AN NCS PREMIERE: TYRANNIC — “SINGE OF ORGIASTIC WASTE”

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Oct 192021
 

 

The Australian band Tyrannic have already established themselves as a weird and wild force to be reckoned with, harnessing together elements of classic doom and savage black metal, but not really beholden to any genre constraints in their haunting and harrowing explorations of Death and what lies beyond. Yet what they’ve achieved on their forthcoming second album Mortuus Decadence is nevertheless a fierce and frightening leap forward from what they’ve done before.

As absolutely vivid proof of this, we present today the premiere of “Singe of Orgiastic Waste“, a song whose name may be confounding before you listen to it, but then begins to make horrifying sense as it spills its demon seed. In a nutshell, the track is a startling collage of calamity, a changing rendition of downfall, degradation, and derangement. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HAND OF KALLIACH — “EACH UISGE”

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Oct 192021
 

 

What we have for you today is a beautiful lyric video for a fascinating and intensely gripping song by an equally fascinating and gripping Scottish band. That band, the husband-and-wife duo of Sophie and John Fraser, chose for themselves the name Hand of Kalliach. We’re told that the name comes from the legend of the ‘Cailleach’, “a Scottish witch god of winter – and in mythology one tale holds that she sleeps at the bottom of an enormous whirlpool in Corryvreckan, off the western isles of Scotland where John’s family is from, arising to usher in winter”.

As you might have already guessed, Hand of Kalliach draw upon from the folklore, history, landscapes, and seascapes of the Scottish islands, and they characterize their music as “Atmospheric Celtic Metal”. But instead of using traditional instruments they draw inspiration from the rhythms, time signatures and patterns used in folk music and adapt them for distorted guitars and other familiar metal instrumentation.

The particular song we’re presenting today is the third track on the band’s forthcoming debut album, Samhainn, named after the ancient Celtic festival of winter (and pronounced ‘Sah-win’). The title of the song is “Each Uisge” (roughly pronounced eyach oosh-keh) and it translates to ‘water horse’. Therein lies the tale of the track…. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: UNCTORIS — “CERCHERÒ IL PASSAGGIO DI RITORNO O SARÒ CANCELLATO”

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Oct 182021
 

 

The bizarre Italian black/death metal band Unctoris have been quiet for eight years, for it was in 2013 that they released their last music, a split that culminated a series of demos and EPs which began in 2005. Those of us who were unaware of their mad and mutilating experiments might therefore be forgiven for our ignorance. But at last Unctoris have revived, or perhaps finally escaped from whatever asylum confined and attempted to treat them.

They completed work on their debut album Shout Demise, which seized the attention of Iron Bonehead Productions, who will release it on November 19th. What we have for you today is evidence that whatever asylum treatments they received were utter failures. If anything, Unctoris have been reveling in their loss of sanity in even more weird, wild, and wondrous ways.

Witness “Cercherò Il Passaggio Di Ritorno O Sarò Cancellato“, a song that in its diabolical ingenuity will shake your sanity like a rag doll but paradoxically becomes mesmerizing. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AUTOKRATOR — “DCLXVI”

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Oct 182021
 

 

Autokrator is one of those bands whose music I think of as the soundtrack to world-ending calamity. The almost unmitigated savagery and destructive power of this French duo’s death/black/industrial assaults are overpowering, even though their music also exerts a powerful primal appeal — you can become easily intoxicated by their brand of blown-out violence. And so it was more than a little frightening to read the comment by guitarist/bassist Loïc Fontaine that the song we would be premiering today is “probably the most brutal song Autokrator has ever composed and played”.

This song, “DCLXVI“, appears on Autokrator‘s forthcoming fourth album, Persecution, which is set for a November 5 release by Kruyator Productions. As has been true of previous albums, this one again takes historical episodes as its theme. Here, they recount the persecution of Christians during the ancient Roman Empire — under the reigns of Marcus Aurelius, Diocletian, Domitian, and Trajan.

They make clear that “the record has nothing to do with glorifying the barbarity; it rather conjures up the cruel and dreadful sufferings of the victims — be it decapitation, execution, lapidation, damnatio ad bestias, dislocation, imprisonment, or banishment”. That is a harrowing mission, and the music Autokrator has created is equal to the task. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEMONIC TEMPLE — “THROUGH THE STARS INTO THE ABYSS”

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Oct 182021
 

 

The fire-breathing band photo of Demonic Temple featured above hearkens back to ancient black metal days, to the fiery expulsions of Quorthon, Frost, and Abbath. Apart from linking arms with the vanguard of black metal’s second wave, the photo also serves as a mission statement for the music of this Polish duo, as revealed through their forthcoming third album, Through the Stars into the Abyss.

The sensations of the album are incendiary, but they also set fire to the imagination, creating both blood-freezing and blood-heating visions that seem both subterranean and celestial. Put differently, the trip through the album is very much what the album title portends — a dazzling but terrifying excursion through the stars above into the abyss beyond.

