AN NCS PREMIERE: VOAK — “FÜR JEDE WUNDE EIN PFEIL”

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Sep 222022
 

For the second day in a row (and there will be a third tomorrow) it’s our pleasure to premiere a song from a forthcoming album on one of our favorite labels, the always distinctive I, Voidhanger Records. Yesterday it was Acausal Intrusion, and today the focus is the Greek black metal band Voak and their debut album Verdrängung.

The musical drive of Voak is fueled (as the label explains) by their concerns over “societies shaken by racial tensions, sexual discriminations and extremisms of all kinds”. They chose for the title of their album a German word that refers to the suppression of inner feelings and conflicts, which can lead to inaction in the face of wrongs. They write:

“The presence of our inner conflict shall trumpet over the mesmerizing melody of our comfort and fear of quarrel. To identify ‘Verdrängung’ as such, is a step to be taken in order to be able to fight among others, after fighting against the causes of our own inertia…. The oppressed and the ones struggling against the ‘Verdrängung’ may live in different prisons, but they are the majority… And in unity there is hope.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SFEERVERZIEKER — “MASTERS OF INSANITY”

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Sep 222022
 

In its debut album Death is the Desired Ending, the Dutch solo project Sfeerverzieker invites you to “Embrace depravity, Embrace brutality”. Consistent with that invitation, the songs’ lyrical themes are themselves centered on “brutality, misery, negativity, and the destruction mankind brings to this world”.

But as is sometimes true of metal spawned by such negative and nihilistic thoughts, the music of Sfeerverzieker, which broadly could be summed up as an atmospheric amalgam of sludge, doom, and post-metal, expresses them in ways that are often brimming with vitality and stunning in the scale of their power. Wide-ranging in their variations, the songs are often unmistakably disturbing and devastating in both their sonic force and their emotional impact, but also relentlessly captivating.

We have two striking examples of these accomplishments today, one of them a song that has already debuted but which you might have missed, and the other a track we’re presenting for its first public airing. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ACAUSAL INTRUSION — “TRANSFORMATIONAL DEATH PHENOMENON”

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Sep 212022
 

For reasons that our man Andy Synn incisively explained in his review last year, Acausal Intrusion‘s debut album Nulitas was a rare piece of work. My favorite fragment from the review was this one: “[T]his is one record that actively feels like it’s evolving and mutating as you’re listening to it, which is no mean feat”.

It wasn’t just that Nulitas morphed from song to song, it was that the individual songs themselves seemed to change when listening to them a second and third time, which was a strange experience. But as Andy also noted, it was only after repeat listens that the album began to make sense — albeit a weird and warped kind of sense.

Now this dizzying and devastating duo are fast returning with a new album, this one named Seeping Evocation. Not surprisingly, it’s a challenging listen, and a frequently disturbing one. As the band’s label I, Voidhanger Records, expresses it:

“Once again the watchwords are chaos and transformation…. Seeping Evocation is like a living organism from another dimension, a giant black hole that pulsates and breathes, the eye of a forgotten Lovecraftian god open to our reality, ready to burn and destroy everything.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MAJESTIC MASS — “APOSTLES OF THE BLACK DAWN”

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Sep 212022
 

The last time I wrote at NCS about a song by Majestic Mass, back in 2018, I tried to explain my enthusiasm by spewing out a string of addled words that didn’t come close to a complete sentence, and ended by referring to the track as “a song with sensations of lewdness and lust, fire and triumph….”

Majestic Mass now have another album on the way, following up on that 2018 debut full-length Savage Empire of Death (and a 2019 EP named Onwards). And look at the epigram featured in the PR materials for the new record.

Feel no fear nor woe
Embrace the final blow
See the crimson glow
Let lust and fire grow… Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THE LOOM OF TIME — “GRAND FALSE KARASS”

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Sep 202022
 

Many much-beloved metal albums, both very old and much newer, follow a straight and narrow path, charting a consistent stylistic course and staying in the lane, without much interest shown in the openings that lead off elsewhere into the thorny brambles and dark woods on either side. They work because the bands are so good at what they chose to do, and make their trails wander just enough to keep the eyes and ears of listeners alert.

On the other hand, some bands only seem to have eyes for the paths that twist and turn, the more tangled and unpredictable the better, and they relish the chance to dart off into side-openings whenever the opportunity presents itself. Some of those bands get lost, and lose listeners along the way, but others succeed in making their less-traveled paths more exciting than the straight and narrow.

