AN NCS PREMIERE: THE SCALAR PROCESS — “INK SHADOW”

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Dec 282020
 

 

The Scalar Process are a French trio who will make their full-length debut in February with the support of Transcending Obscurity Records. As a technical death metal band, their advent comes at a time when their chosen genre is burgeoning, indeed splitting at the seams because it is so over-stuffed with bands both new and old. To stand out at such times is a formidable challenge, but not one that is daunting to this band at all. A feeling of confidence blazes through the music, as well it should.

Perhaps it’s a given that the performers are technically impressive, and they’ve composed their music in ways that allow those skills to shine, and thereby to make the songs electrifying. But this flamboyance is only part of the album’s attraction, because the band are equally skilled at creating contrasts, enabling dramatic changes of mood and the introduction of atmospheric elements that are vital in making the songs memorable as well as pulse-pounding.

We have a great example of these compositional ingredients in the song we’re premiering today, the intriguingly named “Ink Shadow“, which is the third song to debut so far from this new album, Coagulative Matter. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DIRA MORTIS — “ANCIENT BREATH OF FORGOTTEN MISANTHROPY”

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Dec 232020
 


photos by Marcin Studzinski

 

Whoever scheduled the release of Dira Mortis‘ new album on Christmas Day 2020 had a wicked sense of humor. The album, whose title is Ancient Breath Of Forgotten Misanthropy, will be discharged that day by Selfmadegod Records. It has many interconnected themes, but one of them is the use of religion by powerful forces to dominate, intimidate, and divide the masses, and in their hypocrisy to use it as a cover for evil. Lyrically, the album also calls for resistance, lest we be led deeper into an abyss of misanthropy in which humanity continues to be a plague of hate unto itself. Merry Christmas.

On the other hand, in many respects this new album is a great way for many of us (and we mean died-in-the-wool metalheads for whom Christmas has no religious significance) to celebrate the day, particularly this year, when gatherings of friends and family are downright dangerous (or outright prohibited) and when the year as a whole seems like such a godforsaken mess, and offers such powerful proof that people have become dangerously alienated from each other in more ways than simply physical distance.

What the album provides, in addition to particularly relevant lyrical themes, is the work of a veteran band whose talents give death-metal-heads other reasons to rejoice. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SEPULCROS — “HECATOMBE”

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Dec 222020
 

 

Yet another instantly recognizable painting by Mariusz Lewandowski has appeared on the cover of a metal album, this time the debut full-length by the Portuguese band Sepulcros. But as imposing and chilling as the painting is, it only hints at the immense, terrifying power and world-ending majesty of the intensely atmospheric music that Sepulcros have created within Vazio.

Harnessing the soul-shaking forces of death and doom metal, and adding the ferocity of black metal, Sepulcros have created an experience that makes a deep impression, though one that most definitely is not for the faint of heart.

Vazio is set for release by Transcending Obscurity Records on March 12th (assuming humankind lasts that long), and as a spine-tingling sign of what it holds in store we are today premiering a video for a ravishing album track named “Hecatombe“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SCEPTER OF ELIGOS — “REABSORBED”

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Dec 212020
 

 

Denver-based Scepter of Eligos describe their punishing amalgam of death, doom, and psychedelic sludge as “psychedelic metal of death”, and based on the song we’re premiering today from their debut album Inverted Illusions, you can understand why. When you hear it, you can also understand why the press materials for the record make references to the likes of Crowbar, Incantation, The Black Angels, Acid Bath, Celtic Frost, and Grave.

But as this listener did, you might also be tempted to imagine the mind-mutilating “Reabsorbed” as a monstrous hell-beast dotted with weeping sores, stinking of death, staggering across a landscape of skulls — and undergoing spasms that transform it into a high-speed thresher of flesh, all gnashing fangs and ravaging claws. In other words, it’s a nasty, evil, mutating piece of work. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GOLIATHAN — “ABERRATION” (LIVE)

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Dec 182020
 

 

Regular visitors to our site know that I spend a tremendous amount of time focusing on music premieres, at least one premiere of some kind every day. It’s time that could easily be spent in other ways, but one big reason I’m so devoted to doing them is because of how often they’ve introduced me to appealing bands who had flown under my radar. Of course, maybe this in turn leads to you discovering music you weren’t aware of either. Which leads me to the L.A. band Goliathan.

Until being invited to host the premiere of the live performance video you’re about to see and hear, that’s a name I hadn’t heard before, other than as the title to a Weedeater album from five years ago. After being completely captivated by this video from my first exposure to it, I learned that Goliathan launched their recording career with two EPs — their 2017 debut, Awakens, and a 2018 follow-up, Albion. The song featured in the video, “Aberration“, is off that Albion EP.

More recently the band also released Artifact, a collection of recordings that date back to 2006, documenting the band’s earliest incarnation, with the music remixed by Toshi Kasai (Melvins, Red Sparowes, Helmet) and mastered by Gene Grimaldi (Failure, Fantômas).

