more of a studio project than a live band, but on the other hand it allowed him “the freedom to forget about how things will translate live and focus on writing whatever feels right”.

And some things about the music have also changed (though change, at least on the margins, has always been a marker of Golden Bats‘ evolution from release to release), but the darkness at the core of the music hasn’t brightened. The words alone are proof of that. The uncomfortably vivid lyrics spread throughout Scatter yr Darkness are littered with nightmarish allusions to blood, fire, and death, and filled with expressions of rage and disgust directed at morally malformed expressions of humanity. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): OCCULSED — “PARTURITION OF ADULTERATION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 202022
 

It’s the time of year when many of us are reflecting on what we heard in 2022, sorting it out, making lists, reducing our bank account balances… but for the moment I’m thinking about a musical plague that infected me last year for which a cure hasn’t yet been developed.

That plague, Crepitation Of Phlegethon, was the full-length debut of Occulsed. It ushered listeners into a world of terrors, a world created from sounds that spawned electrifying visions of horror and disease, of madness and mayhem, and of blood-freezing intrusions from spectral realms. As I wrote at the time we premiered it:

“It takes a rare kind of talent to make an album like this one, a death metal album that creates such a viscerally disturbing impact, one that preys upon its listeners’ most deep-seated fears and does so in such thrilling and paradoxically enthralling fashion…. It’s all rotten to the core and as creepy as confinement in a coffin filled with wriggling maggots…. The moods change as well, though almost all the moods are ghastly. The music is both predatory and hopeless, noxious and deranged, horrifyingly imperious and seemingly gleeful in its deviant revels”.

Where in the world did that plague come from? How was it spawned, how did it grow into such a mal-formed but unforgettable monstrosity? We have answers today. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OF WOLVES — “MAKER”

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Dec 192022
 

Our old friends Of Wolves put out a hell of an album through Trepanation Recordings two years ago. Entitled Balance, it garnered a lot of well-deserved attention for its heaviness, its near-relentless intensity, its political stances, and its kaleidoscopic amalgamation of musical influences.

We devoted a fair amount of attention to the songs that emerged over a long period leading up to the album’s release, and now we’ve got a new reason to revisit the record, thanks to an unusual and likely controversial video for a punishing song from the album named “Maker“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WOLFDOM — “MOONLIGHT MISANTHROPY”

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Dec 192022
 

The evocation of mood and the inspiration of imagination are important ingredients in the darker veins of heavy metal. The international band Wolfdom obviously know that. They set about doing it before you hear a single note, through the band name they chose, through the name of their debut album — Moonlight Misanthropy — and through the record’s macabre cover art. It all combines to invoke a midnight atmosphere of supernatural horror and hostility to humankind.

But what of the music they’ve made? GrimmDistribution, the label that will release the album on January 23rd, discloses that Wolfdom operated under the influence of Darkthrone (especially the albums F.O.A.D. and Cult Is Alive), as well as Bewitcher and Midnight, reveling in “the glorification of Satan through the good old heavy metal”, with Satan representing for them a “raised banner of freedom, a creative realization of oneself in spite of the propagated propaganda of politicians and religions”.

But let’s see for ourselves, shall we? Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ATRA HAERESIS — “THE WHITE BOOK”

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Dec 172022
 

Last year the part-Russian, part-Belarusian black/death metal band Atra Haeresis appeared seemingly out of the blue with an album named Pretium that was their first release. We were introduced to it through a request to premiere the song “Pretium?” in advance of the album release.

In introducing that song, we warned listeners more than once that it would take their breath away and expose them to physical trauma, and eventually we named it to our list of 2021’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. It still has its hooks in us, and it’s not too late for you to get hooked too:

The rest of the album is also well worth your time, and you can find it here or here.

But as you can see, the reason we’re thinking again about Pretium is because Atra Haeresis have now surfaced again with a new song named “The White BooK“, and we’re bringing it to you today via another lyric video. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CURSED EXCRUCIATION — “BEAST OF FIRE”

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Dec 152022
 

Last year Iron Bonehead Productions released Chalice of Disease, the debut album of the Brazilian solo project Trance of the Undead. “Malodorous black/death” was one of the terms affixed to that record, though in commenting on some of the music we used terms like “mind-mangling”, “unhinged”, “ear-abrading”, and “frighteningly weird”. It seemed like the true sonic spawn of Hell, ugly as sin, oppressively dense and distorted, but unexpectedly intricate in the most bizarre of ways.

