AN NCS PREMIERE: XENOGLYPH — “ICONOCIDE”

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Jun 152022
 

 

The Translation Loss label has repeatedly demonstrated eclectic but dependable tastes, and we have a further vivid reminder of that in the album Spiritfraud that they’ve set for release on July 15th.

This album is the second full-length by a classically trained, avant-garde black metal duo who call themselves Xenoglyph. Conceptually, as the band explain, Spiritfraud is written in call-and-response format “as a dystopian cosmic journey between humans left on earth after technology and robotic overlords have taken reign”. It presents “an inverse relationship between technological advancement and the relevance of humanity, illustrated in a narrative where digital beings want to expedite their own evolution by means of stealing human dreams”.

Yet this tale is clearly presented as a metaphor that confronts us with a choice in the modern age: “Unbeknownst to man, humanity’s spirit has been drained from our collective consciousness by the very technology that we invented (an inevitable consequence of even existing in the 21st century) and replaced with a shadow of our former greatness. The only way out is to channel and meditate on the strength of the cosmos – the only constant in our world”.

With themes as expansive and visionary as those, one would hope for music of a similar scale and imaginative power. As you’ll discover through our premiere of the song “Iconocide“, that hope has been fulfilled. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): APTERA — “YOU CAN’T BURY WHAT STILL BURNS”

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Jun 152022
 

The lyrical themes of Aptera‘s debut album You Can’t Bury What Still Burns (which is set for imminent release by Ripple Music) leap across millennia, from legends of ancient Greek mythology to modern-day race-based murder at the hands of police and personal resistance against daily experiences of repression. What ties these time-spanning topics together is a through-line of anger and defiance, of rebellion and revenge, of refusal to be silenced and at times a call for violent resistance. It’s no wonder, then, that the album’s cover art, like its title, embodies a burning refusal to be buried and silenced.

This Berlin-based quartet’s interest in Greek mythology as a vehicle for some of their lyrical themes is also reflected in the name they chose for themselves, which was the site of a battle between the Sirens and the Muses, where the Sirens lost their wings and were cast into the sea. “Joining the sirens and muses at the table,” as the press materials recount in a further summation of the narratives, “are a coven of reanimated witch spirits and a gang of man-eating mermaids with a healthy appetite for destruction”.

We don’t know what came first, the lyrical themes or the music. But even if the band cooked up the riffs and rhythms before crafting the words, it seems obvious that the same spirit behind the lyrics fueled the music. The fires of rebellion unmistakably burn through both of them again and again, but the band’s music also doses the listener’s mind with hallucinatory vapors and ferries us into perilous supernatural realms. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MAUL — “REPULSIVE INTRUDER”

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Jun 142022
 

When you begin to hear the music on Maul‘s forthcoming debut album Seraphic Punishment, you’ll realize just how perfect Jason Barnett‘s cover painting really is. The imagery is a macabre bestiary, horrifically detailed and hideous in its manifold visions, and yet crafted with pastel rather than hellish colors to portray its paranormal panorama.

Like that artwork, Maul‘s album is also ghastly, a Pandora’s box of death metal horrors that take various blood-congealing shapes. But it’s also a bone-smasher, and fiendishly infectious, and the songwriting is so dynamically good that it causes the album to stand out, just like the artwork’s color scheme.

Like the name of the song we’re premiering today — “Repulsive Intruder” — Maul present themselves as repulsive intruders, but you can’t help but invite them to stay. They might ruin your home, but you’ll have a fucking great time watching them do it. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: TOMB OF FINLAND — “SHADOWS OF THE NORTH”

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Jun 142022
 

This makes our second video premiere for a song off the forthcoming third album by Tomb of Finland, a record whose title — Across The Barren Fields — foreshadows some of its grave and grim moods and its occasionally expansive sweep. But the title doesn’t tell all, as you’ll learn from today’s new song, “Shadows of the North“.

In this newest track, delivered with a well-made video of the band’s performance, a fever burns in the darting riffage despite the song’s dark and ominous name. The music takes flight as the guitars soar like flames in the wind, though the mood even then is no less tormented. The delirium subsides and the music becomes both more forlorn and more mesmerizing — an unfolding of melancholy that quickly takes root in the mind. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GOLGATA — “VAGABOND”

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Jun 132022
 

We welcome the Swedish black metal band Golgata back to our pages roughly 18 months after they first caught our attention and admiration with their last album, 2020’s Tempel, which spawned comparative references to the likes of Skogen, Grift, and Fellwarden. The occasion of their return is a forthcoming third full-length named Ur Eld Och Aska, which will be co-released on July 7th by Satanath Records and Ketzer Records.

As the title implies, the album is a journey through fire and ash but it’s also a journey through time, inspired by the history and natural surroundings of the dark, forested region that gave birth to this duo. It has the capacity to scathe the senses in raw and unbridled fashion, but it’s equally powerful in its capacity to mesmerize and to transport listeners away from modernity and into a much older age, creating grim and haunting visions of yearning and sorrow.