I mention all this because “Aberration” is pulling me toward all of those releases like a strong magnetic force, and maybe the same will be true for you if you’re also a newcomer to Goliathan’s brand of instrumental doom-metal-meets-post-rock. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SATANIZE — “LUCIFERIAN THRONES OF DEVASTATION”

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Dec 162020
 

 

I got big smiles from the press materials for Baphomet Altar Worship, the new album by the Portuguese bestial black metal band Satanize. The biggest smile arrived when I saw that the PR material likened the listening experience to a form of Zen. But by then I had already listened to some of the album — and I actually understood the point, hence the smile.

Make no mistake, just as the album art so vividly portrays, the music on the new album is hellish and iron-fisted. It gives no quarter and yields to nothing in its single-minded channeling of demonic malice and slaughtering barbarity. And yet, and yet, the music does surprisingly have the capacity to induce a fugue state. As unhinged as it is, something about the viper-ous melodies and the jet-speed rhythms produces a strangely mesmerizing effect.

Or maybe I should just speak for myself. You be your own judge. Which you’ll be able to do by listening to “Luciferian Thrones of Devastation“, the song we’re premiering today in advance of the album release by Helter Skelter and Regain Records on January 20th. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ABIOTIC — “SMOLDERED”

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Dec 142020
 

 

In the early years of this site, I closely watched and wrote about the meteoric rise of a South Florida band named Abiotic, who quickly vaulted from a couple of singles and a 2011 EP to the release of their 2012 debut album Symbiosis on the Metal Blade label. In considering that album I did my best (at length) to wrestle its mind-boggling escapades into words, but probably failed. With elements that appealed to fans of both tech-death and deathcore, and probably many people committed to mental asylums, the music (I wrote) was “intricately constructed and capably executed — a full-bore onslaught of brain-twisting technical pyrotechnics, munitions-grade explosiveness, and eerie atmospherics”.

Abiotic followed up Symbiosis with 2015’s Casuistry, which was a crusher, and still displayed lots of technical adventurousness but also moved in the direction of more melodic and catchier songs. And then Abiotic went silent on the recording front, a silence that has lasted for more than five years. But the silence has ended, because on February 12th the band’s third album Ikigai will be released by The Artisan Era — and it’s our pleasure to bring you a track from it today, a song named “Smoldered“, which is presented through a fascinating music video. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: XENO OOZE — “DEUS EX MACHINOOZE”

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Dec 112020
 

 

“Imagine what would happen if you could buy bags of death metal, crust, grindcore, and powerviolence at your local market, throw big handfuls of all that stuff into a blender, liberally lubricate it with alien blood fresh from the refrigerators at Area 51, spice up the mix with amphetamines and lysergic acid, puree the shit out of it, and then chug it straight down without breathing. Sound good? Actually, you don’t have to tax your imaginations, you just have to listen to Parasligm Shift, the debut album by the deviant three-piece Phoenician band Xeno Ooze.”

And with those words, roughly one year ago, we introduced our premiere of a track from that insane album, Paradigm Shift. And now we get to do this again, because Xeno Ooze have a new EP named Slimewave that’s destined for detonation on December 18th via Bloody Scythe Records. What we get to do is throw your brain into the blender again, through our premiere of a lyric video for the song “Deus Ex Machinooze“. Continue reading »

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

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Dec 112020
 

 

Bacchus was the name adopted by the Romans for the older Greek god Dionysus. He was a complex deity — a god of winemaking and wine, of fertility and festival, and of ecstasy, insanity, and ritual madness. Another name used by the Romans for him was Liber — “free” — because of the freedoms his cult represented for its followers from the norms and dictates of repressive powers. In the states of possession induced by Bacchanalian rites, they cast off the chains that bound their minds and emotions to the rigid expectations and oppressive demands of conventional society.

We have no special insight into why the French atmospheric black metal band Bacchus adopted that name for themselves, beyond what we can hear in their self-titled debut album, which we’re premiering today in advance of its December 30 release by Solar Asceticists Productions. However, listening to it is very much like partaking in chthonic mysteries that induce elysian visions and unexpected epiphanies. It creates its own form of possession, casting an irresistible spell, one which is both seductive and frightening, carnal and unearthly, mesmerizing and profoundly menacing.

And it does have the effect of freeing the listener from worldly cares and mundane preoccupations. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HERIDA PROFUNDA — “HUNTERS WILL BE HUNTED”

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Dec 102020
 

 

Since Herida Profunda‘s inception in 2012 in Poland, they’ve amassed a host of gigs throughout Europe, including numerous festival appearances, and have assembled a discography that includes a self-titled debut release in 2013, a 2015 split with UK’s Hellbastard, a 2017 split with UK’s Hello Bastards, and In Fear We Trust — a three-way split with Psychoneurosis and Suffering Quota in 2019. Obviously, the relocation of the band’s vocalist Edi to the UK in 2014 didn’t prove to be an obstacle.

The band are now at the point of completing work on a new album named Power To the People, which will be released on tape and vinyl in early 2021 via 783punx (UK), 7DegreesRecords (GER), Heavy Metal Vomit Party (SLO), To Live A Lie Records (USA), and Give Praise Records (USA). What we’ve got for you today is the premiere of a lyric video for a single from the new album named “Hunters Will Be Hunted“. Continue reading »

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