AN NCS PREMIERE: HEADSHRINKER — “THE BURN OF INDIFFERENCE”

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May 252021
 

 

Almost exactly five years have passed since Chicago-based Polyptych released their third album, Defying the Metastasis. That album was a genre-bending head-spinner, an unconventional mix of death metal and black metal with progressive and technical elements woven within it. It made such a striking impact that we pleaded for a chance to premiere something from it (and our wish was granted).

While that band’s continued existence has been in question since then, it turns out that three of its members — Young Werther, Scott Skopec, and Frank Lato — have joined forces in a new Colorado-based group called Headshrinker, which also features the considerable talents of Havok drummer Pete Webber. Their debut album Callous Indifference is now set for release on August 27th, and once again we have the chance to host a song premiere. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CROSS VAULT — “AS STRANGERS WE DEPART”

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May 242021
 

 

On May 28th Iron Bonehead Productions will release As Strangers We Depart, the third album by the German “Viking doom” band Cross Vault, and their first release since the 2016 EP, Miles To Take.

Each song on the new album is an immersive, time-traveling spell that seems to carry the listener back to a mythic age. They meld poignance and passion, heaviness and heartbreak, with an unmistakable feeling of reverence. It’s a devotional album meant to be savored, to be soaked up from start to finish, the kind of experience in which any sense of time passing vanishes. And thus we’re proud to present a full stream of it today. Continue reading »

TRANSCENDING RITES — “AWAKE!” (AN EXCERPT)

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May 212021
 

 

These are notes I made to myself after listening to the song-excerpt we’re premiering in this article:

“I have never awakened in a house on fire. I imagine that would send me in a nanosecond from somnolence to a rocketing fight-or-flight level of adrenaline. I’ve never escaped a raging inferno and raced outside only to discover that everything around me is also in flames. But listening to this music, those are the experiences I imagine. In listening to it I also imagine the terrible feeling of loss that would come from the inferno-destruction of everything, every memento and memory, that I enshrine in the place where I live.”

Obviously, those are some intense emotional reactions — a commingling of exhilaration, fear, and despair. And those reactions were provoked by only a portion of the entire song, the roughly 8-minute excerpt from “Awake!“, that we’re now presenting. The full song is a daunting 21 minutes long, but I’m anxious to hear it and I think you be will too after you listen to what we’re streaming below. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DØDSFERD — “LOYAL TO THE BLACK OATH”

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May 212021
 

 

August 10 of this year will mark the 20th anniversary of the Greek black metal band Dødsferd, which was first formed in Athens by Wrath (Nikolaos Spanakis) as a one-man band, with the assistance of session musicians, and has been based in Crete since 2018.

Dødsferd’s discography is extensive, and now includes two demos, ten full-length albums, nine split albums/EPs, four EPs, one live album, three compilation albums, and two boxed-set albums. The most recent full-length was 2018’s Diseased Remnants of a Dying World, and the most recent EP is Skotos, which was released earlier this month by Transcending Obscurity Records on CD, in an edition that combined Skotos with Diseased Remnants of a Dying World. (The artwork for both the album and the EP was created by Giorgos Gyzis, aka Bacchus from Grab.)

In commemoration of the impending 20th anniversary, Wrath’s label, Fucking Your Creation Records, will also be releasing the combination of Skotos and Diseased Remnants… in a limited box cassette tape that features layout and graphic design by by Nikos Stavridakis (VisionBlack), and to help spread the word about it, we’re premiering a striking video for the equally striking song “Loyal To the Black Oath“, which first appeared on Diseased Remnants…. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: ODRAZA – “ACEDIA”

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May 212021
 

 

(It is our privilege to bring you this premiere of the experimental and unpredictable new release from Odraza, out tomorrow on Gods Ov War Productions, featuring a foreword by our own Andy Synn)

Ah, Odraza. Now that’s a name I’ve not heard since… well, since just last year, as a matter of fact, when I heaped praised upon their sublime second album, Rzeczom (an album which only just missed out on a place on my “Critical Top Ten” of 2020).

The band’s latest release, however, is even more unique and unusual than its provocative predecessor, comprising as it does a single twenty-minute track, conceived and brought to term as part of an exhibition to be presented at the Museum of Podgórze later this year.

Of course. this isn’t the first time that Odraza have strayed off the beaten (left-hand) path – their 2015 EP, Kir, for example, was a twenty-minute instrumental commissioned and performed live for an event at The Museum of the City of Krakow in tribute to the fallen in the Płaszów concentration camp – but there’s no question in my mind that Acedia is the band’s most unorthodox and unpredictable work yet, as well as a welcome reminder that strange times often breed even stranger art.

Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SEANCE OF… (TRACK 7)

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May 202021
 

 

The Colour of Magick is one of those albums whose name fits the music to a T, not only because the music itself operates as a kind of sonic sorcery but also because the permutations that its creator has worked into the genre-spine of the music (in this case, black metal) are themselves devilishly dazzling, far from the hide-bond conventions for which black metal is often known.

