AN NCS PREMIERE: ERNTE — “CUTTING THE STARS FROM THE SKY”

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Mar 232023
 

A bit more than a year after the release of their debut album Geist und Hexerei, and the release of a 7” EP in September 2022, the Hellvetic black metal duo Ernte are returning with a new album named Albsegen, and it confirms this band’s talents as formidable spellcasters. As forecast by Vendetta Records, which will release the record on April 7th, it “captures real world hate and frustration while calling back to a distant past with an invoking of old energies and spirits”.

This Swiss duo — V. Noir (guitars, bass, drums) and Witch N. (vocals, bass, violin) — have hit upon a formulation of black metal that’s atmospheric and immersive, creating nightside experiences of mysticism and old magic, but they also simultaneously give their songs visceral punch and mind-scarring intensity. Their music can be disorienting, depressive, unsettling, and even deranged, but it’s still very easy to fall prey to the music’s unearthly sorcery.

One song-and-video has already emerged into our consciousness, and today we present a second one, which give us a chance to see the performers doing their thing. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ASYSTOLE — “BLANKETED IN FLIES”

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Mar 222023
 

The ever-interesting musical palette (and palate) of I, Voidhanger Records will become even more distinctively varied on April 7th when the label releases Siren To Blight, the debut album from the NY/NJ avant-garde death metal band Asystole.

The band features the talents of guitarist extraordinaire Pat Hawkins (Thaetas, Aberrated, Needlepusher, Kyrios) and bass virtuoso Kyle Linderman, as well as drummer James Applegate (Windfaerer, Replicant) and vocalist John Dunn IV (Abominism, Dark Waters End).

With a line-up like that, and knowing that they’ve drawn upon the disparate influences of such bands as Gorguts, Virus, Krallice, Cryptopsy, and Anata, you might venture a guess that the album is going to have its fair share of technical razzle-dazzle and a kind of head-spinning adventurousness in the song-writing, and that would be a good guess. But some other things you might not guess, and you’ll see what we mean when you listen to “Blanketed In Flies“, the album’s opening track that we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HELLCRASH — “DEMONIC ASSASSINATION”

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Mar 222023
 

When we premiered the second single from the new Hellcrash album in early February we introduced it this way: “It’s time for a rude ‘n’ crude celebration of filth, fury, and fun! Plus sickness, sleaze, and slaughter!”

It seemed like a fitting prelude to the hell-raising experience of Demonic Assassination, which is now racing toward a lavish March 24 release by Dying Victims Productions, but we also  observed, for those who might not have encountered the band’s debut album Krvcifix Invertör, that Hellcrash “follow in the cloven-hooved footsteps of such groups as Bulldozer, Slayer, and Venom, whipping up a gnashing and pulse-pounding convulsion of blackened thrash and speed metal”.

And we also pointed out that while all those ingredients revealed in the debut album still make up the high-octane fuel for the new album, Demonic Assassination provides even more variety and an even tighter execution. Today you’ll see what we meant for yourselves, because we’ve got the full album stream for you today. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VISION DEPRIVED — “SELF ELEVATING, DEEP INSIDE THE VOID”

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Mar 212023
 

In a search for analogies it’s tempting to compare Milan-based Vision Deprived‘s new album to a musical roller-coaster ride. It’s packed with twists and turns, ups and downs; it gets the adrenaline flowing; it frequently pops our eyes wide open; and it’s scary. But it’s not the kind of trip that’s likely to leave riders laughing it off when it’s time to dismount, and the twists are… twisted… in ways that can become unsettling because they’re so unhinged. You can hear and feel the rails under a roller-coaster car, but what would happen if that sense of being attached were to vanish?

Self Elevating, Deep Inside The Void is the album’s name, and even the title suggests leaving the rails and any other tangible boundaries, which is pretty much what happens as you make your way through the record. What you might not expect from the title is that the music is usually firestorm-fast and decimating, as well as completely dazzling in its madhouse instrumental escapades through a dystopian hellscape. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HERETIC CULT REDEEMER — “GRAVE SOPHIA – BREATH OF THE NIGHTSIDE”

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Mar 202023
 

In April the Greek band Heretic Cult Redeemer will see the release of their third album, Flagellum Universalis, via the label III Damnation. Now featuring a lineup consisting of vocalist/bassist Funus, guitarist/bassist Tempest, guitarist N3, and drummer C. Docre, the band have created a nearly hour-long work that represents a spiritual and philosophical journey, one that explores “the primeval human urge of opposition to law and structure”, in which the band have used themselves “as the means, harbingers, and vessels of Luciferian and Promethean teachings, as expressed through the frenzy, of the touch of Echidna.”

The music is unconventional and often uncomfortable. It operates on multiple planes of experience, as elaborate and strange as it is visceral in its effects. It maintains linkages to second-wave black metal, but inventively spirals off into other directions and dimensions that become head-spinning… and ruinous. It won’t go too far to say that this is avant-garde black metal of a high order, even if that’s a term the band themselves might not use

It’s not music that’s easy to sum up. We’ve struggled to conceive of words sufficient to even a single song, but that song — “Grave Sophia – Breath of Nightside” — is so startling that it compels us to try. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NETHERMANCY — “THE FALL OF MAN”

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Mar 202023
 

Nethermancy brandish their devotion to evil black metal right in the title of their new album Worship Evil Sacrifice, not to mention the cover image, and they do a damned effective job carrying their devotion into the hellish nightmare realms their music creates.

