AN NCS PREMIERE: NIBIRU — “ALKAEST” (AN EXCERPT)

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Oct 302020
 

 

The music of the Italian trio Nibiru is nearly unclassifiable. You can find references to their impetuous and esoteric creations as Ritual Psychedelic Sludge or Blackened Sludge & Drone. The press materials for their new album Panspermia state that “the influences of Neurosis, Black Sabbath or MZ.412 have always been pretty clear”, but those materials also report that “in terms of an atmosphere, Nibiru relate themselves to the post-punk/darkwave scenes of the early ’80s (Fields Of The Nephilim, Virgin Prunes, early Christian Death, Joy Division) and to the pioneers of Depressive Black Metal, as well as bands such as Xasthur or Shining.”

Those are all useful clues, but they also underscore the point above — that the music is extremely difficult to capture through genre labels and other typical reference points. Their non-musical inspirations, which range from occultists and esotericists such as Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Austin Osman Spare and Julius Evola, to “psychiatric essays, a deep inner illness and a peculiar cult for the actor Klaus Kinski”, also provide clues, but they too are a bit bewildering.

Even the premiere we’re presenting today in advance of the new album’s November 13 release by Argonauta Records, doesn’t function as a summing up — not even close — but it does provide a tantalizing glimpse. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PNEUMA HAGION — “ANTICOSMIC INCANTATIONS”

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Oct 292020
 

 

For those not in the know, the death metal band Pneuma Hagion is one of the many projects of the prolific Texas-based vocalist/multi-instrumentalist known here as R., whose other bands include Intestinal Disgorge, The Howling Void, Endless Disease, and Excantation. Under the guise of Pneuma Hagion he has released a handful of demos, splits, and an EP since 2015, and on December 1st will at last release a debut album through Nuclear War Now! Productions. Its name is Voidgazer.

The album’s title reflects not only some of the music’s themes but also its creator’s grim and gloomy perspectives on existence. As he explained in a recent in-depth interview (here), at its core the album is about alienation, and through various symbolic expressions it grapples with the idea that humans are beings of spirit imprisoned in fleshly vessels in an earthly domain that too often make human existence feel pointless. “The world of flesh and matter is ruled by a cruel, tyrannical Demiurge, and we feel this universe to be cruel and evil because we are, at our core, alien to this place. We are from a place that is not a place, and is everything that this place is not.”

This perspective, it turns out, is mirrored in R.‘s own personal turmoils. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HERETIC RITUAL — “BLACK PERVERTED ABOMINATION”

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Oct 292020
 

 

Like just about every other metal genre descriptor that’s been in common usage for more than about ten years, “blackened death metal” (or “black/death”) no longer provides a specific compass point to guide listeners. At one time it was closely associated (at least in this writer’s mind) with “war metal”, but the term clearly encompasses an increasingly wide range of stylistic approaches, with greater and lesser degrees of melody and significant variations in the extent to which bands employ ingredients from the even the more expansive realms of black metal and death metal.

But the Mexican band Heretic Ritual are still pretty firmly positioned in the war metal sector of the blackened death metal soundscape. Yet they execute their assaults of iron-fisted genocidal savagery in a way that, while undeniably raw and vicious, doesn’t wallow in near-formless murky abrasion and relentless hammering, and the music is definitely not monotonous (let’s be honest, it’s not hard to think of many bands who are guilty of all those failings).

We will prove this to you through today’s exclusive premiere of “Black Perverted Abomination“, a song from this slaughtering trio’s new album War-Desecration-Genocide / Passages of Infinite Hatred, which is set for release on November 10th by Death In Pieces Records and Goatthrone Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NOXIS — “EXPANSE OF HELLISH BLACK MIRE”

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Oct 282020
 

 

Cleveland-based Noxis have only been active since 2019 but they have wasted no time in proving their fiendish talents. Setting their sites on a particular kind of death metal, they released the aptly named Necrotizing demo in the year of their birth and are now following that with the new four-track EP we’re premiering today, also aptly named: Expanse of Hellish Black Mire. Those fiendish talents quickly hooked the attention of both Pulverised Records and Rotted Life Records, who will jointly handle the release on October 30.

In formulating their approach, Noxis owe some debts to the great NYDM triumvirate of Incantation, Suffocation, and Immolation, as well as Finnish bands such as Demigod and Convulse, and they’ve paid those debts by creating music that’s thuggish in its bone-fracturing, organ-rupturing belligerence and disgustingly gruesome in its atmosphere, and yet also mind-boggling in its mad contortions and technical extravagances. Their music is thus thoroughly putrid and punishing but also a big adrenaline kick. Continue reading »

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

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Oct 272020
 

 

Khaos is the new album by the Swiss band Icare. It’s set for release on October 30th by Division Records. It sounds like a musical diary, a recording of a band’s progress from a starting point four years ago to the extravagant destination they’ve now reached. Which is not to say their starting point was in any way mundane — far from it. It was as breathtaking as the place where time took them, albeit in a different way.