The band here is Seance Of…, which began as a side project of AR, vocalist and guitarist of the Australian black metal band Grave Worship, but it has grown into the main vessel for AR’s expression and exploration. 2020 proved to be a fertile year for the project, which wrote three albums’ worth of material. The Colour of Magick is actually the third of those in the order of creation, though not the third in the sequence of releases.

Signal Rex will be releasing it on June 21st, on CD and vinyl LP formats. It consists of eight tracks, identified by number rather than title (we’re told that AR encourages listeners to create their own titles, and that this unorthodox freedom is his intent.) What we have for you today is a stream of Track #7. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): IO — “FIRE”

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May 202021
 

 

The Roman sludge/doom band IO chose their name with well-calculated intent, taking for themselves the appellation of the moon of Jupiter which is both the most dense of all moons in the solar system and, with more than 400 active volcanos, the most geologically active object in our system. It produces massive sulfurous plumes that climb hundreds of miles into the sky as well as gargantuan magma lakes, and it’s home to mountains higher than Everest. Keep those features in mind as you listen today to IO‘s debut album, Fire.

The album will be released tomorrow — May 21st — by one of the prime purveyors of ultra-heavy music, Argonauta Records. Not for naught does Argonauta describe the music as “hazy yet blistering”, a sound that “equals a cosmic trip into volcanic space dimensions, and without any doubt owns its parallels to an entire moon”.

Fire consists of four significant tracks ranging in length from 6 1/2 to 16 1/2 minutes, which collectively provide more than 40 minutes of humongous lava-flow riffs, skull-busting percussion, truly harrowing vocals, and an unearthly atmosphere. Continue reading »

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AN NCS PREMIERE: EYE OF PURGATORY — “WHERE LIFE SLOWLY FADES”

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May 192021
 

 

Among the masterful Rogga Johansson‘s multitude of bands and solo projects, each of which seems to indulge some different aspect of his interests under the encompassing umbrella of Swedish death metal, Eye of Purgatory is one of those in which emotive melody plays a more vital role than in others.

Eye of Purgatory released a debut full-length (The Rotting Enigma) in 2018, and a second album is now headed our way. Entitled The Lighthouse, it will be released on June 18th by Transcending Obscurity Records, and for this new record Rogga is joined by Taylor Nordberg (Ribspreader, Goregang, The Absence) on drums, lead guitars, and keyboards, and by Jeramie Kling (Venom Inc., Goregang, The Absence) on bass.

Through the premieres of three previous tracks from the album, it’s likely that many people have already discovered how much enjoyment The Lighthouse brings us, but perhaps we’ll still pick up additional ears through the song we’re presenting today — one that’s thrilling to hear but also has genuine staying power. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SCARRED — “NOTHING INSTEAD”

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May 192021
 

 

In January of this year the Klonosphere label released the third full-length by the Luxembourg-based death-metal group Scarred — almost eight years after the band’s second album, Gaia – Medea. The product of four years of work, this new album was self-titled, an intentional signal that it represented a transformation of the band’s sound. And indeed it is a remarkably wide-ranging experience, organized by design in a way that was intended, from start to finish, “to embark the listener on the same journey the band has traveled, from the initial disaggregation, up and down, to the final liberation”.

The album is daring and risky, repeatedly confounding expectations — not just expectations based on the band’s past releases, but also based on the last song you just heard. It’s stylistically diverse to the point of being unpredictable, which perhaps explains why the many reviews it has received collectively name-drop references to Gojira, Amenra, Opeth, Gaerea, Devin Townsend, and Pink Floyd (among others).

To showcase the album, Scarred have also released a sequence of music videos, all of which are well worth seeing (as well as hearing), and today we’re adding another one, the subject of which is a song that appears dead-center in the album’s track-list progression. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CATHEXIS — “GIVEN TO THE COLONY”

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May 192021
 

 

(Nathan Ferreira wrote the following introduction to our premiere of a song from Untethered Abyss, the forthcoming third album by the Texas band Cathexis, which will be released by Willowtip on June 25th.)

The meteoric rise of bands like Ulcerate, the rebirth of Gorguts, and the general need of tech-death fans to move into more nuanced and tasteful realms have all combined to make tech-y dissodeath a saturated genre. It’s easily marketable with its immediately harrowing aesthetics, but like any style of music, it takes a careful ear to make something worth coming back to more than once, and it could be argued that outside of the big names, there are far more unmemorable misses than hits.

That’s why I approached Cathexis with a bit of caution – not because I’m not expecting something good, but simply because I’ve been burned and had my time wasted before. That being said, they get the seal of approval from Willowtip, who have been a mainstay for this kind of music long before it was ever popular or trendy, so that’s worth at least one honest listen. Continue reading »

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