AN NCS DOUBLE PREMIERE: HOLY GRINDER — “TOXIC POSITIVITY” AND “EXCREMENT CAGE”

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Nov 042022
 

(We have two track premieres for you today from the Canadian band Holy Grinder, one of which comes with a video, prefaced with an introduction by Christopher Luedtke.)

Noise and grind are the perfect marriage. Say what you want of grind, but noise can get married to just about any genre, though when paired with grind it is as perfect as pizza. Holy Grinder has known this not-so-secret blend of gnarly herbs and jangly spices since before their inception. And they’re back to throw another molten slice into our faces and down our throats.

The Toronto, Ontario noisecore/noisegrinders in Holy Grinder have been dishing out the pain since 2016. They have done splits and collaborations with the likes of Christian Lovers, Kubine, Agothocles, Ancient Torture Techniques, and others. And have made it something of a point to both experiment with their sound and attempt to have it descend further into a near wall of noise. Here we have a dual offering from the chaotic void-dwellers, one furious noisegrind skull crusher, another longer, more noise addled dissertation. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GRAVA — “ALIGHT”

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Nov 042022
 

The cover art for the Danish band Grava‘s debut album Weight of A God is the kind of thing that immediately seizes attention and is not soon forgotten. Bathed in a deep apocalyptic red, but also dark as night, the image of an enormous bull elephant about to crush a prone form as cloaked figures dispassionately gaze upon the scene is striking. It’s also a visual match for the crushing music and the album’s utterly bleak conception. To quote from the press materials:

Lyrically, the band portrays scenes of death through the eyes of the dying, unearthed from the great tomes of history. Here you’ll encounter the final moments of shipwrecked men as
the icy waves fill their lungs and drag them to the deep (“WAVES”) and the howls of the 6000 crucified slaves that stood up to the power of the Roman Empire and lost (“APPIAN WAY”) or the unfortunate prisoner who was trampled to death by a work elephant in the East Asia of yore (“CRUSHER“).

While the cover image may correlate most directly to the song “Crusher”, it’s also a representation of the album’s themes as a whole, and connects even to the album’s title. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PLOUGHSHARE — “A HORRIBLE AND TERRIFYING IMPRESSION”

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Nov 032022
 

We’ve written something about every release so far by the Australian band Ploughshare, whose record titles seem evocative of their world view: the 2017 EP Literature of Piss; the 2018 debut album In Offal, Salvation; and the 2019 EP Tellurian Insurgency. We keep that streak going today with our premiere of “A Horrible and Terrifying Impression” from Ploughshare‘s forthcoming second album, Ingested Burial Ground.

In our previous writings we’ve piled up adjectives in an effort to capture just how viscerally terrorizing Ploughshare‘s genre-splicing music is — “violent, oppressive, and mind-bending” was one such string of words.

And, well, we will try again now, because the new album and the song you’re about to hear are also frightening, but they’re also not mere repetitions of what the band have done before. New weapons have been added to the arsenal of nightmares. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VISCERAL — “TOXIN”

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Nov 022022
 

When a solo creator enlists a stellar group of other performers to help realize his vision, there’s a risk that the creator will be overshadowed. In the case of the death metal project Visceral, the centerpiece is Portuguese musician and vocalist Bruno K. He’s no newcomer, as a glance at Metal-Archives proves, having been a member of the death/grind band Bowelrot, who released four demos and a split in the early ’90s, as well as other projects from that era and more recently the black/death bands Enlighten and In Tha Umbra.

So, he has some history, and no doubt it is his musical conception and songcraft that gives Visceral its true lifeforce. But as mentioned, he also recruited some very talented allies for the recording of Visceral‘s forthcoming debut album The Tree of Venomous Fruit, including drummer Menthor Serpens from Enthroned, Lucifyre, and Nightbringer (among others), bassist Alexandre Ribeiro from Grog and Earth Electric, and vocalist Guilherme Henriques from Gaerea and Oak.

What they have all accomplished together is a very impressive 11-song record that draws from old school death metal traditions but goes beyond those, and we have a prime example of that in the album track we’re premiering today through a guitar-playthrough video, one that’s aptly named “Toxin“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: APPALLING — “PAVILION”

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Nov 012022
 

Let me put my cards on the table: I fucking loved Appalling‘s first two albums, 2017’s Secrets of the Adept and 2019’s Inverted Realm. Both of them were powerfully rendered amalgams of chaos and catastrophe, and well-calculated to infect the mind with memorable hooks in the midst of sensations that were both exhilarating and unnerving. Progress was also evident in moving from the first to the second, creating a conviction that these Virginians would continue striving to improve on a very solid foundation.

I make this confession because it means I was already prone to favor the band’s forthcoming third album Sacrilege, especially because it’s being released by a label that’s quickly proved to have dependably good taste (Personal Records) but also because it means expectations on this side were high. Was I disappointed?