You will get a very good sense of this by listening to the album’s title track, which we’re premiering today in the lead-up to its November 11 release by Putrid Cult and Dark Horizon. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PRIMEVAL WELL — “TALKIN’ IN TONGUES WITH MOUNTAIN SPIRITS”

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Oct 152021
 

 

I grew up in central Texas in a household of three generations that included an old-time folk fiddler and a square-dance pianist. Sometimes other musicians would drop in for rehearsals or impromptu performances for friends and family. I’d sprawl on the floor with my brother, mesmerized by the sometimes fiery sometimes forlorn bluegrass and mountain music they made.

This was long before black metal (or really any kind of extreme metal) existed. I mention it because it may help explain how thoroughly my mind was blown when I first heard Primeval Well‘s self-titled debut album two years ago, though that was probably evident from the run-away words that spilled out of me at the time:

“Primeval Well make you understand what black metal would have sounded like if it had originated along the Mason-Dixon line in America or in the Appalachian mountains, instead of Norway. It swirls and spins, it dances and cavorts, it soars to grandiose heights of sheer ebullience, it takes us under sodden wisteria beneath crescent moons. It unleashes hellfire and black magic, lunacy and seizures, the savage delight found by lean, hard-living people who were given nothing by anyone and found their own pleasures in the devil’s dream, and the woozy somnambulance brought about by corn liquor from the still.”

All this comes back to me because I’ve had my mind blown again, this time by Primeval Well‘s second album, Talkin’ in Tongues with Mountain Spirits, which is set for release on October 20th by Moonlight Cypress Archetypes, and which you will now have a chance to hear for yourselves. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DAUÞUZ — “ZAUBERWERK / BERGSCHMIED IV”

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Oct 152021
 

 

The German black metal band Dauþuz, whose musical tales have largely focused on mining in the Old World, have readied an hour-long fourth album for release by Amor Fati Productions on November 12th. The name of this new one is Vom schwarzen Schmied (“Of the Blacksmith” in English). All-consuming darkness and lyrical despair, which ultimately leads to fatal realization, characterize this fourth full-length from Dauþuz. And yet the music is very much a fantastic and even mythical experience.

Take for example, the song we’re premiering today. “Zauberwerk / Bergschmied IV” is a grand blaze of sound, all-consuming in its heart-pounding power and dazzling melodic extravagance. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: IN LOVING MEMORY — “FRACTURED”

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Oct 152021
 

 

The video we’re presenting today includes stunning scenes of sunrise and of cold flowing waters, of haunted souls, the descent of winter, and of graveside grief. The words tell of emotional wounds that won’t heal and of the approach of a time to die.

Like the video, the music brilliantly soars like the sun, and ebbs and flows like tidal waters. It has the majesty of nature in its vast ringing sounds, and the gloom of hopelessness and death in its gripping melodies. Its stately rhythms are viscerally compulsive, its heaviness is crushing, and its feelings of resignation and despair are heart-shaking. It casts a spell that penetrates deeply, and the spell survives the end of the song.

The name of that song is “Fractured“, and it comes from the third album by the Spanish band In Loving Memory. Entitled The Withering, it will be released on January 14, 2022, by the Funere label. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ZETAR — “DEVOURING DARKNESS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Oct 142021
 

 

“The Lights of Zetar” was the 18th episode in the third season of Star Trek, originally broadcast in January 1969. It clearly made an impact on R.G., the central Texas musician who chose Zetar as the name of the metal project he created in 2019, choosing to carry forward (as he has written) “the name of a planet of telepaths who’d transcended into a roaming mass of pure psychic energy to curtail their own meteoric extinction”.

Sci-fi inspirations have also carried forward into the band’s striking debut album, Devouring Darkness, for which R.G. enlisted the aid of French vocalist T.P. and Ecuadoran drummer David Lanas to help realize his vision for Zetar. And it is indeed an arresting vision, both thematically and in the unusual and unpredictable amalgam of influences which make their way into the music, including ’90s death metal, synth-laden and thrashing black metal, and classic science fiction scores.

Today we invite you to experience those visions of horror and wonder through our complete premiere stream of Devouring Darkness in advance of its October 15 release by Spirit Coffin Publishing. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CRYSTAL COFFIN — “THE STARWAY ETERNAL”

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Oct 132021
 

 

Before listening to a note, I loved the idea of Crystal Coffin‘s new album, The Starway Eternal. So let’s begin with that idea, which also helps explain the cover art and the adventurous sensations afforded by the music. As presented in the press materials:

“Cast against the historical realities of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown of 1986, the assumed protagonist – an operator at the power plant – discovers the portalway behind an inoperable console and soon finds that her longing for meaning in this chaotic world answers the opportunity to seek out the purported gods and angels that live among the cosmos in our known solar system.

“To find such entities would be to imbue a sense of importance in our collective existence beyond the daily disorder and existential despair that one accepts. Her trips into various corners of space reveal little to no such beings, and during one such fruitless endeavor, her portalway back to earth is shut permanently; reactor 4 at Chernobyl back on earth has suffered its meltdown during shutdown operation.

“Frantic, she makes the decision to return to earth by falling through the fiery atmosphere as a lonely, final and futile act of desperation. Of course, survival is impossible, and such an act becomes a metaphor for our time, wandering the earth with little connection to anything beyond the physical world”. Continue reading »

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