AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BLOODBOX — “EAT RAPE POPULATE”

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Jul 262022
 

 

“A New Zealand-based grindcore/power electronics trio that take grindcore and fuse it with jungle, power electronics, and distorted sub-bass stabs. Imagine Atari Teenage Riot vs Napalm Death or Full of Hell and you’re halfway there”.

That’s the come-on we received for the new music of Bloodbox, a grotesquely masked trio who’ve bounced around the world and now seem intent on bouncing the world around, and cutting it up with knives. We’re told that after the dis-banding of the New Zealand based experimental death metal act Vext in 1999, the core members (CyZERNOBrG and Megalith X) moved to London and eventually to Ireland, and that during that time they were inspired to push their music in a more radical and chaotic direction, and in early 2001 Bloodbox was born. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WYLD TIMEZ — “BURN”

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Jul 262022
 

 

The Cleveland band Wyld Timez began life in 2019 during the pandemic as an off-shoot of the formidable black metal trio Burial Oath, whom we’ve praised repeatedly at this site, but they’ve really caught fire in the last year, with a self-titled EP released in April 2021, and another one named Let the Devil In that hit the streets just last month.

The releases so far were written and tracked by vocalist/guitarist J, creating a blend of speed metal and metal/punk in the vein of Venom, Motörhead, and The Casualties, but the live band also now includes drummer Luis and bassist Rob. You’ll get to see all three of them in action in the video we’re premiering today for a hell-raising track named “Burn” off the latest EP. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VORARE — “THIS BODY AWEIGH”

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Jul 252022
 

What you’re about to hear is a piece of music that may make you imagine you’ve been taken hostage, with no real understanding of how it happened or why. Blindfolded and hands bound, strapped to a chair in a cold, lightless place, you hear the workings of brutal machinery and eerie vibrations that don’t seem to originate from any earthy transmitter. Your unseen captors go on horrific tirades that seem un-moored from sanity and magnify your fear and confusion. Trembling, you become convinced — this isn’t going to end well, and there’s no escape.

Well, those are one person’s nightmare impressions of the unnerving experience created by “This Body Aweigh“, which is the track we’re premiering today along with a video that manages to make the disorienting audio even more chilling. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MRTVI — “HOME”

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Jul 252022
 

 

In March of this year we premiered a remarkable video for a remarkable song off the then-forthcoming fifth album by the experimental black metal band MRTVI. Entitled The ExiZentialist, the album was released last month by Life As A Dream Records, and today we premiere yet another video for yet another song off that fascinating record.

When we made that previous premiere we explained that although all of MRTVI‘s albums have been rooted in the experiences and thinking of their sole creator, Damjan Stefanović, this newest one is even more autobiographical. It was inspired by his own experience of being uprooted long ago from his homeland in Serbia (to escape from war), transported to live for roughly 20 years in the UK (where he began MRTVI), and much more recently returning to the country of his birth.

In that previous premiere we also included extensive comments from Damjan about the album as a whole and the song in particular that we premiered (“Lake of Memories“). All of that is well worth reading, but today we’ll focus on this one song that’s the subject of the video, a song called “Home“. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: DEATH BREATH, VORLUST, CONSUMPTION, ILUNA PERPETUA

 Album Reviews, Metal News, Movie Reviews, Premieres, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jul 232022
 

 

Would one four-song roundup yesterday have been satisfactory? Were two of them too many? Is it overkill to add music from four more bands today, for an even dozen of them? I hear your answers to those questions, all those deafening howls of “NO!!! WE WANT MORE!!!””

So, on we go….

DEATH BREATH (Sweden/U.S.)

It took me almost a week to catch up to Death Breath‘s two-track EP, The Old Hag, but once I did I haven’t been able to get enough of it. It does its dirty work in just a bit more than 7 minutes, which makes it really fucking easy to keep going back to it whenever I need a musical riot to rocket me out of the doldrums and make me feel like fighting the bastard world. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LIVE BURIAL — “BLOOD AND COPPER”

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Jul 222022
 

Two years have passed since the release of Live Burial’s striking second album, Unending Futility, and now these British ghouls have crawled from their crypt again, bearing a third album in their monstrous claws. As with the second album, the new one will be released by Transcending Obscurity Records, and it is again embellished with the cover artwork of Luke Oram. In February 2020 we premiered a song from the second album, and now we’re doing it again for the third one.

The name of the new full-length is Curse of the Forlorn, a title that suits the music, which carries forward the band’s doom influences, and does indeed sound cursed. Death metal through and through, these songs slug with gruesome, bone-shaking force, create horrifying supernatural nightmares, and explode in convulsions of maniacal fretwork and frenzied percussion.