Well, you can guess the answer to that question, given today’s premiere of a song named “Pavilion“, but I’ll eliminate the guesswork. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: STILLEKLANG — “FESTEN SCHRITTES”

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Oct 312022
 

Today we present the first formidable steps of a captivating German band named Stilleklang. What we have for you is a song named “Festen Schrittes” from Stilleklang‘s debut album TrÄnen der Vergangenheit Part 1, which will be jointly released by the Crawling Chaos and Schattenpfade labels on November 29th. It is a multi-faceted fashioning of black metal that’s elegant and poignant as well as harsh and livid.

As for those many facets, Stilleklang is the solo work of one Fabian, but he is accompanied on the album by drummer Marcus Röll (who is also responsible for the album’s wonderful artwork, which beautifully suits the mood of today’s song), known for his work in Herbstlethargie, Gernotshagen, BlutEck, and Eïs, as well as live performances with Firtan, and the wonderfully talented violinist M. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: IFFERNET — “EMPTY TOMB”

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Oct 312022
 

It’s probably a mistake to try to sum up the early defining characteristics of second-wave black metal in broad strokes, because even then there was more diversity in the music than many people usually credit. But certainly one of those defining characteristics was a feeling of rebellion and rejection expressed in strikingly aggressive, and even hostile terms, drawing in part on the spirit of punk but making that spirit feel a hell of a lot more raw and dangerous.

But soon enough other moods began to be detected. It didn’t take long for adjectives like “grim” and “frostbitten” to surface and become staples, and not just because the breeding ground for the music tended geographically to be in cold northern climes. Looking back, it seems almost counter-intuitive for such scalding firebrand music to be characterized that way.

In part it was because haunting and harrowing elements of the supernatural were surfacing in both the themes and the atmosphere of the music, but that’s not the only explanation. It seems at least equally true that, along with rage and ferocity, some strains of the music also manifested an emotional spectrum that reached from melancholy to hopelessness and agony.

Which brings us, many decades later, to the French band Iffernet. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HIGH FELLS — “WHERE THEY CALL MY NAME”

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Oct 282022
 

It wouldn’t be a big surprise if you found yourself a little perplexed by the High Fells video we’re about to present for a song called “Where They Call My Name“, which is off the band’s forthcoming debut album Catharsis.

On the one hand, the song itself is intense and powerful in many ways, serious music with visceral appeal, and in keeping with the album’s daunting but fascinating cover art created by Dawid Figiliek. On the other hand, the video takes some unexpected turns that radically diverge from the moods of the music… but we’ll come back to that in due course.

First, by way of background, High Fells are a relatively new blackened death metal unit from Denton, Texas. They starting getting things together during the first year of covid and then spent early 2021 writing the rest of that debut album, and they played their first show just a little under a year ago.

As they tell us, a lot of the lyrical concepts within Catharsis “focus around issues with mental illness, whether it be anxiety, depression, or past encounters in life that served as character building”. “Using this outlet,” they explain, “we’ve been able to express and cope with a lot of those lame feelings and avoid messing things up even more”. Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ABIGORUM, LACHRIMA CORPHUS DISSOLVENS, UNTIL MY FUNERALS BEGAN — “THE CALL TO SILENCE”

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Oct 282022
 

Seasons are a state of mind. Here in the U.S. Pacific Northwest where I live the rains have finally come, along with a chill in the air. After an unusually warm and dry early fall, normalcy has arrived, and The Big Dark is under way. Two days ago the sun set at 6:00 p.m., and that will not happen again until March of next year. From now on, for that many months, people will be waking up in the dark, going home in the dark, and sodden clouds will obscure the sun during many days even when it is above the horizon.

Throughout the Northern Hemisphere winter is approaching, or has already arrived, even if it will only bring a reprieve from heat in some places rather than the true feeling of nature dying or hibernating that pervades in the far north. But regardless of the locale, and even in the other half of the world where summer is approaching, we can send our minds into dark and daunting days through music such as you’re about to hear.

What we have for you is the full streaming premiere of an hour-long three-way split called The Call To Silence, and as its title suggests, “The release calls on humanity to return to silence, that harmony of the soundless cosmic vacuum that almost our entire Universe consists of”. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BONES — “VOMIT”

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Oct 272022
 

Chicago’s Bones possess a number of endearing qualities: They are not pretentious, but instead feral. Their music sounds like it hasn’t bathed in weeks, just like us. They’ve got obviously impressive technical chops but manage to sound loose and sometimes even out-of-control. They know how to groove (man, do they know how to groove!), but they’re hellraisers at heart who revel in mauling and massacre.

And as important as all that, although Bones don’t take themselves too seriously they know how to write dynamic and fiendishly infectious songs that harness together a riotous cornucopia of genre ingredients, finding the natural connection points among all of them.

Okay, well “endearing” may not be the best term we could have picked, even though it is linguistically correct — because Bones do inspire genuine affection among fans of gnarly, in-your-face metallic extremity that revels in its carnal wildness.

We could probably stop right there and just leave you to the main object of this feature, which is a premiere stream of Bones‘ new album Vomit, which will be out on October 28th via disorder-recordings. But of course we won’t shut up right away — the album’s too much fucking fun for us to clam up about it. Continue reading »

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