These Portuguese practitioners have not hurried their blasphemous work. Their discography shows a decade-long gap between their first and second albums, and six years have passed between this new full-length (their fourth album) and the last one before it (2017’s Magick Halls of Ascension). Not surprisingly, there have also been some line-up changes since the band’s birth in 1996. But Nethermancy‘s devotion to the oldest black metal roots hasn’t changed. They’ve only sharpened the cutting edge of their blades, re-fueled their torches so they blaze even brighter, and supercharged their venomous rage. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: JAUE — “GUERRERO MAPUCHE”

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Mar 172023
 

Many of you will be familiar with the decades-old Colombian death metal band Vitam Et Mortem, in which Julián “Thánatos” has been the composer, vocalist, and guitarist. What we have for you today is the music of a side project of Thánatos that he has named Jaue, which we’re told is the name of a spirit that can take the form of any animal.

We’re also told that the purpose of forming Jaue, as revealed in the project’s debut album Cantos del Sur Salvaje, was to “explore ancestral sounds and voices from ancient cultures of the world and puts them in relation to metal”. Organized as a trio of triptyches, the songs interweave many styles, with results that could broadly be summed up as “Colombian epic melodic pagan black metal”.

But summing up is a difficult thing to do with this album, because the journey through it is so varied. As evidence of that we’re presenting a heart-bursting song called “Guerrero Mapuche” today, as well as a juxtaposition of it with the new album’s first single, the majestic “A vuelo de cóndor“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BURIAL HORDES — “INFINITE SEA OF NOTHINGNESS”

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Mar 172023
 

Our fidelity to the Greek band Burial Hordes is of long standing — not as long as the band’s own existence, which stretches back roughly 22 years, because they were practicing their black craft well before our site came into being in 2009, but we’ve been steadily writing about their music for a decade. And for good reason. Over the course of four albums (with a fifth one on the way) and a handful of shorter releases, they’ve established themselves as premiere purveyors of hellish musical visions, while refusing to just keep doing the same thing over and over again.

The band’s pronounced tendency to use their music as a vehicle for continuing exploration of dark subjects is one reason for our eagerness and sense of intrigue every time they release something new. What’s new now, as mentioned above, is Burial Hordes‘ fifth full-length, Ruins, which is set for release on June 9th by Transcending Obscurity Records. That feels like a long way off, but we already have exciting signs of what the album presents — two songs that have already debuted, and the third one we’re presenting today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WITTE WIEVEN — “KOORDDANSER”

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Mar 162023
 

We had some favorable things to say here about the Dutch band Witte Wieven‘s 2016 debut EP Silhouettes of an Imprisoned Mind (available here):

“Perhaps best summed up as an offering of somber, atmospheric black metal, the songs combine low, gravelly riffs and grumbling bass lines with waves of guitar melody that shimmer and mesmerize, accented by beautiful, haunting clean vocals and such things as keyboard notes that sound like a harmonica (or perhaps an accordion) and spectral ambient tones.

“The songwriting is very good — the three songs are each quite distinct and memorable — and so is the production. It’s easy to lose yourself in this otherworldly dreamscape of lost souls and restless spirits.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VOMITHEIST — “TORMENTING FUNGAL INFESTATION”

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Mar 162023
 

Let’s be clear: We have no private info about why a trio of Swiss musical collaborators chose Vomitheist for their name. Mainly, all we have to go on is the name itself and a rudimentary understanding of words. The name looks like a conjunction of “vomit” and “theist”, which suggests that vomit is their god. Which raises the question, what does the worship of vomit sound like? We’ll come back to that.

We say that linguistic analysis is “mainly” what we have to go on, but there’s a bit more, before we get to the music itself. There’s the name of their new album – NekroFvneral – and song titles such as “Putrefaktor”, “Symbiotic Putrefaction”, “Chapel of Abhorrent Reek and Festering Slime” (in case you’re wondering where the worship of vomit takes place), and “Epidemic Disembowelment” (which sounds like a pithy summing up of what a few years of life under covid was like).

All of this points the way to a death metal band who kneel at the altar of disgusting musical extremity, with no pretenses to any higher calling and no problem joining a long lineage of other DM bands who have made their “ethos” out of steaming piles of the nastiest stuff the human body is capable of producing, in life or in death. The kind of extreme metal themes that might be the hardest to explain to the kind of people whose listening choices get nominated for Grammy awards.

So now you’re already pretty well-prepared for what you’re about to hear. You probably already can guess whether Vomitheist are going to be in your personal wheelhouse. But even if you have a taste for the most foul and regurgitative death metal, maybe it’s a refined taste. Maybe you know that there are gradations of quality in this kind of thing (and there most certainly are), so you still insist on getting some filthy tastes before taking the plunge on NekroFvneral. We’re here to help. Continue reading »

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