And thus we’re proud to present today the album’s fourth track in the running order, a song named “Vagabond“, revealed through a lyric video in the band’s native tongue. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEVENIAL VERDICT — “ASH BLIND”

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Jun 132022
 

From from 2009 through 2016 the Finnish band Devenial Verdict released a pair of demos and a pair of EPs, and now, six years later, their debut album is on the horizon. Entitled Ash Blind and adorned with cover art by the great Mariusz Lewandowski, it will be released later this year by Transcending Obscurity Records.

Time brings change, and thus Ash Blind represents alterations in Devenial Verdict‘s sound, revealing more prominent dissonant and atmospheric elements in the music. The band show themselves capable of creating vast sonic vistas that are as entrancing as they are unnerving. But while Devenial Verdict have clearly spread their creative wings in expansive fashion from where they began, the songs also make for potent adrenaline fuel through bursts of obliterating hostility and grooves that hit hard enough to give your spine and skull a terrific jolting.

All these facets of their music (and more) come through in the album’s riveting title track that we’re bringing you today through an official video Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ANTILLES — “HUMANITY IS CANCER”

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Jun 122022
 

 

Who knows when you may read this and listen to the song we’re presenting? Whenever that day may come, we’re first presenting it on a Sunday, a rare day for premieres at this site. But having heard this new song by the German band Antilles, it was an easy decision to make the rare effort.

The song title proclaims that “Humanity Is Cancer“, a bleak and angry sentiment, but one that’s regrettably backed by mountains of deplorable evidence that shows humankind’s persistent use of the Earth as a sewer, befouling and degrading it in a headlong rush toward what we imagine in our hubris as “progress”, and simultaneously turning the climate into an oven.

Much of that evidence is assembled in the video that accompanies Antilles‘ lyric video, interspersed with footage of the band explosively expelling their disgust and fury through the music. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TRUENT — “THROUGH THE VALE OF EARTHLY TORMENT”

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Jun 102022
 

The press materials for Truent‘s debut album Through The Vale of Earthly Torment recommend it for fans of early Revocation, early Gojira, Fit For An Autopsy, and Archspire. Those turn out to be good clues to what this Vancouver-area band have achieved on their first full-length following a pair of EPs.

Across eight tracks, most of them rushing ahead at a turbocharged pace, Truent create an electrifying death metal amalgam that features tour de force technicality, non-stop prog-metal adventurism, eye-popping vocal barbarity, and grooves that hit hard enough to cause visions of ruptured organs. To leap ahead in our review, which precedes a premiere stream of the entire record one week before its release, it’s a true spectacle of sound, an experience that’s both head-spinning and bone-smashing. Continue reading »

AN NCS PLAYTHROUGH VIDEO PREMIERE: THE SECOND FOVEA — “MANTA”

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Jun 102022
 

The Second Fovea is a band with its origins in India but with a current location in the San Francisco Bay Area. They’ve released two singles so far, 2021’s “Headshot” and the song “Manta” that came out just a couple months ago. We’ve written about both of them here, not only because the music grabbed us but also because of the songs’ conceptual themes.

“Headshot” was a condemnation of global hate crimes and racism, and “Manta“, as is obvious from the name, was “dedicated to appreciating the majestic manta rays and spreading awareness about their conservation”. Two very different subjects, but we can get behind both of them.

What we’re bringing you today, in an effort to shine a bigger spotlight on “Manta“, is a playthrough video for that song which features the performance of the band’s drummer, principal spokesman, and co-songwriter Priyam Srivastava. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE ATROPHIC — “COAGULATING MIRTH”

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Jun 092022
 

What we have for you here is yet another welcome sign that even the darkest of times can’t black out artistic creativity, and can indeed become the inspirational fuel for something new and vibrant.

Today’s case in point is The Atrophic, a North Carolina band formed in 2021 that combines the talents of vocalist Sean Irizarry and guitarist/bassist Kyle Kuffermann. Working our of their home studios, they recorded a four-song EP named Coagulating Mirth, augmented by the performances of session drummer Robin Stone (Ashen Horde, Norse, ex-live for Augury). And then they had it produced, mixed, and mastered by Hannes Grossmann (Alkaloid, Blotted Science, ex-Hate Eternal, ex- Obscura, etc.) at Mordor Sounds Studio in Germany.

And if that alone doesn’t tell you how much they believed in what they had accomplished, they enlisted one of our favorite visual artists, Vladimir ‘Smerdulak’ Chebakov, to create both the cover art for the EP and a separate piece for its first single, and they turned to the talented sci-fi and horror artist Sanskarans for the creation of an artwork piece for the title track — which we’re premiering today in advance of the EP’s release on July 8th.

You can see the work of Sanskarans above, and here’s Smerdulak‘s cover for the EP: Continue reading »

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