The Loom of Time‘s new album Grand False Karass is certainly a vivid example of the latter, and an even more surprising one in light of the bamboozling (and dangerous) new adventures it offers by comparison to the band’s debut. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SCHELETRO — “UN FETO SCHIACCIATO SENZA TRE FALANGI”

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Sep 192022
 

If you’re not fluent in Italian and feel the urge to resort to google translate, we’ll save you that step: Un feto schiacciato senza tre falangi, the name of Scheletro‘s new album, means “A crushed fetus without three phalanges”.

That’s a grim and gruesome image to contemplate, but it’s just a hint of the traumatic nature of the album concept as a whole, which is described as a narrative “in which rebellion against patriarchy ends in suicide, social emancipation is humiliated by sexual blackmail, revenge is swept away by repression, and perversion is sublimated into necrophilia”.

How Scheletro tell this harrowing tale through their music is a tale all its own, one in which the group bring together ingredients of traditional Italian old-school hardcore, D-beat crust punk, and strands of old school death metal and thrash. The results are bleak, punishing, and emotionally moving, but also explosively wild and exhilarating. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: CATALYST — “WORMS AND LOCUSTS”

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Sep 162022
 

As you can tell from the title of this feature, we’re about to premiere a video for a new song by the French technical death metal band Catalyst — one that they call “the fastest and most savage song” of their repertoire. It’s from their forthcoming second album, with the intriguing title A Different Painting for a New World. We have lots of interesting details to share about the band and the new record, but this is one of those times when we’re going to cut to the chase first.

What we’re chasing (or more accurately, what’s chasing us like a Formula One car with the agility of a cheetah) is the song “Worms and Locusts“. When we get to the details, you’ll learn that the song is part of an album-length conceptual narrative, and in the tale of this track a world is purified by apocalypse. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ATRUTA — “SŁAVA ČERAVIE-LILIT”

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Sep 152022
 

The band name Atruta probably won’t be familiar to you, but the names Downcross and Khandra should be. We’ve written frequently and appreciatively about the music of those two black metal bands from Belarus (as you can see here and here, respectively), and that’s worth noting because Atruta is a new trio whose members come from those other two groups.

That pedigree alone should inspire intrigue about their music. There’s proven talent here, for sure, but what have these three chosen to do under the banner of Atruta?

The answer to that question lies in a debut album named Da Varot Apramietnaj, which will be released on October 5th by Cavum Atrum Rex (also based in Belarus). Drawing inspiration from medieval personifications of evil, with lyrical themes in their native tongue concerning darkness, evil, and death worship, they’ve recorded 8 tracks for the album, and we’re providing the first track premiere here today. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SINNERY — “BLACK BILE”

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Sep 142022
 

In just a couple of days the Israeli band Sinnery will release their second album, Black Bile. It comes a decade after the band’s formation and a long six years after their debut full-length, A Feast of Fools. To showcase what they accomplished in a first-class manner, they had the album mixed and mastered by Matt Hyde (Machine Head, Trivium, Slipknot, Bullet For My Valentine) and turned for the cover art to the legendary Travis Smith (yes, he’s earned that accolade).

“Death thrash” is the simplified genre description for what Sinnery do, but it’s the strong melodies and the variations among and within the songs that make the album such an adventure to experience from start to finish. Compared to the debut all those years ago, which was entirely written by vocalist/guitarist Alon Karnieli back when he was about 16-17 years of age, these tracks are more elaborate, more sophisticated, more reflective of different moods, while at the same time being more brutally extreme. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEFORMATORY — “HARBINGER”

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Sep 132022
 

Here on the unlucky 13th day of September the Canadian two-man wrecking machine known as Deformatory have returned to visit new death metal ruination on a pathetic world with a new EP named Harbinger. To help announce the EP, Deformatory are presenting it in its entirety as a music video that we have the ghastly pleasure of premiering down below.

This makes the fourth premiere we’ve hosted on behalf of Deformatory going back to 2015, including the video for a song off their mind-mauling 2021 album Inversion of The Unseen Horizon. We’ll crib some of our words from that premiere feature, because they’re still relevant as a harbinger of Harbinger: Continue reading »

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