AN NCS PREMIERE: ABYSSLOOKER — “CHALICE OF GRIEF”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 152022
 

Last year the Russian band Abysslooker put out a single called “Maneater“, and it sounded like one. Hell, it was so heavy and hammering it felt like a mountain-eater.

The band combined that titanic pounding with riffing that relentlessly built feelings of tension and misery, plus an amalgam of spine-tingling vocals, which ranged from scraped-raw screams to ghostly crooning, abyssal growls, and maniacal laughter. Unexpectedly, the song also included an interlude of dancing acoustic guitar, mammoth bass grumbling, and gothic singing. A gripping guitar solo led the transition from there back into punishing heaviness.

Turns out that thoroughly riveting song was a prelude to Abysslooker‘s second album Dramaturgy, which is now set for release on July 31st by Symbol Of Domination. Turns out that “Maneater” isn’t the only heavier-than-hell track on that album, but the heaviness comes in different guises, as you’ll learn for yourselves through our premiere today of another one. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CRESTFALLEN DUSK — “CRESTFALLEN DUSK”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Jul 142022
 

Great volumes of music flow through the back of this portal every year, and smaller but still significant volumes flow through the front of it in our daily recommendations for those who visit the site. The range of genres is broad, reflecting the divergent tastes of those who write here. In combination, our recommendations could be considered head-spinning both in their number and in their diversity. Yet despite that, some bands still stand out like beacons on a nightside hill.

In my case, one of those bands that continually drops my jaw like few others is the Tennessee group Primeval Well, whose fascinating amalgams of black metal and old country/folk music is unlike anything else out there. In reviewing the two Primeval Well albums released to date, I’ve spilled torrents of enthusiastic words about their music in an ongoing struggle to explain what it does and how it makes me feel.

And so when I learned that Primeval Well ‘s vocalist/guitarist Ryan Clackner (also in Vile Haint, Stump Tail, and Spintria) had embarked on a new project, I couldn’t wait to hear the music. He named that new project Crestfallen Dusk, and its debut album shares the name. I wondered how it might compare to Primeval Well, because it was logical to assume there must be some difference, else why begin a new project?

The complete answer comes today, because today we’re sharing a full stream of all six tracks in advance of its July 22 release by Moonlight Cypress Archetypes and Folkvangr Records.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HEXIS — “AMISSUS”

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Jul 132022
 

We’ve been enthusiastically writing about the Danish blackened hardcore band Hexis at NCS since 2012. In that time they’ve released two album and an assortment of shorter works, and in combination they’ve shown us a formidable band constantly on the move forward. They’ve now landed at Debemur Morti Productions, which gives us added comfort that we haven’t been entirely crazy all these years in our Hexis enthusiasm, and it’s DMP that will be releasing the band’s third album Aeternum on August 26th.

Anyone familiar with what Hexis have done so far knows that their musical ingredients have increasingly ranged beyond their backbone of hardcore and black metal, and the new album is undoubtedly their most diverse yet. It’s not the kind of album where you can listen to a track or two and figure out what everything else will sound like. As DMP reports, the three years of work on this album have allowed the band “to refocus and redefine their thunderous sound into a truly distinctive beast which merges violent Hardcore, desolate Black Metal, brooding post-Metal and elements of Dark Ambient with the churning ruthlessness of bass-driven Industrial and Grind”.

Not surprisingly, then, three tracks have been released so far in the run-up to the album’s release, and now we bring you a fourth one. These songs display the album’s dynamism and diversity of songcraft, but even four of them don’t provide a complete map of the soundscape that awaits listeners. They are, however, very effective in proving that the album is remarkably intense on multiple levels, and well worth a complete investigation. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CRITICAL DEFIANCE — “NO LIFE FORMS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  6 Responses »
Jul 132022
 

A bit more than three years ago the Chilean thrash band Critical Defiance released their debut album Misconception through Unspeakable Axe Records. It was reviewed here by TheMadIsraeli. You won’t find many people more devoted to thrash than him, or more knowledgeable about the genre, its history, and its evolution. And so his abundant enthusiasm for Misconception carried a lot of weight among those of us who knew him.

Among other things, he wrote: “These guys are very old-school-minded, but they aren’t trying to imitate the sound — they embody it, seeking to break their way into the public consciousness by approaching from a different front of channeling the heights of thrash based on technical endurance. I’m talking bands like Dark Angel, Coroner, Watchtower, old Kreator, Forbidden. Not many bands attempt this school of thrash metal if they’re into visiting old school sounds because I think it’s difficult to write thrash like this without sounding needlessly excessive. Thankfully, Critical Defiance never fall into this trap….”

Now these prodigiously talented Chileans are returning with a sophomore album named No Life Forms, set for release by the same Unspeakable Axe Records on July 18th. Did they fall into a sophomore funk, or did they hit the heights again, or maybe even soar higher? You can guess our answer, given that we’ve agreed to premiere the full album stream today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ABEST — “MOLTEN HUSK”

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Jul 122022
 

Let’s cut to the chase: What you’re about to experience is a completely unnerving combination of sights and sounds — music that will put your teeth on edge as it claws at your sanity and bludgeons your bones, and an accompanying video that’s equally nightmarish. The combined experience is harrowing and indeed uncomfortable, but so gripping that it freezes you in place, perhaps like waking to find a venomous serpent coiled on your chest, tongue flickering toward your face. You move at your peril.