It turns out that Trance of the Undead (the creator of those malevolent and malignant insults) has other methods of expression, and as the vehicle for those he chose the name Cursed Excruciation, whose debut album Arcane Diabolism the same Iron Bonehead has now set for release on January 13th. In this new guise, Trance of the Undead has pulled from the infernal wellsprings of such landmark ’90s black metal bands as Necromantia, circa Crossing the Fiery Path, and Mystifier, circa Göetia.

As an example of where this led, we’re now premiering a song fittingly named “Beast of Fire“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEFY THE CURSE — “EIDOLON OF THE BLIND”

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Dec 152022
 

In September 2018 we came across a song from the then-forthcoming self-titled debut EP by the Dutch band Defy the Curse, and it lit us up like a torch. The band was relatively new then, but was composed of members who had previously honed their sonic weaponry in such groups as Legion Of The Damned, Collision, Slam Squad, Inhume, and Acid Deathtrip. In verbally frothing about the music, we ticked off some of what made it so gripping:

“First, they know how to cook up a clobbering caveman riff, and then flesh out that brutal thing with a massive HM-2 tone and the kind of drum-and-bass work that slugs damned hard right in the solar plexus (and the neck). The first minute-and-a-half of the song is just made for headbanging (and made very well for that purpose).

“Second, the band are also adept at awakening that dormant circle pit in your head, which is what they do when they start romping, rampaging, and chainsawing after that mid-paced opening segment. (But fear not, they come back to that staggering opening rhythm soon enough).

“And third, the band’s vocalist clearly needs to be tested for rabies.”

The rest of the EP also proved to be a hellaciously good offering of primal death/crust, and it left us hungry for more. Five years of hunger is a long time, but at last we’ve got new music from these marauders, in fact a full album’s worth of new music, which will be brought to us on January 15th by Hammerheart Records under the name Horrors of Human Sacrifice. What we’re fiendishly happy to bring you today is an album track named “Eidolon of the Blind“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NIHILIST DEATH CULT — “OBEY & CONSUME”

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Dec 132022
 

Near the beginning of this month Toronto’s Nihilist Death Cult unleashed their debut album Death To All Tyrants — and in this case the overworked term “unleashed” is damned accurate. There’s as much brazen and brawling fury in the record as you might expect from its title.

To express that anger, Nihilist Death Cult stew together ingredients of hardcore punk, death metal, and grindcore in an iron cauldron over a hungry blaze. The bass hits like a sledgehammer, the d-beat gallops and double-bass fusillades feel like hammers to the skull, the riffs have a cruel, mauling tone and they slash like serrated blades and boil in voracious feeding frenzies, and the vicious growls and rabid howls are utterly barbaric.

It’s a full-throttle, full-force rampage that wastes no time, discharging 9 tracks in less than 15 minutes total, and for an extra dose of exhilaration the music includes some wild guitar soloing that sears like acetylene torches applied to flesh.

Here at this site we stupidly missed this release, and maybe some others missed it too, which is why we’re fucking stoked to premiere a lyric video today for one of those 9 onslaughts — a track called “Obey & Consume“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TATTVA — “LE DÉLUGE DE L’ÂME”

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Dec 132022
 

To celebrate its five-year anniversary the Dutch underground label Void Wanderer Productions will be releasing a special shirt and a CD compilation that includes songs from 10 of the label’s bands. Today we premiere one of those 10 tracks, a song exclusively recorded for the comp by the French black metal band Tattva.

This new song, “Le Déluge de l’âme“, marks Tattva‘s first appearance at our site, but it’s certainly not this solo project’s first recording. In short order Tattva has released two albums since 2020, including the 2021 record Nirjara (released by Void Wanderer) and this year’s Naraka, as well as two EPs and a split with the Oregon band Ashes of Old. Continue reading »

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