It turns out that the idea of a journey that comes to mind in listening to the album isn’t too far from the truth. When Icare joined together in 2016, in La Chaux-de-Fonds, their vision was to create an extremely virulent form of grindcore, which incorporated elements of black and death metal. They recorded an album in that year named Khaos. But things began to change. Those changes were manifested in a 2018 album named Charogne, which the band performed live as a single 45-minute song.

This year they returned to those early steps in Khaos, and transformed the album in the studio, among other things giving the music a greater connection to black metal. But it would be wrong to sum up the album as solely “blackened grindcore” — it goes to many other places as well, which you can discover for yourselves through our premiere of a full album stream today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COFFIN APARTMENT — “TRANSIENT EXUBERANCE”

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Oct 232020
 

 

In Hong Kong, where a population of roughly 8 million people are packed into a confined area in which little developable land remains, landlords have resorted to illegally subdividing space into tiny cubicles for rent in which all living activities must take place within areas as small as 15 square feet. Known as “coffin apartments”, these nightmarishly claustrophobic holes have been condemned by the United Nations as “an insult to human dignity”.

Coffin Apartment is also the name chosen by a Portland trio whose unsettling music is the subject of this premiere — though in the age of the coronavirus the name has different and perhaps even more relevant connotations.

Trying to succinctly describe the audio assaults of Coffin Apartment is not an easy task. In a freewheeling way they’ve thrown elements of death metal, grind, hardcore punk, sludgy noise rock, and even prog and psychedelia into a blender. The results are heavy as hell, rabidly raging, and mentally destabilizing. Calling the music “off kilter” would be an understatement. But the results are also so surprising and so electrifying as to become unexpectedly transfixing. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: KATAPULT — “LOAD THE KATAPULT”

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Oct 232020
 


Photo by Florian Moritz and Rikard Östberg

 

We’re about to premiere a red-hot song and video from the new EP by Katapult. It’s so damned tempting to just quote the title of the EP — Shut the Fuck Up and Press Play — and get out of the way. But we have to have our own fun too, even if it probably pales in comparison to the amount of fun it looks like the Katapult crew are having in this video. So, on we go….

You can see the name of this first single from the EP up above, but there’s a sub-title: The complete name is “Load the Katapult (your old band is shit)“. They’re probably not talking about your old band in particular, so settle down. Though, actually, settling down is not what any red-blooded listener will do when they hear this track and watch these Swiss and Swedish thrashers stomp on the gas pedal. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MONGREL’S CROSS — “WHAT THE CARDS MAY TELL”

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Oct 222020
 

 

Two years ago we had the pleasure of premiering a full stream of Psalter of the Royal Dragon Court, the second album by the Australian extreme metal duo Mongrel’s Cross. As we wrote of the album in an accompanying review: “It’s ravaging and regal, sinister and searing, warlike and overflowing with a kind of mythic grandeur. It’s the sound of saga, with an aura of larger-than-life fantasy surrounding all of its movements. And it’s almost relentlessly explosive, blazing like a comet in the heavens, or like the fireballs erupting from that clash of titans on the cover.”

We might have gotten carried away with words (as we admitted at the time), but the album had such high-flying splendor (and feral savagery) in its amalgam of black thrash and epic heavy metal that it was hard to stay calm. And thus it was exciting news to discovery that Mongrel’s Cross would be returning this year with their third album, Arcana, Scrying and Revelation. Like the first two, it will be released by Hells Headbangers Records, and we again have the chance to spread the word with another Mongrel’s Cross premiere, in advance of the record’s November 27 release. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SYNASTRY — “DEAD TO ME”

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Oct 222020
 

 

Montreal’s Synastry first came together in the early 2000s, at a time when MySpace dominated social networking and the metal scene was in many ways very different from what it is today. The band released their first EP, Pallets of My New World, in 2006 and followed that with a debut album named Blind Eyes Bleed in 2008. But in 2012 the band went dormant, and only this year have revived.

In making their comeback, Synastry have recorded a new EP named Civilization’s Coma, with plans to move forward with work on a new album. The EP is a three-track affair set for release on November 27th, and today we’re premiering, through a lyric video, a single from the EP entitled “Dead To Me“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): KEVEL — “MUTATIS MUTANDIS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Oct 212020
 

 

In the first minutes of the opening song “Of Being“, the Athenian band Kevel lay before the listener a blueprint of what will become the foundation for the imposing and wondrous edifice of their new album Mutatis Mutandis, which we’re premiering today. In that opening, a riveting drum solo is joined by heavy groaning chords and shrill discordant arpeggios. In one fell swoop, the music hybridizes primal physical punch, dismal and depressive moods, and spine-tingling sensations of flaring madness.

The band’s ability to create teeth-on-edge tension and earth-quaking heaviness comes to the fore again and again over these 50 minutes. The nuanced yet persistently skull-cracking drum performance repeatedly threatens to steal the show, both amplifying the songs’ most intense moments and creating fascinating contrasts within all of the band’s other richly multi-faceted movements. The bass tone possesses the heft of granite but the nimbleness of larks. And the guitarists are highly adept at creating tension and turmoil.

But it turns out that all these riveting contributions really are just the foundation, and what Kevel have created around it is a gnarled, frightening, yet shining tower that reaches into the stars, almost as astonishing and awe-inspiring in its visions as it is shattering in its impact. Continue reading »

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