AN NCS PREMIERE: PALACE OF WORMS — “WHEN THE STONES COME TUMBLING DOWN”

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Jan 052023
 

February 3rd, 2023 will be a bittersweet day for ardent admirers of adventurous music. On that day Acephale Winter Productions will release a new album named Cabal by NorCal’s Palace of Worms. It will be a sweet day because the album is so gloriously intrepid and unpredictable, but a bitter one because Cabal is reportedly the band’s final album.

Anyone who has followed the musically mercurial course of Palace of Worms doesn’t need to be told that there’s no sure way of knowing in advance what each new release will do. Significant time has elapsed between albums since 2010’s Lifting the Veil, with six years between that one and The Ladder, and then another seven passing by before Cabal. Time brings change of course, but especially when the mind behind the project — Nicholas “Balan” Katich — is already so intrinsically pre-disposed to turn the tables on listeners, most likely because he finds straight and narrow paths to be stultifying.

So, what has he done with Cabal? Well, here’s one series of clues from the press materials for the record: Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MAGEFA — “PATHOLOGY CALLS”

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Jan 052023
 

As you may have noticed if you’ve been slumming at our putrid site this week, we’re in the midst of rolling out our list of last year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. But even this early in the new year we’re beginning the task of assembling candidates for the 2023 list for a year from now — and the song you’re about to hear has jumped on it with both lead-shod feet.

“Pathology Calls” by German death metal band Magefa (named for a Hebrew word meaning plague) is a catchy musical monster in several respects, but the grabbiest part is probably the brutal jackhammer groove that opens the track and then continues to pump heads like pistons every time it re-surfaces. But yes, there’s more… Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MITHRIDATUM — “MOURNFUL GLOW”

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Jan 032023
 

My internet pen-pal Rennie Resmini from the band starkweather has a talent (born of a mind that functions as a vast musical encyclopedia) for hinting at the experience of a new release through references to other bands. In the case of Mithridatum‘s debut album Harrowing, he wrote: “If you said this was a collaboration between Zhrine, Ulcerate and Thantifaxath it would make sense.”

Willowtip Records, which will release the record next month, has provided a different kind of hint: “Through mercurial waves beneath the moon’s mournful glow, a trinity of incarnate beings that embody Mithridatum have conjured forth the entity known as Harrowing, an auditory pilgrimage traversing a gloomscape leaden with dissonance, despondency, isolation, entropy… into the abyss.”

You might also want to consider the origins of the band’s name. As the label, or perhaps the band, explain: “The name Mithridatum refers to the practice of achieving immunity against poisoning through self-administered, sub-lethal doses. The allegory is inescapable in its illustration of the unrelenting immiseration all incarnate beings must endure, willing or unwilling.”

Of course, I’ll add my own two cents about the impressions left by the music, which truly is startling, but as of today you have two tracks from which to form your own impressions. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: RIGOR SARDONICOUS — “CAELUM ARDERE VIDISTIS”

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Dec 302022
 

One of the ways we’ve tried to help introduce our visitors to new music that might strike a chord with them is through premieres of new songs and complete releases. During 2022 we did that almost every week-day for 52 weeks, and now we’ve arrived at our final premiere of 2022. And what we’re presenting now could hardly be a more fitting way to draw a heavy shroud over a moribund year.

What you’re about to hear is the opening song from Praeparet Bellum, the forthcoming seventh album by NY-based Rigor Sardonicous in a career that has spanned more than 30 years. It also happens to be this steadfast duo’s first full-length in a decade, and so calling it “long awaited” is an understatement.

As in the case of that long-ago last album, 2012’s Ego Diligio Vos, the Memento Mori label will usher the new one into the world, with the crypt doors set to open on January 23rd. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ANALEPSY — “EDGE OF CHAOS”

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Dec 292022
 

At a time when avid metal listeners are beginning to turn the page on what seized their attention in 2022, and to look ahead to what’s coming in the New Year, we have one more vivid reminder of just how great 2022 was for extreme metal, thanks to a tremendously good video for a tremendously good song by the Portuguese death metal band Analepsy.