The music is capable of both suffocating hope and supercharging the senses with high-voltage energy. It’s muscular enough to pack a wallop and creepy enough that its horrors shiver the spine, and the embroidery of the guitar-work has become even more technically accomplished and elaborate than before, adding to the music’s dynamism. We have a great example of all these qualities in the song we’re presenting today — “Blood and Copper“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HERIDA PROFUNDA — “POWER TO THE PEOPLE”

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Jul 212022
 

It’s hard to understand what life is really like in another country unless you’ve lived there, or maybe spent a lot of time seriously studying it from afar. In the case of Poland, I’ve done neither. Living in the United States, what I know about the current state of affairs in Poland comes just from reading a scattering of news stories from time to time.

A lot of the recent stories tend to focus on the country’s support for Ukraine in its struggle against the Russian invasion, and the huge volume of Ukrainian refugees that have flooded into Poland. At least here, that reporting (which comes with a favorable gloss) has tended to eclipse other things I remember reading about the autocratic and theocratic nature of the country’s right-wing ruling regime over the last few years.

Herida Profunda‘s new album Power to the People caused me to re-focus on those eclipsed narratives. The band’s frustration and fury over socio-political conditions in Poland (where they live) is plain for all to see (and hear) in the album. The music burns so ferociously that you could know and feel the emotions that spawned it even if you were ignorant about its lyrical content.

Of course, the assaults on civil rights that have been occurring in Poland are happening in many other countries, including the one where I live. And thus Power to the People is a rallying cry that knows no borders. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THRASHERA — “BASTARDOS DA NOITE”

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Jul 192022
 

Much has been written about the history of thrash metal, and in those annals you’ll discover how it evolved from both the stripped-down rebelliousness of punk and the influences of earlier “classic” heavy metal, adding more speed, more aggression, and an even more defiantly confrontational attitude to the music. One thing that sometimes gets lost, especially in how the genre has evolved, is that some of the earlier practitioners made the music also sound downright evil.

The Brazilian band Thrashera haven’t forgotten that. It may have something to do with the fact that their own homeland spawned such bands as Sepultura, Dorsal, Atlântica, Chakal, and Vulcano, not to mention Sarcófago. But whatever the reason, these dudes revel in the “golden age” of thrash, when it was taking shape as a world-eating but still deeply underground and confrontational force.

Their roots are plain for all to hear, but they’re so damned good at what they do that the music sounds explosively alive — and yes indeed, downright evil — rather than generic and worn out. You’ll believe this for yourselves when you hear their new album Bastardos da Noite, which we’re streaming in full today in advance of the record’s imminent July 20 release by Helldprod Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BATTLEGRAVE — “CAVERNOUS DEPTHS”

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Jul 182022
 

The Australian duo Battlegrave chose a suggestive name for themselves, one that evokes both warlike savagery and visions of death and all its horrors. Further clues to their music (or at least some aspects of it) are evident in the remarkable hand-painted cover art by Shaun Farrugia for their sophomore album Cavernous Depths. It’s subterranean and supernatural, and has the hallmarks of an instant classic.

But of course these are all merely hints. Of course, other hints are to be found in the band’s previous releases, the 2017 EP To Hell With War and their first album, 2018’s Relics of a Dead Earth, but don’t put too much stock in those hints, because Battlegrave‘s music has evolved from then until now, morphing (as the band themselves have observed) “from more of a Crossover Thrash project to a Thrash/Death project, and now closer to straight-up modern Death Metal”.

One thing hasn’t changed, and you’ll figure it out damned fast when you listen to the new album today in advance of its July 22 release by Bitter Loss Records, and that’s the speed and ferocity of Battlegrave‘s attack. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE SAW — “NOTHING BUT DARKNESS”

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Jul 182022
 

You have to admit (I insist!) that The Saw is a great name for a death metal band. In the lore of horror and the reveling in destruction that inspires so much of the genre, it’s not a tool of carpentry but a weapon of ruination. The teeth don’t cut wood and scatter sawdust but bite through flesh and bone. It’s a wonder that Metal-Archives shows the name as unclaimed… until now.

Who has now claimed it? The answer is a quintet of talented Russians, who first began gathering as a side project of vocalist and lyricist Evgeny Pchelyakov (from the band Анклав Снов) and guitarist and composer Roman Derevyanko (Стальные Нервы) and then expanded through the addition of guitarist Max Nikolaevsky, bassist Dmitry Bichenkov and drummer Yuri Puzanov.

What they’ve achieved together is captured in a debut album named Nothing But Darkness that’s set for release on July 30th by the Ukraine-based label GrimmDistribution, and to help pave the way we’ve got the premiere of the album’s title track today. Continue reading »

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