Chariot Of Black Moth is a proven master at creating stark and startling visual hallucinations, never lingering for too long on any one element of the flashing imagery, so that you can’t be entirely sure what you’re seeing, but you feel its horror at a visceral level. Horror and insanity inhabit the music here as well, and we have the German band Abest to thank for it. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ROTHEADS — “GORE COFFIN”

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Jul 122022
 

We liked the Romanian death metal band Rotheads before hearing a single note, thanks to Comrade Aleks‘ engaging June 2022 interview here with guitarist/vocalist Bogdan. He comes across as down-to-earth, unpretentious, and intelligent, very matter-of-fact in his discussion of the band’s history and approach to the music and the lyrics, but with an unmistakable and contagious enthusiasm. We hoped the music would be equally engaging — and thankfully, it is.

What we have in front of us now is Rotheads‘ second album, Slither In Slime, which is set for release on July 25th by the Memento Mori label. Compared to the band’s full-length debut (2018’s Sewer Fiends), it still displays the influence of the early ’90s Finnish scene, melded with other classicists from the Swedish and American old schools, but as Bogdan relates in the interview, it sounds more like a studio album and less like a demo. It’s ugly and twisted, to be sure, but with a sharper and more calculating sound, and the songwriting more powerfully creates creepy and crypt-borne atmospheres as the band crush and careen their way through these tracks. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COSCRADH — “PLAGUES OF KNOWTH”

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Jul 072022
 


photo by Piotr Jóźwiak

Even ears and minds that have been hardened by extensive exposure to the most extreme ravages of blackened death metal are still capable of being stunned by the music of the Irish band Coscradh. (Even the toughest callouses can be scraped raw and split open.) The eye-popping impact of their slaughtering talents was made evident from their first (self-titled) demo in 2016, and was renewed and reinforced through a pair of subsequent EPs (Of Death and Delirium and Mesradh Machae), all of them released by Invictus Productions. And now Coscradh‘s debut album is on the way, like a terrorizing, earth-shaking upheaval.

The name of this first full-length (41 minutes long), which the same Invictus Productions has set for release on August 5th, is Nahanagan Stadial. We are told that the title is an old Irish term for the rapid onset of a glacial period 10,000 years ago, which rendered life extinct: “A massive rise in oceans blocked out the sun, and coronal mass ejections and sunbursts hit the planet, overturning civilization, which brought a new ice age upon the island of Ireland”.

That choice of title is in keeping with the band’s entire aesthetic, both their devotion to the old language and history of Ireland and the summoning of catastrophe in their music. The band’s Irish Gaelic name itself (which we’ve learned is pronounced coss-kraa or cuss-kraa depending on the dialect) refers to slaughter or massacre, but such decimating visions would come to mind from the music alone, as you’ll discover from the album track we’re premiering today if you don’t already know. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GALLOWER — “CLAWS AND FANGS”

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Jul 062022
 

On July 29th Dying Victims Productions will release a new EP by the savage Polish sorcerers in Gallower. The band’s musical identity has already been well-established through a sequence of demos and splits and a 2020 debut album, Behold the Realm of Darkness. As Dying Victims accurately portrays, “Gallower incite a riot of violence that skillfully melds the Teutonic legendry of Destruction, Sodom, Kreator, and Violent Force with the first-wave black magick of Bathory, Hellhammer, Venom, and Japan’s Sabbat“.

The new EP is a five-song, 17-minute rampage that (to again quote the label) “emits strong vibes of early Bulldozer, Running Wild, Deathrow, and pre-Rick Rubin Slayer“. And thus it fortifies Gallower‘s reputation as black thrashing maniacs cloaked in an unearthly aura that merits the title of the new EP — Eastern Witchcraft.

One track from the EP has already surfaced, and today we’re presenting another. Continue reading »

TRIUMVIR FOUL: A REVIEW OF “ONSLAUGHT TO SERAPHIM” AND THE PREMIERE OF “SERPENTS’ GNASH FOR WAR”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Jul 052022
 

(Today we’re premiering a song from the forthcoming final album of Triumvir Foul, which will be released on CD by Invictus Productions and on cassette tape by Vrasubatlat on July 29th, with a co-released vinyl version to come soon after. Preceding the premiere stream we have Hope Gould‘s vivid review of the new album.)

Enter the racing drums, rumbling like the bones of an undead army as they clamor up the caverns of the deepest ossuary. A “Presage” indeed – the opening track to Triumvir Foul’s latest offering is the harbinger to something truly fetid.

The Portland duo have emerged from the tombs of Ur with another ode to the Exalted Serpents in the form of their latest, and quite sadly, final album, Onslaught to Seraphim. Despite being their last release, Triumvir Foul have done anything but gracefully bow out. They have offered up perhaps their most caustic material thus far; a killing blow to be lauded for, a subsidence crater in the wake of their destruction. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEMIRICOUS — “SMOKE CHASER”

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Jul 052022
 

 

In case you’ve been living under a rock, you may have missed the stellar news that in May of this year Indiana’s Demiricous released their first new album in 15 years. Fittingly entitled III: Chaotic Lethal, it finally follows up a pair of full-lengths released in 2006 and 2007 — I: Hellbound and II:Poverty, respectively — which were both released by Metal Blade and sky-rocketed the band’s name.

Our writer DGR has already given Chaotic Lethal a lavish review here, one that underscores how well Demiricous have picked up where they left off, as if so much time had not passed at all.

Re-uniting the same line-up that brought us Poverty — Nate Olp (vocals, bass), Dustin Boltjes (drums), Scott Wilson (guitar), and Ben Parrish (guitar) — they’ve given us a new record that DGR calls “a constant circle pit”, “purpose built for moshing”. He concluded his review this way: Continue reading »

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