The song that’s the subject of the video, “Edge of Chaos“, is the penultimate track on Analepsy‘s powerhouse second album Quiescence, which was jointly released this past spring by Agonia Records, Miasma Records, and Vomit Your Shirt Records. It was a great choice for the video because it’s convincing proof that trying to sum up Analepsy‘s songcraft as brutal or slamming death metal leaves a lot un-said, and what those labels fail to capture is part of what makes Quiescence stand out from the pack. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CONJURETH — “CREMATED DOMINION”

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Dec 292022
 

Once again, as you can see, Mark Erskine has made a stunning piece of cover art for the San Diego-based death metal band Conjureth. It’s only flaw is that it’s not violently shivering and splintering as you gaze upon it. Only in that way could it begin to manifest the sheer breathtaking madness of the music within.

As you can also see, the name of Conjureth‘s new album is The Parasitic Chambers, and it’s set for release on January 23rd by Memento Mori. Anyone who heard the band’s first album, 2021’s Majestic Dissolve, should be slobbering in eager anticipation of it, and trust us when we say to those rabid fans: You will not be disappointed.

If anything, this talented group, whose resumes include the likes of Encoffination, VoidCeremony, and Ghoulgotha, have created a record that’s even more head-spinning than what they’ve done before. Conjureth still pay homage to emergent forms of ferocious, thrash-propelled death metal from the late ’80s, but the new album is so fiendishly intricate and so technically jaw-dropping that it just makes a listener shake their head in wonder.

Consider, for example, the song we’re premiering today — “Cremated Dominion“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: LAUDARE — “HER ENCHANTED HAIR WAS THE FIRST GOLD”

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Dec 292022
 

What do you do when you enthusiastically agree to premiere a video, then forget to mark the appointed day on the calendar, and then fail to make the premiere when the day arrives? Well, if you’re me you make abject apologies to the band and host the video the day after it has become public, and you still call it a “premiere” even if technically it isn’t.

In the case of Laudare’s video for their live performance of a new song named “Her Enchanted Hair Was the First Gold“, my fuck-up is especially embarrassing because of how excited I was after watching and listening to the video for the first time. The song is such a fascinating variation on our usual musical fare around here, but rest assured, there is a valid reason why Laudare call their music “violent poetry”.

Well, let’s talk about the poetry first, in both of the forms it takes. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SEVEN DOORS — “I’LL SWALLOW YOUR SOUL”

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Dec 282022
 

Fans of horror films released during the ’70s and ’80s span the globe, a cult to be sure, but a large and devoted one. If we were to make a Venn diagram, we would also find a significant area of overlap with the cult of metal, and within that intersection we would find Seven Doors, a one-man horror-themed death metal band from the South West of the UK.

Through this project, named for the hotel in the Lucio Fulci film, The Beyond, Ryan Wills has combined his passion for horror films of those past decades with musical inspirations drawn from such bands as Death, Gorguts, Asphyx, Malevolent Creation, and Cannibal Corpse, and the results of those intersecting interests are to be found in Seven Doors‘ debut album Feast of the Repulsive Dead. Like Seven Doors‘ debut EP The Gates of Hell, it will be released by Redefining Darkness Records, with the arrival slated for January 27th to quickly darken the impending New Year. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TRASTORNED — “INTO THE VOID”

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Dec 282022
 

Three days and counting until New Year’s Eve, and to help get you in the mood to raise hell (even if you’ll be sitting at home and only raising hell in your head), we’re bringing you the title track from Into the Void, the debut album of the Chilean hellions Trastorned that’s now set for a January 27 release by Dying Victims Productions.

Thrash is the name of the game they play, and it’s a vicious but intricate game that pulls from a deep well of influences, including the likes of old Vio-lence, Forbidden, and Exodus, as well as prime Demolition Hammer and Morbid Saint. It’s a game in which riffs are trumps, and played on the clock, where speed counts — and kills. But as you’ll discover from the title song we’re premiering, Trastorned also put a premium on keeping their listeners off-balance as well as exhilarated. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: IRON FLESH – “AS GHOULS MARCH ON”

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Dec 262022
 

Over the last five years we’ve devoted no fewer than seven articles to the music of the French death metal band Iron Flesh, most recently Andy Synn‘s review of their second full-length Summoning the Putrid in 2020. But just last month Iron Flesh released a third album, that one entitled Limb After Limb, and we can’t let the year go by without paying attention to them once again.

In commenting on the last Iron Flesh full-length before this most recent one, Andy suggested you “think Grave/Dismember meets Autopsy/Hypocrisy, with a little bit of early Paradise Lost and Edge of Sanity added for good measure”.

The newest album, out now on War Anthem Records and Cudgel Metal Mailorder, is a weighty offering, featuring 10 tracks of widely varying lengths, and they provide varying experiences as well. Continue reading »

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